The History of Jazz

by Ted Gioia

Yet bigger ensembles also gave Wynton a chance to flex his muscles as a leading post-Ellington composer, demonstrated most notably on his 1994 piece Blood on the Fields (later awarded the Pulitzer Prize) for a fifteen-member jazz orchestra. This impressive and lengthy work, some three and a half hours in duration, seemed determined to swallow whole not only the early jazz tradition but elements of a range of other African American musical styles—gospel, work songs, blues, and other cultural bric-a-brac from a bygone era. This historical eclecticism would constantly reemerge, in ever-differing forms, in Marsalis’s later work, whether he was sharing the stage with country artist Willie Nelson, collaborating with Ghanaian drum master Yacub Addy on the trumpeter’s composition Congo Square, or devoting tribute albums to everyone from Jelly Roll Morton to Thelonious Monk.