Kid Zipper's High Horn

By JAY COCKS

Wynton Marsalis swings easily from Monk to Mozart

Miles Davis may have heard it coming, or surely sensed it. Down in New Orleans in the mid-'60s, he was saying hello to a widely regarded jazz pianist, Ellis Marsalis, who was playing behind Al Hirt. Marsalis had a little boy of six named Wynton at home, and Wynton had an older brother named Branford, who was playing both clarinet and piano by the time he reached second grade. Feeling a few faint nudges of paternal concern that Wynton not fall behind in the musical Futurity Stakes, Ellis hit Hirt for an advance to finance the purchase of a trumpet. "Don't get that boy no trumpet," Davis interrupted. "It's too hard. Let him play something else."

Advice heard, advice unheeded. No advance was forthcoming, but Hirt passed along a horn to Wynton, who made his first public appearance the following year, blowing the Marine Hymn during a recital at the Xavier Junior School of Music. Over the next decade, following a few years of preadolescent musical indifference, teen-age funkifying, intense jazz practitioning and a little professional seasoning with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, Wynton Marsalis found himself with a major-label record contract. His debut album has sold about 125,000 copies--a surprisingly strong showing for a jazz record--and pulled down a brace of awards while earning Marsalis a reputation as the hottest young horn in town. Are those footsteps you hear behind you, Miles?

Now, one year later, Marsalis has issued a new jazz album, Think of One (title track courtesy Thelonious Monk), and, concurrently, a piece of classical virtuosity, three trumpet concertos (Haydn, Leopold Mozart and Hummel). And Marsalis just seems to be warming up. Remarked the classical trumpet virtuoso Maurice Andre": "He is potentially the greatest trumpeter of all time."

There may never have been a soloist who passed so freely over the closely guarded borders between jazz and classical. Marsalis, who has just turned 22, makes the usual declaration at customs ("I'm just a musician, I just play music"), but though his predisposition may be toward jazz, his training is markedly classical. "Not very much is similar between jazz and classical," he says, "but both are about the elevation of the audience. Both have spirituality. You learn the jazz vocabulary by listening to records and watching other musicians. Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Rollins, Art Blakey. Jazz is the first Western music in which the audience participates in the creative process. With classical, you have to really learn the music, learn the instrument. You have to be as faithful to it as possible." On Dec. 4, Marsalis will test his fidelity in concert at New York City's Lincoln Center, appearing with Flautist Hubert Laws and Soprano Kathleen Battle on a program that will highlight both Bach and Ellington. Next year Marsalis promises he will be doing "a number of classical performances."

This apparently effortless shuffle between styles was characteristic even of the young Marsalis, who started to study seriously at age twelve. So was a kind of competitive fearlessness that flirted with brashness. According to Branford Marsalis, who now blows a wizard saxophone in his brother's quintet, it was a fellow high school student who really got Wynton fired up. Wynton just said, "Man, I'm gonna practice until I zip this kid." At 14, Wynton performed the Haydn Trumpet Concerto with the New Orleans Philharmonic ("I believed you should play every gig that you could play"). At about that time, he and Branford were part of an eight-member high school funk group called the Creators, who pulled down 300 per person per gig. Wynton says, "We were real sad, but we had a lot of fun. The '70s was an age of fusion and funk and stuff. I would try to play any kind."

Marsalis scored a full scholarship at Juilliard, but he had not been there for a complete term when he sat in with Drummer Blakey at a Manhattan night club. The interlude resulted in a prompt invitation to spend his summer vacation as a sideman with the Jazz Messengers. After another summer spell in 1981 with Herbie Hancock and a few months more with Blakey, he formed his own group and cut his debut album, Hancock-produced and rigorously jazzy. No fusion allowed, and check your funk at the door. "I don't like it when pop is sold as jazz," Marsalis says. "That's the record companies trying to redefine jazz. I can't go for that. I'm just sorry that saying it makes me sound arrogant. If I were 41, it would be cool."

It's cool enough just as it is. The fact that the debut album sold so well, and that this new follow-up is also flourishing, may be a tribute to Marsalis' single-mindedness. Although, he remarks wistfully, "it'd be nice to just chill out all the time and hunt and fish," most of his free time, aside from an occasional foray onto the touch-football field, is spent practicing, reading or listening to music. But the healthy sales may be taken as a sign that there is indeed a sizable audience for hardheaded jazz. Marsalis is already masterly, and just conservative enough to be reassuring. The bebop foundations of the Marsalis style are so solid and strict that he still seems slightly more at ease playing something from the standard jazz rep, from reworked pop standard to a 1960s model, than with a free-for-all improvisation. "I listen to musicians when they were in their prime, and I know how good they felt because I can hear something in their playing," he says. "And I know it's not in mine yet. They're playing with a certain exuberance. To get to that point is the ultimate goal." He has lots of time yet to get there. Listening to him play, though, it is easy to forget just how much in the sheer rush of imaging what he will do once he gets there.

--By Jay Cocks.

Reported by Don Winbush/Chicago and Georgia Harrison/New York

With reporting by Don Winbush/Chicago, Georgia Harbison/New York This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.