In 1981, my parents had the good sense to send me to the Berklee School of Music in Boston for a seven-week session. When they sent their 16-year-old jazz guitar player to the big city, I think they must have thought that I would have some counselors or some kind of supervision. As it turned out, it was just like regular college life, and I ended up unsupervised in a dorm room at the corner of Mass Ave. and Boylston with my two friends from North Carolina.
I learned a lot that summer. The curriculum at Berklee was outstanding, and I had a great guitar teacher who taught me to play on the upper diagonal of the fingerboard where the strings had more resonance. I learned to pick out chord changes by ear and how to write four-way-close for sax sections.
Of course, I learned more than just music. For one thing, I figured out that the world had a lot of guitar players. Of the 300 students at Berklee, 100 played guitar. My two roommates played piano and bass, and they had a lot easier time picking up jam sessions than I did.
The day we got there, we saw that pianist Herbie Hancock was coming to the Berklee Performing Arts Center. Ron Carter and Tony Williams were with him on bass and drums, so this was the same legendary rhythm section that formed the Miles Davis Quintet in the 60s. We blew a good chunk of the summer’s spending money on tickets.
When Hancock, Williams, and Carter took the stage, they had a young trumpet player with them. The kid had no trouble holding his own with the giants. After the first few tunes, Hancock introduced the members of the quartet, including their recently discovered 19-year-old trumpeter, Wynton Marsalis. While I was mesmerized by his performance, enough of my cognitive powers were still functioning that I kept reminding myself that he was less than three years older than I was.
When we got home that summer, my two roommates decided they were going to back to Boston to study music at New England Conservatory, but I decided I was going to come to Carolina to study chemistry. By the time I was stressing over sophomore organic, Marsalis had his big double-grammy year where he won for playing trumpet concertos and jazz.
Jazz is often called the only uniquely American art form. (I think “mockumentaries” like This is Spinal Tap might also qualify, but let’s take it that their status is less legit for the time being.) Perhaps unknowingly, Americans have almost completely entrusted the preservation of jazz to one person in Wynton Marsalis. That’s a big responsibility for one guy, but Marsalis has admirably stuck with the straight-ahead idiom and has avoided venturing into funk and fusion (as Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock did). He created Jazz at Lincoln Center and is a tireless advocate for the jazz preservation.
When one person shoulders most of an art form, it’s likely they’ll have to endure considerable criticism. The same is true for Marsalis, whose authoritative opinions often cause dissent. Many critics felt that he and Ken Burns over-emphasized some artists and short-changed others in the Jazz series. I agreed with some of these gripes, particularly since they gave short shrift to my beloved Miles. Still, after watching the full 17 hours on DVD, I found Marsalis persuasive and articulate, and when he sang a Louis Armstrong lick that matched the music playing in the background, it was magic.
Recently, I attended a performance of Marsalis’ Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra at Carolina’s newly renovated (and magnificent) Memorial Hall. I took my 11-year-old budding-musician son, and of course, he patiently listened to all of my musings about Marsalis and the times I’d seen him before. We didn’t realize that the LCJO would be performing “Congo Square,” a new work about the history of Marsalis’ New Orleans home. Marsalis wrote “Congo Square” with Yacub Addy, a genius of Ghanaian drumming and vocals. Addy’s ensemble, Odadaa!, joined the LCJO on the stage.
Congo Square is a section of New Orleans where African slaves performed ancestral dancing and drumming well into the 19th century. Marsalis announced the upcoming work in August of last year – four days before Hurricane Katrina. At points, the finished work directly invokes the storm, but its presence is felt throughout the two-plus hours of the piece.
Congo Square is a monumental work in the tradition of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, which I heard recently at the also-magnificent Meymandi Hall. (What a treat that we now have these two spaces for important music!) The jazz improvisation solos in “Congo Square” parallel the excitement of the soloists in Bach’s Passion.
The scope, glory and originality of these works are hard to describe. The vision of composers with the courage to create these epics is startling: the enthralled audience and the huge ensemble make for an electrifying live performance. And having your 11-year-old sax player sitting and cheering along with you doesn’t hurt.
After hearing “Congo Square,” I was reminded of the good decision I made 25 years ago to learn the bass and improve my skills on the piano so that I would have an easier time getting gigs. It worked, because I’ve had a great time playing music in my life.
And once again, Wynton reminded me that it was a good idea to have a day job.
Holden Thorp serves as Chair of the UNC-Chapel Hill Chemistry Department
(Reprinted with persmission from the July 2006 Issue of Wake County Physician).
http://www.wakedocs.org/magazine.html
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