Two recent concerts

Last week, Wynton Marsallis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra played a concert in Portland, and the review in the Oregonian was glowing. The band, it said, played jazz from all the eras of its long history, but the arrangements were modern and challenging and the soloists were brilliant.

Mary and I saw them a few nights later at the Britt Festival in Jacksonville, and though it was an enjoyable night out, I left feeling dissatisfied. How can this be with fifteen of the best jazz musicians in the country on the stage at the same time? Blame Wynton.

It’s true that some of the arrangements were modern versions of old classics. The band played a particularly appealing arrangement by Ted Nash of Down by the Riverside, rhythmically complex while only faintly alluding to the original melody. Nash also composed the most interesting piece of the evening, a musical reflection on painter Jackson Pollock, and Nash himself was a brilliant soloist. And there were other spectacular solos. Trumpet player Ryan Kisor was brilliant and evocative with a plunger mute.

In fact, everybody who took a solo was sufficiently brilliant, but often the performance seemed just lacking enough in energy to feel like something essential was missing. Wynton sat back in the trumpet section and never stood, whether announcing a song or taking a solo. After a song, he would acknowledge some of the soloists but not all, including the Kisor solo, which to me was the highpoint of the concert.

Marsallis has won just about every award possible in music, including a Pulitzer Prize. He’s the only musician ever to win Grammys for best jazz and best classical album in the same year. But he’s long been unpopular and even reviled among long-time jazz listeners for what is seen as his reactionary attitude towards jazz. It’s not just how he plays, which can sometimes be modern enough, but what he says. Under Marsallis, jazz stays put more than it moves forward, and he seems better overall in marketing himself than advancing as a musician. I’ve liked him best as a sideman with other musicians, but I’ve never thought he was among the best trumpet players in jazz or a particularly interesting composer.

In contrast, I saw Return to Forever a month earlier at the Britt, and although fusion has never particularly appealed to me, the reunion-tour concert by Chick Corea, Al Di Miola, Stanley Clark and Lennie White was one of the most exciting jazz nights I’ve ever enjoyed. Their on-stage energy was enormous, and though they first played these songs together some thirty-five years ago, their solos and unison passages were as fresh as they were explosive. They were clearly having fun, and I can't say I saw much fun in the JLCO.

Even at its most introspective, jazz is about energy, or so it seems to me. If I’m not bopping in my seat, something is missing, and I did little or no seat bopping with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. With Return to Forever, I risked rupturing a disc.

Call it my seat-of-the-pants critical theory, or as Ellington put it, It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing. Sad to say, the JLCO don’t swing.