226 Media Reviews From the Plantation to the Penitentiary. Wynton Marsalis. Wynton Marsalis, trumpet and vocals; Walter Blanding, soprano and tenor saxophones; Carlos Henriquez, bass; Ali Jackson, Jr., drums; Dan Nimmer, piano; Jennifer Sanon, vocals. Liner notes by Stanley Crouch. 2007. Blue Note Records 73675. $18.98. It is difficult to approach Wynton Marsalis’s new album, From the Plantation to the Penitentiary, with an open mind. For over two decades the trumpeter has been a polarizing figure at the center of various debates over jazz’s musical identity and cultural meanings.6 Along the way he has composed several overtly political historically-oriented works, including Black Codes from the Underground (1985), All Rise (1999), and the Pulitzer prize-winning oratorio Blood on the Fields (1994). This latest contribution, a sweeping critique of contemporary African American culture and moral values cast in the form of an hour-long cycle of original music, is to date his boldest endeavor to address present-day concerns directly. Marsalis is controversial not simply because he has never had qualms about expressing aesthetic and political views that are not shared by much of jazz’s critical establishment, or for that matter by many of his fellow musicians, but because as founding artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center he has, since the late 1980s, become an influential cultural arbiter.7 (That he acquired this position for reasons having as much to do with his being the leading classical trumpeter of his generation as with his accomplishments in jazz has also left lingering questions about his artistic credentials to oversee a high-profile jazz institution.) In a nutshell, Marsalis defines jazz as a music grounded in blues and swing that embodies universal moral and ethical values such as the individual self-discipline needed to exercise freedom within a collective, coherently structured environment. In the album’s liner notes, Stanley Crouch, the cultural critic who has long been Marsalis’s intellectual mentor, writes in typically measured tones that ‘‘the quality 6 For two recent overviews, see Stuart Nicholson, Is Jazz Dead? (Or Has It Moved to a New Address) (New York: Routledge, 2005), 23–76; and John Gennari, Blowin’ Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 339–71. 7 On Marsalis’s aesthetic views, see Wynton Marsalis, ‘‘What Jazz Is—and Isn’t,’’ in Keeping Time: Readings in Jazz History, ed. Robert Walser (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 334–39; and Rafi Zabor and Vic Gambarini, ‘‘Wynton Vs. Herbie: The Purist and the Crossbreeder Duke It Out,’’ in Keeping Time, 339–51. Marsalis is clearly a critical lightning rod for reasons beyond simply the content of his opinions; in contrast to the extensive published literature taking the trumpeter to task for his views, there is a conspicuous paucity of written commentary concerning other, less institutionally powerful, jazz musicians’ expressions of opinions that are equally at odds with those of the mainstream liberal critical establishment. Three exceptions are Pearl Cleage on Miles Davis’s misogyny (‘‘Mad at Miles,’’ in The Miles Davis Companion: Four Decades of Commentary, ed. Gary Carner [New York: Schirmer, 1996], 210–16); Ajay Heble on Charles Gayle’s homophobia and anti-abortionism (Landing on the Wrong Note: Jazz, Dissonance, and Critical Practice [New York: Routledge, 2000], 199–228); and Terry Teachout on Louis Armstrong’s conservative social views (‘‘A Face of Armstrong, But Not the Image,’’ The New York Times, July 29, 2001, pp. AR25, 30). Also see Burton W. Peretti, ‘‘Republican Jazz? Symbolism, Arts Policy, and the New Right,’’ in Music and History: Bridging the Disciplines, eds. Jeffrey H. Jackson and Stanley C. Pelkey (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2005), 99–114. Jazz Perspectives 227 and range of [Marsalis’s] talent has few peers and his integrity is exceeded by no one. (Uh-oh: did I hear somebody say integrity in this house?).’’ The trumpeter inarguably exhibits musical integrity in staying true to his (and Crouch’s) conception of jazz by melding elements of blues and swing with Latin rhythms and the romantic popular ballad style.8 Indeed, the title track, an extended multi-sectional form comprising several contrasting rhythm-section grooves, is a near-perfect synopsis of the rhythmic variety Marsalis venerates in the music of his chief compositional role model, Duke Ellington. Elsewhere, he has described these Ellingtonian traits as ‘‘shuffle swing; … slow, deep-in-the-pocket groove swing; church grooves; the Afro-Cuban pieces; ballads with brushes; exotic grooves.’’9 This tendency to juxtapose and combine diverse stylistic elements, whether within single compositions or in the contrasts between, for example, the album’s mellow, harmonically rich ballads (‘‘Love and Broken Hearts’’ and ‘‘These are Soulful Days’’) and the more austere, dissonant chromatic palette of ‘‘Find Me,’’ which is designated a ‘‘Modern Habanera’’ (the printed track listing gives each piece a descriptive rhythmic/generic label), suggests a self-conscious eclecticism that, it has been noted, could easily be mistaken for the postmodernism of musicians like Don Byron and Dave Douglas were it not adumbrated by Marsalis’s historicist rhetoric.10 While the trumpeter’s versatility has led some to charge that, having no fixed identity, his playing lacks expressive content, it is nonetheless entirely consistent with his antiessentialist view of jazz as a craft that can be learned through mastery of its formal elements.11 Marsalis has also been accused of sacrificing emotion to instrumental virtuosity, although he, for his own part, regards ‘‘pristine technique [as] a sign of morality.’’12 In the present case, he never seems to exploit his technical facility gratuitously, even when executing, with apparent ease, rapid, rhythmically irregular 8 Crouch consistently defines jazz in terms of these four elements: ‘‘4/4 swing, blues, the romantic to meditative ballad, and Afro-Hispanic rhythms.’’ Stanley Crouch, ‘‘The Negro Aesthetic of Jazz,’’ in Considering Genius: Writings on Jazz (New York: Basic Books, 2006), 212. 9 Wynton Marsalis and Robert G. O’Meally, ‘‘Duke Ellington: ‘Music Like a Big Hot Pot of Good Gumbo,’’’ in The Jazz Cadence of American Culture, ed. Robert G. O’Meally (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 143. 10 John F. Szwed, Jazz 101: A Complete Guide to Learning and Loving Jazz (New York: Hyperion, 2000), 274–75; Ted Gioia, The History of Jazz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 390. 11 Pianist Keith Jarrett, for instance, contends that ‘‘Wynton imitates other people’s styles too well … You can’t learn to imitate everyone else without a real deficit. I’ve never heard anything Wynton played sound like it meant anything at all. Wynton has no voice and no presence.’’ Quoted in Andrew Solomon, ‘‘The Jazz Martyr,’’ The New York Times Magazine, February 9, 1997, 35. On Marsalis’s view of jazz as a craft, see Marsalis, ‘‘What Jazz Is—and Isn’t,’’ 335. 12 Wynton Marsalis with Selwyn Seyfu Hinds, To a Young Jazz Musician: Letters from the Road (New York: Random House, 2004), 62. Also see Wynton Marsalis, Sweet Swing Blues on the Road (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), 166–68. On the issue of emotion versus virtuosity, critic Whitney Balliett writes that ‘‘technique, rather than melodic logic, still governs [Marsalis’s] improvising, and the emotional content of his playing remains hidden and skittish.’’ Whitney Balliett, Collected Works: A Journal of Jazz, 1954–2000 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 637. Also see pp. 848–49. 228 Media Reviews passages of considerable harmonic complexity in his remarkable solo on the album’s fifth track13 That solo’s musical merits, and whatever ethical values they represent, are, however, somewhat eclipsed because the most immediate impact of this particular track, which is entitled ‘‘Supercapitalism,’’ stems, as with the rest of the album, from its to-the-point lyrics, which Marsalis penned himself. Here the issue of integrity becomes thornier given that the piece’s critique is not targeted at the social depredations wrought by free-market fundamentalism, but rather at the materialistic excesses of contemporary consumer culture (‘‘Gimme that, Gimme this,’’ runs the refrain).14 This is hardly the indictment one would anticipate from an artist who currently appears in an advertising campaign for ostentatious Movado wrist watches. (And, needless to say, ‘‘Supercapitalism’’ strikes quite a different tone from that of an address the trumpeter delivered, just weeks after completing this recording, at a ‘‘World Business Forum’’ event sponsored by the Pitney-Bowes corporation.)15 Maybe Marsalis can be excused for being a less than perfect exemplar of his professed values, but he steps into still more contentious terrain when his lyrics promote a brand of political individualism that would appear to seriously underestimate the power and complexity of those forces for which individuals cannot reasonably be held accountable. The album’s concluding track, ‘‘Where Y’all At?,’’ an A-flat-major second-line vamp over which Marsalis assails, in rhyming quatrains, the 1960s generation for failing to make good on its idealism, illustrates how even a benignly intentioned ideology of self-reliance can easily end up placing an undue burden of personal responsibility upon those who are largely victims of structural socio- economic factors beyond their own control.16 The real legacy of the 1960s that Marsalis seems to be grappling with philosophically is not one of unfulfilled promises but one of unanticipated consequences. Up until the mid-twentieth century, jazz flourished within a stable yet conflicted moral universe in which traditional (and, for him, positive) values 13 The recording documents a return to form for Marsalis, who entered the studio only weeks after giving his first public performance since recovering from a serious lip injury.