Jazz occupies a special place in the American cultural landscape. It’s played in elegant concert halls and run-down bars, and can feature esoteric harmonic experimentation or good old-fashioned foot-stomping swing. Nobody embodies the scope of modern jazz better than Wynton Marsalis. As a trumpet player, bandleader, composer, educator, and ambassador for the music, he has worked tirelessly to keep jazz vibrant and alive. In this bouncy conversation, we talk about various kinds of music, how they might relate to physics, and some of the greater challenges facing the United States today. Thanks to KentPresents for bringing us together.

Hailing from an accomplished New Orleans family, Wynton Marsalis was marked as a prodigy from a young age. He played locally before moving to New York and attend Julliard, and played and recorded with artists such as Art Blakey and Herbie Hancock. He has recorded numerous albums as a leader of small ensembles, big bands, and as a soloist with symphony orchestras. He is a multiple-time Grammy winner and the first to win in both jazz and classical categories in the same year, and in 1997 his oratorio Blood on the Fields was the first non-classical work to win the Pulitzer Prize for music. Marsalis founded and continues to lead Jazz at Lincoln Center, which is in residence at Lincoln Center along with such organizations as the New York Philharmonic, the Metropolitan Opera, and the New York City Ballet. He has won the National Medal of the Arts and the National Humanities Medal, along with numerous other awards and honorary degrees.

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Episode Transcript

0:00:01 Sean Carroll, Interviewer: Hello everybody, and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I’m your host, Sean Carroll. And I don’t wanna waste your time with banter today because we have a very special guest. We’re very happy to have Wynton Marsalis join us on the podcast. If you are in any sense a jazz fan, Wynton Marsalis is the proverbial guy who needs no introduction. He’s been acclaimed as a trumpet player, of course, but also as a composer, a band leader, and also an educator, and an ambassador for jazz music worldwide. He’s the winner of multiple Grammy Awards. He was the first jazz musician, indeed the first non-classical musician to win a Pulitzer Prize, countless honorary degrees, national awards, etcetera.

0:00:42 SI: He’s recorded a huge number of albums as a leader of small ensembles, big bands, and in collaboration with a diverse group of people from Willie Nelson, to Eric Clapton, to traditional musicians around the world. He’s also the founder and leader of Jazz at Lincoln Center, which joins things like the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic in residence at Lincoln Center. Not only that, but he is a classical musician, who both composes and plays trumpet with symphony orchestras. He won a Grammy for that too. So you get the point. Wynton Marsalis is arguably the most important figure alive in jazz today, and certainly enormously influential in how we think about music. He and I got to meet at a nice event called KentPresents. This is an Ideas Festival in Connecticut sponsored by Ben and Donna Rosen, and we hit it off immediately.

0:01:35 SI: He’s a very curious guy. He wanted to know about physics, and things like that. I wanted to know about jazz. So we have a wide-ranging bouncy conversation. And if you don’t like jazz, or you’ve never heard of Wynton Marsalis, no problem. I would still recommend listening to this episode. This is not one of those conversations where we just name-drop our favorite musicians or artists from the past, or from the present. Wynton Marsalis is an opinionated guy. He always has been. That’s been one of his trademarks all along, and he gives us some of his opinions, not just about music, but about the state of the world, the state of the country, the state of education in the United States. We talk about physics, we talk about time, and quantum mechanics. This is your chance to spend an hour with a brilliant, creative person with an open, fertile mind. We had a great time, and I hope you will too. So let’s go.

[music]

0:02:30 SI: Wynton Marsalis, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.

0:02:45 Wynton Marsalis: Alright. This is such a pleasure, Sean. Thank you.

0:02:47 SI: So I understand that your first paying gig was as a funk musician, is that right?

0:02:54 WM: That’s right, that’s right.

0:02:55 SI: This is the 1970s. This is the bell bottoms, the big hair, the whole bit?

0:03:00 WM: That’s right. Early, early in that year, we played an elementary school dance.

0:03:03 SI: An elementary school dance, alright. Did you get recompense for this? Did you get paid?

0:03:06 WM: Yeah, we got paid. We got paid $100. It was five of us, so it was $20 a person.

0:03:11 SI: And what were you playing?

0:03:12 WM: We played just stuff that was on the radio at that time, but we had learned maybe 15 songs or 20 songs, or 20 songs three minutes. It was a dance for three hours, so after we played the 20 songs, we were like, “Okay, that’s it.” And everybody was like, “Hey, we still have two more hours to go,” so we just played those songs…

0:03:31 SI: Play it again.

0:03:32 WM: In a loop.

0:03:33 SI: They could still dance. [chuckle]

0:03:34 WM: We played in a loop over and over again, so we always laugh about that, about that job.

0:03:39 SI: But there is something special about jazz, right? What in your mind is what makes jazz special?

0:03:46 WM: I think that the three fundamentals are the music, improvisation to some type of grid. So you can improvise, but you have some restraint. The swing, which means you’re improvising with other people, and there are things that govern how you are, will interact with each other, but those things you also choose them. So if you’re a heavy swinger, you choose to be in the groove, and you choose to give some points over to people. If you’re not, you don’t. And then the blues, which is an optimism in spite of all evidence to the contrary.

0:04:24 SI: Aha, so explain that.

0:04:25 WM: It’s like in the words of a blues, “I went down to the railroad, put my head on the track. I went down to the railroad, put my head on the track. When that train came along, I snatched my fool head back.”

0:04:40 SI: So there’s something in there, so the blues is about living through life, not giving up.

0:04:44 WM: It’s living, it’s about an optimism that’s not naïve.

0:04:48 SI: Right, right. And to say more about swing in particular, ’cause I’ve had talks with musician friends. I’m not a musician myself. I appreciate the music very much, but swing is… There’s other genres of music that improvise. The blues is a genre all by itself, but swing is something that is uniquely jazz.

0:05:08 WM: Right, that’s physics. It’s relational, and it’s quantifiable. It’s the reconciliation of opposites. So if you look at swing as a concept, whatever it takes for you to get from the “I” consciousness to the “We” consciousness is swinging. Now when you embrace that in such a way that you’re in a groove, and you make all the little adjustments that are required to make, to not just endure another person or to tolerate them, but you embrace them, then you’re swinging. So when you look at it as a concept, it is a six rhythm, ding, ding, di ding, ding, one, two, three, four, five, six, one, two, three, four, five, six, one, two, three, four, five six against a four rhythm, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, ding, ding, di ding, ding di ding, di ding, di ding.

0:06:00 WM: On the micro level, where it shows up is if you start to play fast, so if you go ding, ding di ding, then you go doodle-doodle-diddle-doodle-doodle-diddle-doodle-doodle-diddle, you can’t go, tacka-tacka-tacka-tacka-tacka, you have to go doodle-doodle-diddle. You’re shuffling. So that’s a two and a three also. So instead of it being da-ta-da-ta-da-ta-da-ta-da, it’s ta ta ta ta ta ta ta, doodle-doodle-diddle-doodle-doodle-diddle-doodle-doodle-diddle. It’s difficult to negotiate the feeling of though that odd and even, at the same time. The swing is the bass, which is the lowest pitch played in four, on every beat, matched with the drums, this in six, which the cymbal is the highest pitch, and the pitch that you can hear the most. So you have all these extremes.

0:06:42 SI: Sounds like the drummer has a tough job there.

0:06:44 WM: The drummer has a tough job, he’s president. He can just choose to just bowl everybody over, but great drummers… They’ll see a great drummer as kind. They use their power very intelligently, and sparingly.

0:06:56 SI: And it sounds like it’s about… So much music is about tension in some sense, right? It’s a competition between what you expect, the sort of natural, easy rhythm pattern, versus a little bit of what doesn’t quite belong that drives you forward, right?

0:07:08 WM: Right. I’m interested in how you would see that in relation to something… Some concepts that you work on, where you have opposite things. They come together, and you say, “Man, these two things are together. I never would have thought these things come together too.”

0:07:24 SI: Yeah, it’s all over the place. Physics, science is driven by what we don’t understand. We try to leap into the places that we don’t yet understand. Science, professional scientists don’t spend their time doing homework problems that the college students do. And so what is the way to make progress? It’s to pinpoint two things that you both think are true, but they don’t agree with each other, righ