Jazz at Lincoln Center
In fact Wynton Marsalis’s major contribution to jazz will most likely be neither his music (which though Pulitzer- and Grammy-winning is not exceptional in any way) nor his trumpet playing (which is sometimes wonderful but rarely heard in a stimulating context) but his insistence–articulated through the Jazz at Lincoln Center’s concerts, its many educational programs, and his own TV and radio shows–that jazz is a historically specific art form that reached its limits with Ornette Coleman in the early 60s. Thereafter it has been subject to “denigration,” “dilution,” “degeneration,” and “corruption” by fusion (which Marsalis says “has one thing in common with hermaphrodites…sterility”) and free and creative musics (whose practitioners Marsalis calls “the primitive frauds”). In case you think he can’t be serious, consider his statement that “as the Third Reich proved, determined corruption can lead to catastrophic events.” To ward off corruption, Marsalis implies, one must have a sense of purity. The Third Reich certainly had some ideas about that.
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It’s possible that both men had creative-music experiences that keenly revealed to them some deficiency in the medium, but if you’re a cynic, their intense rejection of all things impure can look an awful lot like a strangely violent repudiation of personal history. (This summer after the New York Jazz Awards, at which Crouch served as a presenter, he actually punched Jazz Journalists Association president Howard Mandel, who had reproached him for dissing one of the nominees, avant-garde pianist Matthew Shipp, from the podium.) Perhaps each man felt he had to formulate a narrow definition of jazz to create a stronger identity or illuminate a lucrative career path. The problem is that the music is bigger than even the most puffed-up and prickly ideologue.
