Sic Semper Tyrannis

Standard Time

I believe it was Alabama that sang "If you're gonna play in Texas, you gotta have a fiddle in the band."

Another musical truism is that if you're gonna play the trumpet, you're gonna have to play some jazz. I really think that most trumpet players have to come to some sort of reconciliation with the jazz idiom at some point. It's like every serious pianist will inevitably be exposed to Chopin.

There are some pretty iconic figures in the jazz world who played trumpet, the most revered and recognizable of whom would probably be Louis Armstrong. But under him you've also got the likes of Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis, pretty recognizable guys in their own right.

But my first exposure to jazz was a fellow by the name of Wynton Marsalis. His album Standard Time Volume 1 was a real musical education. I don't think I had heard anything like this stuff before! The album starts off with a crazy ride-cymbal-driven drum groove and then the piano comes in with what seemed to my young ears to be the most arrhythmic, dissonant-yet-laid back piano chords ever. And then, after all that settles in to your psyche as acceptable levels of noise, Wynton bends into the long held out first note of "Caravan," the old Duke Ellington standard.

It seemed that once again, my ears hadn't yet grown appendages evolved enough to capture all of this music. Once again, this was music from another planet. A planet of "cool," where everything was made up as they went along. I remember having the gall to tell my trumpet teacher at the time that Wynton didn't play very accurately, and I'm sure he just chuckled. There were all kinds of botched notes and seeming mess-ups that even I, in my two years of playing could hear.

I didn't realize at the time, but this kind of music was a recording of a "controlled experiment." These guys didn't read music off of paper. They let it just come out of their heads. There are amazing lessons to be learned from these captured "moments." One, the freedom. Man, it must be like the freedom a visual artist feels when looking at a blank canvas or a lump of clay. That silence is to become whatever they decide to make it. But with this Wynton music, I have enough experience playing music to realize that the freedom is tempered by trust amongst the musicians. There are four guys in the room all trusting each other to support each other's ideas as they're coming out. That's music-making at a pretty vulnerable level.

All of these revelations and lessons learned and analysis are all after the fact. To be honest, when I first heard Standard Time, I didn't really "get it." (I'm still not sure I really "get" jazz all the time.) But even so, by the seventh grade, this album was my favorite. I can pinpoint the year because I remember writing that in my seventh grade French class. "Le album de mon favorite es Le Standard Time de la Wynton Marsalis." Or something to that effect.

I still have problems realizing what it is about the performances on this album that just feel so...good...to me. I know it has something to do with how the rhythm section is playing-sort of reserved, but tight at the same time. (I had a friend in college point out to me that, for Wynton's band at this time, tempo was even up for group improvisation. And so, in some songs you'll hear all four musicians moving together to higher tempos and back down. That's some sensitive playing! It's kind of like in one of those early black and white Disney cartoons where Donald Duck is zooming down the mountain in his car without any brakes and with a trailer and whenever he hits a bend in the road he comes this close to falling down a cliff.) That Disney image might create the impression that this is wild and crazy careening music, but it's not. For the most part, this is really subdued playing. The harmonies that Marcus Roberts is playing on the piano sound hollow, as if they are leaving some breathing room for the soloist. But yet, all of this subtlety doesn't devolve into generic "smoky club music." This music is still somehow alive and present; it doesn't fall into the background for me. I don't know, man, you just need to hear this stuff to know what I'm talking about.

Wynton is still my favorite trumpet player and I came to realize that he is a true "cross-over" artist as some people in the biz would call it. He has had success in both the jazz and classical worlds, which is quite rare, since both sides have more than their share of purist snobs. (And Wynton's a bit of a snob in his own right, since he apparently hates the rock n' roll that the kids are so crazy about. But I forgive him for that.)

Like I said, I can't say that I always understand what jazz musicians are up to. Their harmonic language is pretty close to incomprehensible to me. I understand the concept of swing and I can play that feel pretty competently but I usually refrain from faking jazz out of respect. But I still enjoy listening to it a lot of the time, thanks to my introduction by Wynton Marsalis' Standard Time Volume 1.

posted by Mike @ 4:01 PM