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Like him or not, I admire Wynton Marsalis for speaking his mind. He doesn't seem to care whether or not people agree. He has opinions and when asked, he states his opinions firmly and eloquently. Since he was just playing here in Vancouver, The Georgia Straight printed an article about him, and his strong feelings on jazz and rap.
One thing that gets Marsalis talking is that rap, rather than jazz, has come to be known as the great African-American music.
"When people say that rap is black music, don't think that it is: it is not," he contends. "It's some black people doing it, but they're fulfilling national objectives."
Those national objectives, he adds, are to divide black from white, men from women, and young from old, while giving suburban dilettantes a titillating ethnic frisson.
And of course the "national objectives" of the record companies today are nothing like the meagre objectives of the tiny mom-and-pop record companies like Dial and Savoy (Charlie Parker) and Prestige and Riverside (Thelonius Monk) that recorded so many of the jazz greats in the old days.
"That bourgeois fascination with slumming? Rap is that," he says. "Certain types of rap. Not all rap, but the type of rap that is most popular: that kind of minstrel-show rap. That does two things: on the one hand, it puts down Afro-American culture completely—-and what better way to do it than to get the people to put themselves down? It brings the minstrel show back, and it gives the bourgeois people some place to go on safari. So it achieves a lot of objectives at one time."
Jazz, by contrast, is a democratic music, capable of uniting listeners of all ages and demanding both virtuosity and consideration from its practitioners. At least that's Marsalis's theory.
Apparently, Wynton Marsalis has not listened to the radio since 1976. I can't blame him, but thankfully now there is radio on the Internet like WKCR, which I am sure plays Marsalis recordings from time to time.
This post quotes The Georgia Straight, Oct 19, 2006
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