He'll turn a tune inside out, turn the harmony on its head. But now this jazz superstar is holding a telephone, and the tune he's blowing is strictly minor key. Jazz is a form of tough love, Marsalis says. True art can't be commercial. He's tooling along a Massachusetts turnpike on the way to a gig.
Jazz history is marred by the perspective of the writers.
Reading that stuff doesn't give me understanding. It's 80 percent anecdotes, road stories. It's never about what the intent of the artist was. But you can be pretty sure that whatever age was supposed to be the golden age, wasn't. You read about the great days on 52nd Street in New York, when you could hear anybody for no money.