Wynton Marsalis at 2nd Annual Silver Spring Jazz Festival 9/10/05

by Alan Greenblatt

Thanks for the many positive responses you sent last week regarding my excerpts from New Orleans' storm literature. I had the chance to see the most prominent inheritor and promulgator of that city's music, Wynton Marsalis, in my new hometown's 2nd Annual Silver Spring Jazz Festival on Saturday.

Marsalis was quoted in the Washington Post yesterday talking vaguely about hopes for rebuilding the city, but he didn't mention it or its problems during his Silver Spring appearance (where buckets full of money were raised for hurricane relief). He did at one point announce that he and his quintet were going to play a pair of New Orleans-style funeral tunes, one mournful and one jubilant, "for my home folks." It was a clear highlight.

The festival attracted, I don't know, 10,000 or so folks crammed into what amounts to a vacant lot, with hundreds more looking down from the parking garage across the street. It was one of those moments where you're glad to be part of a big crowd, everyone experiencing the same emotion, many people dancing and waving handkerchiefs -- one person even had an umbrella to bounce up and down.

In recent years, many New Orleans rituals have passed into the wider culture. People don't typically wave handkerchiefs except when hearing New Orleans-style music (it's a regular sight when the Federal Jazz Commission plays a furious uptempo number at Colonel Brooks Tavern). But think how often you've seen people wearing plastic beads as a sort of getting drunk uniform. It was sad to think that such rituals -- which always become so important to dying cultures, such as New Orleans' has been for decades -- will become even more artificial, practiced not by tourists in the French Quarter but suburbanites in Maryland.

Marsalis's burden has always been, despite his many original compositions, that his has been the career that marks just about the end of jazz as a living music. Each generation of jazz musicians has rejected the styles that came before and tried to strike out in pursuit of something new. It was always the white man's burden to revive older forms, such as Dixieland. Marsalis was not only the first black musician to play the part of archivist, but also the first dominant musician in the idiom who really can't be called an innovator.

Such is always the complaint lodged against him. Iny many ways, it's unfair. He has led revivalist bands, such as the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, which plays old big band charts, but he has grown considerably from his early days, when he was so derivative of Miles Davis, Freddie Hubbard and other trumpeters. Plus, he sounds good. No one has a more beautiful tone on the instrument.

His solos also can be remarkably inventive. They weren't on this occasion, though. He sounded good on the New Orleans stuff and Dizzy Gillespie's "Blue 'n Boogie," but most of his solos were not interesting explorations. He stuck close to the tune as written, varying his tempo slightly and making key changes. But he didn't remake the tunes in his own image the way that, for instance, sax player Walter Blanding did.

The most exciting player, though, was pianist Dan Nimmer, who I had never heard of before. He's a terrific young white player. His best moment came during the mournful tune, "St. James' Infirmary," when he played a painfully slow solo -- his tempo threw off the drummer and bass player -- constructing it out of occasional, erratically placed single notes. He stripped the tune bare and made you think about it anew -- that's what I call jazz.

The Silver Spring festival went on all day, one of many festivals around the DC area this past weekend -- Takoma Folk, Kennedy Center open house, that Orwellian "freedom march" cordoned off on the Mall. In Rosslyn, a longer-standing free outdoor festival gave folks the chance to hear on a splendid afternoon Nnenna Freelon remake standards with unique rhythms and tenor sax legend James Moody turn one of his signature tunes, "Benny's From Heaven," into an ever-more baroque indulgence. His yodeling and interpolated jokes can be immensely charming, but I think he's getting too much in love with his own shtick.

The only set besides Wynton's that we caught in Silver Spring belonged to the great singer Carol Sloane. She was as good as I've ever heard her, which is saying a lot. Her slightly husky voice pours out of her like pleasing liquid. She has perfect pitch and a great sense of time and really knows how to caress a melody.

Sloane sang some uptempo stuff -- "I Can't Believe That You're in Love With Me," Jon Hendricks' endless string of lyrics that he set to Ben Webster's recording of "Cottontail" -- but it was a lot of slow ballads, luscious numbers such as "All Too Soon." She sounded great but that slow, beautiful music and her subtle effects with the microphone -- she modulates her own volume by moving the mike at times all the way down to her waist -- was lost on the big outdoor crowd. There was an awful lot of chattering during her set.

Sloane was supposed to be accompanied by bassist Keter Betts, who was all set to have a big weekend, playing in Silver Spring and leading a group for two nights at the Kennedy Center. But Betts died recently, so the festival was dedicated to his memory.

In my years in DC, Betts was always treated like a legend, subject to many long and fulsome introductions. Jazz musicians nowadays seem to be rated according to what famous names they have played with. Betts, having played with Dinah Washington and having spent a long time in the employ of Ella Fitzgerald, had come to be honored himself. He never seemed to take any of that seriously, though. He just sort of smiled as people went on about him, and then lent quiet support with his big, fat tone to whoever else was holding down the solo spotlight.