Ellis Marsalis at the Kennedy Center 2/15/01

by Alan Greenblatt

Ellis Marsalis walked onto the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater stage Thursday night wearing a dark suit, a loud tie and the air of having been roused from doing something else. He plucked out a few random chords on the piano that eventually organized themselves into the Kurt Weill melody "Softly, As in a Morning Sunrise."

You could hear where the spare lyricism of his recordings comes from. His touch is light but sure and he plays distinctive solitary notes (as opposed to messy, jangling chords). His solo encore of "The Party's Over" was a lovely, articulate reading of the melody, which his left hand laying down some interesting harmonies.

It was unfortunate that his left hand rested through the rest of the concert, the rhythm being handled by the bass and drums. Marsalis' playing was completely uninspired. He meandered away from melodies into solos that had no clear direction; they were simply strings of notes fllowing one right after another without a guiding principle of wit, funk or feeling.

Marsalis presented younger musicians who played in much the same style. Derek Douget played alto and soprano saxophones with skill but without ideas. Leon Anderson banged away steadily at the drums, the sort of soloist who builds by playing the same phrases repeatedly with only slight variation but steadily increasing volume. Bass player Bill Huntington offered a few surprising bars in the early going but mostly it was plonk-plonk-plonk.

The thing the concert reminded me of most was the state of mainstream jazz twenty-odd years ago, before young Wynton Marsalis restored a kind of (dead-end?) vitality to it by digging into the music's roots.