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Monday, Oct 13, 2008
Why must Marsalis suffer to be considered good? Plus: A vote for Sega is a vote for Microsoft; comics creator Stan Lee's disputed legacy.
Aug 24, 1999 | Sharps & Flats: "Sweet Release and Ghost Story"
BY SETH MNOOKIN
(08/17/99)
I suppose you'd like Wynton Marsalis better if he had some dark, secret, suffering past? Let him be a junkie or a drunk, a closet homosexual or a '60s radical with an official intelligentsia, "outsider" passport. Let him be a philanderer or prodigal son, let him be a she and write duets with Wendy Carlos, let him fail gloriously and then you'll embrace him, eh? Ask yourself whether you as a listener and critic would receive his music differently if his biography were different, or if his prolific output were halved or quartered. Is it too much, too smooth? Where's the effort, where's the sweat?
Sometimes the front-runner is Secretariat. Sometimes an artist can actually find the material for greatness in a "silver trumpet" youth and adult existence. Must a young virtuoso/composer run off the rails to be deemed worthy in your eyes? Please state your conditions for acceptance at the beginning of your next review.
And what about "pretentiously ambitious"? Is any large plan by a successful artist going to be labeled as such by you? It has long been the fashion in New York fringe critical press to tear down the provincial strivers who have flourished in the embrace of the mainstream public, but I have yet to see or hear any dilution in the Marsalis product. Here in the backwaters of Chicago, we like to say, "Make no small plans." That doesn't mean every building has to be the Parthenon or every opera the Ring cycle, but why not dream big?
Man, if I had music pouring out of me like Wynton does, I'd just open the faucet and let flow. Hold on to that hose, Seth, get a bucket, get a tub, let Wynton fill up all your vessels -- because the man is still young. Just wait, there's more to come.
-- Chris Toft
I've always found Wynton Marsalis to be a technically proficient and emotionally frigid artist. My head tells me he's got tons of reverence for classic trumpet players, but he's just so goddamn precise that Marsalis' playing is as exciting as a computer programmer writing code.
I'd rather listen to my poor dead Miles Davis in his worst electric phase noodling than the tastefully boring work of Wynton. I'm afraid while Wynton learned everything he knows from Miles, Louie, Dizzy and Charlie, he's didn't learn everything they knew.
-- Jeff Winbush
Columbus, Ohio
Finally someone came out and said it: Wynton Marsalis is a trumpeter with superior technique, but he's led a comfortable life, never knowing real fear, desperation, and heartbreak. I don't think he's ever had to worry about racing to the bank with money obtained from pawning an instrument to try to cover a rent check that would otherwise bounce. He's never had to kick a habit, or worry about whether a club he's playing at will go under and he'll be out of a job and might have to live in the shelter. Few if any devils -- except a Muse that demands higher and higher levels of tonal perfection -- seem to haunt him. As you so eloquently put it, "jazz finds its base in pain." And judging from his beautiful but antiseptic work, Wynton Marsalis doesn't seem to feel it.
-- Russell Shaw
Portland, Ore.
Story Minute: "Time bomb"
BY CAROL LAY
(08/17/99)
Carol Lay's Aug. 17 cartoon extolling, in purportedly witty fashion, the merits of mass democide as punishment for "breeders" was indeed a thigh-slapper -- but her scope was a bit too expansive. Perhaps she should display her misanthropy to better effect on a smaller canvas. Rather than urging the slaughter of billions, why not begin with a smaller cohort -- say, ethnic Albanian or ethnic Serbian Kosovars (take your pick). Better yet, why not begin the crusade to "save the Earth" by taking out a small, relatively accessible target -- for instance, a federal building equipped with a day-care center?
I do hope that attentive readers will remember Lay's scabrous little cartoon next time Salon's editorial collective treats us to another sanctimonious treatment of "right-wing hate literature" such as "The Turner Diaries."
-- William Norman Grigg
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