Thanks to my fidgety nature, I take notes, even on something as eloquent as the talk by Wynton Marsalis last night. So, by popular request, here’s my best record of some of what he said:
Music is the most abstract of all the arts. There’s nothing to see there. Music is nothing but an arrangement of somethings strung out along timelines.
- The arts were born as entertainment….
- Somebody in a cave telling the story of catching a fish *this* big.
- The arts mature as education….
- Words and paintings that describe the thing they’re about.
- The arts are reborn as reenactment….
- In a spirit of reverence, re-creating the work of artists you admire.
There are two kinds of music America gave the world. The blues. And swing. And each of these enfolds its own special kind of gift.
The gift of the blues is…optimism that is not naive. What’s the first thing that happens to a baby when it comes into the world? Smack! But then you go on from there. The gift of the blues is a vaccination against life’s pain.
The gift of swing is…embracing a mutual time. When you are playing and swinging, I can tell you the last thing you want is to hold back and think about what rhythms everyone else is playing with you. But you have to do it. The gift of swing is creating a shared time instead of insisting on your own time.
What you see behind Wynton Marsalis and his jazz band is not a backdrop. Those are huge floor-to-ceiling windows looking our over Columbus Circle and Central Park, as night slowly darkens the sky–in the Allen Room at Lincoln Center.
[In my old blog, this was post 2333, created 2005/06/03; I had to recreate it here due to XML problems.]