Disappointing. Didn't get a chance to shake hands with Wynton Marsalis. I was ready. Had a good opening gambit. Good as in I had something to say and wouldn't have stood there stuttering about how I liked his music. Was going to tell him how one of the best birthday presents the blonde ever gave me was taking me to a concert back in Syracuse with him and his father and his brothers, Branford, Delfeayo, and Jason.
Had my one shot at him after all the speeches. Tracked him down at the small stage at the front of the room. A jazz combo featuring a former student of his was playing but he wasn't watching, he was letting himself be schmoozed by various party goers. I was next in line to schmooze but just before the schmoozer ahead of me was ready to let go of her grip on his attention and sleeve, his former student waved him up on stage to sit in for a set.
On keyboard.
Guess he hadn't thought to bring his ax.
When I called Nancy Nall a few days later to report the bad news that our hero James Wolcott hadn't been at the party, duty had called him out of the city that day, and how I'd missed out on talking to Wynton Marsalis, she told me that Marsalis loves to sit in. He shows up unexpectedly at clubs and inevitably he's up on stage, sitting in. That's what jazz musicians do. They play. Nance told me that one time Marsalis was sitting in somewhere, playing whatever, and just as he was hitting the sweetest of sweet notes, somebody's cell phone went off.
This was in the old days before downloadable ringtones. Not that it would have been any better if the phone had started playing Popeye the Sailor Man or the theme from Star Wars. But the cell phone rang with a loud ascending and descending series of seemingly random chimes. The owner of the phone had to fumble to answer it and while he or she fumbled Marsalis, without missing a beat, began to mimic the cell phone's ring on his trumpet.
Then he began to riff on it. He turned the cell phone's ring into it a little jazz aria that he somehow managed to bring back around and seque, beautifully, into the song he'd been playing when the cell had gone off, right at the note where he'd left off to chase the ring tone.
The crowd went nuts.
Stuff of legend.
Nance said that if she'd been there at the benefit Thursday night, that's what she'd have asked him about, how much of that story was true.
She guessed all of it. She just would have liked to hear him tell it.
I would have too, if I'd known about it before to ask him. But I had my gambit and, while I was waiting for the schmoozer ahead of me to let other people have a turn, I thought of something else to say to him, a real question.
About something he'd said in his speech accepting his award.
He'd talked about growing up in a slowly de-segregating South, how his family had lived on the wrong side of the railroad tracks and the right side at the same time. There was a rail line that divided the city by race.
On the one side lived the white folks, on the other side all the black folks.
But there was another set of tracks that divided the black neighborhoods.
On the one side lived all the middle class and working class people and those few poor people who managed to just keep their heads above water most of the time. This is where Marsalis and his family lived.
On the other side lived the really poor people.
Marsalis said that when he was really young he would go days on end, weeks, without seeing a white face. But his daddy was a jazz musician and his friends weren't white or black they were other jazz musicians. Some were paler than others is all. Sometimes some of Ellis Marsalis' friends would come by the house. Whenever the visitors included one of the paler musicians Wynton's friends would be both scared and thrilled. They'd find Wynton and ask him, as if begging to be let in on a family secret.
We saw a white guy going to your house, they's day---Marsalis imitated their hushed, breathless excitement----Is your daddy in trouble?
That's what white people meant in that neighborhood, the intrusion of trouble into people's lives.
One day, shortly after Martin Luther King was murdered, Marsalis' parents sat him down for a talk.
From now on, they told him, you're going to the white school across town.
That's what I would have liked to ask him about if I'd had the chance.
I would have asked him why his parents decided to do that and how King's death figured in their decision.
I suppose I could guess, but I'd rather have heard him tell it.
I was surprised he didn't answer it in his speech the moment her brought it up. But a lot of his speech was a bit disjointed. He'd seemed uncomfortable making it. I've seen him on TV talking extemporaneously and he was a good public speaker. Of course he was talking about music. Thursday night he felt called upon to talk about politics with the rest of us, I guess, and it made him unsure of himself. He might have been improvising. He might have had another speech planned and changed his mind about it while he was listening to speeches ahead of his, which were all political, all partisan.
Partisanship seemed to be on his mind. He doesn't like it. He was trying to define it in a way that would have explained to us what he didn't like about it.
Seems like an odd task to have set for himself at an event sponsored by group that has as its motto a seemingly partisan boast:
"Outthinking the Right."
But maybe it's his temperament. In his speech introducing Marsalis, Andrew Young said that Marsalis had always been one to go against the grain. Growing up a young jazz musician in New Orleans where Dixieland ruled, Marsalis had played be-bop. When he'd come to New York where a cooler, more sophisticated jazz moved the smoke around in the clubs, Marsalis had veered off towards classical music.
At a party where progressives were celebrating and cheerleading their partisanship, he decided to change the beat.
What he likes about the Drum Major Institute, he said, is that it's not all that partisan.
Partisanship to him, it was clear as he went on, was what he met up with at the white schools.
Things were hard for him at school.
I never got nigger-ed so much in my life, he said. Before or since.
Marsalis made one white friend. A girl who'd transfered in to the school from somewhere else, somewhere far away. One day Marsalis asked her, "How come you hang out with me? How come you're not like these other crackers around here?"
"Oh," the girl said simply, "I'm from Montana. We hate Indians there."
So partisanship, Marsalis was telling us, was very much like what the rest of us call prejudice, and in case we didn't get it, Marsalis went on to say how he doesn't like to hear losers talk about winners. Nobody likes to hear losers talk about winners, he said to a room that included a whole bunch of political bloggers who spend a good chunk of our day in the role of losers talking about the winners, explaining to them and ourselves why they weren't really the winners or at least why they shouldn't be the winners.
Partisanship, as Marsalis seemed to see it, is losers telling winners that they had voted stupidly last time out.
The people who voted stupidly don't need to hear it, he said.
"A lot of the people who voted stupidly are saying to themselves, Damn! I voted stupidly!"
Partisanship, I think he was trying to tell us, is a matter of identifying other people's stupidity and despising them for it. If that's what it is, then it isn't much different from prejudice.
"How can you hate me?" Marsalis asked us as if we were standing in for the crackers who'd nigger-ed him back in school. "You don't know me. You only know what you dislike about me."
Like I said, his speech was a bit disjointed. He didn't bother with transitions and he dropped points before finishing them. I do think he was improvising but I don't know. I'd like to ask him.
And he seemed to be calling on us partisans to change our tune, find another approach to the song, at least, try a new beat, a different key.
If I ever do get a chance to meet him, this is what I'll ask him. I'll ask him about his parents' decision to send him to the white school and I'll ask him about partisanship.
And I'll ask him how much of Nance's story is really true.
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