Jazz legend Wynton Marsalis opens week with primer on ‘All Rise’

On Monday morning in the Amphitheater, jazz legend Wynton Marsalis discussed overcoming the struggles of writing a piece of music that successfully brings not only instrumental families together, but also the people that listen to them. The result of Marsalis’ challenge was the piece “All Rise,” which will be performed by Marsalis, the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, the Buffalo Philharmonic Chorus, and Chautauqua’s Music School Festival Orchestra twice this week.

Marsalis’ lecture kicked off the Institution’s Week Nine Chautauqua Lecture Series theme, titled “Rising Together: Our Century of Creativity and Collaboration with Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra.” His talk took the audience through his philosophy on jazz and the Blues, and his process for writing “All Rise,” interspersed with personal anecdotes, while he confronted sectarianism and proposed avenues of unity and freedom through music.

Marsalis began his lecture with a memory of meeting Ella Fitzgerald at Carnegie Hall in the 1980s. He recalled her knowing who he was and telling him, “I know what you’re trying to do. This is going to be very difficult for you.” At the time, he didn’t truly understand her words, but now says that after witnessing many societal failures from his own generation’s perspective he has a better grasp on her meaning. 

“We are in a state of desperate dysfunction, and we seem to not know who we are,” he said. 

Marsalis grew up in what he describes as “a sectarian universe in a small Louisiana town between the second set of railroad tracks and the Mississippi River.” He spoke about his father’s philosophy of universal humanism, an ideology that influences Marsalis to this day. He recalled his father’s debates, saying that “during the 1970s, my father was always the only person in the barbershop arguing for universal humanism.” During Marsalis’ childhood, he and his brother were embarrassed by their father’s outspokenness, which often clashed with those around them. Now, however, he fondly recalls one of his father’s sayings: “The only ‘we’ that I recognize is someone who shows up to solve a problem with me.” 

A key point of Marsalis’ discussion was the freedom and unity that jazz provides, no matter a person’s origins. Jazz is an undeniable part of the identity of New Orleans.

“Jazz. It was messy,” Marsalis said. “It was connected to other persons, and it was also going to communicate a mythology of equality.” 

However, he feels jazz strayed from its original purpose.

“By the ’70s, the music had been reduced to a straw-hatted nostalgia on Bourbon Street to be shouted over by tourists having a boozy good time,” he said. “For Black folks, it was instrumental funk tunes that you could nod your head to while pretending to be deep.”

Marsalis described the current moment as “a difficult time for democracy.” In light of this, he hopes to return to those original egalitarian and unifying roots of jazz and the Blues. 

“‘All Rise’ was intended to bring large and disparate forces together in pursuit of a common understanding,” he said.

“All Rise,” which premiered 25 years ago, took Marsalis six months to outline and another four to write. He described the orchestra as a group of families coming together, and learning how to bring those families together musically was a process for which he spent a long time preparing. 

When Marsalis was first approached by New York Philharmonic Principal Conductor Kurt Masur in the late 1980s, he laughed at the request to write a piece for the orchestra. However, Masur was relentless, asking Marsalis, every time the two met, “Are you still afraid to write for the New York Philharmonic?”

Eventually, Marsalis relented and began building the vocabulary necessary to write for a big band or a full orchestra. He did not want to write “the contemporary music that critics seem to like but (he) hates.” Marsalis wrote a piece based on the work of Stravinsky just “to be able to sit next to a bassoonist.” He asked Peter Martins of the New York City Ballet if he could write a ballet “that’s gonna be terrible,” because he knew he had to learn to orchestrate. During that process, Marsalis also had the guidance and critique of composer James Oliverio. 

When Marsalis told Masur, around 1998, that he was ready to write for the New York Philharmonic, he had a conversation he never expected. Masur told Marsalis about being a member of the Hitler Youth in Nazi Germany. 

“ ‘Do you think it’s possible to kill millions of people and no one knew about it? Everyone knew,’ ” Marsalis recalled Masur telling him. “ ‘Friend, you think erroneously that this cannot happen in your country. You’re going down that road.’ ” 

Masur asked Marsalis to write an ambitious piece, one Marsalis knew would need to draw on universal fundamentals, understood by everyone — truths like “you get old and then people talk about you as a memory.” Marsalis’ next challenge was to craft those ideas into a formal piece.

The completed “All Rise” contains over 850,000 notes and follows the form of the Blues, which Marsalis believes is “the most fundamental form in American music and probably in the world.” Marsalis concluded that the solution to bringing so many different musicians together to create this piece was to “find things that they already have done together that they just don’t know, (to make them realize) ‘Hey, we did this together.’ ”

The progression of the Blues in “All Rise,” follows the form of progression through life. Each section of the piece represents a different moment punctuating life, which Marsalis hopes will resonate with listeners, no matter their experiences and cultures. He said that he found musical commonalities by realizing that sometimes “things that you don’t think should go together actually are the same thing.” 

The first section of “All Rise” is made up of four movements and focuses on the moments of young life. The first movement focuses on pure joy; the second movement engages with themes of childhood play; the third movement is an expression of one’s first time falling in love, and the fourth movement progresses into a young person’s inevitable fall toward arrogance. 

The second section of the piece also has four movements and builds upon the theme of young adult arrogance. Marsalis delves into tribulation and the “quest for maturity.” The fifth movement of “All Rise” is “begging for forgiveness” after recognizing the arrogance from the fourth movement. Marsalis calls the sixth movement “Cried, Shouted, then Sung,” as a description of a person’s mental journey toward maturity following a downfall. The seventh movement moves to understanding and acceptance, and the eighth movement welcomes the person back into joy and grace. 

The third and final section of “All Rise” mirrors the first. Four more movements return again to the theme of joy, but this time that joy is infused with maturity. The ninth movement is a series of Latin dances, intended to imply flexibility and broader global understanding, followed by a 10th  movement returning to the idea of a child playing with a train; this time, however, that train is carrying an adult from one place to another. The 11th movement is the Blues, expressing the “after” that follows heartbreak. The 12th and final movement, which Marsalis calls “The Great I Am,” explores Christian concepts in the context of Arabic music. 

Marsalis encouraged listeners to remember that “we have to find optimism in the fact that things are in cycles.” He continued: “In attempting to unite disparate and large forces, everyone has to give up something in order to achieve the greater whole.”

Marsalis concluded his lecture by returning to his father’s philosophy. He recalled telling his dad that he was bored with music and needed something new. 

“If you’re looking for a new idea,” Marsalis’ father told him, “just listen to the person next to you.”