It wasn't the venue in which one would imagine seeing a master jazz trumpeter and Pulitzer-Prize Winning Artistic Director for the Lincoln Center Wynton Marsalis. But Marsalis and his quartet did play at Bowdoin's Morrell Gymnasium last Thursday evening. Basketball hoops were angled towards the rafters; and bleachers were drawn, making room for hundreds of white folding chairs.
The crowd was a mix of young and old alike, an intermingling of jazz connoisseurs and students, musicians and listeners, professors and amateur cognoscenti. The main floor of Morrell Gymnasium was filled, for the most part, with members of the Brunswick community, while students dangled sandal-clad feet from the bleacher railings in anxious anticipation of the quartet.
The quartet, based in New York City, has been with Marsalis since the mid-1990s, playing local gigs and private benefit parties. The group, fresh off Marsalis's new album The Magic Hour on the ever-trendy Blue Note record label, combines a minimalist approach to modern jazz music.
The quartet, with Eric Lewis on piano, Carlos Henriquez on bass, and Ali Jackson on drums, recalls at times such percussive-based medleys as the former Art Blakely and the Jazz Messengers band, which Marsalis joined in 1979 while he was only 17 and still a student at New York's prestigious Julliard School of music.
Over the years, Marsalis has grown in stature, winning a Pulitzer Prize in music for his contributions on Blood on the Fields in April 1997, a "Messenger of Peace" award from the United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan in March of 2001, and most recently, a Congressional "Horizon Award" in June of 2002. Considered by some to be the best living jazz composer today, Marsalis was the first and only artist to have won two Grammy Awards in both Classical and Jazz music.in the same year (1983).
"It is always great to play in a gym. You can play every place in the world, but you always remember playing in a gym," said Marsalis, donning a stylishly-slim gray suit, a throwback to such early Big Band leaders as the Duke himself. "Today is Duke Ellington's 105th anniversary, and in honor of him we have decided to open up with a set of some Duke and Billy Strahorn classics."
The first set opened with one of Ellington's fundamentals in "C-Jam Blues," played with a cascading piano solo by Eric Lewis that was answered immediately by Marsalis on the muted horn. The song that followed, "Caravan," an Ellington collaboration with the not-so-well-known Puerto Rican jazz trombonist Juan Tizol, introduced a mixture of Latino beats, played in the measure of an American bar. The result was a sultry concoction of bebop and cowbell.
Standing next to Marsalis, on a table-stand nearly waist high, was a shiny array of instrumental accompaniments, from silver to copper stops and mutes: used by Marsalis for different effects throughout the performance. The composer, from song to song, switched between such things as a WA-WA mute to a straight mute, conveying different qualities of tone and atmosphere. At one point during the performance of "Caravan," the bandleader stepped backstage allowing room for Lewis, (or the Professor, as Marsalis refers to him), to flow through a Latin piano deluge that ended in puddles stirred by the accomplished Jackson on drums.
The first set ended with two more Ellington classics, "Rock Bottom" and "Limbo Jazz." "Rock Bottom" was played with a silver mute to the pounding fingers of Henriquez on bass, who worked furiously to sustain an elaborately quickened beat. The band's tightness and fluency spoke for itself. Live, Marsalis's Promethean talent unfurls. Nonchalantly slipping between the swinging beats of "Rock Bottom" to "Limbo Jazz," a light tango-esque bar tune, the quartet plays with a sustained level of non-verbal communication, a sign of their experience.
The second set opened with Marsalis's original "Free to Be," described by the New York Times as "a 32-bar tune with an almost daringly simple theme." The song, by far the best on The Magic Hour, is an astounding display of magnanimity with Lewis playing a haunting set of parallel keys on piano to the sharp elliptical phrasing of Marsalis's horn. Following, "You and Me," the second song on the album and one that is alternately clapped by Jackson and Marsalis, adopts a 12-1 beat borrowed from the Spanish musician Chancho Dominguez.
The quartet's last song encompassed three modes of playing: a 4/4 swing, followed by a traditional afro-blues tune, groove, and a modernized ballad. There was an encore, followed by one last song. After the show, all four members of the quartet dispersed to the far reaches of the gymnasium to be surrounded by excited crowds of newly-converted and lifelong fans who sought the glory of a scrawled signature. Five minutes later, Marsalis could be found in a different location, entertaining signatures across the foyer.