Some things are more important than politics. Great music is one
of them. Music, the “universal language,” can ennoble an entire
civilization and can even serve as a tool of diplomacy. It also can
just flat-out fill a soul with joy. A new CD out this year, to
which I just cannot stop listening, might be the most stunning
collaboration, the most inspired melding of idioms, that you the
listener may hear in decades. It’s just that good.
Ladies and gentlemen, please introduce yourself, quickly,
to
Wynton Marsalis and Eric Clapton Play the
Blues.
The title is actually a bit misleading. Most of the tunes
are played far more like traditional New Orleans jazz than like
blues. In his CD notes, Marsalis explains: “We decided to use the
instrumentation of King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band plus two
(electric guitar and piano), because they transformed the world of
music with a set of 1923 recordings and, with performances like
‘Dipper Mouth Blues,’ forever established the blues as a
centerpiece of jazz.”
He’s right about Oliver’s band. Oliver, who served as the
primary mentor for one Louis Armstrong, is one of the musicians
whose greatness and influence so far outflanks his familiarity to
today’s American public as to be nearly a tragedy. His band’s
recordings, featuring Oliver and a young Armstrong with
complementary cornets along with several other musicians who may
make trad-jazz fans’ eyes light up, were perhaps the seminal LPs in
bringing the new music of jazz to an eager public. (Satchmo
Armstrong would take four of those artists — Johnny Dodds, Baby
Dodds, Johnny St. Cyr, and his new wife Lil Hardin Armstrong —
into the studio sessions for his Hot Five and Hot Seven groups that
produced some of the most revered recordings in American music
history.)
Anyway, what was unique about traditional New Orleans jazz
was that it featured collective improvisation around a central
melody with syncopated rhythms underlying and driving the tunes.
Combining in some senses the blues, ragtime, and the music of brass
marching bands, it forever transformed the world of music. R&B,
rock-n-roll, and of course later forms of jazz all owe their
provenance to the trad jazz widely popularized in the
1920s.
Yet the sad reality is that traditional jazz, even in New
Orleans, has seemed a dying art. Its youngest prominent
practitioners, most notably Dr.
Michael White, are now well into their 50s. Younger groups such
as the Rebirth Brass Band or solo artists such as Nicholas Payton,
familiar to (and deservedly popular with) a nation of Jazz and
Heritage Festival attendees, play a music that contains only
vestiges of the traditional style.
Wynton Marsalis, of course, virtuoso that he is, keeps any
number of jazz sub-genres alive at Lincoln Center in New York, but
even he is now in his 50s and seems to have few peers, or even
imitators, among younger musicians.
Enter Eric Clapton, rock-n-roller extraordinaire. Sure,
his rock often has been tinged with the blues — but traditional
jazz? Really?… Well, on this new album, his love for and facility
with the old style is a revelation. What he and Marsalis and their
band have produced has the potential to re-ignite a passion for the
traditional idiom in a new generation of listeners (and perhaps of
musicians) for whom Clapton has somehow remained uniquely “current”
in way that few of his musical contemporaries (he’s now 66) have
done.
First, credit where due: It’s worth listing all the
musicians. In addition to Marsalis on vocals and trumpet and
Clapton on vocals and guitar, they are: Victor Goines, clarinet;
Marcus Printup, trumpet; Chris Crenshaw, trombone and vocals; Don
Vappie, banjo; Chris Stainton, keyboards; Dan Nimmer, piano; Carlos
Henriquez, bass; Ali Jackson, drums; and special appearances on
vocals and banjo by Taj Mahal.
“We agreed to let the music show how the blues continues
to speak with clarity and immediacy across all lines of
segregation,” Marsalis wrote. “We combined the sound of an early
blues jump-band with the sound of New Orleans jazz to accommodate
the integration of guitar/trumpet lead and to give us the latitude
to play different grooves from the Delta to the Caribbean and
beyond. New Orleans is a mythic birthplace of jazz, the blues,
gospel, rhythm & blues, and rock-n’roll. It is the perfect
place to find our common heritage.”
And boy oh boy, did they ever! What these terrific
musicians have put together is a CD for the ages. A trad-jazz
purist like I am will be ecstatic over it, because it adheres to
the Oliver-Armstrong style in many places with not just a stale and
static fealty, but with a buoyant liveliness as if the entire
musical style is as new and fresh as it was in 1923. Yet it should
also appeal to anybody with an appreciation of good music of almost
any sort. Unlike some trad-jazz standards, these songs, played as
Marsalis and Clapton do them, are eminently accessible, highly
entertaining, infectiously listenable. An old standard called “Ice
Cream” (“I scream, you scream, everybody wants ice scream….”) is a
gem. “The Last Time” is a jilted lover’s ironic but remarkably
good-humored lament. “Just a Closer Walk with Thee” has never
sounded so soulful. On “Corrine, Corrina,” Taj Mahal joins in with
vocals to die for.
And, amazingly, Clapton and the band pull off Clapton’s
signature “Layla” as if it were a blues standard with occasional
jazz riffs, subtly played, in the background. (Marsalis wrote that
bassist Carlos Henriquez, not Clapton, insisted that it be part of
the set — and describes it as being “arranged as a Crescent City
dirge/swing.”) How they manage to cross genres like that, so
effectively, is a thing of wonder. There’s also an amazingly fun
rendition of the old jazz/early rock-n-roll standard “Stagger
Lee.”
It’s hard to describe just how good this whole recording
is. It’s hard to believe it. My friend and fellow conservative
columnist Deroy Murdock, who introduced me to this the CD in the
first place, is usually more attuned to rock and soul and more
modern jazz than to traditional jazz — but he says this about it:
“Clapton’s riffs and singing are as stellar as ever, even in this
most unexpected of formats. This great Briton sounds as if he were
strumming his guitar while throwing Mardi Gras beads at adoring
crowds in the Rex Parade. Marsalis is scary talented, and Clapton
clearly can do anything he wants, at least musically.”
Fly, fly, fly to the nearest CD outlet or computer screen
to buy
Marsalis and Clapton Play the Blues. It’s the best
recording, or any style of music, of this young century.
Period.
