Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas - 12 | Wynton Marsalis on Jazz, Time, and America

Episode Date: September 4, 2018

Jazz occupies a special place in the American cultural landscape. It's played in elegant concert halls and run-down bars, and can feature esoteric harmonic experimentation or good old-fashioned foot-stomping swing. Nobody embodies the scope of modern jazz better than Wynton Marsalis. As a trumpet player, bandleader, composer, educator, and ambassador for the music, he has worked tirelessly to keep jazz vibrant and alive. In this bouncy conversation, we talk about various kinds of music, how they might relate to physics, and some of the greater challenges facing the United States today. (This and the next few podcasts were recorded on the road with headset microphones, and the sound quality isn't quite as good, sorry about that.) Hailing from an accomplished New Orleans family, Wynton Marsalis was marked as a prodigy from a young age. He played locally before moving to New York and attend Julliard, and played and recorded with artists such as Art Blakey and Herbie Hancock. He has recorded numerous albums as a leader of small ensembles, big bands, and as a soloist with symphony orchestras. He is a multiple-time Grammy winner and the first to win in both jazz and classical categories in the same year, and in 1997 his oratorio Blood on the Fields was the first non-classical work to win the Pulitzer Prize for music. Marsalis founded and continues to lead Jazz at Lincoln Center, which is in residence at Lincoln Center along with such organizations as the New York Philharmonic, the Metropolitan Opera, and the New York City Ballet. He has won the National Medal of the Arts and the National Humanities Medal, along with numerous other awards and honorary degrees.

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Wall Supplies last. Selection varies by location. See Lose.com for details. Visit your nearby Lowe's on West Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles. Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Minescape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. And I don't want to waste your time with banter today because we have a very special guest. We're very happy to have Winton Marsalis join us on the podcast.

If you are in any sense a jazz fan, Winton Marsalis is the proverbial guy who needs no introduction. He's been acclaimed as a trumpet player, of course, but also as a composer, a band leader, and also an educator and an ambassador for jazz music worldwide. He's the winner of multiple Grammy Awards. He was the first jazz musician, indeed the first non-honest. classical musician to win a Pulitzer Prize, countless honorary degrees, national awards, etc. He's recorded a huge number of albums as a leader of small ensembles, big bands, and in collaboration with a diverse group of people from Willie Nelson to Eric Clapton to traditional musicians around

the world. He's also the founder and leader of Jazz at Lincoln Center, which joins things like the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic in residence at Lincoln Center. Not only that, but he is a classical musician who both composes and plays trumpet with symphony orchestras. He won a Grammy for that too. So you get the point. Winton Marsalis is arguably the most important figure alive in jazz today and certainly enormously influential in how we think about music. He and I got to meet at a nice event called Kent Presents. This is an Ideas Festival in Connecticut, sponsored by Ben and Donna Rosen. And we hit it off immediately.

He's a very curious guy. He wanted to know about physics and things like that. I wanted to know about jazz. So we have a wide-ranging, bouncy conversation. And if you don't like jazz, if you've never heard of Winton Marsalis, no problem. I would still recommend listening to this episode. This is not one of those conversations where we just sort of name-drop our favorite musicians or artists from the past or from the present.

Winton-Marcellus is an opinionated guy. He always has been. That's one of his trademarks all along. And he gives us some of his opinions, not just about music, but about the state of the world, the state of the country, the state of education in the United States. We talk about physics, we talk about time and quantum mechanics. This is your chance to spend an hour with a brilliant, creative person with an open, fertile mind. We had a great time, and I hope you will, too. So let's go. Winston Marcellus, welcome to the Mindscape podcast. All right. It's such a pleasure, Sean. Thank you. So I understand that your first paying gig was as a funk musician. Is that right? That's right. This is the 1970s. This is the bell bottoms, the big hair, the whole bit.

That's right. Early, early in that, yeah. We played an elementary school dance. An elementary school dance, all right. Are you recompensed for this? Do you get paid? Yeah, we got paid. We got paid $100.

It was five of us. So it's $20 a person. And what were you playing? We played. It was just stuff that was on the radio at that time. But we had learned. We learned like maybe 15 songs or 20 songs or 20 songs three minutes. It was a dance three hours.

So we played the 20 songs, we were like, okay, that's it. And everybody was like, hey, we still have two more hours to go. So we just played those songs in a loop. They can still dance. We played in a loop over and over again. So we always laugh about that job. But there is something special about jazz, right? I mean, what in your mind is what makes jazz special?

I think that the three fundamentals of the music. Improvisation to some type of grid. You can improvise, but you have some restraint. The swing, which means you're improvising with other people, and there are things that govern how you are will interact with each other, but those things, you also choose them. So if you're a heavy swinger, you choose to be in the groove, And you choose to give some points over the people.

If you're not, you don't. And then the blues, which is in optimism in spite of all evidence to the contrary. Aha. So explain that. It's like in the words of a blues, I went down to the railroad, put my head on the track. I went down to the railroad, put my head on the track. When that train came along, I snatched my full head back. So there's something in there.

So the blues is sort of about living through life, right? not giving up. It's living. It's about an optimism. It's not naive. Right, right. And to say more about swing in particular, because, you know, I've had talks with a musician friends.

I'm not a musician myself. I appreciate the music very much. But, you know, swing is, you know, there's other genres of music that improvise. The blues is a genre all by itself. But swing is something that is uniquely jazz. Physics. You know, it's relational.

Right. And it's quantum. viable. It's the reconciliation of opposites. So if you look at swing as a concept, whatever it takes for you to get

from the eye consciousness to the weak consciousness is swinging. Now when you embrace that in such a way that you're in a groove and you make all the little adjustments that are required to make, to not just endure another person or to tolerate

them, but you embrace them then you're swinging. So when you look at it as a concept, it is a six rhythm. Ting, ting, ting, ting, tink, tink. One, two, three, four, five, six, one, two, three, four, five, six, one, two, three, four, five, six,

against a four rhythm. One, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, tink, tink, tink, tete, t'in. Now on the micro level, where it shows up is if you start to play fast, so if you go, ting, ting, ting, and you go, do-d-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-lid. You can't go, takataka, you have to go.

You're shuffling. So that's a two and a three also. So instead of it being ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-tta-litt. It's difficult to kind of negotiate the feeling of that odd and even at the same time. It's the swing is the bass, which is the lowest pitch played in four on every beat, match with the drums. This in six, which the symbol is the highest pitch, and the pitch that you can hear the most. So you have all these extremes.

Sounds like the drummer has a tough job there. The drummer has a tough job. It's president. He can just choose to just bowl everybody over, but great drummers, they'll say a great drummer as kind. They use their power very intelligently and sparingly. And it sounds like it's about,

I mean, so much music is about tension in some sense, right? I mean, it's a competition between what you expect, the sort of natural easy rhythm pattern versus a little bit of what doesn't quite belong. It drives you forward, right? Right. I'm interested in how you would see at in relation to some concepts that you work on where you have opposite things that come together

and you say, man, these two things are together. I never would have thought these things come together to. Yeah, it's all over the place. I mean, physics, science, right, is driven by what we don't understand. We try to leap into the places that we don't yet understand. Professional scientists don't spend their time doing homework problems that the college students do. And so what is the way to make progress? it's to pinpoint two things that you both think are true,

but they don't agree with each other, right? And that's where all progress comes from. So the big one right now in physics is we have quantum mechanics, and we have gravity, and they don't play well together. And their intention, right? And we're trying to figure out, is one of them better, is one of them more fundamental, or is it we got to start all over again? And it's sort of the source of creativity a little bit, right?

And jazz seems to be much about creativity. Yes, it's about creativity at a point of impact. I was also interested in your comments about time because in jazz, you live in the future. You progress from the future to the past. Okay, wait a minute. You're in the future, but you're going into the past. You're moving forward into the past.

You're not moving forward to the future. No, you're going to have to break that down for me. Okay, you are in the future. Like, now the future's past, okay. So we're all in the future. Good. Future, we're in that. Then we pass through the present

into our cognizance of that at present, which is then past. Okay. So jazz is a mastery of a moment of presentness. Right. So the future becomes what you think may perhaps happen with the form in a given space and time. Right.

And the challenge of jazz, when you're actually playing it, is how can I deal with it with all of the entropic moments of this present and give it organization and logic, and give it organization and logic and form with a group of other people who have no idea of, what they're going to play until they play it.

Well, I wanted to ask you about this. So there's the individual improvising and there's the group. Let's just do the individual first. I think that's probably easier to wrap our brains around, right? I mean, do you go into an improvisation to a solo with a plan? Or is it literally right there what you're feeling? I never do that.

Every person is different. I like to be present, so I don't have a plan. My one plan is to take thematic material and develop it in some type of interesting way. to me. And is that the chords or the melody? The chords or the playing field. It's like a football field.

The arena. That's the arena. So you know what the football field are the sidelines. The harmonies progress in a certain way. And there's some alterations, but they are the harmonies. And they're laid out in time. So like you look at the clock, it was 12 numbers. And you know where you are.

When you look at those hands, you know, that's our harmonic form is. You know where you are by the progression of harmonies. where you have to get back to when you get back to the top but the top may be different but the harmony will the harmony is basically the same but it's

because chords have different root notes and they're also a way to substitute cards it's kind of like the directions to your home you give me 50 sets of directions that incorporate different streets in the general direction will be or the different ways you can express

an equation with different numbers we're playing on that playing field so now we know that then we have to be in time. And the concept of time and jazz is probably the most kind of physics related. Right. Because you're not in time, like one, two, three, four time. You're what we

call swing time. And it's not being on time, it's being in time. And that time is like a wave. Because everybody is tugging and pulling at it. Right. Yeah. When you mention how important it is in physics, that's exactly right. Like so much of physics is about waves and the resonance, the beating

together and the interference when they're going in different directions. right? I'm more interested in what does the degree of interference determine something about the wave or does a wave just continue to where it is? Yeah, it can be either way, right?

So I think that physicists love to start with the simplest thing first, right? So the simplest thing is, yeah, the waves, if you have two different waves and they're coming into the same place, they do their own individual thing and then they keep going. And at that moment they might interfere

or constructively interfere. which is a sort of contradiction in terms, but it means they add up together, right? So we teach our students that first, and then the next thing we teach is, well, what if these ways are talking to each other, right? What if they interact with each other? And these days, we think our best theories of the world

are quantum field theories, where the world is this collection of fields pervading all of space, and what we think of as particles are vibrations in these fields, right? And if you make a new particle, that's because, in fact, the analogy I use, is if someone's playing a piano and there's another piano in the room, the other piano starts humming a little bit, right?

That's how you create new particles in particle physics. Kind of sympathetic vibration. Exactly that, that's right. That's exactly what jazz is like. A lot of times you can anticipate what somebody is going to play. You can feel them a certain way

and sometimes they do the opposite and that's okay too. Yeah. Because it's really a lot, it's like super conversation. No wrong notes, right? Well, yeah. You know, there are actually no wrong notes.

There are only awkward moments and non-resolutions and lack of confidence. You have to hear your way out of problems. It's kind of like you're having a conversation and somebody is. Oh, yeah. Awkward moments. Dealing with an awkward kind of, yeah. But it's fascinating when you get a lot of people improvising who really can play how they all hear and interpret the moments because it's successive moments of crisis.

There's always a crisis. Every moment is a crisis. And when the band stops, it's a break and only you play, then it's really a crisis for you because you have to maintain the momentum and the identity. Can't lead on everybody else. No, they're gone. Then they come back in.

So you, you know, our thing is really about mastery of time. And the mastery of time is an individual thing on one level. But in the jazz sense and in the swing sense, it's mastery of the fluctuations of time with other people. Right. Yeah, and that's where swing comes in. You're pushing up and against. The obvious regular beat.

You have the obvious regular beat is a constant that you all know. But the swing is all of you all's interpretation of that constant. And how you can negotiate that constant and make it feel good. And sometimes these solos can get pretty long. You can go on for a long time. How much of it is conscious, would you say? Could you even remember the solo that you played? No.

You can't remember, but it's conscious like when you speak is conscious. Like you weren't using notes when you were talking about. Right. But you knew what you were talking about. I knew the general outline I was going to say, but I had a plan going in, right? And the form gives us a plan. So when I said I don't have a plan, the form gives you some type of plan. And then I tend to take things from the musicians I'm playing with.

Like when they play stuff, I play things. I think that my solos, I try to really think about construction. Okay, what do you mean by that? I mean, how am I going to get from this point by turning phrases around or how am I going to make a cohesive and coherent statement?

You're telling a story. How am I going to tell that story? Beginning and middle and that you can follow it? Right. And how can I get all these little subplots and interesting things and change the emotions of different moments and add things? This June, the world comes to Los Angeles.

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Get yours now at Los Angeles FWC26.com. And it is usually in this group context, right? And as impressed and overwhelmed as I am with a master improviser, I'm even more impressed that people can do it together, right? And how much of it is, you know, I see on the bandstand, you know, people looking at each other like the players and like how much communication is a lot. Is it planned out? Is it really just you sense it?

No, there's so much communication. And that's what I love the most about playing is playing with other people. There's so much communication. Like shifting beads, are you ready to end your solo? is that really the card you want to play? Where are we? Oh, okay. Are you going to play a riff there?

It's so much of it. It's like, and it's very intense. Right. It's like an intense, an intense emotional and mind game with other people. And it's all benevolent. Like, none of it is, because the swing is a reference. It makes you, if you want to swing, it makes you have a constant that you all agree on. Yeah, okay.

It's like kind of like what the constant. institution is supposed to be. You have to agree on something. Something has to have meaning in order for us to have a meaningful dialogue. And there's to be some arbiter, something that we both are reocated. Otherwise, it's just noise, right? Let's not sell this to our kids.

That's right. You know, not let's, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, I mean, jazz is, you mentioned in the, we just, for the podcast listeners out there, we just got finished with some remarks that Wenton made here on stage. And you also mentioned, the Americanness of it, right?

I mean, there's something and for better for worse, right? Mostly for better, but jazz is part of America and America's part of jazz. Well, I don't think for worse, the worse is a part of better. Yeah, okay. You know, you can't,

it's like what you were saying, when you gave us the examples of entropy, one is nothing, then there's some things, then it's, you're not going to have one of all one thing. Right, if everything is too simple, nothing interesting has happened. Right.

And that's the famous Shakespeare to be or not to be. Yes. Right. That's going to be one of those or maybe. Right. Like, you know, all the kind of greatest artists have that kind of dichotomous unity. They understand. That's why Shakespeare and villain is so great.

Oh, yeah. He understands. There's something noble in this villain. There's a humanity in the villain. And a kind of simplistic way of looking at the world does not work well for democracy. Mm-hmm. And jazz is it came from. the most maligned group people that have been slaves,

but they didn't play jazz when they were in slavery. They played jazz when they became free. And freedom is something that has not been guaranteed to people in the world throughout time. If you go throughout time, most groups of people have been dominated or they have been beaten. It's not to be subjugated to the will of a person or group of people.

It's not something that's only about the United States of America. Most of the greatest heroes that we celebrate, our military heroes, that defeated people and engaged in absolute murder, concubinage, and slavery. That's why they were conquering. That's why they were conquering people. And, you know, America is a hope to,

a hope that we have to change. And it's difficult and it's challenging. And we at this moment appear to not be up to that challenge. but when we actually understand what the rest what's going on in the world and that there's democracy and even the thought that there is equality

is not something that's guaranteed your side is not guaranteed to win no you know there's a lot of power and by that I don't mean the fear of another nation I mean a fear of an ideology which says to hell with these people which is what has dominated the world most of the time and he has even been dominant

in our country's leadership if not not its people. But a democracy is a place where you can lose an election and give up power willingly, right? You're supposed to. You're supposed to. And you also, yeah, you're also supposed to agree on a set of principles. Would you say that jazz is, in some sense,

a democratic form of music compared to others? Absolutely no question about it in every way. We could, we could, I could take you down the Constitution and the separation of powers and all of the things that are the foundation of, what we do, the ability to amend the Constitution. The Constitution being a very

simple, framed document, this shorter than every other state Constitution. And the repetitiveness of the Constitution from the federal government to the state government to the local government. But when you don't have an

agreement on the humanity of other people, then you subvert the Constitution. Yeah, and in some sense, I mean, this is what liberal democracy is all about. I had a podcast about liberal democracy. The idea, you don't have to agree with your fellow citizens about values necessarily. You can disagree about fundamental things, but there has to be something shared, right? There has to be something shared that you agree with and you base everything on that.

And a bunch of players up there improvising together have to be the same way. And many times we are not. what has happened with our music in many times one person was solo all night five people were solo forever monitors on the bandstand that are louder than the people were playing all with them in it the strongest

on the bandstand dominating the base turns the amp up to 15 and then it's very difficult to play the music and then another thing that happens after that is slavery and the slavery becomes this system has too much freedom in it let me figure how to repeat things

over and over again so that we do away with some of this freedom. And that's the direction we will go in. If we check out the way systems are slowly beginning to dominate everything. And our systems macro thinkers are very powerful. And we don't realize that when you play a system, a very intelligently designed system out to the furthest extreme of its efficiency, many of these systems don't include people. It has to be something else.

Just the machine. It's just a machine. It is just we don't need you. Then after we don't need you, we don't want to see you. And so you're saying we can think of jazz as a little bit of protest against this tendency. What it's at is best. Even in jazz, right? In any form of art, you can always denigrate into something where it's a great man with an ego.

A lot of it, though. A lot of the tenets and the best of it, the recorded history of it. And jazz is also not anti-the-machine. It's not we're against the machine. We're against the abuse of tools. and we are for the basic principles of our way of government and our music has a history that demonstrates that. Duke Ellington's orchestra demonstrated that.

Pity Goodman's orchestra demonstrated that. Dave Brubeck's ensemble, John Coltrane, Art Blake in the Jazz message. We have people after people, Charles Megas, and they were also able to express that and did express it. So it's not something we're speculating on. Yeah, yeah. And so what, I mean, jazz has a interesting position,

in history in the United States and right now, right? I mean, there's not a lot of radio stations out there that play primarily jazz. I mean, you've been as influential as anybody in not just keeping jazz alive, but keeping it vibrant and making sure that people are educated about it. I mean, how important is that to you? It's very important for us to be educated about our country.

We've stopped civics. You know, we have to understand that for democracy to work, we have to be rabid about education. Right. Rabbit, not about propaganda. Because I'm not a kind of left-right person. I laugh at all of that. Because for me, it's like subterfuge.

It's like you and your friend start a fight in a store, and another one of your friends is going for the cash register. Now, all you do is get a black and a white friend, call each other a name. Everybody's looking at it. That's all fake. It's not people are making money and they're exploiting. One of the biggest problems we have, and it happens in jazz, is the greatest players have to sacrifice for lesser players.

Like the great Art Blakey allowed me to learn on his bandstand. I wasn't bringing anything to him. He had to be willing to sacrifice for me to learn. When you get the most educated class waging war on the uneducated class, man, you have a hard time. You're not going to get the same thing that you get with the Ku Klux Klan or somebody shouting and calling people names. You're going to get contracts.

You get the subprime loan scandal. You can get all the things that you see that are systems that play out on people who can't assess their position, their position in space. I mean, were you, I probably know the answer to this, but how much of this was in your brain when you were 12 years old in first learning and play the trumpet? You know a lot of it. I didn't know it was about playing the trumpet, but my mom and my daddy were very conscious because my father's jazz musician. Just so anyone knows, you're from New Orleans. You're from New Orleans. You're from New Orleans.

You're a New Orleans guy. And my mother was very conscious about reading and staying on top of stuff being engaged. My father was very conscious. So I would always just be around listening to all of them talk. And I didn't understand, of course, what I understand now. But I knew that you needed to know about the country. You needed to follow things. You needed to be, and that was in a time of consciousness.

You know, I was a kid through the 60s. So people were conscious. Yeah. It was something that was talked about, right? Talked that the pop music was conscious. even if it was just Stevie Wonders' music, Marvin Gay's music, what's going on, for just the average kind of citizen that's out here that doesn't have an artist's father or mother, they were still engaged in making things better and being a part of a larger thing.

We lost that momentum, of course, over time because it's difficult to maintain that level of engagement with each other without being predatory. We celebrate predators. Well, it's natural to sort of devolve into conflict, right? Like we try to talk to each other, we try to disagree. Again, this is something that I hope the podcast helps to spread the idea we can disagree, still be friends, go out for the beer after, whatever. But it becomes harder and harder, especially in a very shouty age that we live in.

A shoddy ideological age that is not respectful of any fact. It's all so true, that is right. There has to be some fact that we agree on. We're in Louisiana. Okay, that's a fact. Let's just start with that. And that's why I try to explain things in a human context. Like the musicians I knew, whether I argued with them or not, when we talk to each other, we were talking about human things.

Not my philosophy about their style of music. It was my mama is dying. You know, my son told me the other day. Can you believe that I always had dyslexia and I was always ashamed? You know what I mean? It's human. Absolutely. I mean, when you try to be a communicator of science,

even though science is based on facts and you should all agree with them, if you really want to get things across, you have to be likable. You have to relate it to people's interests, right? You know, people care about what matters for their lives. That's not surprising at all. But that's what you're wonderful at. Like when I first talked to you, you're very approachable. I started asking you about entanglement and will the universe just continue to expand?

Yeah. And you started to give me very concrete kind of breakdowns of what something was. in a way that I can understand it, and you're friendly. I think it matters. You know, and honestly, to give credit where credit is due, my wife gets a lot of credit to this. I'm a scientist by training. She's a writer by training,

so she's helped me in the communication skills. So you went from this kid in a sort of household where all these ideas were talked about, and a very musical household, obviously, playing all sorts of things. Now you're the director of jazz at Lincoln Center, and that's a responsibility, right? That's not, I mean, how do you think of that role?

I mean, you're a musician. You play the trumpet. You're a composer, but then you're also an ambassador, right? Yeah, I'm honored to be in that role. I mean, I love people. I like to talk about the music and to be a part of people's lives and to recognize other people, Jazz Linger Center, is our basic tenets of what we do, we entertain,

we educate, and we advocate for jazz through performance, through education and through advocacy. We try to bring people together around the music. We have a very simple kind of down-home type of welcome vibration. We have no generation gap. Oh, is that true? Okay. I was going to ask about that.

We stress no generation gap, no segregation, and all of our music is modern. We don't separate it in the kind of time periods. We believe the music does have fundamentals. We don't believe everything is a horn, this jazz. Yeah. But we're not against things that are not jazz. We just are in favor of jazz.

And we've been blessed to work with, I mean, we've collaborated with so many musicians in different cultures and played with... Yeah, tell some of your favorites. Man, you know, I could just tell you a couple of stories. One is a great master drummer from Ghana. Yakub Adi. He passed away.

I did a piece called Congo Square with him. It took me 10 years to write this piece. I used to playing rhythms I couldn't figure out because his style of music they play in two times. times at once. So I'm counting doing all Western. And then a kid who I taught when he was younger grew old enough. He started

playing with our orchestra. His name is Carlos Enrique is. And he's from the Afro-Latin tradition. So he grew up playing on clavets. So we're close enough. He's really like my little brother. So he was always in mind. So I said, man, why is this sad? And we put it on and he started to interpret like kind of what the clavees are doing this. This is where

one is. This is what we need to do. He could translate for you. He could translate for me. So he translated for me. And Yakub One funny stories, he was playing a rhythm. He said, ah, brother, this is a royal rhythm, a royal rhythm. I said, it don't sound royal to me. I'm American, man. We don't have royalty.

And he said, that is why you will never play it correctly. Well, he led you up to that, and you jump right there. You know what I'm saying? And Kurt Mazur was the conductor of New York Philharmonic. He had grown up in Germany during the period of the Nazis. And he asked me to write a piece for the Philharmonic, and he said he wanted the peace to celebrate humanity. and people coming together

and he told me, I never forget, he said, you have no idea of how thin the, the, that the veneer is and how it can be pulled off. And people,

people will cheer lead the very opposite. He said, and you'll be mindful of how fragile all of this is. And when you write this music, be cognizant of the fragility and be strong

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And that's for better or for worse. It can excite us for the good things, and it can be used as propaganda, right, for the less good things. I mean, what do you think about the state of jazz today, if that's not too grandiose a question? Well, I think most of the young musicians are demoralized, and mainly commercial music. It's like the state of our country. We are consumed with rampant commercialism and materialism that is destroying. our human connections. It's out front.

It's embarrassing. It's just kind of open corruption. And we have to get on track. And we're a long way away. It's not because of the president. He's, of course, a shining symbol of it, but it's not because of him. It predates long before that.

And I don't like when it's reduced to him because it keeps us from addressing the issue. There's deeper things going on. Much deeper. Than one guy, yeah. Much deeper, much deeper. much deeper and we have taught it to our kids. We've used them as a market.

They're now being sold to and exploit it from a very young age. They can't defend themselves. We're not defending them. And music is a large part of their exploitation. Now, pornography is a fact of kids' lives. It leads them into their rituals of courtship and their development. Of course, I'm from older generations, so I don't understand all of the nuances of it.

The Tinder and everything. But, I mean, no, it's not even so much a specific thing. It's just how many, many acts you can see. Every generation lives in a different world. Yeah, everybody says that, but you know, it's like you're working

on a heart attack till you have it. You tell somebody, man, you have a heart attack to say, I haven't had one. Okay? You haven't had one, but there's going to come a point where the kind of descent you're going to reach, there's a thought that because there's always there's always misinformation and the conflation of fact, and there's always a kind of alarmist, the

Pass is better. You touched on that too. Yeah. I love one thing you said. I took my notes. I could get on my phone, but you said there are more, the gist of it is that there are fewer plausible past than there are possible futures. Exactly right. That was what you said. So I love that. That's right. Yeah. You know, so the tendency is to always think the past was so glorious and I'm not coming from there at all. Yeah. We've got to be forward thinking. Yeah. I'm just saying that we, I'm just saying that we, kids are not a market

and our celebration of the market and of money has damaged our sense of the primacy of humanity and that that should be first it should be first in our education left or right it's not from the right and it's not from the left it's from all of it and it's starting to rot

and we got to wake up but it's tough you know you got to earn a living if you want to be a professional musician being a jazz musician is hard, right? You know, let it be hard. Yeah, you told the story about your father. Could you tell the set? I grew up watching my father just struggle and not make money.

You know, he was always playing for three and four people, five, eight people in a room, and I just wondered over all these years, man, why do you keep doing this? And he said, somebody's got to do this. Why? You know, people need, if nobody's here, that people don't want this.

Like, why? Why? is the music has meaning but to who nobody is in it it means something to me and sometimes you have to be the one to say the Constitution has meaning I am going to be civil

and I'm not going to just let the fact that somebody's paying me some money affect my ideology or the fact that we're our somebody who's given a tax break means that we should have policies that put people unjustly

jail and it's not just a problem of those people. We're all those people. And that kind of super consciousness, we don't have that type of leadership. Not because of the president. No, I get it. Yeah. And in no way I'm my supporter of the president's agenda, social agenda. In no way. You can't come from my background and support using people, Mexican people and, you know, Arabs and black people. You can't support that coming from where I come from. But once again, I don't want to pin a national problem on a figure that is actually doing the bidding of a large part of the nation. Yeah, and one of the ways I think about this is how hard it is to be generous, right?

To be generous to someone who we don't agree with. How easy it is to declare someone bad or evil because they're not on our side and how hard it is to work together with people who are against us in some ways. Oh, yeah, to get in there, like you were saying, to get in there. in there with someone who has a different point of view who can help you. Sometimes you have a figure that you cannot work with, which may be the case in this instance.

But for our nation, the divisiveness that attacks all of us, regardless of who the president is. On an atomic level, we're responsible. And you've written, you know, you've composed many things and you obviously have quite a discography, and sometimes

instrumentals, sometimes there's words in there and your words are pretty unsparing. You don't mess around, right? No, I don't. I'm very direct, and I try to be as honest as I can be. You know, as honest as I can be at the time with the information I have. Everything is not right, but it's as right as I can feel. When I write a piece, I think it's serious, and I don't care who doesn't like it.

And I don't mind them expressing that they don't like it. That's one of the strengths of our way of life. We should all strive for that attitude. I would love to be able to do that. It's what I try to do. Yeah, we can't stop them. Yeah, yeah. And do you see the younger people today?

Are they, is there a jazz following out there? I don't see that much of a following with the younger people because the younger people are marketing. We're trying to sell things to them. And they are, largely their sexuality has been co-opted by visual images. And jazz is about music and it's quality. You have to take the time. And we are not interested in teaching our younger people.

how to take time and to be a part of our way of life. I do think there's room for optimism in the sense that technology, et cetera, has given people more room to be creators, to be innovators themselves. Is that too optimistic? Am I whistling Dixie? No, no, I think there's always... Younger people, I teach a lot of students, and I always tell them what they're going to do.

I cannot see that. I give them some information that they can use and what they're going to do, but they have to do what they are going to do. And I try to, the biggest thing I see in my students is the ones who are really creative suffer the greatest

failure of optimism and of belief. It's easy for them to become cynical and just say, man, I'm just going to make some money, or I'm just going to dump my music down, or I need to get a public. Like, I can't just be out here.

I don't, it's hard there. keep their belief strengthened so that they can be innovative as musicians. Right. Because the music they're hearing, a lot of it is like wallpaper, like it's being made by a person on a computer. And it's not like a democratic. Music is not, people are not even in this room at the same time. They're making an artifact. Right. Which is, can be very creative. Human beings are creative in anything we do. It doesn't matter. For jazz musicians, it's not optimal for us because I'm,

music is very much human. You're sneaking looks over the bass player and the drummer, right? Yeah. What changes are you going to do next? It's about human beings and how we interact, not about our tools that we have developed. I mean, you play obviously a lot at Lincoln Center.

You played large concerts, but there is something romantic about being with one or two other people up there in a tiny stage, right? Yeah, I love it, but I love in any context. Okay. It is, of course, when you're in a small place. It's also for me is how I grew up. So a small place with no people in it,

I'm at home. I get down to that at 2.30 in the morning. That's what I knew. That's jazz time as far as I'm concerned. That's what I knew. But it's not all you do. You've also been very successful in the classical music world. How do you mentally sort of make that leap,

or do you even see a difference between jazz and classical music? It is a difference in procedure and training in the style of music, but classical music is one of the foundations of jazz. So I also love that music. I don't play as much, but I do write piece. for orchestras. And I used the experience I had playing for many years. I love playing an orchestra playing all the great orchestral pieces.

And I do feel that that is, that's a library that is so phenomenal that we sell that library short. I always wonder, never forget about the power of this library. So what are your favorite classical pieces? Man, I can't. I could start with any symphony of Haydn, any, all of Beethoven's symphonies, Beethoven string quartets, It's all the box music. It's great.

It doesn't even matter what you listen to. Palestrina, Pope Marcellus Mass. I like the name, but that's an unbelievable piece. Bartok Concerto for Orchestra Stravinsky.

Whatever you take your pick. Legetti, it does make, I mean, you can just go on and on and on. It's a fantastic Brahms, fantastic library, Mahler, Strauss. I'm very thankful that I was able to develop the ability to hear that library

in high school because when I started I couldn't hear that kind of music at all. And I thought it was only for white people. But to be able to overcome that ignorance and that prejudice and actually listen to the music, it's akin to a person who doesn't know what jazz is. Like if you can get to where you can hear John Coltrane's music, Philonious Monk, Duke Gallington, Count Basie, and you know, it's a struggle. You have to work on it. But if you get to where you can hear it, it's so many unbelievable riches.

And classical music is, man, just shots to COVID. As a Shastikovych 7th Symphony, if you can get to where you can hear that, I strongly encourage you to develop a taste for it because these were very, very serious people who sacrificed a great deal for music and had extreme insight into the nature of many things. And there's also sort of a, I mean,

especially if you're a kid, there's just a coolness barrier, right? Like when I first started listening to jazz, sure, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, and it was years later that I started listening Duke Ellington. I was like, where if I bit? What was I doing, man?

Okay, you know what's happening. Yeah, I was like that too. I didn't like Duke. Big band music, man like Jared Tall. Exactly, right. That's like your grandparents listen to that. That's exactly. We have the same experience with it.

And with that kind of quality music, I feel, of any tradition, it could be tango music of, of, uh, of, uh, I was, I was listening to us, my man. Like, I always forget people's names, but I was checking out my,

my tango orchestras from the 1950s and 60s and I was like, man, listen to this. And the Brazilian music of Morseus Santos, there are these figures in every culture that were deeply engaged with the music of their culture. And they created things that when we touched them, Horatio Saugan, is the person who I was looking for in tango music. And when you include them into your listening, they lift you. Yeah.

And do you incorporate classical elements into your jazz composing and vice versa? Sure. Yeah. Yes, it's only natural you would use contrapuntal elements that come from classical music, harmonic devices, orchestrational techniques. Why not? Would you talk about the physical universe? No, I know. It's all the waves.

But would there be the kind of improvisation that he do in jazz that would sneak its way? Sometimes pianists, right? Yeah, when you write for classical musicians and orchestra, no. But I had an idea for one other day of the other day. How could you get everybody to improvise not in a vocabulary of this jazz, like in a rhythmic vocabulary? And in a non-harmonic vocabulary, I figured out how I want to write a symphony this all with a lot of improvisation in it.

You have to figure out the improvisation not in the jazz context. You can use the same forms, but you have to give the different sections because you have 70 people. Well, like you said, improvising multiple people at once. Actually, you said something earlier today that was fascinating about just two trumpet players up on stage and the phrase you used over and over again

was sharing space. And that's the trick, right? Yeah, to share space, it's complicated. You and your wife. You and your brothers or your sister. You and yourself. Can you make space for yourself? Now it's two of us, so

there's less and there's more at the same time. There's less for us to eat, but there's more. Right. Yeah. There's more variety. There's more inspiration. There's more tension. That's growth. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But that's why so much improvisation is done in the soloing context, right? I mean, how often do we get five, six, seven people literally improvising? Well, very difficult. But if you get five or six different functions, you can get it.

But if five or six of them are playing in the same functional space, it's very hard for that to sound good, unless that's the point of it. then it can sound great you know just be this is a texture of five or six people solo it and you've also played with country artists with rock and roll artists I only found out last night when I was anticipating this interview

that you did a whole album with Eric Clapton right it was and we were playing blues yeah well there's a common language it's a common language it's we our language is so much more common than the language we spoke with Yakou I mean with somebody like Eric who loves blues

and he studied it and played it. He said, we were going to do King Oliver's band orchestration with blues songs. So with some of the bases of rock and roll is blues. Rock and roll started as shuffles. The Count Basis Orchestra

would play, which became played by Lewis Jordan's band. And then it went on to doon to doon to do do do do do do they went on to be that. Later it became segregated in America and it stood for white.

but that had nothing to do with the music. I remember, you know, so I was growing up 70s and 80s just a little bit after you, and do you know, living color? Of course. And I was a huge fan, and I was, like, shocked to learn that here was a rock and roll hard rock band. They were all African-American, and people objected to that.

They're like, what are these African-Americans doing, playing rock and roll? I was like, where did you come from? Isn't that? Where it all originated? Yeah, you know, I mean, I don't even... I don't even... I don't even... I don't even... I used to have a friend, you would say, people say this, and you say, there's a lot of people. A lot of people. People say things. Yeah, they do.

Yeah, I remember Vernon Reed, I think. Yeah, Vernon Reed is the guitarist for a living color. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I remember. Yeah. In New York in the 80s. That's right, exactly, yeah. And now you waded into hot water recently, right, talking about hip-hop. It's not hot water to me.

It's good to like the hot water. But so what are your feelings about hip-hop for those? I was not speaking of hip-hop as a feel. I was talking about specifically the use of certain words that I don't like. Right. to be mainstream words. I first started saying that in 1987. Now it's 2018.

So the public has made this decision. They like that. They want that. Let's not forget the menstrual show lasted for 100 years. If you count 1840 to the end of Amos and Andy, there's a taste in our country for that. I don't share that taste. So if it gets me in hot water because I say I don't share it,

and they want to truncate what I'm saying to be a blanket indictment of hip-hop and make it seem irrational. There's nothing you can do about that. Sure. I'm grown. You got to say what do you think. I'm a grown man. Right. And I believe that those words are destructive.

And they have been destructive because they've been out here for 30 years. They didn't just get out here. The nation has chosen. They like that. Okay. I have to live with that, but I don't have to like it. So you think it's a coarsening? I think what you think.

Yeah. We all think something. I want to do is look at it. We don't want to be attacked. but we all think something. So there is socially conscious hip hop. There's poetry in hip hop, but it's sort of not winning. Right?

Yeah, I'm not talking about that kind. Yeah, exactly. And I'm not talking about it itself in a blanket, in any type of blanket kind of crazy, unintelligent way. Whatever it is, there's unintelligent. It does not account for the fact that there are many different kinds of a thing. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about what is in the mainstream from a linguistic standpoint.

And I'm not even comment on it musically, which I'm qualified to, but I'm not. That's not what I speak about. You're not going to comment right now? I'm not going to comment about it. No, because it doesn't matter. There's the direction that all of our music is going in, of a kind of way of being produced and a way of being treated as a product. And to segregate hip-hop from everything else is unfair.

That's a very good point. I mean, hip-hop doesn't create the universe around it, right? It's the other way around. No. But what I speak about is very specifically about certain languages that I did not like when it was first around. Sure. Then I was young. So sometimes I see a young person.

Well, you're just an old guy who was looking. I was saying this before you were born. Right. Yeah. And once again, the nation has clearly spoken. It likes that. But I knew it liked it. My mama told me something when she realized when it stumbled into all of that, talking about the words I say I don't like.

Call people bitches and all that. My mother said, it's going to get unlimited resources now. Yeah, I mean, I feel I like hip hop when it's good, and of course whether it's good is up to me, right? As it is for anybody, right? As it is for everybody. But some of the classic albums, some of the early ones, I can't listen to, it's harsh, right?

And it's kind of a shame. It's up to each person. And once again, what we think about it has no impact on who likes it. We're not judges. We don't have the opportunity or the ability to pass a sentence on it and keep people from making their records or this is a democracy.

Well, we can make them think. Maybe. But I've been talking about it for years. I don't think anybody thought about people are making money with it. And it's a national pastime. It's not just something to do with black people. Oh, yeah, no, not all.

There's like a tremendous national taste for this type of imagery. Yeah, and not just in hip-hop, obviously. Right, not just in hip-hop. I'm not a fan of that. Right, right. Not saying I don't think it should exist, I don't think it should be a mainstream.

Right. So I'm even qualifying and more. If you want to go somewhere and get stuff, hey, we always had stuff that was like that. Kendrick Lamar just won the Pulitzer Prize in music. You were the first, is that right? You were the first winner of the Pulitzer Prize in music. It was not classical at all.

I think so, yeah. Yeah, yeah, that was a great thing. And, you know, it's, I don't know a lot about that world. To me, it's probably similar to the Nobel Prize in the sense that there's a lot of bad things about people chasing prizes and things like that. The prize doesn't always go to the best person, but maybe it can help bring some attention to some good work.

Yeah, I don't know. The prizes are, I don't know. Prizes are as serious as the rigor at which people who hand out the prizes have about them. Right. I think it's good for people to win prizes and to celebrate other people and to show up its shows with tuxedos on because it's fun.

I totally agree. And it doesn't mean. anything larger than that. I don't really look at it. I remember when I won two Grammys, my father and mother came out to Los Angeles, and there were many other people who should have won, could play better than me.

So after the Grammys, I was in the room with my father, and my father looked at me and said, wow, the Grammys. He didn't eat it. You know, he's not a guy who's Hollywood kind of pop central. He doesn't care about any of that. So he looked at me before I went out in the street to party, he said, yeah, you want two Grammys, man,

I'm glad you won, you know, but winning has been losing. Then he seriously looked at me and said, I hope you don't think that this means you can play. Okay, I was 21. I understood exactly what he meant. But I think the whole point of winning a Grammy is to impress your parents.

But he was, I mean, I knew my father would not be impressed by him. And he also was not dowsing me. He wasn't trying to, he was just saying, man, you know, this stuff is not really about, it's fun, but it's not about nothing. Like, you need to learn how to play, son. You play okay, but you're not the best anything. And in his way, you'd have to know him. In no way was it like a negative or a dousing.

I laughed. Actually, I said, man, I know better than this. We go out and I'm partying for a good time. Somebody's got to win these awards. So I think I congratulate people when they win awards and we keep it moving. It's going to be another award next year. And it's not, I don't look at them one way or not look at them.

I'm not critical or non-critical. What are your goals for your own music in the future? To become better, better musician, right? better music, become better at dealing with the orchestra, combine more forms and do more things that are interesting and innovative with jazz music and putting it to become a better soloist, be more sophisticated than my understanding

of different forms around the world, and I'll just be more dedicated and humbler about my development. These are good goals for everybody. But I'll say also, you know, we're here at this conference with, you know, there's people talking about politics and science and everything and you were one of the people up there on stage, but you were also one of the people in the audience, right? You were listening, so your mind is growing as well as your technique.

Oh, I loved it. Man, I loved your presentation, and I loved a lot of the presentation. I took a lot of notes. I go back and study, read books, people said, it's a luxury to be able to sit up and hear unbelievably brilliant people talk. You know, everybody's dedicated. Think of all the dedication you've had and your journey. And another thing you learned as a jazz musician is, you know,

the creativity is all over the world. My father used to always say, man, it's of many creative, great people who don't wear signs saying, I'm creative, I'm great, I'm smart, and learn how to put your radar up. You can find it. And listen. And believe me, I'm on it.

I'm on this podcast we're on. I'm putting it on in the morning. I'm checking you out. No, I'm not just saying it because I'm on it. I mean that. I'm going to love being educated about the things that you're talking about with the guests you have on. And I've thoroughly enjoyed myself.

everything from new developing cities to autism, to the Me Too movement, to what you were talking about, what Julie was talking about. I mean, you know, it's all, it's all, it's all interesting, 3D copying. Did you have any, or have you had any special interest in science in general, or is this just? Yeah, I always loved science when I was growing up. Yeah. I loved all of the sciences. I love biology. I always did pretty good as a student and chemistry.

And, yeah, I love the sciences. I told you I read the dancing woo Lee masters years ago and I am interested I need to be educated there's an infinite number of things that we all need to learn right that we're not going to run out of interesting things to learn about right but we were having

this interesting conversation the other night about entanglement quantum mechanics right and maybe there's a connection with jazz well in fact I mean it's almost a cliche I don't know if you know Stefan Alexander do you know that name He is a physics professor at Dartmouth who wrote a book called the jazz of physics.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, the jazz of physics. I haven't read that book yet, but yeah, I know him. He is a saxophone player. Yeah, I know him. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, I mean, part of me, like, you know, we're trained. It's just like you're trained to be a critic of music. We're trained in science to be skeptical, right?

Someone makes some grandiose claim. So the claim would be that, you know, there is at least an analogy between how we already talk about waves and waves bumping into each other. Clearly, that's part of music, rhythm and so forth, tone and pitch. But there's also randomness, right? There's probability, but it's not a mess, right? There's probability in quantum mechanics. Things don't exist until you observe them.

You bring them into existence. And maybe there is an analogy that's useful there between that unconscious solo that you're doing, that until you played the note, it wasn't there. Like, you didn't write it out ahead of time. Well, all that, or the, the, the, the, I think that repetition is a way that we control entropy. We have to repeat things.

I was talking with the artist, and he was making me laugh. He said, I see the world new every day, and I create new things every day. I say, well, I equate that with being on the run. You stop and spell the rosions a little bit. We all have things we're going to do that we're touch stones. That's part of being in a kind of system that. But if you're running, you're not doing a lot of things that are the same. It's true. It's true.

And I think that we even mentioned before the balance between something different and something that fits in. That's right. It's sort of what you're looking for. And that goes into what I said about entropy in the sense that we start with a universe that's simple. We end with a universe that's simple. Entropy is going up along the way. But it's in the middle where entropy is middle and complex structures are there and you don't know what's going to happen. It's not so simple.

That's fun. Right. And you're saying you're trying to order them in a way that you can order them to understand whatever you can understand. Yeah, we try to understand bit by bit. Right, but jazz gives you the opportunity to understand slices of reality

not just from your perspective. Now, you understand it so much, I call it at the speed of instinct. Like, how fast is instinct? Man, it's fast. Shit. You know what I'm saying? That's fair. That's speed. And you're playing, in that on the edge, always of instinct.

Because it's always a present moment, present moment, present mom, present. And you're trying to command that, it's like riding a wave. Right. And you're just going on that wave. And there's other people. The presence of other people make you all have, it's like a multi, it's like a hydra. It's like, and you're perceiving them

and you're perceiving the form, and you're perceiving and you're perceiving the audience. And they're perceiving you. And it's all going on, going on, going on, boom, then there's all, then you can listen to it and assess it. When you're playing it, you can. Right. I mean, do you ever just trance out? You're just like playing, you don't even notice what's going

I'm always like that. I'm only listening. Like, I'm listening so intensely and trying to just, it's like you're just looking at something in the space. Like, Dizzy Glesby told me, he asked Lewis Armstrong, called me once at 4 o'clock in the morning in Los Angeles. He said, are you up?

I said, of course, man, of course. I'm up as only 4 o'clock. He said, man, you know, I remember I went to the ophthalmologist, and he said, when you want to play low, look low. When you're playing middle register, play, and when you want to play high, look up high. And Disney told me, he said, man, I started doing it. I said, wow, I asked Lewis Armstrong one time.

I said, Pops, why are you always looking up high? What are you looking for? And he said, Pops told him, I don't know, brother Deers, but I always find it. He was looking for some high notes up there, right? He's looking into the head. He's looking up there where it's stuff. Sometimes I tease musicians with the bandstand, and I'll see them looking at it, and I know what they're looking at.

And I'll say, look at it. You know, look at it. Focus on that. Because they're looking. When you look at, you're looking at a point in space, you don't look at anything. But you're trying to just hear and perceive everything that's going on and order it. I figure out where do I fit into this? And it's such an unbelievably exciting thing when it's done well.

And it's, you know, I wrote a book about time and the nature of time and how clocks tell time and everything. And our bodies are full of clocks, right? Our bodies are full of things that do the same thing in a rhythm over and over again, whether it's our heartbeat or our breathing or our nerves bouncing back and forth. And I think that really good music, whether it's jazz or classical or whatever, it feeds into that and draws from it, right? It's like the rhythms inside us come out in some interesting way.

I would love to see, I would love to get in the, I'm going to get the book, but is it, do you talk about all the different clocks that are in the body? I mean, if I looked at it, would it give me an understanding of what they are? No, but I have friends who know that stuff, right? Yeah, I'm just a physicist, but, you know, the body is far too complicated for me. But it goes into, you know, some things can be taught, and some things are just kind of in you. I don't want to say they're inherited,

but they come from places we don't understand. It's instinctual. Yeah, it's a thing. Like with you in jazz, we call it a thing. Yeah. He got that thing. Did anyone ever, did any, I sometimes for the podcast interview neuroscientists. Did anyone ever try to put you in a brain scanner while you're playing when you're improvising?

Somebody was talking about doing it with a band. Yeah. But we didn't do it. I would love to do it. Well, David Puppel, who's a, I'll hook you up if you want to do it. I would love to do it. So, because his. thing is there's different ways of looking inside the head to see what your brain is doing.

Now, I mean, this is stuff that we've developed over the last couple decades, right? So you don't need to do surgery to peek into the brain. You can do an MRI, which will show you where in the brain things are happening, but it's very slow. So even if you're just talking, forget about improvising and forget about playing fast. You don't know when it's happening. But what you can also do, what's happening in the brain, right, are these chemicals zooming around and they make little magnetic fields that pop outside your head.

And they can measure those right away. Man, I would love to see what it would be like for a band, really playing and improv. I would love my students to do it. And I told you I want you to talk to my students. They would love it. I got great students at Juilliard. I would love to do that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And, you know, I think it's coming because brain computer interfaces. I think this is a common theme for me, but I think that, you know, one of the things that's going to change the future is our ability to forget about our fingers, just go right from the brain. brain to the machine or whatever and go back and forth. And it might be very, very slow and it might be 100 years from now. So that's okay. I'm a physicist. If it's 100 years, nothing, right? But I think that, yeah, well, it'll be interesting to see how we learn about music.

We learn about what it means. Some people less musical. Like, I can't sing a note, but I love listening to other people. It's great. So, which and Marcelus. Thank you so much for this fantastic conversation. Man, it's such a pleasure. I have so much respect.

and it's an honor and pleasure. And keep the journey going. Yes, sir. That's what we both doing. All right. Thanks, man. Yes, sir. Thank you.