Tag: jeffwatts

Wynton Marsalis, J Mood

Cover to J Mood, illustration by Romare Bearden

Album of the Week, April 12, 2025

In the Bring on the Night documentary, there’s a brief interview with Kenny Kirkland at the very beginning in which he says, “I’m sure some people, some purists, jazz people, don’t like the idea of our doing this,” meaning being a jazz musician and playing with Sting. Kirkland was sure, all right; his former boss, Wynton Marsalis, had in fact kicked him and his brother Branford out of his quintet for joining Sting’s band. We’ve now heard some of the story about what happened next for Kirkland, but what about Wynton? Interestingly, the answer seems to be that he found his own voice.

One notable thing about Marsalis’s Black Codes (From the Underground) is the degree to which it resembles an album from Miles Davis’s Second Great Quintet. That album was recorded in January 1985. His second album from that year, recorded in December, was a quartet with two new players: Marcus Roberts on piano and Robert Hurst on bass (Jeff “Tain” Watts returned from the old band). Both players would have a noticeable impact on Marsalis’s sound, but the biggest factor was Roberts.

Marthaniel Roberts, who goes professionally by Marcus, was born in 1963, two years after Wynton, to a longshoreman father and a gospel singing mother who went blind as a teenager. It ran in the family; by age 5, Roberts was blind from a combination of glaucoma and cataracts. Also at age 5, he learned to play piano, teaching himself on an instrument at their church. He attended the Florida School for the Deaf and Blind, which had previously graduated Ray Charles, and studied piano formally beginning at age 12. This album was his first recording, and the style that he brought to Wynton’s band, anchored in gospel and ragtime rather than the post-bop influences that informed Kirkland, made a significant impact on Wynton’s sound.

The album opens with “J Mood,” which true to its name seems more like a mood—specifically, a blue mood—than a composition. Starting around this time, Marsalis’s compositions started to feature complex chord changes that could be downright Ellingtonesque, and this one is no exception; there’s also a thread of restraint, as though the music was moving in some mysterious underworld. The meter is complex, too, swerving from a slow 7/4 to bits of 4/4. The band starts out stating the theme together, with the trumpet playing over top of the changes in the piano, and Marsalis goes into a slow 4/4 blues in which he establishes a series of melodic phrases that don’t quite cohere to an actual melody. Tain and Bob Hurst anchor the low end, with Hurst keeping a “walking bass line” feel in his melodic progression but constantly swinging against the beat, and Tain exploding the harmonic envelope with inventive use of cymbals both soft and loud. When Roberts plays, it’s in a deceptively slow cadence that brings some melodic sense to the music, with hints of church in some of the low chords and his arpeggiated right hand, all the while swinging hard. The band finishes where they begin, with only a diminished seventh in the upper octave hinting at any of the development that has taken place.

Marcus Roberts’ sole compositional credit on the album, “Presence That Lament Brings” has a melody, but not an easy one (I am reminded a little of some of the twelve-tone solo lines in Bernstein’s Kaddish) and plenty of rubato to go around. Wynton is muted here, but the effect is less explicitly Milesian than on Black Codes; he seems to be finding his own expression and sound in which the combination of the soft tone of the mute and the growling of his note-bending playing combine to create a completely different emotional space. Space is the defining characteristic of Roberts’ solo, which has both that same deceptively unhurriedness and a sparser chord voicing than on “J Mood.”

“Insane Asylum,” composed by Donald Brown (who was the pianist in Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers when Wynton was in the group), has a lazy intensity about it; there’s still that mute and that extreme swing that seems to wait until the last possible moment to move, and the melody descends chromatically like a swoon. Still, Tain’s cymbal work keeps insistently nudging us forward, and Wynton’s trumpet climbs to the highest heights as if urging us forward up a trail. The tune itself seems to circle back insistently to the the same chromatic descending motif over and over again, as if painfully fixated on it.

“Skain’s Domain” refers to Wynton’s childhood nickname; while you practically can’t refer to Jeff Watts without his rhyming “Tain,” “Skain” seems to be used principally only inside Wynton’s band, and mostly as a joke. The liner notes takes some pains to tell us that “the song is twenty seven bars long, with a two/four measure at the nineteenth bar.” What is true is that the playing is brisk and light enough that you don’t count the measures; though the tune, like everything else, keeps to the minor-key side of the equation, it feels almost sprightly. By contrast, “Melodique” is, rhythmically, a slow blues over a samba rhythm, and bears more than a family resemblance to Herbie Hancock’s “Mimosa.” It plays some of the same tricks with rhythmic pulse and stasis, with the added trick of a twelve-tone inspired melody from Wynton over the top. It’s a gorgeous track, regardless.

“After” is a wistful ballad by Wynton’s father Ellis Marsalis, albeit one that is amped up by Tain’s cymbal work, which urges the track along with splashes, washes, and marches of cymbal sound against the more meditative backing of the piano and the bass. It seems to capture a tender moment alone, where “Much Later” seems to find the couple jitterbugging the night away. The pulse is constantly moving eighth notes, Tain finding a way to swing even at high velocity. The track has a much looser feel, and the cough or sneeze at around the 40-second mark as well as the barely detectable fade-in suggest that it was a full band jam session during which the engineer just happened to be rolling tape. It sounds great and blows some of the sleepiness away, ending the album on a high note—as well as a simultaneous Wynton and Roberts quote of “If I Were a Bell”!

Marsalis was finding his way to the key ingredients of his compositional and performative voice: in addition to the bell-like tone of his early recordings, we get a variety of distinctive sounds through the mute here, along with a healthy dose of both Ellington and Armstrong—as well as the blues. On later albums of his own material for small group, Wynton would lean more heavily into one or another of these directions, particularly the blues—his trio of albums in the “Soul Gestures in Southern Blue” series is worth seeking out—but they play as elaborations of the musical language that was first captured here.

If Wynton was driving deeper into the jazz tradition, he wasn’t the only Marsalis brother to be recording jazz albums. About six months after the quartet wrapped up its sessions for the album in December 1985, Branford recorded his own set and second album, Royal Garden Blues, in New York. But Branford was also busy with some decidedly non-traditional endeavors, and we’ll pick up that story next time.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

Wynton Marsalis, Black Codes (From the Underground)

Album of the Week, March 22, 2025

It’s a little unfair to judge any artist by one album, and we picked an atypical one to start with for Wynton Marsalis. As I said of Hot House Flowers, “there might be a pretty good quintet performance here, if we could just get the orchestra out of the way.” Black Codes (from the Underground) gives us that, and more—a sharply modern small group record consisting almost entirely of Marsalis’s compositions, pointed (at least in title) at forces that Marsalis saw as keeping black Americans down.

The band had some familiar faces in it—literally familiar, with the return of Wynton’s older brother Branford on tenor and soprano saxophone, and figuratively with Jeff “Tain” Watts behind the drums, Kenny Kirkland at the piano, and Ron Carter joining for one number. For the rest of the session, 18-year-old bass prodigy Charnett Moffett anchored the bottom end of the rhythm section. Moffett, a Philadelphia-born prodigy, joined his family’s band at age 8 for a tour of the Far East and at age 16 appeared on Branford’s solo debut, 1983’s Scenes in the City.

The point of departure for the sound of the album appears to have been the harmonic palette of Miles’ second quintet. Indeed, in the lengthy, all-caps liner notes by Stanley Crouch, we learn that Wynton had been listening to a lot of Wayne Shorter compositions: “In every era you have composers who stand out and who set up directions. Ellington and Strayhorn tower over everybody. Then you have Monk. Then Wayne Shorter. Right now, it is easy to see that Wayne took the music in a fresh direction because of his organic conception of the interaction of melody, harmony, and rhythm. … . Wayne Shorter knows harmony perfectly and, just like Monk, every note and every chord, every rhythm, every accent–each of them is there for a good reason.”

High praise, indeed, given that for much of Wynton’s professional life Shorter had been anchoring the most storied jazz fusion group around and had been engaging in the sort of “pressure of commercialism” that in Crouch’s mind reduced musicians to Roland Kirk’s “volunteered slavery.” Nevertheless, the Shorter influence is present throughout the album, alongside the inimitable stamp of the approaches of each of the musicians in the band.

“Black Codes” starts us off with a driving energy in 12/8 from the rhythm section, with Kirkland splashing Monk-like harmonies under the horns. Wynton and Branford play the opening melody in a frantic harmony, teasing a little rubato before shifting to a secondary theme. When Wynton comes in for his solo it’s with a high, piercing tone, accompanied by explosive blows in the drums. Wynton swings over Kirkland’s insistent, impeccably placed chords. His improvisation takes the form of long runs that bristle with unexpected flourishes at the corners. As Tain settles down we start to hear Moffett, who consistently digs at the action, leaning in with a dominant tone up to the tonic by way of the subtonic, repeatedly urging the action forward. When Branford comes in, by contrast, Kenny gives more space in the accompaniment to underscore his soprano lines, which tend to perch above the harmonies rather than dart among them like Wynton’s work. Kenny responds to the patterns in Branford’s solos with stabs of light, and takes a solo following the saxophonist’s recapitulation of the melody. There’s a huge bag of tricks at the pianist’s command—Hancock-like runs over left hand block chords, dancing moments of Jelly Roll Morton-inspired rhythms, moments of classical sonata, Stravinskyesque harmonics—and we hear them all here in a single absorbing conception. The band reprises the melody one more time, hits that rubato… and melts, glissandoing down a half step, as though slumping in defeat against the insistently oppressive codes. But there’s a pickup from the bass and the sound of the trumpet, echoing from the far side of the room, as if leading us out to another place.

“For Wee Folks” might just be that destination. Opening with the sounds of a ballad, the band changes direction into a minor swing that calls to mind Coltrane’s “Crescent.” Wynton and Branford take us back out of time, though, out of the swing and back into the ballad, before Branford takes a solo over the swing. Here he plays it safe on the lower end of the soprano sax, unspooling melodic lines that call to mind Wayne Shorter’s sound on In A Silent Way, but crucially minus the intensity of that masterpiece. Wynton plays tenderly, using rhythmic variation to take the same melodic directions into a more intense expression, before passing to Kirkland. Here the pianist uses some of that classical expressionism, alternating long lines with block chords that alternate between the right and left hand and pivoting through a long trill into a quietly meditative statement. Underneath it, Tain and Moffett keep everything on a simmer, with occasional pops of cymbal and tom from the drummer to signal the roiling energy kept just beneath the surface.

“Delfeayo’s Dilemma,” named for a younger Marsalis brother (#4 of 6, and the third of four to go into the family business as a trombonist and composer), begins with Branford and Wynton duetting in close harmony, exchanging runs with Kirkland on the piano. There’s more than a bit in the head melody that sounds like it was borrowed from Wayne Shorter, perhaps a faster track from Speak No Evil. But where that album’s Freddie Hubbard would have unleashed a piercingly pure glissade of notes in his solo, Wynton adopts a softer tone through his Harmon mute. The glissade is there, though, along with some off-beat asides. When Branford’s solo comes, it’s right in line with his brother’s approach, albeit with a greater use of sustained notes that heighten the suspensions and keep the energy moving forward. Kirkland, Tain and Moffett continually stoke the fires beneath, and when the trio moves forward into their solo moment it’s to a dazzling display of chromatic motion. When the horns return to the head once more it feels like the recap of Miles’s “Agitation,” albeit without the dizzying virtuosity of Tony Williams’s drums.

“Phryzzinian Men,” true to its name, gives us a melody in the Phrygian mode. The band’s energy seems to flow directly from “Delfeayo’s Dilemma” but gives us a more upbeat group energy, especially in Branford’s solo, which seems to play around the edges of the changes, giving a flavor of Wayne Shorter’s “Yes or No” melody. Kenny Kirkland gets the last word, repeating the striking modal broken arpeggio from the beginning into the fade-out into the next track.

“Aural Oasis,” one of the few songs on this album in a ballad tempo, opens in the same key as “Phryzzinian Men.” But this track sees Wynton and Branford exchange phrases in a wistful minor key over the piano, declaiming from minor into a hopeful major. Branford’s solo in particular is a standout, rooted in some of the chromatic joy of Shorter but with his own voice emerging through emotional intensity. This is one of Kirkland’s quiet moments, in a way that seems deliberately reminiscent of Shorter’s “Iris”—it’s even in the same key. But the band’s attentiveness to the music, their use of space—especially in Ron Carter’s bass line—and the emotive core of both brothers’ playing, lifts this above mere pastiche into a true highlight of the album.

“Chambers of Tain” takes us back to where we began, with a frantic opening that seems to recapitulate the opening “Black Codes.” But the Kirkland-penned tune gives Wynton the floor right away, and the trumpeter shows where he was pointing at the end of the opener—into a solo that blends swing, blues, and that impeccable technique into a statement of freedom. Branford’s solo seems contrarian, starting in a different mode but then soaring out of it when the key changes into a moment of affirmation. Underneath it Kirkland repeats the same pattern over and over again, leaving it to Tain and Moffett to drive the energy through continuous improvisation on the drums and bass. When Kenny takes a solo we get both the simultaneous rhythmic and chromatic improvisation and some thrilling frontal assaults on the chords, before Tain takes the final solo to drive things home into the final recap.

Black Codes (From the Underground) showed that Wynton not only had serious chops, he had something to say, and his band was uniquely positioned to help him say it. But that band wouldn’t be with him for very long. Several of them were already crossing over to more pop-oriented pursuits, joining up with alums from Miles’ band and Weather Report to support a newly minted solo artist who was ready to trade his old artistic direction for something more in line with his jazz roots. In fact, when they made the first recording with that artist, Wynton fired them from the band. We’ll hear that first recording, finally, next week.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

Wynton Marsalis, Hot House Flowers

Album of the Week, March 8, 2025

The good thing about being the hot young artist on a major label is that the label will sometimes throw a lot of resources at your recordings. The bad news is that’s maybe not always the best idea.

Wynton Marsalis burst out of the gates as a performer, performing with Herbie Hancock, signing a contract with Columbia Records (Miles’ home) in 1982 at the age of 20 and releasing three albums—two jazz, one classical—in the first year. In 1984, the Juilliard-trained Marsalis was the first performer in history to win Grammy awards in both jazz and classical. His technique and sound were undeniably wonderful; listening to the early recordings, you hear the soul of Louis Armstrong alongside the virtuosity of a young Freddie Hubbard.

He also had strong opinions, and wasn’t shy about sharing them. And he brought additional voices to the fight along with him. The strongest voice standing alongside him was Stanley Crouch, a one-time poet, avant-garde jazz drummer, and civil rights activist (he worked for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) turned fiercely neo-traditionalist jazz critic. Crouch felt that jazz fusion and avant-garde were ultimately empty, even phony, artistically and called for a return to more traditional jazz values. Marsalis felt the same, ultimately setting out a sort of manifesto for jazz. To be considered jazz in his eyes, the music had to have the following: the blues, the standards, swing, tonality, harmony, craftsmanship, and “a mastery of the tradition” going back to New Orleans times. The definition left out much jazz between 1960 and 1970 and everything from the fusion era; the albums I’ve reviewed from CTI and much of Coltrane’s work would be out of scope, as (notably) would all of Miles’ work starting with Bitches Brew. Wynton may have idolized Miles, but the reverse was not true; on meeting Wynton, Miles is said to have remarked “So here’s the police…”

With that as a background, Wynton’s third album feels deliberate, a sort of provocative retrenchment into standards, strings, and beautiful melodic playing, the polar opposite of Decoy. It could very well also have been Wynton deciding to record a standards album and the studio adding strings for commercial reasons; we’ll never know. At any rate, in addition to the orchestra there’s a proper group behind Wynton on the recording, and what a group! In addition to his brother Branford on tenor and soprano saxophones, the group featured Kenny Kirkland, who had played with Miroslav Vitouš before becoming Wynton’s pianist; Jeff “Tain” Watts, an often ferociously muscular (but here restrained) drummer from Pittsburgh who had gotten his professional start on Wynton’s first album; and the redoubtable Ron Carter on bass.

But all of that aside: how does it sound? Overall it’s beautiful, but careful. Hoagy Carmichael’s “Stardust” opens with strings backing Wynton’s note-perfect solo. Ron Carter’s bass begins the verse with a simple walking figure, but accelerates into something a little more adventuresome; he’s the only one of the quartet (Branford sits this one out) to come out of the background. Mostly we’re left to a reverie.

“Lazy Afternoon,” written by Jerome Moross and John La Touche for the 1954 musical The Golden Apple, is more band-forward. Kenny Kirkland takes a solo opening, setting up Wynton’s entrance. The trumpeter chooses a Harmon mute, the same that Miles used for much of his classic recordings, and the solo sounds deliberately evocative of Miles. The mood is abruptly changed by the swelling of the strings, who signal a change to a different space. Wynton plays a phrase or two on the unmuted trumpet, setting up Branford for a solo on the tenor which is considerably less pyrotechnic but more evocative than the work he did on Decoy. Ron Carter underscores the second verse with gravely chosen notes accented with slides and vibrato, descending to the lowest tonic as the strings reenter with a chromatic climax. The coda has Wynton playing pointillistic passages over a single harmonic from a plucked bass string. It’s among the more successful tunes on the session overall.

J. Fred Coots and Sam Lewis’s “For All We Know” gives us something roughly in between “Stardust” and “Lazy Afternoon.” There’s almost a duet between Wynton and Ron Carter being played out against the background of the orchestra. The string arrangement feels deliberate throughout, as though walking on eggshells in the adagio tempo, until suddenly Wynton and Carter break into a swing rhythm two-thirds of the way through, giving the tune sudden life. The strings try to get the last word, swooning into a major-key finish, but a portamento plucked note from Carter and a modal riff from Wynton close things out.

Leigh Harline and Ned Washington’s “When You Wish Upon a Star” is a welcome surprise: an uptempo introduction in the bass and drums, Tain finally given a little room which he uses to underpin the melody with massive snare hits and cymbal accents, and Carter providing a pedal point on the dominant and its octave. We’re not out of the lugubrious yet though, as the orchestra drags things down to a rubato with each entrance. On the third one, Wynton uses it as a way to switch to a hard-swung tempo that the strings punctuate rather than swamp. Branford takes a tenor solo that points up the rhythm, then swings into the strings and a sort of trading eights between the horns and Kenny Kirkland. If this kept on the same sort of boil as the opening it would be exhilarating, but the temperature cools down past a simmer as the musicians bring the work to a close. I’d love to hear a small-group reworking of this arrangement minus the strings and the rubato; the opening bars show just how much this particular group could cook when given the chance.

“Django” gets the same lento opening tempo as in the classic Modern Jazz Quartet version, but with just strings backing up Wynton’s introduction we don’t get the rhythmic imperative that drives the John Lewis classic until Carter, Kirkland and Tain swing into the verse. The band points up a tango-like rhythm under the solo, driving it forward to a climax and then a final orchestral swoon. Wynton gets the last word, as always, playing a tart tag.

Duke Ellington’s “Melancholia,” first recorded in a trio on his 1953 recording The Duke Plays Ellington, gets a muted introduction from Wynton leading into a rubato string section. There’s not much special going on here aside from some nice playing from Wynton throughout. “Hot House Flowers,” the sole original here, seems doomed to the same fate. There’s an orchestral swoon that’s interrupted by a series of puckish outbursts from the trumpet and drums, but we seem firmly stuck in low gear until about a minute and a half in when things get interesting. Carter and Kirkland propose a circling rhythmic figure that drives us forward to a bracing flute solo from Kent Jordan. Carter then takes a solo of his own, playing against the rhythm with a series of sallies, that circles to a conclusion with a final sting from the orchestra. As a composition from a 23 year old it’s highly promising start, and one wishes for more of it on this album.

“I’m Confessin’ (That I Love You)” starts with an orchestral jog into a swinging solo from Marsalis. Here the orchestra functions less as a blanket and more as a punctuation, with both Kirkland and Tain underscoring the melody. Wynton concludes his solo with a high stretto, leading into a solo for Kirkland. Kenny’s style is instantly recognizable, with block chords and runs in the right hand that give a percussive emphasis to the chord progressions while also making them more interesting with swerves into minor, blues, and modal moments. Branford takes a straightforward solo that swings its way around the melody before taking a run of off-beat hits. The band plays an intricate 12/8 interlude and then swings to the finish, with Wynton playing a 16-bar passage in triplets without a breath, and finishing with a run of deliberately breathless leading notes leaning into the submediant (6th) over Carter’s final pizzicato.

Hot House Flowers is a frustrating album. One can’t help but think there’s a pretty good quintet performance here, if we could just get the orchestra out of the way. But it’s not a bad way to hear why Wynton was both praised—that trumpet tone is extraordinary—and derided for what is ultimately an extremely buttoned-up sound. He would record far better records, and we’ll hear them soon. We’re going to give Miles one more word first, though.

You can listen to this week’s album here: