Wynton Marsalis Takes His Musical Genius to the Screen

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Now, around the world, a cycle of poverty and exclusion has long denied people their equal opportunities. A new film “Bolden” reimagines the tragic life of Buddy Bolden, an original inventor of jazz music. He struggled with mental illness and he died in obscurity in a mental asylum, but his music would inspire the likes of Louis Armstrong and so many other artists. Wynton Marsalis is one of the world’s most acclaimed jazz musicians and he’s won nine Grammy Awards. He sat down with our Walter Isaacson to discuss his role as executive producer on this film, as well as composing the soundtrack.

WALTER ISAACSON: Wynton Marsalis, my hero. Welcome to the show.

WYNTON MARSALIS, EXECUTIVE PRODUCER AND COMPOSER, “BOLDEN”: Man, it’s such a pleasure.

ISAACSON: Good to see you. Good to see you.

MARSALIS: Yes, sir.

ISAACSON: So Buddy Bolden, man, he’s finally getting his due. You’re doing a movie on him and the theme is he invented jazz. What does that mean? What ingredients did he put together?

MARSALIS: He’s the first person who realized you could take church music, like Afro-American sanctified church music and put it together with the sounds of the street. So he put two opposites together. He played cornet solo.

ISAACSON: The cornet, you got right there. Yes. Yes.

MARSALIS: So you have one form is more like hollering and shouting with effects maybe like (♪MUSIC♪). That’s like kind of a style of playing the blues and blending those. Another style is very straight and sweet sung — a song style. It’s like (♪MUSIC♪). You have another style that is like a ragtime style, which would be (♪MUSIC♪). He put this kind of ragtime styles, the sounds on street parades, hymns, marches, church music. He put all of these things together.

ISAACSON: We’re talking 1890s or so in Central City, New Orleans?

MARSALIS: 1890s uptown.

ISAACSON: Uptown.

MARSALIS: So he was an uptown musician, Johnson Park and this kind of places. And he was competing with the downtown musicians.

ISAACSON: Right.

MARSALIS: Because it’s the whole kind of thing of where does the nobility come from?

ISAACSON: And the downtown musicians were a little bit more refined?

MARSALIS: They were more refined and they thought they were on a much higher level than Bolden because Bolden was playing street sounds, rag sounds, sounded like chicken and cats are making the fix on the instruments. But whenever they met and combatted each other and Bolden would go and do his thing, improvising, being like you, you’re having a conversation, no one had ever heard anything like that.

ISAACSON: As you say, you found together the sanctified church, the marching traditions, the French Creole traditions, the downtown music. What else?

MARSALIS: He also taught his band members how to interact with him. So he would take the traditional march formation. The clarinet plays up high, high pitches in many places, figures from all places down low. Bom, bom, counter-melody. And he explained to them how to interact with the lead part when it’s improvised. So everybody started to figure out how they could converse and play together and that’s where people called him King Bolden.

ISAACSON: Now, we have a clip from this amazing movie that you’re the executive producer of, of Buddy Bolden doing exactly that, teaching his band how to do syncopation. They’re a little confused at first. Let’s watch it.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GARY CARR, ACTOR, “BOLDEN”: Put your bows down. Put them down. Put them down. You don’t clap it out. Give me that beat you work with hitting on the floor.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This one?

BOLDEN: Yes, that’s it. Full. Now, Jonathan. See how that feels. Yes. Yes. That’s it. Now, give me tom. Oh, yes. Come on now. Come on. Go. Yes. Yes, that’s right. Now, Willie, pay attention. You’re going for full. Come on, Willie.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

(♪MUSIC♪)

ISAACSON: It’s infectious. You’re playing on.

MARSALIS: Yes, man. It makes you want to play.

ISAACSON: So you decide to do this movie. You’re doing it with I think Dan Pritzker, right. Why?

MARSALIS: He was interested in Bolden as a mythic character so I found that very interesting. And he also knew a lot just about the music in the context of American history and he was also putting it in the context of the Constitution.

ISAACSON: What about in the context of race?

MARSALIS: Well, you can’t discuss the United States seriously in any way without always discussing that. Many times we’re tired of hearing about it. And as someone who grew up in the Civil Rights Movement — trust me, I’m tired of it too. But in our country, we do everything we can to maintain the wealth disparity, the education disparity, all of our intellectuals, all of our kind of things are formed around a way of avoiding the obvious, that you can’t displace a whole population of people and just leave them ridicule and then make fun of them, give them the worst deals, exploit them in many ways north and south. It’s not just a southern problem. And then just one day, they’re going to be OK. And it’s not a fairy tale. It won’t have a fairy tale ending. It’s going to take engagement.

ISAACSON: And so how do you think Buddy Bolden addressed it in his music?

MARSALIS: I think just the fact that he can say, I am Buddy Bolden. At that time that was addressing it, the freedom in the music. And Buddy Bolden wasn’t coming with his music to ask for something, he was giving something. And he knew he was giving it.

ISAACSON: One of the things you do in the movie is you use as a framing device Louis Armstrong.

MARSALIS: Right.

ISAACSON: Louis Armstrong as part of the myth says he grew up in that same neighborhood of New Orleans, very young when Buddy Bolden gets sent to the insane asylum.

MARSALIS: Right, right.

ISAACSON: But Louis Armstrong at least thinks he’s heard Buddy Bolden play and he becomes a new interpreter of Buddy Bolden.

MARSALIS: Well, Louis Armstrong did hear Buddy Bolden play through King Oliver. Jo Oliver was Louis Armstrong’s mentor. And even at the end of his life, in the ’60s, Louis Armstrong would say whenever I pick my horn up, I look up, I see Jo Oliver. His whole trumpet style. Louis Armstrong is the great consolidator of all of the styles. So you take the cornet solo style, which we were doing. Cornets, we do variations on something. Like if there’s the cornet, the Carnival of Venice is the famous one. So we go (♪MUSIC♪) — you take that theme and play different variations on it. It could be a fancy one like (♪MUSIC♪) . So on and so forth. Just variations on the theme. What Louis Armstrong would do is he’s going to take that concept of playing, sweet trumpet, variations on the theme, blues. The sound of Buddy Bolden. The dignity of King Oliver’s way of playing. The diminished core quality that Buddy played with. Freddy Keppard in effects he can make on the trumpet. Bunk Johnson’s smoky sound. High trumpet, operating hours that he heard on recordings of people singing and put all of that in one style. So when people heard him, it was infectious.

So the level and the depth of his playing and the different traditions, he brought together to hold the American cornet tradition. And that’s why his playing was so transcending.

ISAACSON: And then transfers the trumpet.

MARSALIS: OK. So you’re on the trumpet and take the cornet, it has this sound, (♪MUSIC♪). And when you get to the trumpet, it’s a much brasher sound. And this actually is Louis Armstrong’s mouthpiece, which I don’t play on, but you’re going to see a difference in the sound (♪MUSIC♪). So the pop is starting to play also in the upper register like (♪MUSIC♪). He plays stuff you never heard. A cornet is played with the type of power, a feeling he would play with no sweep.

ISAACSON: Now, tell me the truth, growing up in New Orleans, young musician, black, did you admire Louis Armstrong when you were really little?

MARSALIS: Man, under no circumstances. Not only did I not admire him. None of us admired him and we didn’t really know who he was. We knew his name. We knew he was a trumpet player because we came up after the Civil Rights Movement. And in my generation, we felt every black person before 1960, we felt bad for them like they were in slavery.

When you don’t actually know the history and the tradition and what people went through, it could have been anything. And we would see movies of him singing to a horse and that kind of stuff and smiling and cheesing for white folks. That wasn’t our — our whole thing was black power, Malcolm X. We don’t have to take this kind of stuff and we’re not going to take it. And from a musical standpoint, we’re listening to stuff like Marvin Gaye, James Brown, Stevie Wonder, and this is what we were playing. But I didn’t really listen to a Louis Armstrong record until I came to New York.

ISAACSON: You came up here. You’re in Juilliard, right around the corner. And if I remember the story, your father, the great — who’s still great pianist, Ellis Marsalis, sends you Jubilee I think it says.

MARSALIS: He sent me a cassette tape. He said, “Hey, man. Check this Louis Armstrong.” I was listening to it — just to give you a sense, I was used to playing like songs like a Freddie Hubbard song, like a solo I would learn would be like Intrepid Fox. So (♪MUSIC♪). So I’m working on that kind of stuff that is really technical, difficult, and fast and it’s Freddie and it has got a vibe, like (MUSIC). So on and so forth. Now, I’m listening to this Louis Armstrong which is like (♪MUSIC♪). And I’m thinking man, that’s some of the corniest stuff I ever heard. So I picked this Jubilee solo up and he’s playing notes like this (♪MUSIC♪). For a long time, I’m saying that’s not the Jubilee solo. I don’t really remember it. But I said let me just learn this solo, knowing well I could play that solo.

ISAACSON: And that made you decide, OK, pops is the king?

MARSALIS: It forced the humility on me. I said, you know, I need to learn — see what pops was doing. Instead of getting secondhand information, I called my father. I said man, I can’t make it through this pop solo. He started laughing. He said, “I know.” Then I began to study pop’s music. And I saw quotes of a famous, more modern musicians like Miles Davis saying, “You can’t play nothing on the horn. Pops is not played even modern.”

ISAACSON: One of the things about Louis Armstrong though is he really looked down upon the more modern jazz, some of the things happening. And in some ways, you’re a bit like him. You’re dismissive and sometimes antagonistic to rap and other forms of new music that you think dishonor the tradition.

MARSALIS: Yes. Well, pops, it was different because he was coming from a style that he hadn’t played and didn’t know. So it’s hard when you’re in the position of — you’re in your 40s, 43, 44, certainly aging, and all of a sudden there’s another whole style of music, just presenting something totally different socially and technically. I asked Disney about that too. Man, I thought you and pops didn’t get along. He said, oh, man we had a little thing in the beginning of it but in the end — whereas with me, I grew up not playing jazz. I grew up playing funk and pop music. And with me, the social issues were very different because, with a lot of them, the contemporary music was returning to the show. So we’re going back to the 1800s.

ISAACSON: You’re talking about rapping?

MARSALIS: Not rapping, the art of it, but the terminology talking about killing brothers and all this. I can’t endorse that. I don’t think that has anything to do with me and them or this new, old. Coming from the Civil Rights Movement, it’s not possible to endorse that. And my issues with them are not musical. It’s also not of a personal nature. It’s with the whole of our country and it’s social, what of a country is entertained by that? That’s always my question, why is that entertaining? We will entertain people playing dances to funk and pop music and the backbeat long before you heard of rap, black people then. And it was not necessary to degrade ourselves.

ISAACSON: One of the things you led in New Orleans was the idea that we should take down the Confederate monuments, well before Charlottesville, well before the other things. And I think you talked to Mitchell Andrew, who was then the mayor, and you helped push that. Why did you do that?

MARSALIS: Well, Mitch and I, we just had a middle-aged conversation. It wasn’t a big political conversation about the statues or anything. We were talking about our fathers, our families. And in the course of that conversation, we talked about the statue. I said that’s symbolic and we should take the statue down for the tricentennial.

ISAACSON: Robert E. Lee.

MARSALIS: Yes, Robert E. Lee statue. My great uncle always hated that statue. That’s how I knew about it. Yes. Mitch — then he said, “Well, let me look and see whose jurisdiction it is.” Then he later called me and he said, “You know, I looked into this and the damn thing is in my jurisdiction.” Then we had more of a conversation but the conversation, he wasn’t reticent about it. So I don’t want to give the impression I convinced him to do it. I didn’t convince him to do it.

ISAACSON: You and I talked about it. And I remember I said to you when you first asked me, you said we got to take down Robert E. Lee, I said man, I have driven around Lee’s circle a thousands of times in my life, I never think about who’s on top of that plant. And you paused and looked at me like you’re looking at me now and you said, “I do.” And that helped me see it differently. So how did you start that conversation?

MARSALIS: I think for all of us, the most difficult thing for us to realize are the things we don’t realize. When you try to communicate with people across cultures, many times it’s not something you studied. I’ll just put an analogy of music. Like I spent time trying to write music for symphonic orchestra musicians that has just like jazz, so I would write it in choruses. Jazz musicians naturally at the end of a chorus pause and we don’t think about it. But when I write music, the symphonic musicians never pause because that’s not their style of music. It would never dawn on me that they wouldn’t pause because that’s so deep inside the fundamentals of the thing I know. I don’t consider them.

So I think for us to speak to one another across cultures, across gender race, whatever the cross is going to be, we have to look to those things that are so fundamental, we wouldn’t notice them. And it’s those things that actually determine much more and the symbolic things, fundamental things that we hold so deeply, we don’t consider them, that it’s where the real transformation can take place.

ISAACSON: And you created a soundtrack for this Bolden music. Some of which are songs like Star Dust that Louis Armstrong played or even I think Basin Street Blues and others that are traditional. Some are new songs that you have written and you tried to do it both in the Bolden style and the Armstrong style as if it’s a conversation between them, right?

MARSALIS: Yes, because all of the styles are just generational in culture and the arts because each subsequent achievement is not necessarily better than the one before it. We tend to forget what came before it. All we laud what came before is the only thing that will ever happen. But the notes of Johann Bach are in the notes of Kevington. The notes of Anton, the trumpet player that played from the concerto in 1780, whatever it was, are in the notes of my trumpet when I play. The notes of Francis Johnson are in the notes of Louis Armstrong. And when we take those notes out of our horns, we play less, not more. And those notes are not going to keep us from finding what we’re going to find in the future. They don’t keep us from being modern.

ISAACSON: In the movie, you talk about race, Buddy Bolden, handed off to Louis Armstrong. You do an arrangement, and this is what I’m going to ask you to do right now, of the song of Louis Armstrong that to me most has the emotions of race in it and that’s Black and Blue. Tell me about that song and maybe hit me a few bars.

MARSALIS: Well, that song, Louis Armstrong thought was a protest song. So what did I do to be so black and blue was a song that was considered to be a song of protest. But when you get to the bridge, it says I’m white inside but that don’t help my case, that’s hard for that to be a protest song. So in the early years, yes, that was considered protest. As we went along, no. My generation, we didn’t consider that. Black and blue, we thought, you know. But it’s — I like the chromaticism of that song (♪MUSIC♪). I didn’t mean to get you. I got you.

ISAACSON: Wynton Marsalis, thank you for being with us.

MARSALIS: Thank you, Walter. Such a pleasure, man. Always great to see you.