Louis Armstrong? Or Parliament-Funkadelic, Earth, Wind & Fire, and proto-rap group The Last Poets?
It is perfectly logical to assume New Orleans-bred trumpeter and Pulitzer Prize-winning jazz composer Wynton Marsalis grew up as a fan of jazz pioneer and fellow New Orleans trumpeter/composer Armstrong, the subject of the national “Louis” silent-film-with-live-music-tour Marsalis and his 13-piece band are now embarked upon.
Logical, but wrong, since Marsalis’ first band of note as a teenager, The Creators, was a funk and R&B band that catered to young, dance-happy audiences eager to get their groove on.
“I always knew about Armstrong,” said Marsalis, who will perform “Louis” on May 18 at downtown San Diego’s Balboa Theatre.
“But coming up during and after the Civil Rights movement — and the killings of President John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. — you didn’t look kindly on Armstrong. A lot of things were left out of Black Culture then. A lot of people didn’t really know who he was then and were embarrassed by his antics and by his smiling and grinning.
“I knew about Armstrong because my father taught a history course about him. But it was so antithetical to Malcolm X and the post-Civil Rights movement. The music we were doing in The Creators by The Last Poets, Earth, Wind & Fire and P-Funk, that stuff was very remote from Armstrong.’’
Marsalis was 17 when he began developing an abiding passion for Armstrong, whose profound impact on American music continues to be felt around the world and whose storied legacy Marsalis happily discusses later in this interview.
Stevie Wonder, The Meters
He was similarly enthusiastic recounting his three-year stint as a teenage member of the New Orleans funk band The Creators, whose repertoire included songs by Stevie Wonder. Earth, Wind & Fire, The Commodores, War, Ohio Players and The Meters. The band, whose lineup featured Wynton’s saxophone-playing brother, Branford, also performed songs by the George Clinton-led Parliament-Funkadelic.
“I can still play P-Funk horn parts right now!” Marsalis said, speaking by phone from his home in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood.
“I wonder if I can still play (Wonder’s) ‘Sir Duke,’ which I was playing when I was 13. Let me see how much I remember. Let’s see.”
Marsalis picked up his trumpet and began playing “Sir Duke’s” snaking horn lines.
“There you go!” he said triumphantly.
Putting down his horn, Marsalis began to sing a snippet of “P-Funk Wants To Get Funked Up,” the opening selection from that band’s landmark mid-1970s album, “Mothership Connection.”
“I want my funk uncut, make my funk the P-Funk, I want to get funked up!” he sang, laughing with delight.
“I can remember some of their horn parts, too,” said Marsalis, who picked up his trumpet again and began playing some brassy bursts.
His palpable zeal for revisiting his funk-fueled teenage musical pursuits will surely come as a surprise to many, or at least to anyone who did not grow up alongside him in New Orleans.
This, after all, is the same Wynton Marsalis who in 1983 — at the age of 22 — became the first artist to ever win Grammy Awards in both jazz and classical music. It was a feat he handily repeated the following year.
In 1997, Marsalis became the first jazz artist to win a Pulitzer Prize for music. That honor was accorded to him for “Blood on the Fields,” his sweeping jazz oratorio, which was inspired equally by slavery and the quest for freedom. It was commissioned by Jazz at Lincoln Center, the New York nonprofit arts organization for which Marsalis has been the artistic director since its inception in 1986.
A champion of jazz as both a form of vital artistic expression and as an exemplar of musical democracy in action, he has not hesitated to voice his opinions about popular culture. When accepting one of his two awards during the 1983 Grammys telecast, he denounced “enforced trends” and “bad taste.”
In a 2018 Facebook post, Marsalis lamented hip-hop’s propensity for “the perpetuation of negative imagery and stereotypes (that) are self-inflicted for a paycheck… At 56, I’m pretty sure I will not be alive when our country and the world (of all races and persuasions) no longer accepts being entertained by the pathology of Black Americans and others who choose to publicly humiliate themselves for the appetites of those who don’t share the same ongoing history and challenges. Over the years, I have come to accept this, but that doesn’t mean I have to like and endorse it. So I don’t.”
His disdain for much (but not all) hip-hop did not prevent Marsalis from rapping on “Where Y’All At,” a song from his 2007 album, “From The Plantation to the Penitentiary.” Set to a snappy New Orleans second-line drum beat, it opens with him declaring:
“You got to speak the language the people are speakin′ / Specially when you see the havoc it’s wreakin′ / Even the rap game started out critiquin’ /Now it’s all about killing and freakin′ / All you ′60s radicals and world beaters / Righteous revolutionaries and Camus readers / Liberal students and equal rights pleaders / What’s goin′ on now that y’all are the leaders?”
Not a ‘jazz nerd’
Marsalis has been the president of the 56-year-old Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation since 2018. He received the National Medal of the Arts In 2005 and has written or co-authored seven books, including 2008’s “Moving To Higher Ground: How Jazz Can Change Your Life.”
But Marsalis is quick to challenge the long-held contention that he grew up in a bubble as a jazz purist or “jazz nerd,” a point contradicted by his tenure as a teenage trumpeter in the New Orleans funk bands The Creators and Killer Forces & The Crispy Critters.
“Me growing up as a ‘jazz nerd’ is far from the truth, because that didn’t even exist at the time I was growing up,” Marsalis said.
“So few young people were into this music, and I was one of the few saying: ‘You can play real jazz and not this, not funk.’ Of course, cats didn’t want to hear any of that. It was always an uphill battle for jazz. But when you played funk, you didn’t have to fight for it.
“I said if you play funk that doesn’t make you a jazz musician, and I wanted to play jazz. Now, once I started saying that, it became a thing for writers — critics — who wanted to turn jazz into rock or funk. Why can’t jazz be itself? No disrespect to funk, but it’s not jazz.”
But funk is the music Marsalis happily performed for several years in his teens.
“It was just what everybody was doing then and it was fun,” he said “We had a lot of funk bands in New Orleans then. And me and Branford were the youngest musicians on that scene. We played with older musicians in The Creators who were in their late teens and 20s. We did three gigs a week all over the city, proms, weddings, police department talent shows.
“We played at so many dances and we had such a good time. And we played a lot of slow songs, like The Commodores’ ‘Easy’ and Heatwave’s ‘Always and Forever,’ because we wanted girls from our high school to come see us play. In terms of playing and really learning how to play, it wasn’t about that. We did horn parts, dance steps and background vocals, and it was a lot of fun. But nobody in those funk bands was playing (John Coltrane’s jazz classic) ‘Giant Steps’ because nobody knew what that was.”
Marsalis left The Creators when he was 16 to focus on jazz. He was 17 when he began studying classical trumpet in New York at the Juilliard School and 18 when he joined Art Blakey’s fabled band, The Jazz Messengers.
“I was always studying jazz and I was always trying to learn how to play it,” said Marsalis, who has been the director of Juilliard’s Jazz Studies Department since 2014. “I was always playing with older guys in New Orleans. I did weekly gigs there at Tyler’s Beer Garden with guys in their 20s and 30s.”
Marsalis was still in high school when he began his deep dive into Armstrong, a music giant whose peerless trumpet playing and infectious singing earned him a worldwide following and set an enduring standard.
“I was 17 and had a tape of Armstrong’s music,” Marsalis recalled. “My father said I had to learn (Armstrong’s 1938 classic) ‘Jubilee.’ At the time I was learning solos by Freddie Hubbard, complicated things. ‘Jubilee’ was simple — and I couldn’t play it.
“Learning to play it made me understand I really had to study his songs. So, I started learning Armstrong’s music and his style. Being from New Orleans, I was aware of his style when I was young, from marching band and all the experiences he had, but I certainly didn’t know this was something you needed to study.
“Whereas we knew you had to study ‘Giant Steps,’ or Charlie Parker, or a Thelonious Monk song. We didn’t know the history well enough so we felt like Lous Armstrong was old-fashioned. We had a preconceived notion of him that kept us from appreciating how significant he was then and is now.”
Big-screen tribute
Armstrong died in 1971, shortly after celebrating his 71st birthday. His greatness has been increasingly recognized and celebrated in the decades since then, on recordings and in books and films.
One of those films is “Louis,” the 2010 silent movie that was inspired by Armstrong’s pre-teen years in New Orleans and boasts a soundtrack by Marsalis. Filmed in black and white, the R-rated “Louis” has a quaintly old-fashioned aesthetic. Its antagonist is a Charlie Chaplin-esque villain, Judge Perry, a corrupt White politician running for higher office while trying to hide having fathered a child with a Black New Orleans prostitute.
The cast features Anthony Coleman as the young Armstrong, Shanti Lowry as the prostitute, Jackie Earle Haley, as Judge Perry and Anthony Mackie as Buddy Bolden, who was Armstrong’s jazz forerunner.
Many of the songs heard in the film were composed by Marsalis. He also wrote new arrangements of such gems as Jelly Roll Morton’s “Black Bottom Stomp,” Charles Mingus’s “Boogie Stop Shuffle” and Duke Ellington’s “Happy Go Lucky Local,” along with several pieces by the 19th-century Creole composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk.
Directed by Dan Pritzker, a former member of the rock band Sonia Dada, “Louis” debuted in 2010. The same year saw Marsalis and his band take to the road to perform the soundtrack live at screenings of the film in theaters across the East Coast, Mexico, Europe and in Havana, Cuba.
When “Louis” screens in San Diego at the historic Balboa Theater, a former silent movie house, Marsalis and his band will be present but not be on stage.
“We’re going to be performing in the orchestra pit because the focus is on the film, not on us,” he said.
“The score is hard to play! Believe me, we have our hands full performing it. I’m practicing for the tour right now. We have to hit the marks with the film. But because it’s music I wrote, it has room for improvisation. So, we improvise within the structures of the songs.
The band for this year’s “Louis” tour features pianist Manila-born classical piano star Cecile Licad and Marsalis’ youngest brother, Jason, on drums. While the elder Marsalis was not present when “Louis” was shot in New Orleans more than 15 years ago, he immediately recognized each of the locales featured in the film.
“New Orleans is not that big,” he noted, “especially the downtown area.”
Like Armstrong before him, Marsalis has become synonymous with jazz and the trumpet. His schedule of constant touring, recording and advocating for the music he has devoted his life to appears to be virtually nonstop, but he wouldn’t have it any other way.
“Man, my work is such a blessing,” Marsalis said. “For me, my work has been like a calling. I have practiced a lot since i was 12 and I’ve been blessed to have this opportunity. People still come out to support our concerts and that means a lot to me. And I’ve been blessed to play with such great musicians in my bands and in my student groups.
“I am always grateful. And I always tell my students: ‘Be engaged, take yourself seriously and make the right statement for what you want to accomplish and how you want to accomplish it.”
“Louis: A Silent Film with Live Music by Wynton Marsalis and Cecile Licad.”
When: 7 p.m. Sunday, May 18
Where: Balboa Theatre, 868 Fourth Avenue, Gaslamp Quarter
Tickets: $76.35-$108.05
Online: theconrad.org