Wynton Marsalis leads his
Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra
in a swinging big band bash
By John Mark Rafacz
A day after Hurricane Gustav battered Louisiana with wind, rain, and floods, trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, one of New Orleans’ most gifted native sons, released a book ironically titled Moving to Higher Ground. Written with Geoffrey C. Ward, a noted author and historian, the book, subtitled How Jazz Can Change Your Life, is testament to the convictions of a gifted musician, composer, and thinker.
“In this book,” Marsalis writes, “I hope to reach a new audience with the positive message of America’s greatest music, to show how great musicians demonstrate on the bandstand a mutual respect and trust that can alter your outlook on the world and enrich every aspect of your life—from individual creativity and personal relationships to conducting business and understanding what it means to be American in the most modern sense.”
If one person embodies the quest to reach audiences with America’s greatest music, it’s surely Marsalis, who leads his Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra in concert at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, October 9, in Penn State’s Eisenhower Auditorium. The trumpeter, composer, artistic director, and educator has previously performed four times with the orchestra before appreciative Eisenhower crowds.
The fall 2008 tour, dubbed a “big band bash,” allows the orchestra to perform an array of works from the extensive songbook of swing.
“It’s obviously going to be some of the most swinging big band—probably dance music I would think—that has been around since the history of the music,” says Victor L. Goines, who has played tenor and soprano saxophones plus clarinet with the orchestra for most of its two decades. Goines, another native of New Orleans, has also been a member of the Wynton Marsalis Septet since 1993.
Under the directorship of Marsalis, Jazz at Lincoln Center has become the world’s foremost cultural and educational resource devoted to jazz. Its famous orchestra entertains and educates in New York City, across the United States, and around the globe.
“Jazz, for Wynton Marsalis, is nothing less than a search for wisdom. He thinks as forcefully, and as elegantly, as he swings,” Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic, writes in his review of Moving to Higher Ground. “When he reflects on improvisation, his subject is freedom. When he reflects on harmony, his subject is diversity and conflict and peace. When he reflects on the blues, his subject is sorrow and the mastery of it—how to be happy without being blind. There is philosophy in Marsalis’s trumpet and in this book. Here is the lucid and probing voice of an uncommonly soulful man.”
Like Marsalis, Goines is as much a teacher as a musician. “I’ve been involved in education most of my life,” says Goines, speaking by phone from Atlanta. “It’s a great opportunity, because as an educator I think one is always trying to learn more, and the best way to do it is to try to teach the topic that you’re dealing with because your students always give you multiple viewpoints of how to do something.”
Goines took over this fall as the director of jazz studies and professor of music at Northwestern University. For seven years before that he was the first artistic director of the jazz program at The Juilliard School, where he also taught jazz clarinet and saxophone. During his time at Juilliard, the department went from being a collaborative program with Jazz at Lincoln Center to offering bachelor and master’s degree programs.
In addition to his contributions as an instrumentalist and educator, Goines has also composed more than fifty works.
“I do have many [compositions] for big band,” he says. “I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to compose and arrange for the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, for other things we’ve done with the Wynton Marsalis Septet, [and] for many of our galas. I’ve also been involved with Alfred Publishing for their education series for high school bands and what not, and those have been big band arrangements.”
He created a commissioned piece, Base Line, for Juilliard’s dance division in 2002. The work, arranged for a small big band of twelve instruments, supported original choreography by Julliard alumnus Robert Battle.
“The composing helps the performance because quite often some of the things I have composed have been focused on the weaknesses that I have as a performer,” Goines insists. “I always try to challenge me to figure out how to deal with different aspects in my playing. For instance, playing in unfamiliar keys is always a challenge for most musicians I would say. So as opposed to writing something in B-flat, which is a pretty familiar key in the music world, I’ll try to write something in the key of A, which creates challenges for us because we just don’t play in those keys on a daily basis.
“I really adopted that particular philosophy from [Wynton’s father and pianist] Ellis Marsalis, I have to say—the fact that he used to compose things when he taught at the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts to address the needs and obstacles that his students were encountering at that time.”
The next challenge Goines would like to take on is composing music for motion pictures.
“I’d like to get involved in some film scores. That’s one thing I really have a great desire [to pursue]. I’m trying to do my homework and study,” he says. “… Herlin Riley, a great drummer who played with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra [and] Wynton Marsalis Septet—and he’s from New Orleans—we always say that when opportunity meets preparation you can deal with the prosperity of the situation. So I’m in my preparation stage you might say.”
Goines and Lincoln Center’s Marsalis, both born in 1961, have performed together in a variety of settings since childhood.
“We both actually went to the same kindergarten,” Goines recalls. “But our paths didn’t cross as much then as they did when we were in elementary school performing in different honor ensembles around the city, particularly in a band called the Genuine Honor Band. That talented youth ensemble also featured saxophonist and clarinetist Branford Marsalis, Wynton’s older brother, who was born in 1960.
It was apparent from a young age that Wynton was destined for greatness. “I think for Wynton, he’s always been one who has put really a high bar in place for himself and his achievements,” Goines says. “I can say by the time he got to high school, he made a very clear decision that music was going to be what he was going to do, and he wanted to be as great as he could at that particular art form. He decided to really attack the practice mode of it, but not only in music. He’s always been a high achiever academically, as well. If my memory serves me correctly he was a National Merit Scholar in high school.”
Goines remembers as a teenager traveling with the trumpeter to auditions. “Normally when most kids would be congregating with their friends and what not, he was studying, reading the old English and other things that were necessary for his assignments in school,” Goines says. “He would play gigs at night. On the break he would do his homework. … He would get up before school and practice. He would practice on his lunch break. He would go to his arts high school and attend his classes there, then he would practice after school. And then he was going to make gigs being with funk bands that he played in or with the New Orleans Philharmonic. They had a brass ensemble that he was participating in in his senior year in high school.”
The fruits of the horn player’s work ethic are apparent to all who have savored his playing since he reached international recognition in the early 1980s. “Ultimately,” Goines says, “he decided that the person he was going to compete against was himself and the legends of jazz, people like Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong.”
Artistic Viewpoints, an informal moderated discussion featuring a visiting artist or local expert, is offered in Eisenhower Auditorium one hour before the performance and is free for ticket holders. Artistic Viewpoints regularly fills to capacity. Seating is available on a first-arrival basis.
Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra
with Wynton Marsalis
7:30 p.m. Thursday, October 9
Eisenhower Auditorium
Adult $43
University Park Student $20
18 and Younger $36
Jazz Spectrum on WKPS THE LION
Corvette America underwrites jazz presentations at the Center for the Performing Arts.
