Wynton Marsalis is on his way to Chandler Center for the Arts with Cecile Licad and an all-star jazz ensemble to perform the score to “Louis,” a silent film telling a mythical tale of a young Louis Armstrong in the cradle of jazz, New Orleans, on Thursday, May 22.

Marsalis will play a score comprising primarily his own compositions with a 13-member jazz ensemble while Licad will play the music of 19th century American composer L.M. Gottschalk.

Marsalis spoke with The Arizona Republic about his involvement in the movie, which grew out of a conversation with filmmaker Dan Pritzker about American cornetist Buddy Bolden, a key figure in the development of a New Orleans style of ragtime music that became what we now know as jazz.

Here’s what he had to say.

How Wynton Marsalis got involved in the silent film ‘Louis’

How did you come to get involved in this “Louis” project?

(Pritzker) was talking about making a film on Buddy Bolden. Well, it was the first time in my life I had ever been approached to do anything about Bolden, and just sitting down with him, he knew all the people in the bands and had a sense of the connection to American history of that time.

So the original talks were about Buddy Bolden, and then the silent film came after that. And that was just a kind of mythic, nonfactual thing that dealt with life in New Orleans around Louis Armstrong’s time with little Pops as a character from a mythological standpoint.

All of these were Dan’s ideas. He had seen a Charlie Chaplin film with the Chicago Symphony backing the film and he thought it would be a good idea to do a contemporary silent film.

What was the appeal of the project to you?

Well, one was to recreate Bolden’s style for me as a trumpet player, because I had always heard that he played less than the people who came after him, you know? And I always thought that was kind of curious, because most of the people, the people who invent styles, always played much better than the ones who followed them.

If you take Charlie Parker, he played his style better than anybody who played it. You take the style Louis Armstrong invented, many trumpet players came out of his style, but his style was the prototype. Generally, the prototypical style is an amalgamation of all the styles that came before it.

If you take what Beethoven combined to follow Haydn, and then, even though he wasn’t trained in that when he was younger, as a much older man, he began to try to write fugues and other things that were much more the provenance of Bach in the earlier era.

I just feel in the arts, that’s just how it always works. The person who brings together the styles influences other people with aspects of their personality, and then eventually another person comes that amalgamates all those styles. So I was really interested in that.

And with the silent film, he was talking about Gottschalk and that kind of New Orleans music — piano music, parlor music. I thought that was a good idea. And once again, I mean, how many times you ever talk to anyone about Gottschalk’s music? In my life, that’s maybe one of two conversations I’ve had. And I’m not a spring chicken, you know what I mean?

And the piano player he wanted to play with was Cecile Licad, and just ironically, she and I were signed to CBS Masterworks at the same time when we were young people. In 1982, ’83, we were 21, 20 years old. So I was very familiar with Cecile, because we had the same product manager, Miss Christine Reed. So I knew all of Cecile’s early records and had heard a lot about Cecile from Christine.

I thought, What’s the chances of this, 20-something years later, to meet somebody talking about Gottschalk, Louis Armstrong, Buddy Bolden’s band and knows Cecile. So you know, yeah, I had to say yes to it.

And when you play in Chandler, you’re providing the score live?

We play the score live, yeah, with a click track (a metronome, used to keep the live performance synced up with the film). A lot of the music is written, but some of it is improvised, too. Andy Farber is the conductor, the same conductor we had originally.

I was wondering how much would be improvised.

Well, you figure, the rhythm section is improvising almost all the time. I would say 50% of it, probably? Fifty-five? But we have a click track, and we have to stay on cue.

Building the score for a silent film about young Louis Armstrong

How did you go about writing the score?

Well, in the case of this score, Dan used different musics, and he put them together the way he wanted to. And whenever he needed some new music, he said, I need music from this time to that time. But he’s a musician, so he has a good sense of it. I like the way he uses the music. He picked some difficult music to play, too.

Was the idea to capture the spirit of Armstrong’s work, or the music that inspired him, or something different altogether?

Well, to say that it’s all a continuum. We represent the continuum. So this is all a part of the table we can set and the menu we can serve. It includes Gottschalk. It’s about Louis Armstrong. It has him, but it also has songs that sound like (Arizona native Charles) Mingus wrote them, or something that nobody at any time has done.

Was the film what you imagined it would be when Dan approached you with the concept?

I didn’t really think about what it would be. We kind of learn playing jazz, if me and you were playing together, I can’t have a picture of what you’re gonna play in my mind, because if I do that, then I’m gonna start judging what you play.

And many times, when you hear a take of something, or you hear a tape back of a piece that you thought sounded a certain way, it doesn’t sound like you thought it sounded. And that’s because your perspective when you’re listening to it is prejudiced by what you expect to hear.

I didn’t have a vision for a silent film, of a contemporary film set in that time. And it had all the kind of fundamentals, mythological things, a lot of American mythology.

Like, the judge has the baby with the mulatto girl, and there’s political corruption in the police and the younger person in that environment trying to make his way, and the kind of moral decisions people have to make, and some make moral decisions and some don’t. And young genius and virtuosity and the upper class and the lower class, all these kind of grand themes that run throughout all of our mythology.

Wynton Marsalis: Louis Armstrong’s ‘genius was transcendent’

Could you talk about how Armstrong has remained such an iconic figure in the history of jazz, in the history of music?

He was just that great. It’s like how Bach has remained. Bach just consolidated the 10-finger way of playing the keyboard. Louis Armstrong taught us how to improvise coherent solos. He was a master of the blues. He could play tangos and things in the Afro-Latin diaspora. Many times, people in those cultures would say, ‘Man, who the hell is that playing our music that well?’

He was an unbelievable singer. He influenced everybody. Even Frank Sinatra said about him, ‘He’s the beginning and the end of it.’ And everybody from Frank to you-name-it, whoever was great, they loved him. Billie Holiday.

People might not have necessarily liked his demeanor because he had an element that came from that minstrel era. But his genius was transcendent.

And if you’re a trumpet player, man, you know…. (laughs) What can you say? Whatever he played on our instrument, it was never played like that before or since. I mean, at this point, you can’t imagine anybody playing with the type of human depth that he played our instrument with, especially when he became an older man.

Some of Louis Armstrong’s playing in the ’60s doesn’t even sound like a trumpet. It’s like a person talking to you.

So his genius has merited that type of attention. And even with all the kind of ‘yuck-yuck’ entertainment stuff that he did, that was required of him to do — and it was something he did willingly — even that has not been able to obscure the actual depth of his genius.

So the contemporary student today, when confronted with Louis Armstrong playing, if they’re a trumpet player, believe me, they say, ‘Damn, what in the world could I do to play like this man plays?’

How New Orleans shaped the musician Louis Armstrong became

Could you talk about the role New Orleans played in shaping the musician Armstrong became?

Well, you got to figure it was French. It was Spanish between 1750-something and 1800. It was at the mouth of the Mississippi, so you had all the riverboat Americana people there. It was the largest Southern port. It was a center of legal prostitution, so all the sailors were down there coming from the Caribbean. You had all that influence.

You had all the stevedores and people working on the levees and their songs. You had the blues coming from Mississippi, and all those people down below sea level in the capital of malaria and diphtheria and typhoid, all the stuff we had that would ruin our population from time to time.

They were hot-blooded people who were always ready to enter into a duel. And the slave population was much freer than it was in other places. Then you had an influx of Haitians after the Haitian Revolution. So it was and unlike any other place in the United States. It was Catholic and it wasn’t Protestant because of the French. And it had Santeria, and all the kind of European traditions were still down there.

So it’s all of these types of things that took place in New Orleans that didn’t take place anywhere else. The Mexican pop exposition brought an influx of Mexican musicians and the style of music that they played. Manuel Perez was a great cornetist who came out of that influx and so on and so forth.

You had the French music and the kind of parlor music that Gottschalk’s music represents. You had the bands used for advertisements. You had white, Black and Creole, a three-strata caste system that was not the way it was in the rest of the United States. I could go on and on.

And all the people at the bottom of society, all the people in the clubs, the sporting houses, people involved in prostitution, gambling, all those people always had an equality you didn’t find anywhere else in the world, right? Because when you’re down there, you’re with everybody else, you know? Jelly Roll Morton actually said that.

Wynton Marsalis: ‘I’m still trying to learn and become better’

What’s been the best part of being involved with this project for you?

It’s all the music I learned and had the opportunity to play, especially if you combine it with Bolden, you know? I got to study styles of people like Freddie Keppard and Manuel Perez and Bunk Johnson and King Oliver, and look at their styles and just learn more about our instrument, more about playing jazz.

That’s an important history that I knew and was familiar with, coming from New Orleans, but to really study it helped my musicianship at that time, I think.

It’s great to hear someone who’s done as much, accomplished as much, as you talk about this as a learning experience. It’s great that you’re still learning.

Hey, man, I appreciate you saying that. Yeah, I’m still trying to learn and become better, more knowledgeable.

‘Louis’: A Silent Movie with Live Accompaniment by Wynton Marsalis and Cecile Licad
When: 7 p.m. Thursday, May 22.
Where: Chandler Center for the Arts, 250 N. Arizona Ave.
Admission: $62 and up (fees included).
Details: 480-782-2680, chandlercenter.org

by Ed Masley
Source: The Arizona Republic