Jon's good, good, good friend, the conservative (conservative-lite, if you insist) Fareed Zakaria, will visit with Stephen again tonight. I am not a fan. However, chances are he'll discuss his recent Newsweek article, "The Case for Barack Obama." A quick read suggests that his problem with McCain is, in large part, the cranky out-of-touch old guy factor -- plus, Palin --but he ends his article with this:
I admit to a personal interest. I have a 9-year-old son named Omar. I firmly believe that he will be able to do absolutely anything he wants in this country when he grows up. But I admit that I will feel more confident about his future if a man named Barack Obama became president of the United States.
And bigtime jazz musician Wynton Marsalis is also on. I was going to include a fantastic video showing off the glory of his music, but, um, there was only so much I could stand to listen to. Maybe it's just the sound on my system. Yeah, that's it. I haven't optimized my audio output for "trumpet." That's the problem.
Anyway, he's probably here to talk about his book. Possibly also one of his recent (or upcoming) DVDs, Live from Jazz at Lincoln Center New York City (2008) Starring: Willie Nelson, Wynton Marsalis, or the related "Willie Nelson & Wynton Marsalis: Two Men with the Blues." Maybe I'll find a good clip from that. I'll have to look.
But the book. It's called "Moving to Higher Ground: How Jazz Can Change Your Life." I found a few reviews (Amazon and B&N have more), and he's done some press. There's also an excerpt out there, and something about that leads me to think that the review from the Christian Science Monitor is fairly accurate:
Like many jazz historians and critics, I have the deepest regard for Wynton Marsalis as a remarkably eclectic and imaginative musician. But not content to be known solely for his musicianship, he has fashioned an identity as the most publicly loquacious jazz musician ever. For two decades he has positioned himself as an educator and advocate for his particular jazz slant. This book amplifies that advocate identity, one also reinforced by five previous books.
The book’s subtitle uses the phrase "your life." This book, however, is almost entirely about Marsalis’s life and opinions about jazz. Jazz did surely change his life – and we can experience the world as a better place musically since it did. But even the most eloquent musician can falter as a spokesperson for his or her art. If this is read as an autobiography, what is its purpose? Marsalis has been thoroughly generous in giving the gist of his life story in numerous interviews, articles, and previous books. But this book is less a carefully fashioned autobiography than a jumble of personal anecdotes, or sermons with obvious, and often repeated, moral and aesthetic injunctions, all about what is and isn’t "jazz." In fact, if you want to enjoy jazz without fussing over a precise definition of what jazz means, you – and I mean you, dear reader – will be ridiculed by Marsalis. See page 92 to discover that you’re one of those who "so successfully attacks the central nervous system of education" by not caring whether the music you like is "jazz" or not.
Yet there is a nobility in a musician of Marsalis’s artistry connecting jazz to core values such as integrity, intellectual curiosity, passionate perseverance in learning artistic craft, and democratic tolerance. All of these ideas and more are expressed with more specificity, eloquence, and wit in "The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison." To be fair, Marsalis and Ellison had a mutually satisfying intellectual connection until Ellison’s death in 1994, and Marsalis wrote the introduction to a selection of Ellison’s essays entitled "Living with Music." But Ellison was a painstakingly cautious writer who rarely confused his cherished musical opinions with grand public proclamations of musical truth. Marsalis is a reckless talker, as undisciplined in his rants as he is exquisitely refined and delicate in his music.
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