MUSIC - JUNE 18, 2003

Marsalis brings a taste of 52nd Street to Old Town
By LAWRENCE COSENTINO

A few minutes into the second set of the unassumingly billed "Father's Day Jazz" last Saturday night at the Creole Gallery, owners Robert Busby and Meegan Holland propped open the door to let some air into their jubilant, packed house. Despite the cool June evening,the music inside was white hot and getting hotter. Two ticketless women peeled their ears off the window, leaving visible prints, and moved to the open doorway, relieved not to have to depend on skull conduction to soak up the Lansing jazz history being made within.

Wynton Marsalis

The instant the door swung open, a blast of sublime trumpet music fanned out into Turner Street like sunlight through a keyhole. They were muscular, clear tones with golden DNA going back to Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis, Louis Armstrong and Buddy Bolden, even back to Handel and Gabrieli and the antiphonal brass that bounced from the walls of Renaissance Venice. The author of these sounds knew these predecessors well, and had spent years blending them into a potent, blinding alloy all his own. A swinging rhythm section shot this sonic light over the parking meters and the ancient bricks and lintels of Old Town, making the whole block seem like a mothballed movie set that's been waiting 50 years for someone to call "action."

A passerby stopped in his tracks, peered into the peeling shoebox of a gallery, and was rewarded with a tableau straight out of 52nd Street in New York, circa 1949. Perched atop the Creole stage, fused together like a multi-headed knot of cubist Picasso troubadours, was a classic jazz quartet in fully synchronized action. A second passerby stopped to look. "Man, it's pullin' me in," he said to nobody in particular.

One of the musicians sat erect on a stool, legs apart, a taut study in trigonometry with trumpet and gray suit. When the first passerby could stand the uncertainty no more, he tore himself away from the door to verify the testimony of his senses by reading a pink 8-by-11-inch piece of paper taped to the window. "Rodney Whitaker Quartet, with Special Guest Wynton Marsalis" read the announcement. A young couple also stopped to look at the sheet. "Wynton Marsalis?" asked the girl. "Branford's father," answered her escort helpfully.

Nobody on the street corrected the lad, for fear of missing a single gesture or note escaping from the sanctified-by-swing, newly consecrated Creole. The sounds laid down by Marsalis, bassist Rodney Whitaker, drummer Randy Gelispie, and pianist Rick Roe were too riveting for anyone to get distracted by an argument over who is who's father, even on Father's Day.

For the record, though, Wynton Marsalis is Branford's brother. He is also the director of jazz at Lincoln Center and the most indefatigable jazz performer-educator-composer in the world.

It turned out that Marsalis, who shuns idleness like Dracula shuns sunlight, found himself with nothing to do between gigs in Chicago and Interlochen last weekend. Whitaker, an old friend and colleague of Marsalis from Lincoln Center days, has already built MSU's Jazz Studies program into one of the finest in the country, and now he's hungry to put Lansing on the jazz map as well. The result was a weekend of four sold-out shows that took Lansing's cigar factory-turned-art-gallery into the highest stratum of the jazzosphere.

"It was great to see that kind of support for us, for Wynton, and for the music," said Whitaker, reached en route to a repeat gig with Marsalis in Ann Arbor's Kerrytown Monday night. "I feel like I'm really being welcomed here. The people who run the Creole, Meegan and Robert, are terrific, and we're already trying to figure out how to make this an annual event."

After the success of the Marsalis gigs and the Professors of Jazz shows at the Creole last April, Whitaker is ready to embark upon a concert series of major jazz names. "This is only the beginning," he says. "We can do a lot -- as much as people want to support. I'd like to bring a lot of the people from New York that we've had the opportunity to play with.

"It'd be hard to top Wynton, though," he acknowledges with a laugh. "Maybe we can get Zeus."

Unfortunately for the Creole, even the mythological son of Cronos would be a come-down in terms of name recognition after last weekend. For many people, Marsalis is the face of jazz in America, the only living jazz musician many people can name. Yet those who were lucky enough to get into the gallery last weekend discovered that for all his fame, Wynton Marsalis is actually underrated as a performer. Just joining him on the same stage seemed to kick an already accomplished rhythm section up several notches. "It's surprising how many people you play with don't know how to listen," says Whitaker. "Wynton really listens to everyone in the band." Several times, Marsalis traded jabs with pianist Rick Roe, a Thelonious Monk specialist, and singled out Roe's skill at building solos in his comments to the audience.

It's rare, outside New York, to catch Marsalis without his orchestra, where his playing is hemmed in by the complex arrangements and solo time-sharing that go with that territory. To hear him live, in such an intimate setting, with a smart and swinging rhythm section to support him, is to experience an amalgam of raw talent and superhuman discipline that comes along very, very rarely in any of the arts, let alone jazz.

Comparison is a dirty business, but it's sometimes necessary to help explain such an outlandish claim. After all, jazz fans were never so ungrateful as to ask for the power and passion of Louis Armstrong without the vaudeville antics, the balladry of Miles Davis without the fluffs and the latent hostility, the high notes of Maynard Ferguson without the chest-hair smarm, the hummingbird trills and runs of Dizzy Gillespie without a fudge or fill. Nevertheless, they seem to have gotten all of that and more in Marsalis. Sorry, Diz, but when Marsalis played a blistering "Cherokee" Saturday night, every one of his fizzing one-sixteenth notes went firmly on the record, as if Gabriel himself were taking a long-distance deposition from the heavens, under oath.

Marsalis is at that point in his career when supreme technical mastery is completely fused with the momentum of thought and emotion, leaving no show-offy burrs or frills to distract from his devastatingly direct message. His masterly, way-down solo on "Just a Closer Walk With Thee" Saturday night seemed impossible to top, but for the restless Marsalis (he was on stage practicing over an hour before Saturday's gig), every solo is definitive until tomorrow.

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