Wynton Marsalis: Blood on the Fields

Wynton Marsalis has built a career on high ambitionsincluding (for a start) assimilating the music vocabulary from Haydn to Ornettebut this may be the biggest gambit of them all. The best comparison point here is Duke Ellington's extraordinary Black, Brown & Beige, composed a half-century before Wynton presented his Blood on the Fields to the music world. Like Ellington, Marsalis also tries to pull together history, sociology and lots of dramatic music into a big, big, big composition-- more than twice as long as Ellington's work. It may take the jazz world decades to digest this massive three-hour work -- and with Wynton Marsalis there is a particular problem that people like to talk about his music without giving it the close listening it deserves. But I predict that the Pulitzer committee's controversial decision to select this composition as the first jazz work honored in their long history will eventually look like a very smart move. Who would have thought that the dazzling trumpeter who first made his mark as a teenager hard-bopping in Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers would evolve into such a masterful composer? Listen especially to how well he writes for horns. One of the high points of a storied career.