An Interview with Wynton Marsalis

Everything old is new again. From the 1920s through the 1940s, the art of jazz revolved around the music of the great big bands. Led by men like Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Earl Hines, Fletcher Henderson, and Benny Goodman, these large ensembles typically divided 10 or more musicians into four sections: trumpets, trombones, saxophones, and rhythm. Although the styles of jazz these groups played varied widely, there was, especially in the golden era of the later 1930s and early 1940s, one element common to them all, a quality called “swing” ​— ​the pulsing groove that drove dancers all over the world to previously unimagined heights of ecstatic communion with each other and the music.

On Saturday, September 29, Wynton Marsalis, the preeminent jazz bandleader of our time, and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra (JLCO), a veteran ensemble thoroughly schooled in every aspect of the big band and orchestral traditions, will take the Granada stage for the opening event of the 2018-19 UCSB Arts & Lectures season. While Marsalis and the JLCO are familiar to audiences in Santa Barbara ​— ​thanks to Arts & Lectures, they have been coming here since 2001 ​— ​this show, an evening-length presentation titled Spaces, introduces an element that is at once brand-new and as old as the big band tradition itself, namely the presence of virtuosic dancers as soloists: the jook master Lil Buck and the tap genius Jared Grimes.

Marsalis has been breaking through cultural barriers for decades. It’s amazing to realize that it’s been more than 20 years since he became the first nonclassical composer to win the Pulitzer Prize, an honor he received in 1997 for Blood on the Fields, an ambitious vocal-orchestral suite about American slavery. Since then, he’s been involved in dozens of important projects, most notably the construction of a permanent home for the Jazz at Lincoln Center program, the 100,000-square-foot Frederick P. Rose Hall at Columbus Circle in New York City. When it opened in 2004, this magnificent facility became the first performance, education, and broadcast venue in the world devoted to jazz. Just a few blocks north of Carnegie Hall, Rose Hall stands as a confirmation in bricks and mortar of the permanent position jazz occupies at the heart of American culture, and it would not exist without either the vision and artistry of Marsalis or the collective genius of the musicians of the JLCO.