Fortunately for fans of jazz and important music of any classification, Santa Barbara has long been a regular stopping place for influential trumpeter/bandleader Wynton Marsalis, usually through the inspired aegis of UCSB Arts & Lectures (A&L). The Santa Barbara relationship goes deep, to the formative period before his Lincoln Center and big band venture, when his small groups played in such venues as the old Oscar’s and even a show at Bebop Burgers. We knew him when, and we’ll know yet another side and sight-sound context when he returns to the Arlington on Saturday, May 17.
The evening will offer the West Coast premiere of 2010 project LOUIS: A Silent Film with live musical performance, with Marsalis leading a 13-piece ensemble, featuring pianist Cecile Licad, in live accompaniment to a richly fashioned modern-day silent biopic about Louis Armstrong by director Daniel Pritzker. The A&L-presented live stage and screen package ties in handily with Marsalis’s long-professed love and respect for Armstrong’s central role in the formation and crystallization of early jazz. Marsalis’s score is a composite of original music and aptly vintage music of Armstong, Duke Ellington, Jelly Roll Morton and LM Gottschalk.
Post-screening, Marsalis’s ensemble will serve up a purely musical set.
Director Pritzker, whose love of vintage jazz was funneled into his rare jazz-related feature Bolden — about seminal New Orleans trumpeter Buddy Bolden — was drawn into the concept of creating a silent film through the inspiration of a Charlie Chaplin encounter. Catching a performance/screening of Chaplin’s City Lights, with the acclaimed Chicago Symphony providing a live score set his creative wheels in motion. “It was fantastic,” Pritzker remembers, “took my breath away. I’d never seen anything like it. I decided I would write a silent film about a little boy named Louis who wanted to learn to play the trumpet. I like challenges so thought since I was already going to direct Bolden, why not try to direct two companion piece films. While there are links between the two stories, they are free-standing, independent films.”
As Marsalis points out about the project, “Of course, calling it a silent film is a misnomer — there will be plenty of music, and jazz is like a conversation between the players, so there’ll be no shortage of dialogue.”
Marsalis’s musical plate is full, as usual. His recent large-scale projects included The Democracy! Suite, which was performed in virtual form as part of A&L’s House Calls series during the COVID lockdown, and his tribute to Chinese culture, The Shanghai Suite.
Marsalis remains dedicated to the importance of education, of emerging jazz musicians and also of audiences. He advocates for jazz as a music with broad, demographic-crossing appeal, an idea also supported with the entertaining LOUIS project.
“I don’t see this art form as something that is elitist. It is of a very high quality, but I feel there are elements in the music that are very listenable, mainly swinging, the groove — something that always attracts people — changes in colors and dynamics, having a melodic base and some type of form that people can follow if they want to stick with it,” said Marsalis.
“I also believe in the blues. When you can get those cries and moans and shouts in your music, it attracts people to it. I keep playing the slow songs or songs with some romantic import.”
LOUIS, a Silent Film with Live Musical Performance by Wynton Marsalis and Cecile Licad takes place at the Arlington Theatre (1317 State St.) Saturday, May 17, 7:30 p.m. Seebit.ly/4mcDFha.
