Man with a Horn with a Seven-Player Itch

The Marsalis–Lobero express continues. On July 16, the much-celebrated jazz trumpeter and all-around jazz sparkplug Wynton Marsalis follows on the heels of his older brother Branford (who appeared here last month with this quartet) and younger brother Delfeayo (in town with his Uptown Jazz Orchestra last year) in gracing the hallowed hall of the Lobero Theatre, at long last. 

Wynton has happily made a habit of passing through Santa Barbara, making multiple stops here over the years at The Granada Theatre, the Arlington, and out at UCSB Campbell Hall, mostly through his tight relationship with UCSB Arts & Lectures, and its now-retired head Celesta Billeci. But he is finally heading to the Lobero, inarguably the finest jazz venue in town. 

This time out, the 64-year-old musician will be appearing with his septet, which performed at the Granada in 2023. The Lobero’s intimate setting affords a more up-close and personal stage for this small format group, for an artist often associated with his long-standing big-band persona. He will return to the 805 with the big-band domo hat on, early next year (Feb. 24, see here) with his Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, during his final season before retirement. 

Meanwhile, the leaner yet still arrangement-friendly format of a septet lends more of a deserved spotlight on his unique expressive powers as a trumpeter, as demonstrated through his impressive stretching out at the Granada concert. Unfortunately, the program there leaned on the over-familiar stuff of very standard standards. It mostly avoided his own fascinating compositions for the format, as heard on the superb 2000 album The Marciac Suite (listen here).

The subsequent Wynton Marsalis Septet release included the jazz ballet Here… Now (2007), for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, and 2006’s In This House on This Morning, a church service–like suite, recorded live at Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall.

When I asked him about the current period he was in, compared to others during his long journey, Wynton replied, “I cannot pick a period that I felt was not good. It has all been a blessing. Of course, I grew up seeing my father struggle, the whole time. He would play for seven or eight people. But he had belief in playing and in music was so uncompromising, he had such a belief in the quality of it, I think just seeing him taught me. He didn’t do a lot of preaching and talking about it. I do a lot more talking about music and all of that. He didn’t talk much in that way. He was about playing, in the years that I was growing up.”

How does he manage to juggle so many tasks and projects? Is he a virtuoso multitasker at heart?

“I don’t really juggle,” he says. “It’s all the same thing, to me. Everything comes out of the same thing. If you’re teaching, it’s about music. If you’re writing a piece, you use the logic that you use in music. If you’re reading budgets, it’s like reading music, especially when you have to understand what every note of it is. It’s all going to add up to something, because it fits on a page and has to be quantified. 

“If you’re soloing, you’re playing. If you’re not soloing, you’re listening to somebody else play. Everything comes out of the understanding of the music.”

Throughout his musical ventures over the past four-plus decades, including his work in Septet mode, Marsalis has been an artist with a keen interest in maintaining, and gently extending, values and styles from jazz history. In an interview I did with him, he commented, “I believe they both work together — the future and the past. I don’t think we have to segregate ourselves from either one. I’ve always believed in the history and in the tradition — not just of jazz, but of everything. 

“I want the little baby and I want the great-grandma, too. We don’t have to kick the grandma and grandpa out because we have a newborn.”

Wynton Marsalis performs at the Lobero Theatre (33 E. Canon Perdido St.) Thursday, July 16, 7:30 p.m. See lobero.org/events/wynton-marsalis for tickets and information.