Wynton Marsalis comes to UC

Last week, in a moment of crystal clarity, I realized why it is that I love my job. Why it doesn’t seem like work so much as exploration—less duty, more wonder. I am a teacher. And so is Wynton Marsalis, who I watched lead a master class and talk music at UC.

I quickly moved him from the “superstar” to “real human” category as I sat within 10 feet of him and his meticulously tailored suit. He perched on a small stage where students who joined him sat in cheap folding chairs and wore flip flops and madras shorts. At first, it was easy to read his quiet as disdain, or paper-thin tolerance, especially when he answered questions. But in his awkward glances, his almost-whispered replies, he seemed more restless than arrogant. The portion of the class that focused on him—the laundry list of jazz greats who hung out in his childhood kitchen, his feud with Miles Davis—just plain bored him.

Then a man in the audience asked him to play. The dulled trumpet, an extension of his left arm, leaned at the ready. An elderly woman in the crowd hunched forward. Long-haired students hugged their knees to their chests. But Marsalis didn’t lick his lips in anticipation. He didn’t stride to the middle of the stage to a spotlight-worthy mark. He kept his instrument at arms length and called for three students to join him—he needed, he said, his “rhythm.”

First, the pianist took to his bench, comfortably sliding into place behind the grand’s keys. He nodded confidently to Marsalis, who dipped his head and whet his lips in affirmation, the trumpet flirting with a note or two before Marsalis’ focus shifted. Then, the bass player moved in an awkward tango with the instrument that dwarfed his slight frame. Finally the drummer, whose every muscle seemed to mirror the squint of his eyes, perched on the edge of his stool. The dance of jazz had started on the silent stage, and to me if felt like the creative and improvisational efforts inherent in any place of learning.

I felt an unexpected kinship with this man whose resume stretches around the world and into the annals of music history. This man grew up with John Coltrane at his kitchen table. When he talks about music being “sad,” he doesn’t mean sorrowful, he means pitifully bad. When he talks about how there were no other brothers playing in the symphony in New Orleans, he doesn’t mean that his sibling Branford was busy. Here was jazz history, clad in a tweed suit and orange wingtips—close enough to touch, real enough to catch off guard.

From the great divide of our experiences, I felt a thread of experimentation and discovery that binds us as tightly an arpeggio played over a minor chord. And while our notes hit varied media, we both revel in pushing and tugging at that creative cord—the process of teaching and learning, of growth and self-discovery.

It’s a messy process. Sometimes when I’m teaching, doubt nearly stops me in my tracks. I saw it creep into Marsalis’ rhythm section as the drummer and bass player strained to work independently. Instead of connecting with each other, their notes clashed in conflict. Marsalis didn’t let it slide for a second. ”You don’t have to fight with your identity,” he coached, explaining the downbeats and rhythm patterns they needed to let inform their playing. “You have to realize it.”

Marsalis talked about creativity—born of built-in sensibilities that come from being of a certain place and time, an awareness of the history of your chosen art form, a sense of the broader history of arts in general, and, finally, imagination. Part instinct, part determination, the ability to create transcends media. It also translates personal journeys into universal ones. And that’s where I traced my bond with Wynton Marsalis. The stories I teach my students to tell, the stories I tell, carry their own distinctive rhythms. They capture places in time. They illuminate a world too often tangled in shadows. They blur the lines between the teacher and the taught. Together, we can absorb the power of connecting, the power of caring about what happens next. As teachers, we can feel the power of honoring a craft, even as we watch it evolve beyond our capacity.

I recognize that evolution in the beauty of a well-placed note or an image that captures many dimensions of meaning. I feel it in the knot of fear that punches into every journey I take, as a teacher and in life, into the unknown. But best of all, I recognize it in the thrill that accompanies stepping up on whatever stage moves you, holding your head high and saying with giddy confidence what Wynton Marsalis told himself after he first heard the “dope” music of Beethhoven: “I’m gonna learn this.”

—Elissa Sonneberg, MSEd
UC ABJ Adviser