Around the world, a cycle of poverty and exclusion has long denied people the equal opportunities.
A new film, Boldon, reimagines the tragic life of Buddy Bolden, an original inventor of jazz music.
He struggled with mental illness, and he died in obscurity in a mental asylum.
But his music would inspire the likes of Louis Armstrong and so many other artists.
Wynton Marsalis is one of the world's most acclaimed jazz musicians, and he's won nine Grammy Awards He sat down with our Walter Isaacson to discuss his role as executive producer on this film, as well as composing the soundtrack What in Bombshell is My Hero?
Welcome to the show and it's such a pleasure.
Good to see you.
Good to see you, sir.
So Buddy Bolden and he's finally getting his.
Do you doing a movie on him?
And the theme is he invented jazz.
What does that mean?
What ingredients did he put together?
I think he's the first person who realized you could take church music like Afro-American church, sanctified music and put it together with the sounds of the street.
So he put two opposites together.
He played cornet solo.
That the corner you got right there?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, yeah, one, one, one for me is more like like hollering and shouting would effects maybe like So that's like kind of a style of playing the blues and bending notes.
You have another style is very straight.
The sweet song.
A song style is like a then you have another style that's like a ragtime Scott style, which will be top notch.
So he put these kind of ragtime styles, the sound of street parades, hymns, marches, church music, that sense of building the blues.
He put all those things together, and we talk about the 1890 or so, and Jamai and Central City, New Orleans teen is uptown.
So he's uptown musician Johnson Park and these kind of places.
And he was competing with the downtown musicians, right?
Because it's the old kind of the whole kind of thing of where does the nobility come from?
And the downtown musicians are a little bit more refined.
They were more refined, and they could they thought they were on a much higher level than both because they're bored, no playing streets sounds ragged, sounds sound like chickens.
And cats are making effects on the instrument.
But whenever they met in combat at each other, Imboden would go into his thing, improvise, and being like you, you have in a conversation.
No one had ever heard anything like that.
Then you say you're throwing together the sanctified church, the marching traditions of French Creole traditions of downtown music.
What else?
They also taught his band members how to interact with him.
So he would take the traditional March formation.
The clarinet generally plays up high, high pitched as many plays or opinionated fingers was devoted to dip into the trombone, plays down low ball count of melody.
And he explained to them how to interact with the lead part when it's improvising So everybody started to figure out how they could converse and play together.
And that's what people call him King.
Now we have a clip from this amazing movie that you were the executive producer of of Buddy Bolden doing exactly that, teaching his band how to do syncopation.
And they're a little confused at first let's watch it and put your hands down.
Put it down.
Put it down.
We have it up till then.
Give me that.
Give me that.
Beat you work with and hit it on for this new.
Yeah, that's it for Johnson.
Well, I thought, but yeah, that feels.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, you be tough to keep to oh, yeah.
Oh, come on now.
Hit two or four companies.
Yeah, yeah.
Let's go.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right.
Yeah, yeah.
Won't pay.
We get the full 11 for it's infectious.
You will play on it.
Yeah.
And then you see that you want to play.
So you decide to do this movie.
You're doing it with, I think, Dan Pritzker, right?
Why?
He was interested in Bolden as a mythic character.
So I found that very interested.
And he also knew a lot just about the music in the context of of of American history.
And he was also putting the music in the context of the Constitution.
What about in the context of race?
Well, you can't you can't you can't discuss the United States seriously.
In any way without always discussing that.
Many times we're tired of hearing about it.
And as someone who grew up through the civil rights movement and trust me, I'm tired of it too.
But in our country, we do everything we can to maintain the wealth disparity, the education disparity, all of our intellectuals, all of our kind of things are a form around a way of avoiding the obvious that you can't displace a whole population of people in this, leave them ridiculed and make fun of them.
Give them the worst deals, exploit them in many ways, north and south.
It's not just a southern problem.
And then just one day they're going to be okay.
And it's not a fairy tale.
It's not it won't have a fairy tale ending.
It's going to take engagement.
And so how do you think Buddy Bolden addressed it in his music I think just the fact that he could say I am Buddy Bolden at that time that was addressing it.
The freedom in the music and the Buddy Bolden wasn't wasn't coming with his music to ask for something.
He was giving something and he knew he was giving it.
One of the things you do in the movie is you use as a framing device.
Louis Armstrong right?
Louis Armstrong, as part of the myth, says he grew up in that same neighborhood of New Orleans, very young.
When Buddy Bolden gets sent to the insane asylum right.
But Louis Armstrong at least thinks he's heard Buddy Bolden play and he becomes a new interpreter about him.
Well, Louis Armstrong did have Buddy Bolden played through King Oliver.
Joe Oliver was Louis Armstrong's mentor.
And even at the end of his life in the sixties, Louis Armstrong was there.
Whenever I pick my horn up, I look up, I see Joe Oliver.
Here's his whole trumpet style.
Louis Armstrong is the great consolidator of all the styles.
So you take the console style, which we would do reconciles.
We do variations on something like a physical.
The Carnival of Venice is a famous one.
So we go, no, no, no, no, no.
You take that theme and play different variations on it.
What would be a fancy one like so and so forth?
There's variations on the theme.
What Louis Armstrong would do is he would take that concept of playing sweet trumpet variations on a theme, the blues, the sound of Buddy Bolden, the dignity of King Oliver's way of playing, the diminished core quality, the Buddy Petite play with Freddie kept in the effects he could make on the trumpet bone.
Johnson smoky sound, bravura, high trumpet operatic arias that he would hear.
He heard on recordings of people singing in and put all of that in one style.
So when people heard him, it was it was infectious.
So the level in the depth of his playing and the different traditions he brought together, the whole American Cornet tradition, and that's why his playing was so transcended, then transferred to the trumpet.
Okay.
So you on the trumpet, you take a cornet, has this sound then when you get to the trumpet, it's a much brasher sound.
And this actually is Louis Armstrong's mouthpiece, which I don't play on.
But you you're going to see the difference in his arm.
So first Pop started to play also in the upper register, like he played stuff you never heard.
A Cornetist Konate is play with the type of Powell feeling he would play no sweat.
Now tell me the truth.
Growing up in New Orleans, young musician Black, did you admire Louis Armstrong when you were really little man?
Under no circumstances.
Not only did I not admire him, none of us admired him.
And we really didn't know who he was.
We knew his name.
We knew he was a trumpet player.
Because we came up after the civil rights movement.
And in my generation of young, we felt every black person before 19 06, we felt bad for them like they were in slavery.
Because when you don't actually know the history and the tradition and what people went through, it could have been anything.
And we would see like movies of him singing to a horse and that kind of stuff and smiling and cheese.
And for white folks, mean, that was an hour.
That wasn't our whole thing was, you know, Black Powell, Malcolm X, we don't have to take this kind of stuff and we're not going to take in from a musical standpoint.
Wilson Stuff like Marvin Gaye, James Brown, Stevie Wonder, and this what we were playing.
But, you know, I didn't really listen to Louis Armstrong record until I came to New York.
You came up here.
You're Juilliard, right around the corner.
And if I remember the story, your father, the great still great pianist, Ellis Marsalis, sends you jubilate, I think it says he sent me a cassette tape.
Is it me, man?
Check this Louis Armstrong house I was listening to.
Just give you a sense of it.
So I was used to playing like songs like a Freddie Hubbard song.
Like a Fool I would learn would be like like Intrepid Fox.
So I'm so I'm working on that kind of stuff.
This is really technical, difficult and fast.
And it's Freddie and has got a vibe like that and so on his nose.
And I'm just Louis Armstrong is and I'm thinking, man, that's some of the corniest stuff I've heard.
So I picked his Jubilee solo up and he's playing like notes like this is it's corny, but it's for a long time.
So I'm saying I'm just I'm just not that's not the Jubilee solo.
I don't really remember it.
But as I said, let me just learn the solo I know in the world I could play that.
And that made you decide, Okay, Pops is the king.
You know, a he force the humility on me.
I said, well, you I need you.
I need to fill and see what Pops was was doing instead of getting second hand information.
I called my father.
I said, Man, I can't make it through this, pop, so at least start laughing.
He's in a no and then I begin to study pops his music in and I saw quotes of famous more modern musicians like Miles Davis saying, You can't play it.
Nothing on the horn.
Pops is not played even modern.
You know, one of the things about Louis Armstrong, though, is he really looked down upon the more modern jazz some of the things happening.
And in some ways you're a bit like him.
You're dismissive and sometimes antagonistic to rap and other forms of new music that you think dishonored the tradition.
Yeah, were pops.
It was different because he was coming from a style that he had he hadn't played and didn't know.
So he was.
And it's hard when you're in a in a position of your you and your forties, 43 40 for a certain age.
And now all of a sudden it's another whole style of music just presenting something totally different socially and technically.
I asked Dizzy about that to Man, I thought you and Pops didn't get along.
He said, Old man, you know, we had a little thing in the beginning of it, but in the end, whereas with me, I grew up not playing jazz.
I grew up playing folk and pop music.
And with me, the social issues are very different because with a lot of them, the contemporary music was a return to the minstrel show.
So we're going back to the 1800s.
You're talking about rapping and returning.
That's not rapping is not rapping.
The art of it.
But these little that terminology, you know, talk about killing brothers and all this anarchy.
I can't I can't endorse that.
And I don't think that has anything to do with me.
And then with this new show, coming from the civil rights movement is not possible to endorse that.
And my issues with them are not musical, you know, and it's also not of a personal nature is with the whole of our country and is social, whatever country is entertained by that.
That's always my question.
Why is that entertaining you can be you will be entertaining people playing dances to funk and pop music in a back beat long before you heard of rap with black people then and it was not necessary to degrade ourselves.
One of the things you led in New Orleans was the idea that we should take down the Confederate monuments well before Charlottesville, well before, you know, the other things.
And I think you talked to Mitch Landrieu, who was then the mayor, and you helped push that.
Why did you do that?
Well, with Mitch and I, we just haven't been leads conversation.
It wasn't it wasn't a big political conversation about the statues, anything.
We talk about our fathers, our families in the course of that conversation, we talked about the statue.
I said, that's symbolic.
We should take the statue down for the trash and tell you.
Robert Lee, the rubber statue, my great uncle always hated that statue.
That's how I knew about it.
Yeah.
Mitch then he said, well, let me look in to see whose jurisdiction it is.
So he did.
He later he called me and he said, you know, I looked into this and the damn thing is in my jurisdiction, you know, then we have over a kind of conversation, but the conversation, he wasn't reticent about it.
So I don't want to give the impression I convinced him to do it.
I didn't convince him to do it.
You know, you and I talked about it.
And I remember I said to you when you first asked me, you said, we got to take down Robert Lee.
I said, man, I've driven around Lee Circle thousands of times in my life.
I never think about who's on top of that plant.
And you paused and you looked at me like you're looking at me now.
And you said, I do.
And that helped me see it differently.
So how did you start that conversation?
I think I think that for all of us, the most the most difficult thing for us to realize are things we don't realize.
You know, when you when you try to communicate with people across cultures, many times it's not something you studied.
I just put in an analogy of music, like when I was spend time trying to write music for symphonic orchestra musicians that has just like jazz.
So I would write it in choruses and jazz musicians naturally at the end of a chorus pause.
We don't think about it, but when I will write the music, the symphonic musician never pause because that's not his style of music.
It would never dawned on me that they wouldn't pause because they're so deep inside of the fundamentals of the thing.
I know I don't consider them.
So I think for us to speak to one another across cultures, across gender, race, whatever the across is going to be we have to look to those things that are so fundamental.
We would we would notice them.
And it's those things that actually determine much more and symbolic things, fundamental things that are we also deeply we don't consider them that are that that is where real transformation can take place.
And you created a soundtrack for this Bolden music, some of which are songs like Stardust that Louis Armstrong played, or even, I think based on street blues and others that are traditional.
Some are new songs that you've written, and you try to do it both in the Bolden style and the Armstrong style, as if it's a conversation between them, right?
Yeah, because all the styles are just it's just generational in culture, in the arts, because each subsequent achievement is not necessarily better than the one before it.
We tend to forget what came before it, or we are we laud what came before.
It is the only thing that will ever happen.
But the notes of Johann Bach or in the notes of Duke Ellington the notes of Anton, very good.
The trumpet player that played the Haydn Trumpet Concerto in 1780, whatever it was, or in the notes of my trumpet when I play the notes of Francis Johnson or in the Horn of Louis Armstrong.
And when we take those notes out of our horns, we play less, not more.
And those notes are not going to keep us from finding what we're going to find in the future.
They don't keep us from being modern.
In the movie you talk about race, Buddy Bolden handed off to Louis Armstrong you do an arrangement and this is what I'm going to ask you to do right now of the song of Louis Armstrong.
That to me most has the emotions of race in it, and that's black and blue.
Tell me about that song and maybe hit me a few bars.
Well, you know, that song Louis Armstrong thought was a protest song.
So what did I do to be so black?
And Blue was a song was considered to be a song of protest.
But when you get to the bridge, this thing says I'm white inside.
But that don't help my case.
It's hard for that to be a protest song.
So in the early years, yeah, that was considered protest as we went along.
No, we of my generation, we didn't consider that black and blue.
We thought, you know, but I mean, this is a just I like the chromatic system, but that song, you know.
Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo that don't do that.
I didn't mean to get you if I got Wynton Marsalis saying we're being like the world's leading man.
Always great to see you.