Wynton Marsalis, artistic director of jazz at the Lincoln Center, who is known to be a harsh critic of Hip-Hop, recently had another anti-hip-hop episode in the UK’s Guardian newspaper, where went on to call Hip-Hop ‘ghetto minstrelsy’. To an extent, in this day and age, this might be a correct depiction of what one sees on MTV. For the casual viewer/listener of Hip-Hop, such depictions can be perceived as the definitive representation of Hip-Hop. But what really might piss some people off at Marsalis is that he goes on to say that rap music in general is not a credible art form: “It has no merit, rhythmically, musically, lyrically.” The fact that you, as an accomplished Jazz musician, have worked with artists such as Mike Ladd and M-1 of Dead Prez, and based upon several of your past interviews, it seems like you would be on the opposite end of Mr. Marsalis’s argument. Besides the fact that he is rapping on his latest release, do you think there is any validity in his argument? Or is he going senile like Dr. Huxtable?
“It never struck me that Wynton was qualified to speak on the subject in the first place. I don’t know why anyone would listen to his opinion on any music outside of the area where he is a respected practitioner. But one thing that happens to the rich and famous is that they are frequently asked questions on subjects they know nothing about, and their answers instantly enter the global media echo chamber. I’m not here to root for all things hip-hop – certainly there are aspects of it that I am not down with — but at this point hip-hop is so vast that it’s inseparable from mainstream culture at large. Disavowing hip-hop in 2007 is just naive and pointless.Another aspect of his utterance that we can’t deny is that saying extreme stuff like this keeps him in the news, which serves his overall strategy; even my act of answering this question simply fans the flames.Meanwhile, there are numerous historical examples of high-culture individuals saying the same thing (“it has no merit”) about jazz. In fact, jazz once occupied a place in culture similar to what hip-hop did in the 80s and 90s – a supposed “threat” to high culture and all things respectable. One defensive strategy of cultural arbiters in the 1920s was to describe jazz as non-music – sound familiar? Herbie Hancock recently gave it up to Missy Elliot in his iTunes celebrity play list. So obviously jazz today accommodates a spectrum of opinions, and nobody should take one guy’s words as indicative of what all jazz people think.”
How did you link up with Mike Ladd for the 2004 release “In What Language?”, and more recently with the Still Life With Commentator album? When you and Ibrahim Quraishi conceptualized the album, did you think of Mike Ladd as the commentator?
Mike Ladd and I met in the late 90s, and I ran into him frequently in New York after I moved here in late 1998. I always admired his work and we talked several times about doing something together. Then in 2001 I was approached by the Asia Society to create something new for their series on Asian American Music. It seemed like the right opportunity to collaborate with Mike; in a way it was my tactic of resisting a facile approach to Asianness, because I was less interested in nationalist notions of ethnic pride (as would be suggested by an “Indo-jazz” project, which might have been expected of me) than I was in developing inter-ethnic coalitions and collaborations. So things unfolded as they did and we somehow came up with “In What Language?” which portrayed various (quasi-fictitious) people of color telling personal tales of globalization and post-9/11 anxiety. That project was really (and surprisingly) well-received, and on the strength of that album, Brooklyn Academy of Music invited us to do something else. When Mike and I started thinking about it, it was right around the time that the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, and it was also around the same time that the blogosphere was exploding. These two facts, one horrifying and the other by turns inspiring and nauseating, were disrupting and changing our everyday lives, and we found that they were actually both part of one larger phenomenon, which is difficult to describe. We couldn’t pay attention and share our opinions without somehow becoming complicit in it all, in the stupefying everyday realities of mediatized culture in wartime. Rather than responding to an event, we found ourselves responding to the response and so on, becoming emotionally wrapped up in this parasitic phenomenon that eclipsed the urgency of the original events. So that’s what we decided to address in this project. Ibrahim wasn’t involved so much in the album – he directed the stage version (which came first), and he worked intensively with all the vocal performers. Mike initially hoped not to perform as a vocalist in the project at all, and we thought about options for who else could do his parts, but it became clear that no one could pull off his texts better than he could. He’s a really musical person and could bring a certain lightness to balance the gravitas. He becomes a quasi-narrator figure, who basically is the Still Life Commentator in different guises – the newsman on location, the captain of spin, the news-as-opiate dealer.
You have described the album as a “long, hard look at our relationship to TV news——at the way we experience violence and atrocity through the media and how that ends up being an aesthetic experience.” Yourself being of South Asian descent, Quraishi being Muslim, and Mike Ladd being an African American-all groups that have been typically marginalized and demonized in the media-how important was it for you to collaborate with these artists on a project such as this?
It is more than crucial – it was the only way that I could work on this project. In order to create authentically, I need to be around sympathetic individuals who have the kind of compassion and critical sensibility that comes from life experience. I believe that it’s enormously important for people of color to weigh in on these “national conversations,” to stand up and to be heard. We are also insisting on the validity and relevance of our black and brown perspectives on these matters. Some of these mainstream issues are typically seen as colorblind, but we are asserting is that there is a racialized dimension, and inviting the audience to consider what this might mean. It’s funny watching the response to this project compared to our previous project, “In What Language?” which was more specifically engaged with issues around race and ethnicity. I find (and I’m sure you will agree) that there is an inherent tension that emerges around people of color in performance; mainstream audiences want the dots connected for them, either by our acting or sounding “ethnic” or otherwise filling in those blanks. In the case of “In What Language?” that tension was channeled in a specific way; it was done with care and a lot of thought, but there is a certain amount of “performed ethnicity” in the piece. We were rewarded in the critical response — the writers seemed to appreciate how these unasked questions were somehow answered. I think that with “Still Life,” because the subject matter is less obviously racialized, that tension is unrelieved. It’s funny because overall I think it’s an easier album to listen to, but it’s harder to “resolve” in this sense. So-called “ethnic” people are not typically rewarded for trying to take part in these larger conversations.
Was it decided from the initial stages that this project was going to be realized as a full-length album?
Yes, though we had no idea what it would sound like or what the scope of it would be. Early on, it was very hard to imagine how this project was going to take shape. We just had to trust the creative process and each other to come up with something worthwhile!
How come there aren’t more contemporary jazz musicians of South Asian decent?
There are more and more coming out of the woodwork, but I’m one of the first to gain any prominence, and at 35 I’m already in the position of mentoring younger South Asian artists. It’s worth noting that I’m part of the first large generation of South Asian Americans born in the US; my parents came here in the 1960s as part of the first major immigration wave from South Asia. So before my generation, there just weren’t many people like us around.
Also, for most people in my generation, being the children of immigrants, not many of us went into the more risky career paths like the arts; for most of my South Asian peers, in the aftermath of the risk that our parents took by coming here in the first place, our choices were about survival, family stability, and risk avoidance. There’s plenty of talent in our community, but it’s seen as a bit of a crazy thing to make music for a living. I don’t blame anyone for thinking that – it’s the truth!
