NYT: Wynton Marsalis & Willie Nelson
Source: New York Times
Now here's a CD I did not expect to hear about:
“Two Men With the Blues”
(Blue Note)
Two musicians from different corners of the record store collaborated for two days of concerts at Jazz at Lincoln Center last year, and this album is the harvest. Country and jazz? No, this record isn’t about country and jazz; it’s a lot more interesting than that.
First it’s about Willie Nelson fitting his wayward, contract-and-expand vocal phrasing into the sharp swing of Wynton Marsalis’s small group, and the cool rhythmic discrepancies that come of it. Then it’s about improvising: Mr. Marsalis’s trumpet solos poised and gleaming, Mr. Nelson’s guitar solos dusty and crotchety but full of early-jazz knowledge. (The other musicians play with power too: Mickey Raphael on harmonica, Walter Blanding Jr. on saxophones, Dan Nimmer on piano, Carlos Henriquez on bass, Ali Jackson on drums.)
It’s about the persistence and adaptability of the 12- and 8-bar blues forms: “Caldonia,” “Rainy Day Blues,” “Ain’t Nobody’s Business.” It’s a little bit about the arrangements — the Mingus-like, organized street ruckus in “Bright Lights, Big City,” the harmonized long-tone drapings in “Stardust,” the New Orleans parade beats in “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It.” But above all it’s a smart and heartfelt record about someone whose name doesn’t appear anywhere here: Louis Armstrong. Armstrong did something like this in 1930, when he recorded “Blue Yodel No. 9” with Jimmie Rodgers.
Armstrong remains the model of phrasing and narrative in Mr. Marsalis’s boldest playing here. And he was precisely the kind of performer for whom Willie Nelson is a living analogue: a troubadour with wicked, transformative rhythmic and melodic powers, an improviser comfortable with a sturdy song regardless of style. Armstrong’s example created the conditions for this to happen, and the record is an almost classical example of his old game: eluding American stereotypes of country, city, blues, jazz, race, class, humor and sadness.
