Tonight, 8 p.m.
"The thought that something exists, and it has no meaning?
" asks Wynton Marsalis over the phone from the offices of Jazz at Lincoln Center, the New York institution he's led for nearly 20 years.
"That's absurd if you think about it. Every art form that ever existed has a meaning -- except for jazz?
Although we've been speaking for just a few minutes, his pronouncements have shifted into that familiar Marsalis mode: direct and damning and delivered in a style akin to academic combat.
The 45-year-old trumpeter, bandleader, composer and educator -- the most famous jazz musician of his generation -- was responding to the furor over a recent story about him in the New York Times.
But Marsalis, whose sextet performs tonight at Vancouver's Orpheum Theatre, wasn't referring to the article itself.
The letters to the editor rankled. They ran for weeks afterward. Some canonized him; others savaged him.
One reader called him a "mediocre" trumpet player. Another said he was nothing but a "brand builder," someone "in the business of building walls, not tearing them down."
The ruckus isn't new.
Marsalis has long used his fame, and his position at Lincoln Center, as a kind of international pulpit: to make clear the historical arc of his beloved genre and, more controversially, to define as he sees it, what is -- and what is not -- "jazz."
"You have to remember that there was divisiveness around ending slavery in America," he says. "There was divisiveness around the civil rights movement .
. . .
There's divisiveness around important issues. And the national art is an important issue . .
. it's the national identity that's at stake."
Upping the ante has always been Marsalis's style, ever since he burst onto the music scene in the early '80s.
In a community riven by factions and wildly divergent tastes, he's always put tradition first.
"This music has artistic substance. It's not a fad," he observes.
"I'm playing things that resonate in the consciousness of the culture. And by that, I don't just mean America."
He's hardly veered off this path since he first moved to New York, a New Orleans-born prodigy, and a member of drummer Art Blakey's fabled Jazz Messengers.
He wore fine suits and ties, performed classical music, and played original work that was reminiscent of Miles Davis's 1960s innovations: nuanced, driving modern jazz with shifting meters and complex harmonic forms.
He headed a pack of musicians labelled the Young Lions. Some called them the neo-conservatives.
But his renown almost single-handedly made straight-ahead jazz viable, and fashionable, again. Columbia Records signed him straight away. He created a buzz, a public conversation about the genre, excoriating the fusion and freer form experiments of the '60s and '70s.
In 2001, when Ken Burns made Jazz, his 10-part documentary, Marsalis, and his philosophy, was front and centre. He was featured perhaps more than anyone else: part historian, part musician, part preacher telling stories and anecdotes of musicians and scenes that often predated him by half a century.
As the recent Times article suggested, Marsalis had become a kind of latter-day Leonard Bernstein, a "global emissary" for the music.
And Jazz at Lincoln Center, perhaps his ultimate legacy, had become the heart of New York's, and in turn America's, jazz establishment.
As the organization's artistic director he spearheaded the search for a permanent headquarters. Two years ago they moved into a new $128 million US mid-Manhattan complex: with a club, two performance halls, and over two dozen education programs.
The big band, the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, is at the heart of the project. It's a 15-piece repertory band that has mined music from early New Orleans up into the modern era, based in New York but often on the road. The centrepiece of their Vancouver performance last year was John Coltrane's A Love Supreme suite.
And that's where the nub of the controversy lies. Marsalis, a virtuoso trumpeter, and a composer with an encyclopedic knowledge of 20th-century forms, has allowed the music of his predecessors -- most often, perhaps, Louis Armstrong or Duke Ellington -- to colour everything he does.
Unlike Armstrong or Ellington, for example, his critics say he's never rewired the way musicians really think.
As one of the recent letters to the editor noted, Marsalis has never "added to the vernacular or standard repertoire of the art form he now dominates."
But Marsalis isn't fazed by the attacks.
"Every note that I have played has been the music of my generation," Marsalis says.
Why? Because he played them, he says.
"The thought that because something has a swing rhythm on it, then it's old?
Most of the music I play is music that I wrote so it has to be from our era. I don't know any other music."
Tonight, with his longtime quintet (tenor saxophonist Walter Blanding, pianist Dan Nimmer, bassist Carlos Enriquez and drummer Ali Jackson) and 21-year-old singer Jennifer Sanon, he'll play a mixture he often favours: standards and originals and versions that take shape on the bandstand with very little preparation at all.
It's a timeless formula that seems to comfort him. Especially in the past year. He's been recovering from a lip operation last spring.
He admits that the surgery forced him to alter his basic trumpet technique, something that hadn't changed a great deal since he was 12.
"For me at this age to have to go back to the fundamentals and do, like long tones. It was a great experience, man," he says breaking into loud laughter.
But Wynton Marsalis is in it for the long haul. Lincoln Center is first. Then there's an upcoming quintet disc, From the Plantation to Penitentiary (Blue Note).
"I'm just gonna get deeper into the music," he says. "I'm about the music. A lot of times they write those big articles and they leave the music out.
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