The Moan of a Trumpet

Caption

Wynton Marsalis

Credit: Collage by Jake Cook

TRANSCRIPT:

MUSIC: Wynton Marsalis - "The Very Thought of You"

Chuck Reece: The great New Orleans trumpeter Wynton Marsalis is the same age I am. His first album came out when we were both twenty years old. But it took me a while to get into his music.

Jazz didn’t really make sense to me at twenty. In college, I had a friend who swore he could help me understand it. He played me lots of records. And I listened. But I couldn’t hear them, if you know what I mean.

I did not know then that jazz came from the South, where I had came from too. I did not yet know that jazz was the music that happened when the blues and gospel and life experience of Black Southerners crossed paths with the instruments of European orchestras.

I didn’t actually hear jazz until the summer between my junior and senior years of college. I was in New York City, my first summer there, for an internship at a magazine. I was staying in a dorm at New York University, in Greenwich Village. About six blocks from there was the Village Vanguard, a jazz club in a basement on Seventh Avenue. It’s been open in that exact location since nineteen-thirty-five.

One evening very late, maybe two a.m., I was walking down Seventh Avenue. I passed under the red awning above the Vanguard’s door. The door was open. Every other time I walked by, it had been closed. So I looked inside, figuring I might glimpse someone on stage. But I just saw what everyone for the past ninety years has seen when they stood at the door of the Village Vanguard—a stairway leading down to a basement.

But I heard something—the moan of a trumpet wafting up those stairs. Couldn’t tell you the song. Couldn’t tell you who was playing the horn. All I knew is that the sound I heard coming up from that basement was eerily familiar to my ears. It sounded like home somehow.

Over the years since, I’ve listened to a lot of Wynton Marsalis’s music—not all of it, mind you. Near as I can tell, he’s released nearly seventy albums since he was twenty. Many times since, I’ve been fortunate enough to go down the Village Vanguard stairs into a small room shaped like a slice of pie, where many of the music’s greatest have played over the past ninety years.

Maybe it was the atmosphere that night, the fog that had settled over the late-night streets after a rain. Maybe it was a case of homesickness I didn’t even know I had. But in the sound of that horn drifting up the stairs, I heard jazz for the first time. And it set me on the path toward learning about one of the greatest gifts the South, my home, ever gave to the culture of the whole wide world.

Come see us anytime at SalvationSouth.com.

Salvation South editor Chuck Reece comments on Southern culture and values in a weekly segment that airs Fridays at 7:45 a.m. during Morning Edition and 4:44 p.m. during All Things Considered on GPB Radio. You can also find them here at GPB.org/Salvation-South.