"In this book I hope to reach a new audience with the positive message of America's greatest music, to show how great musicians demonstrate on the bandstand a mutual respect and trust that can alter your outlook on the world and enrich every aspect of your lifefrom individual creativity and personal relationships to conducting business and understanding what it means to be American in the most modern sense." Wynton Marsalis In this beautiful book, the Pulitzer Prize-winning musician and composer Wynton Marsalis explores jazz and how an understanding of it can lead to deeper, more original ways of being, living, and relatingfor individuals, communities, and nations. Marsalis shows us how to listen to jazz, and through stories about his life and the lessons he has learned from other music greats, he reveals how the central ideas in jazz can influence the way people think and even how they behave with others, changing self, family, and community for the better. At the heart of jazz is the expression of personality and individuality, coupled with an ability to listen to and improvise with others. Jazz as an artand as a way to move people and nations to higher groundis at the core of this unique, illuminating, and inspiring book, a master class on jazz and life by a brilliant American artist. Advance praise forMoving to Higher Ground "An absolute joy to read. Intimate, knowledgeable, supremely worthy of its subject. In addition to demolishing mediocre, uniformed critics,Moving to Higher Groundis a meaningful contribution to music scholarship." Toni Morrison "I think it should be in every bookstore, music store, and school in the country." Tony Bennett "Jazz, for Wynton Marsalis, is nothing less than a search for wisdom. He thinks as forcefully, and as elegantly, as he swings. When he reflects on improvisation, his subject is freedom. When he reflects on harmony, his subject is diversity and conflict and peace. When he reflects on the blues, his subject is sorrow and the mastery of ithow to be happy without being blind. There is philosophy in Marsalis's trumpet, and in this book. Here is the lucid and probing voice of an uncommonly soulful man." Leon Wieseltier, literary editor,The New Republic "Wynton Marsalis is absolutely the person who should write this book. Here he is, as young as morning, as fresh as dew, and already called one of the jazz greats. He is not only a seer and an exemplary musician, but a poet as well. He informs us that jazz was created, among other things, to expose the hypocrisy and absurdity of racism and other ignorances in our country. Poetry was given to human beings for the same reason. This book could be called "How Love Can Change Your Life," for there could be no jazz without love. By love, of course, I do not mean mush, or sentimentality. Love can only exist with courage, and this book could not be written without Wynton Marsalis's courage. He has the courage to make powerful music and to love the music so, that he willingly shares its riches with the entire human family. We are indebted to him." Maya Angelou

Wynton Marsalis, the artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, musician, educator, and composer, was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, and received his first trumpet from renowned musician Al Hirt at the age of six. Marsalis has won nine Grammy Awards, in both jazz and classical categories, and is the only artist to have won Grammy Awards in five consecutive years, from 1983 to 1987. In 1997, Marsalis’s oratorio on slavery and freedom, Blood on the Fields, became the first and, to date, only jazz composition to win the Pulitzer Prize in music.

Geoffrey C. Ward, a historian, screenwriter, and former editor of American Heritage, is the bestselling author of many books, including The War: An Intimate History, 1941-1945, Jazz: A History of America’s Music, and A First-Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt, which won a National Critics Circle Award.


From the Hardcover edition.

CHAPTER ONE

Discovering the Joy of Swinging

Kids were supposed to stay in the back room. But some kind of way I stumbled into the front room of this tiny wood-frame house in Little Farms, Louisiana. I must have been four or five years old at the time, but I remember it was dark in there, lit only by a soft blue light or a red one, and a lot of grown-ups, men and women, were snapping their fingers on two and four and grooving to a rhythm and blues song. Some sang the words, but they werealldancing up a healthy sweat. I didn’t know what was going on back then, but I could tell it was something good—so good I wasn’t supposed to be around it.

Well, I could bearoundthe music, couldn’t miss it, actually. R&B was always on the radio: “Baby this” and “Baby that”; “I need you, girl”; “Why’d you leave me? Come back. Ohhh!” That music was a way of life. Everybody knew those songs and everybody loved them: “I Heard It Through the Grapevine”; “Stop! In the Name of Love”; “Lean on Me”; “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag.”

Now, jazz was different. That’s what my father played: modern jazz. No one danced to it, ever. That had something to do with rhythm. The backbeat of R&B was steady and unchanging. The rhythms my daddy and his friends played were ever changing and many, a torrent of ideas that came together and felt good. I later came to know it as swing.

The first jazz gigs I remember going to with my older brother Branford were like recitals. Only a handful of older people turned up. Some gave us candy, and there was always a good opportunity for us to run around. I noticed that very few black people seemed to like this kind of music. As a matter of fact, so few people understood it, I wondered why my father and his friends bothered to play it at all.

Then, when I was about eight or nine, I began to notice something very strange. Even though most of the people in our community would never attend a jazz concert (or anything artistic for that matter), even though they didn’t even consider playing music to be a profession, they had a type of respect for my father. I figured it had to have something to do with jazz, because he certainly was not in possession of any material goods indicative of even the slightest financial success.

I began to pay closer attention to all the jazzmen who came to our house or played with my father in clubs around New Orleans. They were an interesting group, if you could get past how different they seemed to be. First, they had their own language, calling each other “cats,” calling jobs “gigs” and instruments “axes,” peppering their conversations with all types of colorful, pungent words and unapologetic truisms.

Even if you were a child, they spoke directly to you and might actually listen to what you had to say.

Of course, they talked about men and women, politics and race and sports. But above all, they loved to talk about jazz music, its present and its past at once, like it was all now: “ ’Trane and them was playin’ so much music I couldn’t move. And people had been telling me all week they weren’t playing nothin’. Man, the music stood me up at the door.”

They could go on and on about what different musicians played or did or said, great men who all seemed to have colorful names: “Frog,” “Rabbit,” “Sweets.” It seemed to me that all of these people knew one another or at least had some type of connection. For all of that hard, profane talk, there was an unusual type of gentleness in the way they treated one another. Always a hug upon greeting and—from even the most venerated musicians—sometimes a kiss on the cheek. A natural ease with those teeteri

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Excerpted from Moving to Higher Ground: How Jazz Can Change Your Life by Wynton Marsalis, Geoffrey Ward
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.