Jazz Moves Uptown : Lincoln Center has enlisted artists like Wynton Marsalis to convince skeptics that the music can thrive in classical halls

Shortly after Lincoln Center announced early this year that it is making jazz a formal, year-round program at the classical music bastion, trumpeter Wynton Marsalis glided onstage at Alice Tully Hall.

Marsalis, the artistic director of the center’s jazz program, was appearing in the role of Aloysius (Louis) Weber in a children’s play about a young Mozart incarnate whom he transforms by exposing to jazz.

“I love to improvise,” says Wilma, a 13-year-old prodigy in the play who has been inhabited by Mozart’s spirit, after a jam with Marsalis. “Louis, if I could, I would quit playing Mozart right this minute and play nothing but jazz.”

“Don’t give up on Mozart,” Marsalis-as-Louis replies. “I like to create new pieces myself, but I don’t desert the masters: Bach, Chopin, Ellington, King Oliver. They gave me the foundation, they inspire me to play at my best.”

To Marsalis, 29, who has won Grammys in both the classical and jazz categories, it’s perfectly reasonable to mix Bach and King Oliver. He feels jazz has as legitimate a place in the cultural firmament as classical music.

And after years of second-class citizenship in the country that gave birth to it, the Lincoln Center commitment to jazz is a dramatic example of how the music is finally taking up full-fledged residency in halls long identified with classical productions.

Lincoln Center’s jazz program is the outgrowth of its highly regarded “Classical Jazz” summer concerts. The series, which enters its fifth season next month with concerts featuring such artists as Marsalis, drummer Kenny Washington and alto sax player Charles McPherson, is part of a trend toward placing jazz in permanent repertory, much the way the works of classical composers are presented.

And the movement isn’t limited to New York.

In Washington, the 17-member Jazz Masterworks Orchestra performed its debut concert in May at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. The orchestra, funded by a $242,000 congressional appropriation, is part of the Smithsonian’s own jazz program, which will publish transcriptions of recorded works by Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Fletcher Henderson, Jimmie Lunceford and other jazz legends.

In Los Angeles, a series of three summer jazz concerts--titled “Jazz at the Music Center”--will begin Friday at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. (See accompanying article on Page 57.)

This increased commitment to jazz was helped by a groundswell of philanthropic funding, as well as extensive jazz curricula at colleges and high schools and the wide popularity of charismatic young players like Marsalis, his brother Branford, Roy Hargrove and others who venerate the works of jazz masters.

Though the Smithsonian has promoted a variety of jazz-related programming since the early ‘70s, Lincoln Center’s involvement is seen by many as a breakthrough in this area.

“The mere fact that Lincoln Center saw fit to include jazz in its program is going to give added prestige to this music,” said George Butler, vice president of jazz artists and repertory for Columbia Records. “People who have had reservations about jazz will feel that if Lincoln Center is involved with it, then they should take a look.”

While the programs at Lincoln Center and the Smithsonian have been greeted with hosannas from jazz fans and the press--the New York Times editorialized that the Lincoln Center imprimatur will give jazz “its proper place in the American artistic pantheon”--some aspects have drawn criticism.

The Smithsonian’s note-for-note transcriptions of recordings by Ellington and others--necessitated by the dearth of original scores and the questionable fidelity of subsequent arrangers’ interpretations of the music--seem to some to contradict jazz’s emphasis on improvisation.

“There’s an argument that says that it’s not jazz, because you’re re-creating something--it’s not valid to perform this because there’s no improvisation,” acknowledged John Edward Hasse, the founder and executive director of the Smithsonian’s jazz orchestra.

Said David N. Baker, chairman of Indiana University’s jazz department and co-director of the Smithsonian orchestra: “Why should a student who wants to play Ellington play some watered-down arrangement when he can play the original?” And, he said, the original scores often included scripted solos anyway. “Can you imagine someone complaining about James Earl Jones doing ‘Othello,’ that if he says the same words every night, then it doesn’t make sense?”

Meanwhile, the notion of presenting jazz in a concert hall instead of the grungy intimacy of a Greenwich Village club alienates some purists.

Young artists like Wynton Marsalis, who prefer Evian to Night Train and who have scrupulously distanced themselves from jazz’s hookers-and-heroin image, find the argument insulting.

“Why does everything have to fit into this cliched view?” fumed the trumpeter, who points out that Duke Ellington, whose elan and stylish dress he emulates, performed at Carnegie Hall in the ‘40s. “Why shouldn’t jazz be at Lincoln Center?” is his response to the question of why it should.

Stanley Crouch, the respected music and social critic who is an adviser to the Lincoln Center program, agrees.

“That’s like people who have had romantic assignations in the back seat of an automobile who believe they can’t express intimacy in a room at the Ritz,” he said. “The vitality of something is not determined by the circumstances in which it appears. Something is not vital because it appears in an impoverished setting, nor is it refined if it appears on a concert stage. First-class presentation of this music does not hamper its vitality.”

Said Rob Gibson, the former director of the Atlanta Jazz Series who heads the Lincoln Center program: “For people to take this music seriously, it has to be in the concert hall. I think 100 years from now, people will have grown up listening to jazz in concert.”

The enthusiasm that has greeted the nascent legitimization of jazz raises the question of why it took so long for the music to gain entry to the classical arena. “We’re tardy in this regard,” said Nathan Leventhal, the president of Lincoln Center. “This is something Lincoln Center should have done long ago.”

As the Smithsonian’s Hasse explained: “You can point to racism, the cultural inferiority Americans have vis-a-vis Europe and economics. It’s really expensive to rehearse and perform with a 17-piece jazz orchestra.”

The movement to re-evaluate the place of jazz in the musical hierarchy gathered momentum during the ‘80s, when the music regrouped after being swamped by the tidal wave of rock. The 1986 film “ ‘Round Midnight,” which starred tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon; increased jazz programming on public radio, and the rise of roots-conscious young artists all brought jazz to a broader audience.

“The Wynton Marsalises and Roy Hargroves have demonstrated a mastery of their instruments that has provoked the curiosity of people who weren’t into jazz,” said Columbia’s Butler. “When (Marsalis) won the Grammys in both the jazz and classical idioms, it was a turning point.”

Said Gibson: “People were knocked out by this guy’s talent. He legitimized jazz in a lot of people’s eyes.”

Amid this ferment, Lincoln Center executive Alina Bloomgarden set into motion the events that brought jazz to the home of the Metropolitan Opera. Bloomgarden had taken to hanging out at the Jazz Cultural Theater, a performance space and ad-hoc salon on New York’s West Side run by jazz pianist Barry Harris.

“He was as much as proselytizer as a musician,” Bloomgarden said, “and he would say that if jazz wasn’t reaching out to young people, it would die--that somebody had to do something about it. At the time, Lincoln Center was looking for new programming ideas, so I started carrying the banner for it.”

To his credit, Lincoln Center President Leventhal didn’t reject Bloomgarden’s early, unfocused proposals, though he wasn’t overly enthusiastic. “I thought it was sort of a questionable idea,” Leventhal said, “because, like other people, I didn’t realize that jazz has every bit as much rigor as classical music.”

“It was an absolute leap of faith,” Bloomgarden said. “Some of the Lincoln Center people had stereotypical images of jazz and jazz audiences--that it might be a disorderly crowd.”

With Leventhal’s tacit blessing, she moved forward. “I felt almost called to do this,” she said, “but I wasn’t the most knowledgeable person about jazz. Then I was able to gather people around me who were.”

Enter Marsalis, who enthusiastically signed on as artistic director for the project and offered to play for free.

“It did help to have Wynton on board,” Bloomgarden recalled, “because he had such respect in both areas.” With Marsalis in the fold--the trumpeter enlisted critic Crouch to help with the programming--Bloomgarden’s mission evolved into “Classical Jazz,” which debuted in the summer of 1987.

The weeklong concert series has been praised for generating the excitement of a club in a concert hall setting and for selecting musicians whose talents complement the material, which has ranged from Ellington retrospectives to stripped-down New Orleans-style jazz.

“I was pretty skeptical about it at first,” said Crouch, who writes the program notes for the series. “I thought it would just be more lip service--these things are usually presented on such a mediocre scale. I was rather startled at the degree of commitment. The excitement and support at Lincoln Center was a result of the quality of what was done.”

Encouraged by the critical and popular success of the series--most of the concerts have sold out--Leventhal announced in January the formation of the jazz program, with an annual $1-million budget for performances, and the formation of a jazz archive, educational programs, seminars and film series.

For Rob Gibson, the Lincoln Center program confirms the obvious.

“When Sonny Rollins played at Carnegie Hall, it was sold out,” he said, referring to a date last year. “Over at Radio City Music Hall, Ella Fitzgerald sold out. I went to three clubs and there were lines coming out the door. It ain’t like nobody’s going to see jazz. We’ve got as much jazz going on in our time as ever in the history of the music. It’s virtually a renaissance.”