Page 12 - Media Coverage Book_Wynton Marsalis, The Ever Fonky Lowdown

The album has been launched amid the frenetic machinations of the US presidential election
campaign, which hardly seems a coincidence. Wynton Marsalis has described the work in
one interview as “show[ing] us a blueprint how to rise above populist propaganda.”

And yet Marsalis is also keen that the work be seen in a broader context. Not just in the
sweep of history, but also in the context of the canon his own larger works which have
commented on societal issues, of which this is the fifth: Black Codes Underground was
recorded in 1985. Then Blood on the Fields which looked at freedoms, All Rise , with Los
Angeles Philharmonic from 2002 which he sees as looking at ‘collective humanity’ and From
the Plantation to the Penitentiary, released in 2007.

The Ever Fonky Lowdown was recorded in a day and a half of sessions in October 2019, and
features the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Jason Marsalis on drums (“it has so many
New Orleans grooves, it had to be someone from New Orleans”) , singers including Camille
Thurman and Doug Wamble and an important role for narrator Wendell Pierce. Wynton
Marsalis did a series of interviews to mark the release (*) including one with Sebastian.

“The music satirises the things that divide us,” Marsalis has said. But he goes a step further:
“We are in such an ironic time, it is almost hard to be satirical.”

There is a narrator and main protagonist, and this is a new departure for Wynton Marsalis’
major works. There was a spoken text by Stanley Crouch in The Fiddler’s Tale, but the
integration of a voice which comments and explains and is also a protagonist in the
proceedings does determine the way Fonky Lowdown works.

Mr Game, whose words are all written by Marsalis and spoken by Wendell Pierce, is
something of a circus ringmaster. Marsalis says he is like PT Barnum… but also based on
“evangelical hustlers throughout time… the Western braggart round the campfire, and
politicians going back to Julius Caesar.”

The narrator can ironize, ensure that the listener keeps thinking, using techniques
reminiscent of Brecht in, say, the Threepenny Opera. Thus when the singers solemnly and
beautifully intone a phrase like “What would the saviour think?” the narrator instantly
overlays the moment with irony, describing what has just been sung as “that saviour
nonsense.”

Mr. Game points out that the people who are being talked of as winners are being taken for
a ride in a game where money and power are guarded jealously, obsessively: “You, oh
glorious people, may not get any of the spoils of this war but you’re winners!”

The dark forces at play in the law are singled out too. Legislators who are in fact ignorant
traders and have never studied law, or indeed bothered to read the legislation they are
enacting for are savagely taken to task in the number “Night Trader”: “Sign a bill, don’t even
read a Bill… Sell you a loan that’ll take your home.” And the lyric elsewhere is scathing
about “the easy attitude of entitlement that comes with freedom and wealth.”

Repeatedly, the piece makes it plain that the processes of bullying and exclusion and
intimidation are actually carried out as if with sadistic pleasure. So if the question is: