Page 13 - Media Coverage Book_Wynton Marsalis, The Ever Fonky Lowdown

“My sister my brother, won’t you tell me why you treat me so bad?”

Then the answer comes back unequivocally:

“Because I want to/ Because I like to / Because I CAN.”

And yet with the cruelty there is also a lot of clever and targeted humour in Lowdown. The
narrator at one point calls himself a “Happy rhyming fool” and if one listens carefully there
are rhymes that are sometimes poignant, as in “Our lives gave them purpose / To serve us”,
or clever (like ‘orderr’ rhyming with ‘slaughter’, or just funny: when one hears the
juxtaposition of ‘working’ and ‘twerking’ it suddenly seems obvious that the two words
were made to rhyme.

That contrast between the seriousness of the issues and the joy of making the music
dominates the piece. Doug Wamble, with whom Marsalis long-standing working
relationship, is given a very powerful song, “I Like my Ice Cream”, which is loosely based on
Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land”, but taken on a harmonic wander through several
keys.

In the final analysis, however, Lowdown is an unmistakable call to what Marsalis has
repeatedly called ‘acuity’, to “recognize what is going on”:

“You’re going to pick on the poorest and most disenfranchised people and they are going to
be the enemy of the United States of America,” he said in the TV interview with Bill Maher
(link below). “Focus your gaze on who is exploiting and manipulating you.”

The JLCO at the sessions for “The Ever Fonky Lowdown”