Growing Up in New Orleans
Growing up on Perrier Street, one house off Napoleon Avenue, Mardi Gras parades basically rolled directly past my home. I walked a few blocks to Saint Charles Avenue to catch the rest of the processions. The jazz bands in those parades were my first exposure to the street beat, the second line, the rhythmic traditions that define New Orleans music. That rhythm does not swing in the way bebop swings. It has its own pocket, its own logic, and its own unquestionable musicality. And yet, when I listen to musicians like Wynton Marsalis, Branford Marsalis, Terrence Blanchard, Nicholas Payton, Victor Goines, and Donald Harrison, all of whom are rooted in or emerged from the New Orleans musical tradition, they move fluidly between that street beat and swing. They play in both worlds.
These musicians did not arrive at the street beat from outside the jazz tradition. They learned it first, in New Orleans, from the same teachers, in the same neighborhoods, through the same cultural transmission that Wynton himself cites when he traces jazz back to its origins. The music they make in the street beat idiom is undeniably jazz. So when Wynton has articulated his philosophy of what jazz fundamentally requires, there is a tension worth examining. His stated definition does not easily accommodate what he and his peers actually play.
Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz Definition
In his writings and public statements, Wynton has articulated a clear definition of what constitutes jazz. Working with critic Stanley Crouch, he has argued that jazz requires three essential elements: swing, the blues, and improvisation. He has extended this to include tonality, harmony, craftsmanship, and mastery of the tradition from New Orleans jazz through Ornette Coleman. Swing, in particular, emerges as foundational, not optional, not contextual, but central to what makes jazz jazz. His concern has been that without these anchors, music drifts away from jazz into something else entirely. This framework has shaped his influence at Jazz at Lincoln Center and his broader advocacy for jazz as America’s classical music. It is a serious, coherent philosophy. But here is where the tension emerges.
The Caravan Example
Consider Wynton’s own recording of “Caravan” from Marsalis Standard Time, Volume One, recorded early in his career. The tune is structured in AABA form. The A sections sit unmistakably in the New Orleans street beat, the second line pocket that does not swing in the bebop sense. Only in the B section, the bridge, does the music shift into swing. Then it returns to street beat for the final A. Within a single performance, Wynton demonstrates that both rhythmic feels function as jazz. He plays them both. He moves between them fluidly, as do his peers. They grew up in this tradition. They understand both languages intimately.
Yet Wynton’s stated definition of jazz fundamentals does not easily account for what he himself performs. If swing is non-negotiable to jazz, how do we categorize music that opens in street beat, that locks into the second line pocket, that draws its validity from the same New Orleans genealogy he celebrates? Is it pre-jazz? Ancestral reference material? Or is it simply jazz operating in a different rhythmic mode, one that Wynton plays but his philosophy struggles to encompass?
Congo Square as Foundation
The roots of New Orleans music are found in Congo Square, where enslaved and free people of color gathered on Sundays beginning in the eighteenth century to play African music, dance, and preserve their cultural traditions. The rhythms they maintained, the street beat, the syncopated pocket, the improvisational spirit, became the foundation from which all subsequent jazz evolved. Wynton Marsalis knows this history intimately. He has composed works celebrating it. He plays in that tradition.
His own Congo Square collaboration with an African drum ensemble, performed at the Barbican in London, confronted this tension directly. By one account it was one of his most difficult musical challenges, precisely because the rhythms at jazz’s African root do not swing in the bebop sense and do not fit comfortably inside the framework he had spent decades defending. Yet his philosophical framework for defining jazz does not easily accommodate the street beat as a living, contemporary jazz practice. It treats the street beat as ancestral context rather than as a valid rhythmic mode within modern jazz. This tension deserves examination not because Wynton is wrong, but because the question itself remains unresolved. If the street beat is where jazz began, if it persists in the playing of New Orleans musicians today, and if it functions as jazz when those musicians perform it, then perhaps our definitions need to account for that reality more clearly than they currently do.
Further Reading
A complete list of Jazzocrat essays can be found here.
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