Jazzocrat

An earlier Jazzocrat essay examined the tension between Wynton Marsalis’s stated philosophy and his own recorded practice.

The Language Branford Speaks

Branford Marsalis has said for decades that jazz in New Orleans is a language shaped by the choices of musicians rather than a category governed by fixed requirements. His position is not a personal rebuke of anyone but a philosophical claim about how music lives and grows. In his 2019 JazzTimes interview with David Fricke, he described jazz as music rooted in dance and in the particular charisma of New Orleans, a tradition defined by what musicians hear and choose to play rather than by adherence to a single rhythmic or harmonic template. In his DownBeat interview that same year he rejected the idea that jazz can be defined by a checklist of required elements, and in conversations with NPR he has returned to this position repeatedly, arguing that musicians expand the tradition by playing what they hear rather than by conforming to a predetermined set of stylistic rules.

This view has a specific target, though Branford rarely names it directly. It stands against the essentialist framework that his brother Wynton Marsalis and the late critic Stanley Crouch spent much of their careers advancing, namely the argument that jazz possesses a fixed identity rooted in swing, blues feeling, and acoustic ensemble interaction, and that music departing from those features has departed from jazz itself. Branford’s counter-argument is not that those elements are unimportant, and it is not that anything qualifies as jazz. In the same interview he said of saxophonist Kamasi Washington that his vocabulary is not jazz, and that hearing the lineage in a player’s work is what makes something jazz. His disagreement with Wynton is not about whether the tradition has a lineage but about whether that lineage can be reduced to a checklist of required rhythmic and harmonic features, and whether swing is the only thread running through it.

Wynton and Crouch Built a Framework

In his interviews for Ken Burns’s Jazz, broadcast on PBS in 2001, Wynton Marsalis articulated a definition of jazz that has shaped institutional thinking about the music ever since. Jazz, in his account, requires swing, blues feeling, and acoustic ensemble interaction. These are not stylistic preferences but are, in his view, the core identity of the music, the features that distinguish jazz from everything else and that must be present for the music to qualify as jazz at all. He has expanded on this position in essays and public statements for Jazz at Lincoln Center, where he has described swing and blues as the foundation of the tradition and the standard against which new music should be measured.

Stanley Crouch supplied the critical architecture for this position. In his essays for The Village Voice and in his 2006 collection Considering Genius, he argued that jazz possesses an essential character rooted in the blues and in the rhythmic language of swing. For Crouch, the tradition was not simply a historical lineage but a set of values that could be defended or betrayed, and music that abandoned swing or blues feeling was not jazz evolving but jazz diluted. Together, Wynton and Crouch built a framework that was serious, coherent, and genuinely motivated by a desire to protect something they believed was being lost.

That framework also had consequences. It drew a boundary around the music at a particular historical moment and asked that everything outside that boundary be called something else. What fell outside included not only fusion and free jazz but, as the first essay in this series argued, the New Orleans street beat that Wynton himself plays.

The Historical Record Does Not Cooperate

Branford’s most effective argument against this position is not philosophical but historical. He has pointed out that early jazz was not a codified system but a hybrid of street parades, Caribbean rhythms, blues forms, ragtime syncopation, and the everyday dance music of New Orleans, and that the musicians who created it did not follow a single rhythmic or harmonic template. They drew freely from the sounds around them because those sounds were all part of the same cultural environment.

Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, and Jelly Roll Morton are the figures Wynton and Crouch most frequently invoke as the standard bearers of the tradition. But these musicians did not arrive at jazz by conforming to a predetermined set of requirements. They arrived at jazz by absorbing everything available to them in New Orleans at the turn of the twentieth century, a city whose musical culture was already a convergence of African rhythm, Caribbean melody, European harmony, Protestant hymnody, and the street parade tradition that had been sustained in Congo Square since the eighteenth century. The music they made was jazz precisely because it refused to limit itself to a single vocabulary.

This history does not support the checklist but undermines it. If the founders of the tradition were themselves synthesizers rather than purists, then the essentialist framework does not describe what jazz has always been but rather what one generation decided jazz should become. That is a legitimate aesthetic position and not a historical fact.

A New Orleans Counter-Position

Branford Marsalis is not speaking alone, and the position he articulates is shared by a generation of New Orleans musicians who grew up inside the same tradition and who have reached the same conclusion from their own experience of the music.

Nicholas Payton made the institutional dimension of this argument explicit in his 2011 essay On Why Jazz Isn’t Cool Anymore, where he argued that the term jazz has been frozen by institutions while the music itself continues to evolve. That freezing was not accidental. As jazz lost its commercial audience through the 1960s and 1970s, the music moved from ballrooms into concert halls and universities, and the people who administered those institutions needed a definition they could teach, fund, and defend. The essentialist framework served that need. In his essays Payton has described the tradition as Black American Music, a lineage that moves through swing, funk, hip hop, and second line without treating any single rhythmic language as mandatory. For Payton the problem is not stylistic drift but institutional capture, the moment when a living practice gets handed to administrators who mistake the boundary for the music.

Donald Harrison has described his concept of Nouveau Swing in interviews with Hollywood Soapbox and WBGO as a blend of swing, Afro Caribbean rhythm, and the street beat he learned from his father’s generation. His comments are precise on one point, which is that New Orleans musicians do not experience these rhythms as separate categories requiring separate justifications but as a single cultural vocabulary through which musicians move as naturally as a speaker moves between registers of the same language.

Herlin Riley has made a related observation in interviews with NPR and in conversations documented by Ted Panken, explaining that parade rhythms, church rhythms, and swing coexist in his playing without hierarchy. That word is important because hierarchy is exactly what the Marsalis-Crouch definition imposes, placing swing at the center and treating everything else as peripheral or preparatory. Riley’s account of his own practice describes something different, a musical culture in which no single rhythmic feel outranks the others because all of them belong to the same tradition.

Terence Blanchard has said in interviews with 64 Parishes and the National Endowment for the Arts that New Orleans musicians are supposed to evolve, and that the thing that makes the music powerful is that it was born out of a need to express something. He does not describe his work in film, opera, and electric ensembles as a departure from jazz but as a continuation of what jazz has always done, which is to absorb the sounds of its moment and transform them into something new.

Taken together these voices describe a coherent counter-position that is not a rejection of the tradition but a different account of what the tradition actually is.

What the River Carries

The argument that emerges from these voices is not that anything can be jazz but that jazz defines itself through practice rather than through mandate. The musicians quoted in this essay are not calling for the elimination of standards but are arguing that the standards Wynton Marsalis and Stanley Crouch identified are descriptive of one important period in the music’s history rather than prescriptive for all of it. Swing is a powerful and central rhythmic language within the jazz tradition and is not the only one the tradition has ever recognized, and the historical record does not support the claim that it was ever meant to be.

New Orleans is where this argument has its deepest roots, and that is not incidental. The city’s musical culture has always operated as a river rather than a reservoir, constantly shifting and scouring its own bed, carrying material from every source it passes through rather than holding water still to be measured and managed. The street beat and the second line are not pre-jazz artifacts preserved in amber but living rhythmic languages that New Orleans musicians have played alongside swing for as long as both have existed, moving between them fluidly, without apology and without a felt need for institutional permission.

What Wynton and Crouch built was a serious attempt to give jazz the dignity of a classical tradition, to argue that it deserved the same institutional support and the same critical rigor applied to European concert music. That project had real value and real consequences for how jazz is taught, funded, and preserved, but the framework they used to advance it drew the boundary of the tradition too tightly at a moment in the music’s history rather than around the full arc of what the music has been and continues to become.

Jazz is not a fixed category but a cultural practice with a lineage, and lineages grow. The musicians in this essay understand that growth as the music’s natural condition, and their collective testimony does not close the question of what jazz is but insists that the question remain open, which is exactly where a living tradition needs it to be.

Further Reading

For the first essay in this series, see Wynton Marsalis and the Street Beat: Congo Square’s Living Legacy.

Bibliography

Blanchard, Terence. Interview by Melissa Weber. 64 Parishes. 2020.

Blanchard, Terence. Interview by Josephine Reed. Art Works Podcast. National Endowment for the Arts. Recorded 2023, published 2025.

Burns, Ken. Jazz. Documentary series. PBS. 2001.

Crouch, Stanley. Essays for The Village Voice. Various dates between 1980 and 1995.

Crouch, Stanley. Considering Genius. New York. Basic Civitas Books. 2006.

Harrison, Donald. Interview by John Soltes. Hollywood Soapbox. 8 January 2024.

Harrison, Donald. Interview by Pat Prescott. WBGO. 16 April 2026.

Marsalis, Branford. Interview by Guy Raz. Weekends on All Things Considered. National Public Radio. 11 August 2012.

Marsalis, Branford. Interview by Denise Sullivan. DownBeat. 17 April 2019.

Marsalis, Branford. Interview by David Fricke. JazzTimes. 3 June 2019.

Marsalis, Wynton. Interview in Jazz. Directed by Ken Burns. PBS. 2001.

Marsalis, Wynton. Public statements and essays. Jazz at Lincoln Center. Various dates between 1995 and 2020.

Payton, Nicholas. “On Why Jazz Isn’t Cool Anymore.” Nicholas Payton Blog. 27 November 2011.

Payton, Nicholas. “Black American Music and the Jazz Tradition.” Nicholas Payton Blog. 30 April 2014.

Riley, Herlin. Interview by Ted Panken. Today Is the Question. 1999.

Riley, Herlin. Profile by John Burnett. National Public Radio. 30 December 2023.