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Media Reviews

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 Jazz Perspectives
Vol. 1, No. 2, November 2007, pp. 223–229

Media Reviews

When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts. Spike Lee, director. Boxed set of 3
DVDs. 2006. HBO Video 93973. $29.98.

From the many who gathered in Congo Square in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries to the skilled performers who came of age in the 1980s and 1990s, the
people and institutions of New Orleans—formal and informal—have continually
nurtured musicians.1 It is impossible to discuss the careers and influence of
performers like Louis Armstrong, Fats Domino, and Allen Toussaint without taking
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account of the city.

Partly because of the city’s critical role in music history, a number of people in the
jazz research community were particularly struck by the tragedy that unfolded after
Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans and much of the Gulf Coast on Monday,
August 29, 2005. In the days that immediately followed, it became clear that local,
state, and federal authorities were at best unprepared to evacuate and care for the
thousands of people who survived the ensuing floods. At the same time, various
contributors to and maintainers of jazz-related e-mail lists and websites provided one
another a steady stream of information on the status of the city’s resident musicians
and its historical landmarks, libraries, and archives. To be sure, there was deep
sympathy for all affected by the hurricane, but musicians and researchers known to us
seemed to merit a concern typically reserved for family members. So intense and
pervasive was the feeling of despair in and beyond our community that the mere sight
of alto saxophonist Donald Harrison taking the stage at the Chicago Jazz Festival on
September 4, where he performed with the Charles McPherson Quartet and Frank
Morgan, was enough to elicit cheers from the audience.
Three months afterwards, director Spike Lee took cameraman Cliff Charles and a
small crew to New Orleans for the first of eight trips to gather location footage and to
interview over 100 government officials, military personnel, newscasters, engineers,
scholars, activists, musicians, and other New Orleans and Gulf Coast residents.2 The
resultant four-hour-plus documentary, which combined Lee’s original footage with
stills and moving images from various sources, was first broadcast on Home Box
Office (HBO) on August 21 and 22, 2006, and released on DVD (with a bonus 105-

1
For an account of the historical role played by educational institutions in New Orleans, see Al Kennedy,
Chord Changes on the Chalkboard: How Public School Teachers Shaped Jazz and the Music of New Orleans
(Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2002).
2
From the film synopsis posted at http://www.hbo.com/docs/programs/whentheleveesbroke/synopsis.
html (accessed July 2, 2007).

ISSN 1749-4060 print/1749-4079 online

DOI: 10.1080/17494060701612039
 224 Media Reviews

minute epilogue) on December 19 of that year. The documentary also won three
awards at the 2006 Venice International Film Festival.
Deservedly or not, Lee has a reputation for being controversial, especially where his
work in the late 1980s and early 1990s is concerned. With School Daze (Columbia/40
Acres and a Mule, 1988), Do the Right Thing (40 Acres and a Mule, 1989), Jungle
Fever (Universal/40 Acres and a Mule, 1991) and Malcolm X (JVC/40 Acres and a
Mule, 1992), he sometimes elegantly and often clumsily reignited debates about what
W. E. B. Dubois predicted as the major problem facing the United States in the
twentieth century and what, more recently, Thomas C. Holt has suggested it must
still confront in the twenty-first: race relations.3 While it might be easy to lament
Lee’s penchant for exploring those issues in films for which he wrote the screenplays
and in which he cast himself in prominent roles, his presence in this documentary is
surprisingly muted. At only a few points are viewers made aware of him, and then
only through hearing his voice, off-camera, asking questions of those being
interviewed. The film is, likewise, one of Lee’s most balanced productions. His
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interviewees are the ones who identify the story’s heroes and villains, and many
singled out for criticism were given time on camera to refute allegations.
Music, used both diegetically and non-diegetically, plays a nearly constant role in
the documentary. The Act I opening sequence, which combines archival and recent
moving images and stills to contrast historical New Orleans with the city after the
flood, is brilliantly underscored by the 1946 recording of ‘‘Do You Know What It
Means to Miss New Orleans?’’ by Louis Armstrong and His Dixieland Seven. Lee and
his collaborators employ a similar strategy 38 minutes later in presenting studio
footage of ten-year-old trumpeter Glenn Hall III playing ‘‘St. James Infirmary’’
interspersed with film of New Orleans residents wading through chest-deep flood
waters. Immediately following, viewers see Wynton Marsalis, eyes closed, singing the
same song as accompaniment to another succession of stills. An attentive watcher and
listener could hardly fail to connect the deceased woman laid out on a table in the
song’s first verse with a city in a similar position or circumstance.
At other points, music written by Terence Blanchard—some specifically for the
documentary, but most culled from his score for Lee’s film The Inside Man
(Universal/40 Acres and a Mule, 2006)—adds an elegiac cast to the images on screen.
Perhaps the most powerful musical moment, however, is an unscripted one that
occurs at the end of Act I as a number of interviewees reflect on the squalid,
demoralizing conditions inside the Superdome, where many survivors were sent to
await assistance. Spoken-word artist Shelton Shakespear Alexander explains how a
young man known to him only as ‘‘Radio’’ took it upon himself to raise the spirits of
those suffering inside the dome. He started clapping loudly and singing ‘‘This Little
Light of Mine,’’ eventually being joined by and leading dozens of people through the
structure and around it and, at least temporarily, restoring a sense of hope.

3
W. E. B. Dubois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Modern Library, 1996); Thomas C. Holt, The
Problem of Race in the 21st Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000).
 Jazz Perspectives 225

For educators and historians, perhaps the most useful portion of the documentary
is a segment titled ‘‘The Roots Run Deep,’’ which appears around 34 minutes into
Act III. In that segment a number of commentators discuss the history and culture of
New Orleans, focusing particular attention on food, music, and daily life. Among the
practices vividly illustrated are the regalia and movements of brass bands and social
and fraternal organizations during Mardi Gras and during funerals; the dancing of
second-liners; and the bamboula rhythm that undergirds tunes like ‘‘Indian Red
Chant’’—sung on camera by saxophonist Donald Harrison, Jr. Alongside Harrison,
Marsalis, actor Wendell Pierce, and a number of others give a brief, but compelling
history of music and race relations in New Orleans. To be sure, some of the
commentators present more received wisdom than historical fact,4 but the clip taken
as a whole provides a useful starting point for a discussion of jazz’s history and place
in American culture.
Except for that segment, When the Levees Broke is not concerned specifically with
jazz. As a result, its more prominent focus on racial and economic inequality, on
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criticism of George W. Bush and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and
on the resiliency of everyday people may lead some readers to question its relevance
for a journal devoted specifically to this music. Musicians, their families and their
friends, however, live their lives without the luxury of seeing music as analytically
separable from the complex social, political, economic, and cultural issues explored
by this documentary. For that reason, When the Levees Broke should be required
viewing for anyone who wants a concrete understanding of the articulation between
music and those varied contextual frames or even of how music functions as a
‘‘technology of the self.’’5 It is a documentary that, more vividly than other available
materials, situates music in a broader world and reminds us that its trajectories can
never be understood independent of the exigencies of its creators’ lives.

Travis A. Jackson
University of Chicago

# 2007, Travis A. Jackson

4
Particularly glaring is Marsalis’s reductive description of Creoles as ‘‘light-skinned blacks.’’ For a more
nuanced definition, see Jerah Johnson, ‘‘Jim Crow Laws of the 1890s and the Origins of New Orleans
Jazz: Correction of an Error,’’ Popular Music 19 (2000): 243–251.
5
On the idea of race and articulation, see Stuart Hall, ‘‘Race, Articulation and Societies Structured in
Dominance’’ in Sociological Theories: Race and Colonialism (Paris: UNESCO, 1980), 305–345. On how
music functions as a ‘‘technology of the self,’’ see Tia DeNora, Music in Everyday Life (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000).
 226 Media Reviews

From the Plantation to the Penitentiary. Wynton Marsalis. Wynton Marsalis, trumpet
and vocals; Walter Blanding, soprano and tenor saxophones; Carlos Henriquez, bass;
Ali Jackson, Jr., drums; Dan Nimmer, piano; Jennifer Sanon, vocals. Liner notes by
Stanley Crouch. 2007. Blue Note Records 73675. $18.98.

It is difficult to approach Wynton Marsalis’s new album, From the Plantation to the
Penitentiary, with an open mind. For over two decades the trumpeter has been a
polarizing figure at the center of various debates over jazz’s musical identity and
cultural meanings.6 Along the way he has composed several overtly political
historically-oriented works, including Black Codes from the Underground (1985), All
Rise (1999), and the Pulitzer prize-winning oratorio Blood on the Fields (1994). This
latest contribution, a sweeping critique of contemporary African American culture
and moral values cast in the form of an hour-long cycle of original music, is to date
his boldest endeavor to address present-day concerns directly.
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Marsalis is controversial not simply because he has never had qualms about expressing
aesthetic and political views that are not shared by much of jazz’s critical establishment, or
for that matter by many of his fellow musicians, but because as founding artistic director
of Jazz at Lincoln Center he has, since the late 1980s, become an influential cultural
arbiter.7 (That he acquired this position for reasons having as much to do with his being
the leading classical trumpeter of his generation as with his accomplishments in jazz has
also left lingering questions about his artistic credentials to oversee a high-profile jazz
institution.) In a nutshell, Marsalis defines jazz as a music grounded in blues and swing
that embodies universal moral and ethical values such as the individual self-discipline
needed to exercise freedom within a collective, coherently structured environment.
In the album’s liner notes, Stanley Crouch, the cultural critic who has long been
Marsalis’s intellectual mentor, writes in typically measured tones that ‘‘the quality

6
For two recent overviews, see Stuart Nicholson, Is Jazz Dead? (Or Has It Moved to a New Address) (New
York: Routledge, 2005), 23–76; and John Gennari, Blowin’ Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2006), 339–71.
7
On Marsalis’s aesthetic views, see Wynton Marsalis, ‘‘What Jazz Is—and Isn’t,’’ in Keeping Time:
Readings in Jazz History, ed. Robert Walser (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 334–39; and
Rafi Zabor and Vic Gambarini, ‘‘Wynton Vs. Herbie: The Purist and the Crossbreeder Duke It Out,’’ in
Keeping Time, 339–51. Marsalis is clearly a critical lightning rod for reasons beyond simply the content of
his opinions; in contrast to the extensive published literature taking the trumpeter to task for his views,
there is a conspicuous paucity of written commentary concerning other, less institutionally powerful, jazz
musicians’ expressions of opinions that are equally at odds with those of the mainstream liberal critical
establishment. Three exceptions are Pearl Cleage on Miles Davis’s misogyny (‘‘Mad at Miles,’’ in The
Miles Davis Companion: Four Decades of Commentary, ed. Gary Carner [New York: Schirmer, 1996],
210–16); Ajay Heble on Charles Gayle’s homophobia and anti-abortionism (Landing on the Wrong Note:
Jazz, Dissonance, and Critical Practice [New York: Routledge, 2000], 199–228); and Terry Teachout on
Louis Armstrong’s conservative social views (‘‘A Face of Armstrong, But Not the Image,’’ The New York
Times, July 29, 2001, pp. AR25, 30). Also see Burton W. Peretti, ‘‘Republican Jazz? Symbolism, Arts
Policy, and the New Right,’’ in Music and History: Bridging the Disciplines, eds. Jeffrey H. Jackson and
Stanley C. Pelkey (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2005), 99–114.
 Jazz Perspectives 227

and range of [Marsalis’s] talent has few peers and his integrity is exceeded by no one.
(Uh-oh: did I hear somebody say integrity in this house?).’’ The trumpeter inarguably
exhibits musical integrity in staying true to his (and Crouch’s) conception of jazz by
melding elements of blues and swing with Latin rhythms and the romantic popular
ballad style.8 Indeed, the title track, an extended multi-sectional form comprising
several contrasting rhythm-section grooves, is a near-perfect synopsis of the rhythmic
variety Marsalis venerates in the music of his chief compositional role model, Duke
Ellington. Elsewhere, he has described these Ellingtonian traits as ‘‘shuffle swing; …
slow, deep-in-the-pocket groove swing; church grooves; the Afro-Cuban pieces;
ballads with brushes; exotic grooves.’’9
This tendency to juxtapose and combine diverse stylistic elements, whether within
single compositions or in the contrasts between, for example, the album’s mellow,
harmonically rich ballads (‘‘Love and Broken Hearts’’ and ‘‘These are Soulful Days’’)
and the more austere, dissonant chromatic palette of ‘‘Find Me,’’ which is designated
a ‘‘Modern Habanera’’ (the printed track listing gives each piece a descriptive
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rhythmic/generic label), suggests a self-conscious eclecticism that, it has been noted,

could easily be mistaken for the postmodernism of musicians like Don Byron and
Dave Douglas were it not adumbrated by Marsalis’s historicist rhetoric.10 While the
trumpeter’s versatility has led some to charge that, having no fixed identity, his
playing lacks expressive content, it is nonetheless entirely consistent with his
antiessentialist view of jazz as a craft that can be learned through mastery of its formal
elements.11 Marsalis has also been accused of sacrificing emotion to instrumental
virtuosity, although he, for his own part, regards ‘‘pristine technique [as] a sign of
morality.’’12 In the present case, he never seems to exploit his technical facility
gratuitously, even when executing, with apparent ease, rapid, rhythmically irregular

8
Crouch consistently defines jazz in terms of these four elements: ‘‘4/4 swing, blues, the romantic to
meditative ballad, and Afro-Hispanic rhythms.’’ Stanley Crouch, ‘‘The Negro Aesthetic of Jazz,’’ in
Considering Genius: Writings on Jazz (New York: Basic Books, 2006), 212.
9
Wynton Marsalis and Robert G. O’Meally, ‘‘Duke Ellington: ‘Music Like a Big Hot Pot of Good
Gumbo,’’’ in The Jazz Cadence of American Culture, ed. Robert G. O’Meally (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1998), 143.
10
John F. Szwed, Jazz 101: A Complete Guide to Learning and Loving Jazz (New York: Hyperion, 2000),
274–75; Ted Gioia, The History of Jazz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 390.
11
Pianist Keith Jarrett, for instance, contends that ‘‘Wynton imitates other people’s styles too well …
You can’t learn to imitate everyone else without a real deficit. I’ve never heard anything Wynton played
sound like it meant anything at all. Wynton has no voice and no presence.’’ Quoted in Andrew Solomon,
‘‘The Jazz Martyr,’’ The New York Times Magazine, February 9, 1997, 35. On Marsalis’s view of jazz as a
craft, see Marsalis, ‘‘What Jazz Is—and Isn’t,’’ 335.
12
Wynton Marsalis with Selwyn Seyfu Hinds, To a Young Jazz Musician: Letters from the Road (New
York: Random House, 2004), 62. Also see Wynton Marsalis, Sweet Swing Blues on the Road (New York:
W. W. Norton, 1994), 166–68. On the issue of emotion versus virtuosity, critic Whitney Balliett writes
that ‘‘technique, rather than melodic logic, still governs [Marsalis’s] improvising, and the emotional
content of his playing remains hidden and skittish.’’ Whitney Balliett, Collected Works: A Journal of Jazz,
1954–2000 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 637. Also see pp. 848–49.
 228 Media Reviews

passages of considerable harmonic complexity in his remarkable solo on the album’s

fifth track13
That solo’s musical merits, and whatever ethical values they represent, are,
however, somewhat eclipsed because the most immediate impact of this particular
track, which is entitled ‘‘Supercapitalism,’’ stems, as with the rest of the album, from
its to-the-point lyrics, which Marsalis penned himself. Here the issue of integrity
becomes thornier given that the piece’s critique is not targeted at the social
depredations wrought by free-market fundamentalism, but rather at the materialistic
excesses of contemporary consumer culture (‘‘Gimme that, Gimme this,’’ runs the
refrain).14 This is hardly the indictment one would anticipate from an artist who
currently appears in an advertising campaign for ostentatious Movado wrist watches.
(And, needless to say, ‘‘Supercapitalism’’ strikes quite a different tone from that of an
address the trumpeter delivered, just weeks after completing this recording, at a
‘‘World Business Forum’’ event sponsored by the Pitney-Bowes corporation.)15
Maybe Marsalis can be excused for being a less than perfect exemplar of his professed
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values, but he steps into still more contentious terrain when his lyrics promote a
brand of political individualism that would appear to seriously underestimate the
power and complexity of those forces for which individuals cannot reasonably be
held accountable. The album’s concluding track, ‘‘Where Y’all At?,’’ an A-flat-major
second-line vamp over which Marsalis assails, in rhyming quatrains, the 1960s
generation for failing to make good on its idealism, illustrates how even a benignly
intentioned ideology of self-reliance can easily end up placing an undue burden of
personal responsibility upon those who are largely victims of structural socio-
economic factors beyond their own control.16
The real legacy of the 1960s that Marsalis seems to be grappling with
philosophically is not one of unfulfilled promises but one of unanticipated
consequences. Up until the mid-twentieth century, jazz flourished within a stable
yet conflicted moral universe in which traditional (and, for him, positive) values

13
The recording documents a return to form for Marsalis, who entered the studio only weeks after giving
his first public performance since recovering from a serious lip injury. See Robin Pogrebin, ‘‘Lip Problem
Sidelines Marsalis,’’ The New York Times, May 6, 2006, p. B15; and Nate Chinen, ‘‘Marsalis Is Back
Onstage,’’ The New York Times, June 7, 2006, p. B2.
14
In a recent interview, Marsalis recounts that his initial inspiration for this composition included
automated teller machine surcharges and the corrupt finances of Boston’s ‘‘big dig’’ urban construction
project. Quoted in Bill Milkowski, ‘‘Wynton Throws Down the Gauntlet,’’ Jazz Times, April 2007, 50.
15
For a transcript of Marsalis’s speech, see http://www.wyntonmarsalis.org/2006/09/14/transcript-from-
wyntons-speech-at-world-business-forum/ (accessed May 11, 2007).
16
In the promotional literature that Blue Note Records mailed with review copies of the album, Marsalis
summarizes ‘‘Where Y’all At?’’ as follows: ‘‘There is a lot of talk about what should be done to fix
America, and a lot of ideas, but really, what are any of us actually doing? I’m talking about us. Me
included. We’re just sitting by waiting for somebody else to clean our house. They not coming. Where
are we at?’’ For an impassioned, comprehensive critique of this sort of individualist ideology, see Michael
Eric Dyson, Is Bill Cosby Right? (Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind?) (New York: Basic Civitas
Books, 2005), passim. For a thorough analysis of Marsalis’s politics, see Eric Porter, What Is This Thing
Called Jazz? African American Musicians as Artists, Critics, and Activists (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2002), 287–334.
 Jazz Perspectives 229

coexisted with racial prejudice; the music’s utopian promise, in the view of Marsalis’s
ideological forerunner, Ralph Ellison, was to effect ‘‘a transcendence of those
conditions created within the Negro community by the denial of social justice.’’17 As
things transpired, however, the end of legalized segregation was not brought about by
a transcendence of existing ethical beliefs that preserved them intact. Instead, to
Marsalis’s evident regret, it occurred in tandem with an altogether more radical
unraveling of the moral order, and was furthermore accompanied by an erosion of
jazz’s established aesthetic principals with the rise of free improvisation and fusion. In
the final analysis, perhaps what is most curious about From the Plantation to the
Penitentiary is that Marsalis seeks to remedy this predicament by means of an
individualist politics that is quite contrary to the ethos of collaboration and collective
responsibility he has elsewhere so eloquently described as the essence of jazz
performance.18

Benjamin Givan
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Skidmore College

# 2007, Benjamin Givan

17
Ralph Ellison, ‘‘Blues People,’’ in Living with Music: Ralph Ellison’s Jazz Writings, ed. Robert G.
O’Meally (New York: Random House, 2001), 131.
18
See, for example, Marsalis and Hinds, To a Young Jazz Musician, 46–48.