Wynton Marsalis, Managing and Artistic Director, Jazz at Lincoln Center
In conversation with: Andrew Nusca, Editorial Director, Fortune Live Media

Fortune Global Forum 2024: Jazz, Leadership And The Future Of Democracy 

Photograph by Rebecca Greenfield for Fortune

Conferences

Winston. Thank you for having us in your house today. OK. It's a pleasure being here. We need some better walk on music. So look, I want, we're gonna play a AAA one round game. All right. It's complete the sentence. It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing is democracy swinging right now. Um Yeah, I think so. Why? And it actually might help the room if you tell the room what swing means to you because that is the jazz term. Swing means the constant reconciliation of opposites. So across time, maybe you have eight years swings, 10 years. Wings is the constant attempt to find a balance of opposing forces. Uh So you have to have opposition in the swing rhythm. The drums are in six. The Cymbal is the highest pitch and it has forced to play on every beat with the bass that is in four and the drums, the loudest instrument and the bass is the softest. So all night they're looking at each other. Negotiating man. You're playing too loud, you're not in time, you're not swinging, you're not playing good. And that's, that's the, the, the central kind of idea of our music. How do we share space with people that we don't necessarily agree with? So you think things are going well in that regard? Democracy is, in fact swinging. I think, I think that what I'm describing is a momentum and the momentum goes well or not. Well, based on your perspective for some people, it is going well for others. It's not a very loud drummer thinks things are going great. A bass player with an AMP would turn that amp up to 10 and think, man, this sounds great. All I hear is bass. But we have to realize when we're talking about momentum, you, you're inside of the ocean. You asked me how is a wave doing? It's a wave. Right. Right. So you draw a lot of, and that's a great parallel I have played in live music settings as you have. You and nobody wants the, the, the loudness wars, certainly not the audience. Um Tell me a little bit about draw draw some more connections for me. You know, jazz has a very clear set of elements of fundamentals. So does democracy. There are some parallels for me between those because clearly we're all playing in the same band. Well, the the fundamental, the fundamental of democracy is no king, right? OK. And because you don't have a king, then you have to figure out how to negotiate space. So in jazz, you can be the leader of a band, but if you solo all night. Uh One thing I mentioned, democracy has the element of choice. You can choose to expend as much of your energy as you can expend on the rights of others. Or you can expend it all on yourself. And what you think jazz is the same way one person could solo for 15 or 20 minutes and there could be nine other people lined up waiting to play and the rhythm section which is piano bass and drums, they tend to when you solo too long, they do a thing that we call. Breathe at the top of a cycle. We play on forms that are like a clock has a certain number of bars. When you play too long, the rhythm section goes and you can choose them to play through that. So the element of choice, the fact that we do not have a king and, and the fact that the more global your understanding is, the more you can perceive what other people are doing, the more successful you can be as a player in a group, but you may not be more successful as an individual. So, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I love that term. Breathe by the way, that's one of my favorite. Um So look, you, you gave a lecture in September Thurgood Marshall lecture and you talked about jazz and how it helped you see things differently in your life. And there's a line toward the end of that, that, that I'd like to repeat for the audience here because I think it's right on as to what we're talking about. If the democracy is to be accountable to itself and be what it says it is, we must be whatever it takes to make it be its truest self. You were distilling a lot of knowledge there. Right. Talk to me about that. What that means for our moment right now in this democracy. Well, it's a matter of each person's person with integrity because when you, when you lose your integrity, you have to remember that the loss of integrity is what is celebrated, your leadership becomes corrupted. A cycle is repeated over and over again. Your elites are intellectually corrupt, morally bankrupt and they're no longer accountable to any larger group only to themselves. It's a kind of companies who are only accountable to their board or their stockholders was the time when you had a baseball team, you could go to a company, they put your name on your, on the, on the Little League form or even coming from Canada, Louisiana. We had a company, let us play and segregated Louisiana. We put their name on our uniforms that they also gave us the uniforms and we played at the point at which you are no longer accountable to any community of people except those who you are fiscally responsible to. Then you lose a sense of responsibility and morality. You can no longer define who is the US, who is we and uh integrity is difficult. It has been difficult in jazz. Most of our festivals have the name jazz, but the music has nothing to do with jazz. The top three selling headliners of any jazz festival in the world is people who have never played the music at all. And it seems quite natural and normal because that's how corruption sets into things it sits on. I used to, I had a piece I wrote and I said, you see an eagle sitting on a crow's nest. His mind is in the east, but his head is in the west. He's lost his understanding and you get tired of being preached to because corruption has its own, its own momentum and the leadership lacks discipline, it lacks courage and mostly it lacks imagination then to have something that you're trying to lead people into, this is what we are going to do as a community. This is the direction we're going in. You then sink down into attacking other people because there's always a momentum to negativity and to violence and stupidity and uh to have the, the uh the acuity to understand those things. It's very difficult. We think it's easy but it's not. And then if you do have the acuity, they have the courage to stand against your own people who will be against you. It took Genghis Khan 20 years to defeat his own people. You know. So it's, it's very fundamental and simple. It's been repeated over and over again in the world. But there's always the masses of the universe know everything they went to schools and got degrees, they should have stayed home and been in the community and deal with stuff very fundamentally because we all live very fundamental lives no matter who we are. And you said the word repeat humanitarian, right? You were telling me backstage about something called the importance of repetitive form, symbolic repetition, symbolic, talking about it as a music term but clearly on that. Can you tell us what that means? Let's all think about because we seem like we're old enough to remember this. Let's all look back to our civics classes where we learned about the ci the city government. You go down to city hall and you would look at the council chambers and you would maybe you knew what was going on, but you was just happy to be out of school for a day. There was a form to that where these two houses, these, this is the such and such board. This is the, this, this is the mayor, this is what the mayor does. Then you were lucky enough to travel to another city in Louisiana, Baton Rouge. And we would go to the State Capitol and we would find this is where Huey P Long was shot. But this is what we do here. Then you say, wow this is a lot like the city government. Then when you get the federal government, you say this is like the city government is like the state government is like the federal government. That repetition of form allows you to understand how to function in the largest environment. And if you really think about it, the, the United States Federal Constitution is much shorter than any state constitution. So it's a when you repeat those forms as you're a kid, you start to understand what your power is. You know, Einstein said in 1949 that what what happens in democracy is that the people who have the most resources invest in communication and then they just flood people with propaganda and the people are no longer able to make intelligent choices that actually affect them. So he was talking about them. But we see that today because we use terms that are far too imprecise to communicate, like we say global. When you said I've been in 60 countries, you know what I realized in those 60 countries, global is a heart is a big word. But the one thing I do know is that people are doing the same thing in all of those countries. They have their families, they have their kids, they experience loss grief, they want the best for their people. Some are doing corrupt things. People will treat you to a good meal and if you have good manners and you know how to be polite and keep your mouth closed at the right time, you will be treated relatively well. And if you sense hostility and you act out of a sense of very common and normal fear, you'll avoid trouble. But ultimately, across the world, people want to love each other. It's not the fear that we have of everybody. When you get down on the ground floor, people want to love you. They want to do that. You know, you touch on this in a piece that you wrote. I don't know if you wrote it in 2018, but that's when it was first staged. Yeah. Yeah, I wrote it in 27. Um The ever funky low down ever called. And is it, is it an opera? What do we call it for? Piece of art? Um in it, you have a principal character named Mr Game, um explains how capitalism feasts on. The unfortunate. You talk about political malaise, you talk about cultural decay in America and how to rise above. You talked about global, you talked about a lot of different countries, but you have been one of the sharpest voices about this country. This is the only country I can come in. That's right for sure. I don't know other countries and not say anything except thank you. What should this room take away from that piece? Your integrity is personal back to you have to fight for when you, when you we have to step out on that windy precipice every day. We have thousands of decisions we have to make concerning others. One of the biggest mistakes we make in our country over and over again is we lack, we lack the, the fortitude to defend victories. North had a great victory over the South in the civil war. 10 years, they've given that victory back 12. If you see the end of reconstruction, that's all right. We lost 800,000 people. Don't worry about that. Let's go back to what we were, civil rights movement. A lot of great victories and possibilities. By 1980 we were saying, how can we pull this back and go away from this? Now we go around, hey, you want to know what with these parties are fighting over? I don't know what they're fighting over. I travel up and out in America. You want to be segregated. It is, you want the education to be unfair. It is. You want the job place to not be integrated. Don't worry, it's not. What are we fighting over? We just fighting over how we want to feel about it. We had a bunch of administrations. They all came to the same conclusion. We want this to be like this and we all have personal decisions that we can make and we never lose that ability to stand. I would always notice when I was growing up. If I would be in a tight situation, I grew up really in clubs sometimes late at night, ignorant things would happen. There was almost always a person who would say man, let's not do that. So this is not the right thing to do. I remember one time growing up, some, some younger kids started to attack a man who was looking at water meters and there was a guy in our neighborhood who was who, who had mental challenges and we were all kids. So we were just standing there looking at it and we knew something wrong was going on. And the person with mental challenges said out loud, this is wrong man. And he said it was so much feeling that it allowed us to kind of create a little clamor to let the man get away. We have to be willing to stand up to our own failures, our own lack of integrity, not looking at other people. And we have to always strive to do better. And that's why it's important for us every day to make those decisions and those choices. I have another question for you, but I would like to open it to the audience. If there's any questions for me or Winton, I'm being serious. I'm more serious, I think because we talk a lot of time. If you ask me a question, I would be nice. I'm looking here we go right up here in the front. Hey, Nathan, nice to see you, Nathan Rosenberg from insignia first of all your music, what a gift to the world. So, thank you for that. And what you've done here at Lincoln. Thank you. Thank you so much. OK. When you think about the platform that you have being an artist, um I'm not a politician. How do talking about integrity? How do you, how do you maintain the integrity of your word and the integrity of your art? Talking about things that are outside your everyday world. If it's not my expertise, I always say, I don't really know, but I think I'm not an expert in this. But if you ask my opinion, I will give it. I think this when I'm in other people's countries and I do interviews and I always tell them I'm not here to try to talk about your country. I don't understand. But, but if you put me in a position where I have to talk about mine, I will talk about yours is just good manners. And I go to many countries that the United States are not allies with and, and by and large people have respect that. And uh because I'm an artist, I don't have a military, I'm not trying to take stuff from people. So and I also am not accountable to people in, in any way, but to play good enough music for, don't want to continue to come in here and if they don't want to hear it, they just don't check it out or they don't come. So, uh I'm a public servant and that I have a responsibility to my craft and the seriousness and the, you know, I'm a person who II, I like people. So I will stand every night and sign every person's autograph. And for 45 years I've done that and I've learned more doing that almost and I learned playing and I learned that people just really want to know that it's OK to be themselves and they want to feel something that has a warmth to it. And uh when you're not naive and you're not, we are the world in it and you can just talk to people and say, hey, there are realities out here. People, people even the toughest people will embrace you. Sometimes, sometimes you have the other kind, you got to deal with that too. But our music is a tough music. You know, jazz is not a, is not a, a naive, naive music. We've had many great flo this month, Duke Ellington list goes Louis Armstrong. These are people who were very, very wise and uh and tough people. I have one more question for you and excuse me, it's related to that. You know, we're in a tribal moment. We are, but we've been in that moment. We have, we have not no different from that. We've been in that moment for a long time. We have, but you have a very clear view about the word community finding it. Who is it? Talk to me about that? Well, because after all this division, we need to pull together. Right. That depends on how expensive your view of the world is. Sure when a kid comes to me for a trumpet lesson, if it's in China or if it's in the suburbs of America or if it's in the hood, am I teaching them different things based on who they are? The feeling? I'm going to give them different? Well, it depends on my concept of the world. If I love them. If I hug them, if I teach them trumpet, like my trumpet, teachers taught me if I touch the universality in our instrument and I give them a feeling like, hey, now I, I, because I'm over 60. Now I tell my young people you're gonna have to change this. We messed it up. But that love that I'm giving them is not changing. I remember my father saw me once I was, I was in the hood in the school and I didn't, I dressed down, my father called me. He's a great musician and teacher. He said, man, I noticed you, you didn't have your suit on. I said, man, I'm in the hood, man. He told me, don't put this and that on. He said, when you get in the hood not up twice. And he's not a guy who dressed up like that, but he was a community worker. So I saw him growing up struggling the community with very few people setting out chairs and community centers teaching everybody's kids. Something about the music being hopeful when you would look at him and think, man, this is such a waste of time. But I still, now he's passed away. But I reflect on that call when you're in the hood, not a twice come for real come. Correct all the time. And I think, uh you know, it's, it's your sense of personal integrity is uh that's when you, when you deal with people, you, we are just in China, kids will come to me and say this is a picture of me and you in 1990. And you gave me a trumpet lesson. We played with the Shanghai symphony and the first trumpeter I had given him a lesson and musicians we listen to each other's albums. So no matter where I go in the world, I see people saying, here's your record. I checked out two cats from Uganda. I saw them on the street maybe 20 years ago. We have a program for high school students called essentially Ellington. And I saw him right out here on 66th street and they had pieces of music from essentially Ellington. And they said, oh brother, you know this music, this music. And I said, man, where did you get this music? Oh, a man brought it to us in Uganda. I said, man, you want to come to B and get something to drink with. I pour some coffee for them, sat down and talk to me were telling me how they encounter the music, music and ideas travel. So I feel like uh my, one of my heroes in the world is Muhammad Yunus. I love the fact that he understood that wealth means everybody is, is doing good when we all are doing good. We're doing good. I'm not gonna sound good with a bass player that mad because they never play. Even I played basketball growing up. You gotta give your, your big man. Even though they can't shoot, you gotta know how to give them a couple of shots in the game, man. OK. Here's some junk time shots for you to feel good about what these two misses you're gonna have. Oh, you know what I mean? But your point is good. The ideas flow, the music flows and hopefully the good feeling flows to pull society back together. Well, you got to be aggressive about it, right? Ladies and gentlemen, please give Wynton Marsalis a round of applause. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. It all together. You saying? Oh, of course.