There once was a time when American television embraced jazz, with artists such as Billie Holiday, Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald and Ahmad Jamal bringing their sublime music to millions of viewers.
Television specials such as CBS’ “The Sound of Jazz” and the nationally syndicated series “Jazz Scene USA” proved that the 1950s and ’60s represented a golden era not just for live comedy but for American music, as well.
Those days may be long past, but occasionally a great jazz performance will defy the odds and win a spot on national TV, which is exactly what has happened for this week’s installment of “Sessions at West 54th Street.” The new public television series, which delves into a variety of musical genres, will present the world television premiere of Wynton Marsalis’ “Blood on the Fields” at 10 minutes after midnight Saturday on WTTW-Ch. 11.
The occasion is significant, and not just because Marsalis’ epic vocal-instrumental piece was the first jazz work to win the Pulitzer Prize in music earlier this year. More important, “Sessions at West 54th Street” presents “Blood on the Fields” with a degree of respect and dignity that TV rarely accords jazz these days.
Typically, the music is consigned to brief cameos on TV, as in the annual Grammy Awards, or worse. Just last December, for instance, “The Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz 10th Anniversary Gala Celebration” forced serious musicians to share the spotlight with a bare-chested dancer who slithered around the stage on his belly.
What a startling change of pace, then, to see the “Sessions” telecast of “Blood on the Fields,” which offers an hour of glorious music uninterrupted and undemeaned. Though this is essentially a collection of highlights from the three-hour work, it’s presented so artfully that it likely will whet viewers’ appetites to learn more about the piece.
As its title implies, “Blood on the Fields” addresses the tragedy of slavery in America, but it does so in thoroughly human terms. Specifically, the piece traces the turbulent journey of two slaves, Jesse and Leona, from Africa to America. Through the horrors they face in transit and on the plantation, they learn a great deal about each other, about themselves and about the nature of freedom.
No doubt this is weighty fare for American TV in the ’90s, but Marsalis’ musical treatment of this story makes it accessible to a modern audience. He opens with a grand jazz overture played by the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, its steeped-in-blues melody lines and magnificent swing rhythms evoking the musical language of Duke Ellington’s large suites.
But this is much more than some visit into the jazz past, as Marsalis establishes early on with the grinding dissonances and emotional fury of his horn calls. To hear Marsalis improvising freely, plunger mute in hand, while the band roars behind him is to understand anew the man’s appeal as trumpet virtuoso and bandleader.
Before long, the vocalists have taken the stage, with Jon Hendricks depicting a greedy slave buyer in “Soul for Sale.” Only the most stone-hearted listener will not be moved to hear Hendricks singing these words: “Checking their teeth and hairlines/Pinching a buck whose skin shines/Looking for brown concubines/Soul for Sale.”
That these chilling lyrics are dispatched by a black singer in a black musical idiom only adds to the irony of the scene and the pungency of its message.
By drawing from a broad range of musical forms–from the blues setting of “Will the Sun Come Out” to the early New Orleans parade music of “Freedom is in the Trying”–Marsalis evokes a long and majestic history of black music in America. The performers at hand live up to this challenge, particularly in the honeyed contralto vocals of Cassandra Wilson and the edgy, high-pitched singing of Miles Griffith.
Through it all, the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra acquits itself beautifully, most notably in the fervently lyric playing of trombonist Ronald Westray, the searing alto saxophone work of Wess Anderson and the larger-than-life tuba and trombone solos of Wycliffe Gordon, all longtime Marsalis collaborators.
But it’s when the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra is playing at full tilt, its plush reed choirs and aggressive brass units swinging in unison, that the full power of “Blood on the Fields” becomes apparent. This is jazz orchestral writing of the most erudite sort, with themes and counterthemes woven deeply into the ensemble texture.
On television, of course, sound is only half the story. To their credit, the producers of “Sessions at West 54th Street” keep the camera moving without disturbing the rhythm and flow of the music. This televised “Blood on the Fields,” then, engages the eye without distracting the ear, a considerable feat in today’s quick-edit MTV world.
Still, one yearns to see the entire “Blood on the Fields” on TV, if only because the highlights cannot show the full depth of the work. Television viewers, in other words, will not experience the profound “Move Over” section, which captures the nightmarish passage on a slave ship, nor the “Plantation Coffle March,” with its grim, death-march rhythms.
Considering the strength of the piece and its popular appeal (the three-CD “Blood on the Fields” recording stands at No. 5 on the Billboard jazz chart), public TV’s “Live at Lincoln Center” ought to broadcast the work in its entirety.
Then the whole country could see and hear why “Blood on the Fields” stands among the most important compositions by an American master in the ’90s.
