Photo Credit: Martha Stewart
By Tom LoBianco
Democratic society must have the same elements as a successful jazz band–agreement, an open door, and friction–legendary jazz musician Wynton Marsalis told students and faculty at the Harvard Kennedy School last week in conversation with Center for Public Leadership Faculty Director Anthony Foxx.
At the event, co-hosted by the vlog Institute of Politics and CPL in the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum, Marsalis told stories from his youth and career, showing lessons of how to lead by keeping people together.
Asked how to improvise, Marsalis said there must be agreement–in music as in society–on basics, rhythm, the basic value of every human.
“If I'm playing in rhythm and you're playing a totally different rhythm, we're not going to agree,” Marsalis said. “And not only are we not going to agree, we’re not going to sound good. And if we don't have the same understanding of what we're trying to do on the bandstand, we're going to have a hard time.”
Marsalis recounted first learning how to circular breathe in high school and promptly launching into a blazing three-minute solo. The audience loved it. But his father, the patriarch of the famous Marsalis family of musicians, reprimanded him, “‘Hey, man, the circus is down the street.’”
His father’s lesson for him was he needed to work as part of the band.
“Those are the things that can teach our country,” he said of his father’s lesson for him. “If we cannot agree that the Constitution is a document designed to create agency for others, that it is a leveling document, we can’t have a democracy.”
“If we cannot agree that the Constitution is a document designed to create agency for others, that it is a leveling document, we can’t have a democracy.”
Foxx pressed on this point, noting the current political atmosphere across the world, “One might ask the question, ‘Are we irreparably divided?’”
“We’re not, let’s be real,” Marsalis said, ticking through long-running efforts to undue the victories of the Civil Rights Movement decades ago. Battles over civil rights and equality stretch over the course of history, longer than any single term in the White House, he said.
Marsalis’ talk, preceded by a lunch conversation with CPL, kicked off his collaboration with the CPL Culture and Civil Society Initiative. The initiative, which is led by Secretary Foxx, focuses on the impact of culture and art on democracy and society.
Marsalis, who is the Managing and Artistic Director of Jazz at the Lincoln Center, and a Pulitzer Prize Winner, drew from his storied career to outline the lessons of leadership for the vlog community.
“Open the door to others,” he said. “Create the situation where people can learn the jobs. Let equity be what you strive for.”
CPL’s new effort to find the lessons of leadership in art and culture comes amid a highly chaotic moment in American leadership.
Leading in times like these is akin to playing the blues, Marsalis explained.
“If you check out Shakespeare, Beethoven, William Butler Yeats, Duke (Ellington), (Thelonious) Monk, you always…have two opposite things and you hold them in balance. That is the nature of human life, the friction of those things,” Marsalis said. “Without friction, you don't have any energy. And it's the friction of opposites.”
Marsalis drives the country to teach and perform, he doesn’t fly. (Foxx joked that meant he’s probably logged more miles than any presidential candidate in American history.) He recounted a drive through Memphis with his windows rolled down, he listened to a man on the corner strumming his guitar and humming.
“That’s alright, babyyyyy, Dum duh dee dee dum. Baby, that’s alright,” Marsalis recounted the man singing. “Whoever ‘Baby’ was hurt my man,” Marsalis said as the audience laughed. “But the fact that he can say it makes it name-able.”
“And when you make something name-able and you put form to it, it’s containable. And once it’s containable, you can come to grips with it,” Marsalis said. “Now after you contain it and you name it, now you’re playing with it.”
And Marsalis went back to singing.
Watch the entire discussion
Images by Martha Stewart