Wynton Marsalis’ The Shanghai Suite At Hong Kong Academy For Performing Arts

Lincoln Centre Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis
Lyric Theatre, The Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts
"An Evening of Swing" & "Wynton Marsalis' Birthday Celebration"
Hong Kong
October 17-18, 2024

How does Wynton Marsalis spend his birthday? On the road, of course. The venerable champion of all things jazzy and traditional celebrated his 63rd birthday onstage in Hong Kong on October 18, the second in a duo of divergent dates leading his Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra (JLCO), which taken consecutively felt like two sides of the same coin. At the run's close there was cake. There was a down dirty trounce through "Happy Birthday," and there was even a roaring small-group encore of his 1983 banger "Knozz-Moe-King" that might have finally satiated anyone who bought tickets to hear the birthday boy blow his horn.

Before all that though, the second night's formal programme was devoted entirely to a revival of Marsalis' The Shanghai Suite, which despite its 75-minute scope, marks a distinctly undaring musical experiment. Originally composed to inaugurate the opening of Jazz at Lincoln Center Shanghai in 2019, the nine-movement opus apparently distils Marsalis' impressions of the Eastern entrepot, just as Duke Ellington did with the "Far East Suite" and "Latin American Suite." It must be said then that Marsalis' impressions are somewhat surface level—while there are cursory illusions to Chinese pentatonic scales detectable in some of the horn lines, and a few irregular bar cycles, this is not the great (yawn) "magnificent fusion of Eastern and Western cultures" the programme promised. (It was interesting to watch the man himself squirm, pre-show, when asked by a Chinese journalist his favorite Hong Kong food: "That's difficult. Soup noodles. What do you call them? Soup dumplings? The dumpling with the soup in it?")

Which doesn't mean it wasn't a rollicking ride all the same, rooted firmly down South rather than in the Far East. The nine tunes varied from up-tempo blues stompers ("Hot Pot!"—which, sorry Wynton, is not "the same" as gumbo) to a lilting waltz ("White Yulan—First Flower of Spring"), but the general mode was swing—and despite the reams of fresh sheet music in front of them, the 15-piece JLCO swept through Marsalis' lengthy but light score with ease, the dozen horn players all getting at least a few bars to stand and blow. In that respect, Marsalis is the most generous of bandleaders, only letting rip himself on the closing "Shanghai Skyline."

In truth, the suite felt less like an experiment in fusion and more like an exercise in genre studies—Marsalis the overeager prodigy fulfilling a university assignment to pen a "jazz suite with Chinese characteristics." This sense of shallowness wasn't helped by the composer's earnest, Wiki-style explanations for the naming of each song, which might have struck some audience members as slightly tone deaf. While it's nice to play up an homage to a Tang dynasty poet with "Li Bai's Blues," it seems no one has bothered to point out to Wynton that "The Nine Dragons" (incidentally the piece's most overly Eastern-influenced number) shares a name with Kowloon, one of Hong Kong's three main geographic areas.

If The Shanghai Suite was the homework assignment, then the first night was a share-your-sources-with-the-class explainer. Billed as "An Evening of Swing," it was the kind of show that makes you realise why people say the things they do about Marsalis. Most of the material was drawn from the 1930s; veering through cartoonish dixie and blues workouts, so it was the slower, funkier and better-known charts that stood out—the standards "Summertime" and "Stardust" (another rare solo vehicle for the bandleader), Ellington's "Warm Valley" and Count Basie's "Swinging the Blues." In typical JLCO fashion each of the 13 tunes was preceded by an introduction of not just its name and composer, but also its arranger, notable recordings and even featured soloists. Watching these labored monologues fly amiably over the heads of a multilingual post-work Hong Kong audience, who probably just wanted to get down, felt like the very definition of all those "museum jazz" tags hung around Marsalis' neck. There's no doubt Wynton is dedicated and doing a good job—and a visit to Lincoln Center might do what it says on the tin—but as a touring international spectacle, the format perhaps needs a rethink. And if you devote a fifth of your 75-minute set to lecturing, and don't even return for an encore (on opening night), it's likely some portion of the audience will leave feeling short changed.

The Shanghai Suite is being released by Jazz at Lincoln Center's Blue Engine Records label on October 25, probably by the time this snapshot is published, so best to leave it to scholars to absorb and analyze the complete work, but this was Marsalis' brief comments backstage: "It's just the nine movements. It's very inspired by folklore and different things. It's jazz, but it has a different flavor, a different approach. It's very unusual stuff that we do. It's complicated. The melodies and the harmonies and the way of approaching the music. When you hear it, you'll hear what it is. Different forms, bar forms—like five-bar forms, ten bars—and harmonic progressions that have a pentatonic scale. It's the same pentatonic as the blues—it's only one pentatonic. I mean, it's five notes that are spaced ... but what it means is different."

Full set lists

October 17

Mary's Idea
Lonesome Road
Summertime
San Sue Strut
Stardust
Big Noise From Winnetka
Chant Of The Weed
Warm Valley
Flaming Sword
The Maid With The Flaccid Air
Swinging The Blues
Early Autumn
Tom Cat Blues
Well, Git It!

October 18

The Shanghai Suite
I: Swinging On The Bund
Ii: The Monkey King's March
Iii: White Yulan—first Flower Of Spring
Iv: Hot Pot!
V: The Nine Dragons
Vi: Li Bai's Blues
Vii: The Five Elements
Viii: From The Casanova To The Peace Hotel...
Ix: Shanghai Skyline
Happy Birthday
Knozz-Moe-King (encore)

Comments