Amazon.com

Wynton Marsalis's century-closing series of jazz and classical recordings isn't nearly the pulse-quickening excursion one might expect, what with all the fanfare and all the years the vaunted trumpeter has spent in the limelight. That said, his nod to Jelly Roll Morton is probably one of the better Marsalis recordings available. It's got enough rules built in--compositional economy, instrumental variation, etc.--that it disciplines the trumpeter's more ambitious tendencies. In the liner notes, Marsalis describes Morton dually as a jazz intellectual and a streetwise hustler, and anyone familiar with Morton will know the characterization is apt. Marsalis's read of Morton, however, skips the street hustle and instead focuses on cleanly drawn portraits that amount to fine repertory pieces, works akin to chamber music in their ultimate impact. That's not so much of a putdown as it might seem, as African-American composers are so rarely treated the way European and Euro-American composers are. Morton knew this and wrote his way around it, much as Duke Ellington and Charles Mingus did. And Jelly Roll's stomping-good-time melodies are here to show his knowledge of both his audience and his compositional chops. But if you're expecting something innovative or hair-raising in the way of Marsalis rediscovering an untapped Jelly Roll vein, you'll be greeted instead with full-bore, horn-rich charts that swing strongly. And that ain't half bad. --Andrew Bartlett