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7/12/2004
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'All Rise' rises to the occasion

By Andrew L. Pincus
Special to The Eagle

LENOX -- In a nation divided between black and white, straight and gay, Christian and Jew, Wynton Marsalis' long but irresistibly likable "All Rise" is a call to the melting pot.

In this Pulitzer Prize-winning synthesis of symphonic music and jazz, the blues become a metaphor for life's sorrows and joys. The words and music may come out of the African-American experience (so the message goes) but we're all in this together. And we're not just talking music.

We're talking many musics.

Marsalis lists some elements in a program note: "everything from the didgeridoo, ancient Greek music, fugue, the New Orleans funeral cadence, the fiddler's reel, the clave, the naningo, the American popular song, Eastern and Near-Eastern scales, and plain old down-home ditties."

And a full-dress symphony orchestra, of course. And gospel: The gospel tradition is strong. And spirituals. And probably more.

But, Marsalis adds, "I don't strive to combine many different styles in a 'world-music' type of melange. I only try to hear that they are the same."

That's it, folks. "All Rise," performed by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Marsalis' Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, the Tanglewood Festival Chorus and four vocal soloists at Tanglewood Friday night, ain't world music and it ain't crossover. It's itself, and it made a grand and refreshing opening to the BSO season under the conductor who had commissioned it for the New York Philharmonic, Kurt Masur.

"All Rise" -- the title comes from the last of its 12 movements, an exhortation to rise for God -- does not arise out of a vacuum.

In the beginning, there was the symphonic jazz of Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong. Stravinsky and Ravel incorporated jazz elements into their classical compositions. Gershwin wrote "Rhapsody in Blue." Gunther Schuller and his Third Stream brethren attempted a fusion.

But the composition that "All Rise" most nearly suggests is Leonard Bernstein's "Chichester Psalms." The differences are instructive.

Bernstein set biblical texts to a Broadway beat and blare -- a collision of elements.

Using texts of his own making, Marsalis also invokes the Bible, but as filtered through the black experience ("Come by, Lord, come by, Lord, / Hear me prayin' won't you come by, Lord"). The music and material are one.

Jazz avant-gardists complain that Marsalis is too conservative. The argument can safely be left to the aficionados. The point here is that over its two-hour course, "All Rise" pulses with infectious vitality.

In the second movement, the chorus chants "112," over and over, with childlike glee (Marsalis says his son sang the chant for two hours straight on a train ride). The sixth movement, "Cried, Shouted, Then Sung," is a New Orleans jazz funeral, complete with screams of lament from the brasses and a foot-stamping, hand-clapping chorus. The tenth movement is a woo-woo, chug-chug, clang-clang evocation of trains, "the ultimate dance machine."

On the podium, the 76-year-old Masur shimmed and danced to the beat like a true-believing jazzman, though he came up in the German symphonic tradition. At times, he had only to stand and listen as Marsalis' jazz band took off on improvisatory flights.

The BSO had performed the 1999 composition under Masur last December in Symphony Hall. On a tight rehearsal schedule here, the BSO performance was understandably less polished than that of the nattily dressed jazz band, which put on a spectacular show: This is a great bunch of musicians. Marsalis took only a limited solo role -- also spectacular, of course -- for himself, leaving most trumpet solos to his colleagues.

Though the vocal solos are not big, soprano Laquita Mitchell, mezzo-soprano Cynthia Renee Hardy, tenor Brian Robinson and bass-baritone Robert Honeysucker sent them out into the night like a glory train. Singing from memory as usual, John Oliver's chorus added a lusty assent.

History has not been kind to symphonic jazz. In the symphonic canon, only "Rhapsody in Blue" endures, and it is primarily a Pops piece. With "All Rise," let's see what happens.