Long shot

Wynton's epic comes to Symphony Hall

by Jon Garelick

When is a piece of music too long? Blood on the Fields, Wynton Marsalis's piece for vocalists and jazz band, is the latest contender to raise the question. At three hours, it dwarfs any single work by a jazz composer, including Duke Ellington's extended works. It's a question the classical music world has long been used to: a "flaw" of Schubert's piano sonatas is that they're too long, but on the other hand, where do you cut them?

That sentiment was echoed by an acquaintance on the Mass Ave bus after Marsalis and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra's sold-out performance of Blood on the Fields last Friday in Symphony Hall, as part of the BankBoston Celebrity Series. "You could make an argument for any of those sections being in there," he said. What's more, it was a stirring performance.

Marsalis has tried other long-form pieces -- two of them on albums, In This House, on This Morning (a piece based on African-American church services), and the dance piece Citi Movement. Blood on the Fields, premiered in 1994, is the most successful. The narrative looks at slavery in America through the lives of two central characters, Leona (sung by Cassandra Wilson) and Jesse (Miles Griffith). The veteran jazz vocalist Jon Hendricks plays a slave buyer and a comic trickster/wise man named Juba. We follow the characters' lives from the "middle passage" from Africa (where Jesse was a prince and Leona a commoner) through to their escape to the North many years later. The 13-piece band served as a Greek chorus, introducing most of the 21 sections with spoken narrative.

The piece is held together by music as well as narrative. There are recurring motifs -- Afro-Caribbean piano vamps, New Orleans second-line parade rhythms, the blues, and a shuffle rhythm punctuated by handclap and foot stomp. What's more, the transformation of the characters is reflected in the music. That handclap takes on a new meaning by the end of the piece, just as Jesse's life does.

Yes, it's long (and the Symphony Hall chairs were no help), but individual sections move with swift economy. There are no grandstanding passages for soloist and rhythm section (turns by guest pianist Marcus Roberts and violinist Regina Carter were the least essential). Usually, the solos were orchestrated with rich complementary activity in other sections of the band. Marsalis himself took a stunning turn in the "Back to Basics" instrumental section, ratcheting the tension with his coiled plunger-mute statements. But there were also rapid successions of trading fours among trombones, saxes, and trumpets, and Marsalis built up to his greatest solo frenzy while a lot of this was going on. The passage settled down and faded out to some eerily lovely repeated four-note phrases from the saxes.

Many composers write for large jazz band differently from what Marsalis does (George Russell, Muhal Richard Abrams, Carla Bley, Steve Lacy, the late Julius Hemphill), but I can't think of anyone who's doing it better. He's a wizard at blending voices and yet getting each individual instrument to sound -- he knows how to keep everything in focus at once, from foreground melodies to supporting harmonies and background countermelodies, from top to bottom. Cassandra Wilson's vibrato-laden reading of the gospel number "Oh We Have a Friend in Jesus" drew sustenance from Wycliffe Gordon's low held tuba notes.

Marsalis's sung libretto is serviceable if smartly paced -- alternating uptempo and slow passages, ballads and fast scat. Hendricks in particular gets a couple of star turns, and Griffith has a rasping, soul-shout delivery. Marsalis, though, isn't the first composer to struggle with an English libretto that won't project -- all over Symphony Hall, listeners kept their eyes glued to the text in order to hear the words. And though the individual pieces were acceptable as vocal "parts," I didn't hear any great songs.

That said, the piece is durable. In some sections, Marsalis has pushed himself as far as I've ever heard him go with polyphony and massed counterpoint -- that is, with discordant, "ugly" sound. And this is the first of his pieces that I think finds its length by internal logic, and not merely by the composer's ambition. As a jazz purist, he's found the perfect material. Looking at the past, he can continue to mine jazz's history and reconfigure it in his own voice. As a social humanist -- one for whom the democracy of jazz is a living metaphor -- Blood on the Fields represents his most fully realized vision. The piece ended not with the last note by the band but with the audience continuing the band's syncopated clapping. If Blood on the Fields is about compassion and healing, this joining of artists and audience in community was as real as it gets.