Two Men With The Blues

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TRUMPETER WYNTON MARSALIS has said that a jazz ensemble works best “when participation is shaped by intelligent communication.” In other words, great jazz music emerges from working together.

That democratic quality is something Marsalis shares with Willie Nelson, the unlikely Texas troubadour of good times and bad times, longing and acceptance.

The two musicians have played together before, but here we have palpable proof of their chemistry thanks to this notable 2007 performance at Jazz at Lincoln Center, called "Two Men with the Blues," for which they appeared together performing jazz classics. This performance features a meeting of the musical minds, with the Louisiana inflections of Marsalis mixing with the Texas twang of Nelson on jump-blues standards such as “Bright Lights, Big City,” “Ain’t Nobody’s Business” and “Basin Street Blues.”

While neither musician projects the abject self-pity of a worn-down blues vocalist, each is able to inhabit a song thoroughly, imbuing vocals and instrumentals with a universality that arises out of genuine feeling. In fact, both musicians serve as ad hoc ambassadors for American music, given their open-hearted embrace of a variety of genres, of a democracy of musical influences.

Given that Willie Nelson gives everything he sings a country shape, that is, a laid-back determination to get the point across without shaking you by the collar, his singing on such standards as Hoagy Carmichael’s “Stardust” and even the Ray Charles classic “Georgia on My Mind” has a wistful quality that may evoke the solitary weariness of a late-night rural roadhouse rather than the urgent 3 a.m. last-call of an urban gin mill. But with Marsalis and a five-piece band providing exceptional backup and even some Louis Armstrong-New Orleans style swing, what we hear from Nelson and Marsalis is the common ground of jazz: hard-won knowledge, the sense that joy is fleeting so take it when you can, and the realization that the way to punch back sorrow is to sing out until it’s gone.

Nelson has collaborated with many other musicians in his long career, as has Marsalis, so it’s only natural that their own collaboration should prove so fruitful, indeed, ecstatic. If this isn’t blues in the old-time sense of lost causes and 12-bar laments, it’s the blues as a release from troubles, through the practiced hands of master musicians.