Master Tapper Jared Grimes in 'Cotton Club Parade'

‘Cotton Club Parade’ brings back musical history 

By Valerie Gladstone

Cotton Club Parade opens with the robust Jazz at Lincoln Center All Stars, directed by Daryl Waters, swinging into “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love,” “I’ve Got the World on a String” and “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea,” offering a tantalizing taste of what’s to come.

Composed by Duke Ellington, Harold Arlen and Jimmy McHugh, the music sets the scene for a rollicking, sexy, funny and joyful recreation in song, dance and novelty acts of the legendary Harlem club where Ellington perfected his style in the ’20s and ’30s. Conceived by City Center’s Encores! artistic director Jack Viertel and Wynton Marsalis, artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, and directed and choreographed by Warren Carlyle, whose numerous credits include Chaplin, the 90-minute show returns to  City Center from Nov. 14 to 18, after a hugely successful debut last winter.

When Viertel and Marsalis began working on the inaugural collaboration of Jazz at Lincoln Center and Encores! in the spring of 2011, Marsalis liked the idea of starting off with Ellington. “Wynton calls him the font of everything that he’s done,” Viertel said recently. And what better way to celebrate him than at the Cotton Club, they agreed, where he perfected his array of styles between 1927 and 1931.

“There was entertainment at the club of an elegance no one had seen before,” Viertel says. Line-ups would feature greats like Bessie Smith, the Nicholas Brothers and Lena Horne. Hitting its zenith during the height of the Harlem Renaissance, it thrived in a neighborhood bursting with writers, artists, musicians, playwrights and fiery politicians; a period when Langston Hughes celebrated blacks’ history and gifts in his poetry.

But neither he nor Marsalis would ignore the Cotton Club’s racist policy of headlining blacks, yet not allowing them entry. That is at least until Ellington made such a fuss about it that the rules were eased. “We didn’t want to be overtly political,” says Viertel. “We felt in the very beauty and artistry of the performers, in their self-respect, that we would convey the atmosphere of the time. You can be sure that Wynton wouldn’t have allowed anything patronizing.”

They created a link between past and present through their choice of performers. Viertel gives Carlyle and Marsalis credit for choosing 25 singers and dancers of incomparable individuality and talent. Master tapper Jared Grimes, singers Adriane Lenox, Carmen Ruby Floyd, Amber Riley and all the others each have their moments in the spotlight. No one will forget Floyd’s crooning Ellington’s “Creole Love Call.” “When I talked over my interpretation with Daryl and Wynton,” Floyd says, “I said I thought I should sound like an angel. They thought I should sound like a sexy angel. There are no words, so I just make musical sounds. I do it differently every night – sometimes sad, sometimes fun and flirty. But Ellington’s music is so classic, no matter what you do, everyone relates to it.”

That’s what Carlyle likes about working with Floyd and other members of the cast. “We selected people who are innately musical,” he says, “who can translate music through their bodies. I’m using them like instruments. They have to get what the Cotton Club was all about, how very special it really was. Its time is lost to us now. We’ve all done our period research and checked out performers from the club on YouTube. But we weren’t going to do something old and dusty. For 90 fleeting minutes, we want the audience to experience what the Cotton Club was all about as if it were today.”

From CityArts

Wynton Marsalis may have been raised in New Orleans, but his heart is now firmly rooted in New York. An Upper West Sider since he came to study music at The Juilliard School three decades ago, Marsalis has become a giant of the music world and the leading public figure of jazz. He goes by many descriptions these days—trumpeter, composer, impresario, writer and educator, to name a few—but mostly he is known as an ardent advocate of jazz tradition and the only artistic director Jazz at Lincoln Center has ever known.

Curiously, despite such a legacy of achievement in music, Council Member Gale Brewer remembers Marsalis primarily as a basketball player. Brewer first met Marsalis years ago when she headed to the courts for some pickup with co-workers. That’s where she encountered a jump shooter with a deft touch who everyone else

Wynton Marsalis has released more than 45 recordings, won nine Grammy Awards and received the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Music. Photo By: Andrew Schwartz

referred to as “the famous man.” It was only when Brewer went to a Lincoln Center concert years later that she made the connection.

“Not only does he head up Jazz at Lincoln Center but he also plays basketball on the various city courts on the West Side,” Brewer said.

So it turns out Marsalis has some game. But it’s doubtful his chops are as good with a basketball as they are with a trumpet. This is the guy, after all, who began playing with jazz legend Art Blakey when he was only a teenager.

Since then, he has released more than 45 recordings, won nine Grammy Awards and received the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Music for his oratorio Blood on the Fields. He also helped found the jazz program at Lincoln Center in 1987, shepherded it first to full constituent status and then to its expansive, current home at the Time Warner Center. But Marsalis is an equally well-known teacher.

“He does a wonderful job of arts education,” Brewer said. “I’ve seen him at middle schools, the Apollo Theater, Brandeis High School. He has a touch for getting kids involved with jazz and interested in listening to it.”

Musically, Marsalis is known mostly for bringing jazz back to its roots by forming a neotraditionalist movement after a fuzzy era of fusion and the avant-garde. But it is hard to place his efforts within strict limits. Marsalis has made plenty of classical recordings and composed nearly as many works for dance, including several efforts for the New York City Ballet.

His most recent efforts include a live album of blues with Willie Nelson and a heavily political rap song, Where Y’All At?, that calls out, among others, “All you ’60s radical and world beaters/Righteous revolutionaries and Camus readers.”
As Brewer said, “There’s only one Wynton Marsalis.”