Wynton Marsalis’s “All Rise” Brings 200 Performers to Edinburgh

At Heinz Hall in Pittsburgh, Wynton Marsalis is easy to miss. He first appeared there in 1984 as a 22-year-old soloist playing Haydn out front; now he sits among the strings and woodwinds, half-concealed inside his own symphony. “It’s my piece,” he said the next morning, “but it’s not my show.”

All Rise, written in 1999 as Marsalis’s first symphony, spans 12 movements and was conceived for a 15-piece jazz band, a 50-player orchestra and a 100-voice choir. Kurt Masur kept urging him to write for the New York Philharmonic. James Oliverio helped him learn orchestration; bassoonist Milan Turković advised on woodwinds. The portrait of the solitary composer keeps being interrupted by people who did some of the work.

Its large-scale plan is a 12-bar blues:^*1 four movements for birth and self-discovery, four for error and redemption, four for maturity and joy. These are not twelve conventional blues tunes. Marsalis takes the proportion of the form and enlarges it into a journey lasting nearly three hours.

The central problem was not how to decorate jazz with an orchestra. It was how to organise time. Orchestral double basses do not play continuously; a jazz bass usually carries the pulse throughout. Symphonic percussion may supply an accent, while in jazz and Latin music rhythm can be the structure itself. All Rise does not pretend these jobs are interchangeable.

Marsalis therefore makes the ensembles alter one another rather than merely double one another. The jazz band must deliver written material with orchestral precision; the orchestra must accept a swinging pulse and blues phrasing; the choir carries a dramatic line rather than serving as decoration. The method recalls Third Stream,^*2 though Marsalis is not looking for a polite midpoint between genres.

On 8 August, All Rise opens the Edinburgh International Festival at Usher Hall with more than 200 performers: the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Edinburgh Festival Chorus and Jason Max Ferdinand Singers. James Gaffigan conducts; the listed duration is roughly two hours and 40 minutes, including two intervals. Even a thesis about unity needs room to breathe.

Marsalis speaks about togetherness, but the score makes a more specific argument. A shared sound arrives not when everybody plays alike, but when each ensemble changes part of its working habit while keeping the thing no other ensemble can do for it. That is no longer a slogan about unity. It is a rehearsal problem solved in notation.

The idea is also visible in the composer’s place onstage. Marsalis was once the youngest authority in the orchestra; now, as he steps back from executive leadership at Jazz at Lincoln Center, he talks about the players capable of carrying the work forward. A trumpet can still try to bring down a wall. Here the harder achievement is getting the other 200 people through the entrance together.