wynt-o-mania

Begun in mid-2004, Wynt-o-Mania is an ongoing project which lampoons jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis. It’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it.

Why? Well, “If you have to ask, you’ll never know”—unless you read it!

Yes, it’s a dirty job—and a huge one. There’s a lot to grumble about! I know it looks mean to pick on just him. but really I think everyone else has got it about right.

At the moment Wynt-o-Mania is circulated once or twice monthly to a small but faithful bunch of like-minded (or long-suffering) individuals. You can subscribe by email, using the link on this page, or you can use it to request the URL, Name, and Password you’ll need to view The Incomplete Wynt-o-Mania, which I”m slowly assembling in .pdf form in the Public Folder of my MobileMe site.

So one day Wynt-o-Mania will have a website of its own, and The Complete Wynt-o-Mania will then all be compiled into a single volume—hopefully for publication—called In Search Of Wynton Marsalis: Last Man of Jass©®™ (alluding the book In Search of Buddy Bolden: First Man of Jazz by Donald M. Marquis).

Here’s a sample of what to expect—it’s from from ‘The Curious Case of Wynjamin Mutton’.

Enjoy—if you can…!

He is born, as he later says, under unusual circumstances: the watchmaker I. Dunseen Yomama has handcrafted a priceless timepiece which runs backward, in the hope that it may transport its wearer back to a better time and place. But as yet, there is no one who can possibly afford to wear it… It is October 18, 1961, and in New Orleans, a shivering bundle lies abandoned on the porch of 319 Howard Street. It is Wynjamin Mutton. The doctor describes the tiny, bald, wrinkled infant as being “like a man in his eighties, well on his way to the grave.” He prescribes Coke©®™, but, miraculously, the child survives. As soon as he is big enough to be fitted with a set of miniature dentures, the infant Mutton is able to play the trumpet like a seasoned Maestro. It is almost as if he has learnt to play whilst in the womb (though, of course, this is not at all unusual today, due to modern ‘hot-housing’ educational techniques). While still in short pants, the child can already play the entire Classical repertoire better than any other exponent, living or dead. But despite all his early successes, there is clearly something terribly wrong with him. It is almost as if, while everybody else is aging, he is getting younger. On his first day at Juilliard, aged five, he realizes that Classical music can offer him no more technical challenges. Or expressive ones, for that matter. He leaves immediately without completing the course. In his desperation, he turns his juvenile attentions to an obscure and unpopular American music called ‘jazz’.
The ten-year old Maestro commences an anally retentive study of the works of Miles Davis, and his very first attempts in this genre are brilliantly successful, attracting much critical acclaim. He appears to have instantly assimilated

what had taken his role model an entire lifetime to perfect. He dismisses earlier forms of ‘jazz’ as “ancient.”
In his teens, the adolescent Mutton performs the solo from John Coltrane’s recording of ‘Countdown’ note-for-note—a feat which its composer (who has long since forgotten how to play) could not match even at the height of his powers. In his twenties, he breezes through hard bop, easily outperforming Art Blakey’s former alumni Lee Morgan and Clifford Brown. He swiftly assimilates the rhythmic and harmonic simplicities of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie’s bebop ‘string of solos’ routine, and quickly becomes bored once again. In his thirties, he completes an anally retentive study of one of the more traditional forms of ‘jazz’ which he had once dismissed out of hand.He performs every single piece of music Benny Goodman ever wrote more convincingly then their composer ever did. By the end of his fourth decade, he has learned how to Swing. In mid-life, Mutton is taken in by two elderly and equally reactionary writers, whose only practical involvement with music is that one was a sometime neighbour of Duke Ellington, while the other is a failed ‘free-jazz’ drummer. In a de facto attempt to rationalize Mutton’s musical gumbo, they conspire to brainwash the youthful-looking forty-something-year old by telling him that ‘jazz’ is in fact Classical music after all. Which it plainly is not. And that it must correctly be called ‘Jass©®™’. Wrong again. And then they call him a genius because he does exactly what they tell him. Which is to undertake an anally retentive study of the complete works of Duke Ellington. In his fifties, they appoint him CEO of the

purpose-built Jass©®™@LC at the AOL©®™/Time©®™–Warner©®™ Center. But he very soon finds that there are not enough hours in the day for him to execute fully all the tasks of such an office. Fortunately, he is now in a position where he is able to employ an amanuensis to undertake this particular anally retentive study on his behalf, in the hope of decoding the hitherto elusive ‘Ellington Effect’ for the first time. He has the poor unfortunate fellow score an interminable series of symphonies, operas, cantatas, oratorios, masses, song-cycles, and ballets from his hastily-scribbled pencil sketches, for which he himself then takes all the credit. He modestly accepts a Pulitzer Prize for Music on behalf of the long-deceased Duke Ellington as if it were being awarded to himself.
In his sixties, he begins yet another anally retentive study, this time of the trumpet playing of Louis Armstrong, in the belief that the complexities of his ancient ‘Jass©®™’ will release his own authentic voice at last. But as usual, it is someone else’s. In his seventies, while hordes of minions slave away transcribing his every honk, parp, and smear for posterity, he lectures mega-corporations on the benefits of incorporating democratic ‘Jass©®™’ principles into their everyday working practices. He indoctrinates small children and grown adults alike with the fictitious, simplistic, Disney©®™esque myth of ‘Jass©®™’ history fed to him by his advisors. He is endlessly photographed embracing the movers and shakers of the USA in an attempt to extort vast sums of money from them to…

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