Black Codes (From The Underground)

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Ever since the early 1980, trumpet virtuoso Wynton Marsalis has sought to change the conversation about jazz and its place in American culture. And to this day, as director of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, he‘s never stopped. His first two albums for Columbia (<i>Wynton Marsalis</i> and <i>Think of One</i>) were solidly smoking small-group affair, followed by the Wynton-with-strings offering <i>Hot House Flowers</i>. But it was 1985’s <i>Black Codes (From the Underground)</i> that would prove to be Marsalis’ fiery magnum opus—as well as arguably the single greatest document of what became known as the Young Lions era. The writing on <i>Black Codes (From the Underground)</i> is rhythmically and harmonically imposing, and the swing from bassist Charnett Moffett and Jeff “Tain” Watts is unstoppable. The blended sound of Marsali, his older brother Branford Marsalis (tenor sax), and Kenny Kirkland (piano) was something sublime, on another plane. What this was not, however, was the “return” of acoustic jazz, a style that had never gone away, despite how culturally sidelined by fusion it may have become in the 1970. Marsalis and the <i>Black Codes</i> quintet did, however, set a new benchmark in terms of sonic clarity and color and band interplay in the acoustic setting. .

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