1. The Big Scream (Black Elk Speaks)
2: The Big Show
3: Lost in Sight (Post-Pastoral)
4: La Esquina
5: Us
6: Struggle in the Digital Market
New York City: ‘the most fluid, pressure-packed and cosmopolitan metropolis the modern world has ever seen’, according to Wynton Marsalis. And he should know, having lived there on and off since 1979, when he arrived from New Orleans to study at the Juilliard School. Tapping into this near-40-year relationship, in 2016 the New York Philharmonic commissioned Marsalis to write a work on ‘New York-inspired themes’ for its 175th-anniversary season. The result, a sprawling, 65-minute symphony subtitled ‘The Jungle’, pays loving homage to the city, capturing its melting-pot culture and frenetic energy across six movements.
Marsalis announces the work with a burst of orchestral cacophony that quickly morphs into a sequence of intense, driving passages. This ‘Big Scream’ represents the city’s ‘nervous energy’, its ‘primal soul as maintained across time’. And you can hear that in the confrontational texture Marsalis sets up between different sections of the orchestra, as they compete for space amid the narrow lanes of musical traffic. The combative atmosphere is also an attempt to reflect Native American displacement (the title’s Black Elk was an Oglala Lakota holy man) and the ‘many forms of strife we have endured in an attempt to negotiate this small space with and without each other’.
The restless mood doesn’t let up in ‘The Big Show’, a razzle-dazzle tribute to Broadway. Here we trace ‘the European immigrant’s transition to New Yorker via the syncopated spirit of early 20th-century dance’. Only when we reach the third movement does the momentum (partly) let up. ‘Lost in Sight’ juxtaposes the swank of the previous movement with passages of forlorn introspection – a nod to New York’s ‘ubiquitous and invisible’ homeless population. ‘Their presence’, Marsalis says, ‘connects us to the 19th century and our legacy of slavery’ – a theme which he explored to great effect in his Pulitzer Prize-winning jazz oratorio Blood on the Fields.
Latin music is a regular fixture in Marsalis’s hodge-podge sound-world (see the Tuba Concerto for a boogaloo masterclass). In ‘La Esquina’ he basks in Afro-Latin culture – so foundational to New York life – embracing complex, swirling rhythms, screaming trumpets and a battery of clacking percussion. Nighttime then takes hold in the penultimate movement, ‘Us’, a slick, sophisticated fancy that sees hot bodies pressed up tight against one other, dancing to the dazzle of the New York skyline.
We end with the same intense momentum and tension-building that opened the symphony. Here, rather than channeling universal themes of hope or redemption, as Marsalis does in his first three symphonies, he takes the opportunity to challenge the city’s carnivorous capitalism and ‘the myth of unlimited growth’. The struggle asks: ‘Will we seek and find more equitable long-term solutions … or perish.’