“Doing Your Do”: T. S. Eliot, Wynton Marsalis, and the Idea of Tradition

Abstract In 1935, Ralph Ellison, a student at Tuskegee Institute, discovered the works of T. S. Eliot. “The Waste Land seized my mind,” Ellison recalled in Hidden Name and Complex Fate in 1964. “I was intrigued by its power to move me while eluding my understanding. Somehow its rhythms were often closer to those of jazz than were those of the Negro poets, and even though I could not understand them, its range of allusion was as mixed and varied as that of Louis Armstrong.” In this article, I use Ellison's insight as a launchpad for an exploration of the connections between Eliot's idea of artistic tradition—as articulated in his 1919 essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent”—and the music of Wynton Marsalis, a jazz musician who has found himself at the center of debates over the idea of tradition in jazz. I focus first on Marsalis's relationship with Albert Murray via a close reading of Marsalis's 1989 album The Majesty of the Blues and then on Marsalis's role as a cultural ambassador for jazz at the end of the twentieth century, when the jazz world was engaged in debates over “the jazz tradition” and the institutionalization of jazz in mainstream culture. I argue that many of Marsalis's statements on his art express a view of tradition that is remarkably similar to Eliot's and that Marsalis is, in Eliot's words in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” an artist “who is aware . . . of great difficulties and responsibilities in his relation to the past.”