Out Of The Club Into The Concert hall

This compilation album is called Popular Songs The Best Of Wynton Marsalis. The popular songs reference might lead you to expect an album of standards but the only such here is a very tasteful version of Where or When. The disk is, in fact, an overview of Marsalis's work from 1985 to 2001. He's a performer who comes with a lot of baggage because of his strongly held and unyielding views on muisc, politics and morality. He certainly is far from the embodiment of the romantic but flawed and ultimately doomed jazz musician. No Lush Life for him. Having said that, I must admit to not having studied his pronouncements and am only coming to them second hand. So I listen to this disk putting any preconceptions aside and find a hugely enjoyable and well crafted mainstream album that has the spirit of that New Orleans second line somewhere on most tracks, even if it is a little buried in some. This is disciplined arranged jazz rather than free blowing but again that fits the Marsalis persona and you wouldn't expect much else. It would be nice to occasionally hear him in a different context however. I don't mean his classical career which he seems to have abandoned but playing something approaching a jam with players who aren't strictly in his employ.