Swinging the Blues

When Willie Nelson and Wynton Marsalis first shared the stage at The Allen Room in Jazz at Lincoln Center almost exactly two years ago, the concert was billed as Willie Nelson Sings The Blues as part of a vocalist-centered series. At the time, there was no hint that music history was about to be made: One of the most controversial singers in the history of country music would be paired with the man who is arguably the most recognizable living name in contemporary jazz. Fortunately for those of us who couldn’t get tickets for what turned out to be two amazing nights, the tapes were rolling (everything was recorded digitally), and the result appears on the CD Two Men With The Blues, which I consider to be one of the overall best discs released in 2008. Nelson and Marsalis, Jazz at Lincoln Center’s artistic director, are revisiting that partnership with two nights at the Rose Theater, which are already sold out. Although Nelson has done plenty of collaborations throughout his career, on paper it would seem remote at best that he’d ever team up with Marsalis for an entire gig. However, they seemed to have found much common ground, especially because of their shared Southern roots and mutual admiration for each other.

“The first thing about Willie Nelson is his integrity,” the trumpeter and bandleader states. “He’s been traveling up and down the road for so many years on his bus—he’s kind of the last of a group of a certain breed of musicians.”

On that seemingly loose concert (if you watch the rehearsal videos on YouTube, you realize that everything was carefully rehearsed), they tore through a selection of blues-inflected standards, kicking off with an up-tempo version of “Bright Lights, Big City,” later tapping the jump blues nugget “Caldonia,” both of which featured hot solos from the leaders as well as from the small band made up of Marsalis’ working quartet and Nelson’s longtime harmonica player Mickey Raphael.

With a great band behind him, Nelson took the opportunity to revisit a few signature tunes, including “Georgia On My Mind” (with Marsalis playing against Nelson’s vocals) and “Stardust.” I got goose bumps hearing Nelson’s “Night Life,” mostly thanks to Marsalis’ dirty-sounding solo during the intro, played solely with bassist Carlos Henriquez.

“These songs heard this way with this group has never been done before,” Nelson explains. “Whatever I’m doing, if you put Wynton and these guys around it brings everything to a different level.”

Also included on the bill for this two-year reunion is New York’s own sweet-voiced, genre-jumping Norah Jones, who is considered to be a serial collaborator in her own right via her impromptu appearances alongside friends like Jesse Harris, Karsh Kale, her half-sister Anoushka Shankar—with whom she recorded a track on 2007’s fantastic Breathing Under Water—and anyone else who will have her. Nelson is also pretty comfortable with going across the genre barrier himself—actually, he doesn’t seem to think there is one. “First of all, I think labels were invented to sell the music, and you had to know what to call it before you could sell it, so they called the blues ‘blues’ and jazz ‘jazz’ and bluegrass, gospel whatever,” he explains. “But some music encompasses it all, and that’s pretty much what I like to play.”

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Willie Nelson and Wynton Marsalis
Feb. 8 & 9, Rose Theater, Jazz At Lincoln Center (Broadway at W. 60th St.), 212-721-6500; 8,$132.50-$157.50.