When Black Codes (from the Underground) was recorded, Wynton Marsalis was just 23, and his aesthetic conservatism was at its most oppositional. One of the album's two ballads is called "Aural Oasis" and, to judge from some of Marsalis's rhetoric of the time, the oasis he sought to provide was a relief from every jazz development to come along between 1967 and 1979 — from the funk and fusion of sell-outs to the avant-garde of charlatans (to say nothing of plain old junky pop). Naturally, many folks welcomed the chance to play out the culture wars on or around jazz stages, and if, for a while, the debates seemed to overshadow the music, it was partly because the music wasn't always terribly interesting.

But the music mostly kept up with the chatter on the ambitious and much-lauded Black Codes, still one of the trumpeter's best albums. Except for a Ron Carter cameo, the album was made with Marsalis's working band, and it's hard to imagine it having been otherwise; this isn't the kind of music a band works out in a morning at the studio, and the band is impressively in sync for the complex compositions, all but one from… read more »