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Check out this interview Wynton gave recently to the Guardian over in the U.K., where he's comparing hip-hop with jazz:

Wynton Marsalis is 10 minutes into an angry denunciation of hip-hop and he's just hitting his stride. "I call it 'ghetto minstrelsy'," he says. "Old school minstrels used to say they were 'real darkies from the real plantation'. Hip-hop substitutes the plantation for the streets. Now you have to say that you're from the streets, you shot some brothers, you went to jail. Rappers have to display the correct pathology. Rap has become a safari for people who get their thrills from watching African-American people debase themselves, men dressing in gold, calling themselves stupid names like Ludacris or 50 Cent, spending money on expensive fluff, using language like 'bitch' and 'ho' and 'nigger'."

Wynton was promoting his new CD, From the Plantation to the Penitentiary, which actually has some rhyming on it - what Wynton calls "rapping," but not hip-hop:

"It's rapping, but it ain't hip-hop," he says. "It's the kind of rap we did in New Orleans back in the day. We called it juba juba, you know, 'My grandma said to your grandma/ Iko iko uh nay.' But it dates back long before the Dr John or Dixie Cups version of that song. Kids would sit on the street corner, improvising stupid rhymes with pornographic lyrics. You know the kind of thing: 'Your old woman got an ass like a truck/ Your old woman she likes to fuck.'" He declaims the words while beating out a rhythm on the table. "Today's hip-hop is just those pornographic rhymes on a grand scale."

The interview goes on, but essentially Wynton's take on today's hip-hop is that it's juvenile and puerile...like it's the first time this has occurred to him. It's pop music that speaks to the masses and their love of bling-bling. It's not "art" music like jazz, and for Wynton to take umbrage with it is just silly. It is what it is, and like Max Roach once said, "If you go to a rock concert at Madison Square Garden expecting to hear jazz, you're going to be disappointed." Or as Duke Ellington used to like to say: "There are two types of music: good and bad."

Oh yeah, there was one other tiny morsel of news in that interview - Wynton's salary at Lincoln Center. Get this...Wynton gets paid $850,000 a year from that institute!

Damn! Imagine how many concerts of all the other great musicians out here that could fund...

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