The musical conservatism of Wynton Marsalis, the New Orleans trumpeter, is as profound as his influence is formidable. Recently, his role in Ken Burns's conservative US television history of jazz has brought the "Marsalis issue" back to the fore. That was the backdrop to this visit with the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, with a programme devoted to Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. It was always going to be one of the box-office draws of the jazz year, and one of its exasperating conundrums.
As always, the stagey informality of the banter between the players sounded as if its intention was to massage hip-jazzbo stereotypes in the expectations of an upmarket mainstream audience, rather than reveal the truly wayward spontaneous impulses among the players that brought jazz into being in the first place.
But the music certainly represented what Marsalis always protests is his intention - to recast the early music with a contemporary spin. The first part of the programme was devoted to Louis Armstrong's early work, and the orchestra adopted a policy with this almost eight-decade-old music of shifting between the two-beat chug-chug of an early swing rhythm and a more contemporary feel. The soloists correspondingly operated in a crossover territory between the raw, blues-rooted directness of the old improvising styles, and a more complex and intricate post-John Coltrane, post-Miles Davis manner.
Marsalis himself delivered some masterly instances of this. At the close of Tight Like This, with the orchestra recapping the tune in its authentic tempo, the trumpeter repeated a single note instead of the theme, but kept varying its duration and placement with the deceptive effect that the repeating undertow seemed to be constantly changing shape. Mahagony Hall Stomp was peppered with the kind of bebop sax solos still 15 years away when it was first conceived (tenorists Victor Goines and Walter Blanding Jnr swerved divertingly into Lady Be Good during their duet variations on it), and Marcus Printup confirmed that Marsalis wasn't the only trumpeter who could combine the bravura 1920s manner and postbop's capricious melodies without losing the plot.
An uptempo train-rhythm swinger was one of the concert's few originals, and the musical and conceptual success of Marsalis's music for the 1994 Blood on the Fields oratorio (it remains a high point for him) was confirmed by the swaggering Mingus-like roar of Back to Basics, with its barging, colliding brass lines and wheeling, yelping sax melodies. Marsalis's solo of wah-wah effects, indignant, grimacing slurs, manic giggles, and deft, dancing runs was his solo of the night. It highlighted his pleasure in his work rather than his sense of missionary duty to build a classical edifice for jazz, and it's the part of his shows that stays longest in the memory.
• Wynton Marsalis plays the Corn Exchange, Brighton (01273 709709), tomorrow, then tours.
