What specific qualities constitute the differing technical armouries of a classical and jazz trumpeter are hard to distinguish despite the relative ease of discerning the provenance of a player and his wares. Wynton Marsalis's reputation was built initially on his remarkable versatility from one musical culture to the next, though of late one senses that he is firmly ensconced in his jazz roots and that 'straight' projects are rare and perhaps on the decline. His last classical recording was a highly publicized baroque album with Kathleen Battle (8/92) which revealed a man struggling to recapture the life-blood of this specialized repertoire. If he brought it off then it was as much from his extraordinary technical facility as anything else. There is still much evidence of a fine classical soloist in this disc of twentieth-century standards; these things are not lost overnight. Yet he is, to my ears, too far down the jazz road to sustain a focused and winning sound for these sorts of works. Plentiful bravura and a large, full sound remain intact but the soft-centred tone and craggy articulation are unashamedly carried over from his distinctive and innovative jazz meanderings.
With distinctions blurred then, we have a recording of mixed success. The Halsey Stevens Sonata is the finest achievement: the folky mid-American swagger of the opening movement is suitably laid-back in true Marsalis style and he and his pianist, Judith Lynn Stillman, are acutely matched in this piece's irregular accentuation and sprightly motivic lines. Marsalis operates even more comfortably in the slow cantabile sections-and the slow movement generally-with Stevens's homely and atmospheric legato strands waving like cacti in the warm desert wind. Whatever the idiom, the ability to vocalize is a magical gift as Marsalis shows in the beautifully controlled opening of Enescu's Legend. Compared with Hakan Hardenberger's reading (Philips, 1/90-nla), Marsalis shapes his lines more intuitively and the sound is warmer, if less clean. He does not, however, possess Hardenberger's refined and cornety tonal realization which make the cascading passages in the second section so effortless. Less appealing is Marsalis's wooden and uneven approach to Honegger's Intrada, a showpiece pure and simple which highlights any form of technical insecurity in the art of classical playing. Technical insecurity is hardly Marsalis's problem but I did wince here and elsewhere at some pretty approximate intonation and, in the Honegger specifically, ambiguous changes of colour in the disjunct leaps which frame the work. Finally to Hindemith's excellent Sonata of 1939, a work of considerable substance and too often crassly treated. Marsalis's account is strangely glib for such a powerful and funereal piece but effective none the less. The opening confirms that mit Kraft (''with power'') has less to do with dynamics than an epic and unrelenting outreach to the end of phrases. Hardenberger's sound is sweeter, purer and leaner but comparatively prosaic in expression. Only Gilbert Johnson and Glenn Gould truly plumb the depths of the Trauermusik at the end.'