Reading Comprehension

PT150 · S4 · P1 · Q2 Wynton Marsalis

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This passage was adapted from an article published in 2003.

Topic

Wynton Marsalis, his influence on jazz, and the complicated impacts of focusing on jazz tradition.

Framework

Challenge Position / Problem-Solution

Main Point

While Wynton Marsalis helped bring attention to jazz’s rich history and its legends, his focus on jazz tradition has been criticized as stifling innovation and inadvertently contributing to an environment where record companies prefer reissuing old recordings over supporting new artists. (Most valuable sentence: — Paragraph 3)

P1: Marsalis’s Influence and Recent Criticism

For about 20 years, Marsalis was the top jazz musician and promoter of jazz history, highly admired and influential. More recently, he's been criticized for focusing too much on tradition, and both his and jazz’s future seem a bit shaky.

P2: Marsalis’s Career Shift and Industry Trends

Marsalis stopped releasing new music after putting out a huge batch in 1999 and lost his record contract. At the same time, major labels began losing interest in new jazz artists and started focusing more on reissuing classic albums.

P3: Critics Blame Marsalis for Jazz’s Stagnation

Some critics say Marsalis’s emphasis on tradition has made jazz too rigid, making it harder for innovation to thrive. He’s seen as someone who looks backward, turning jazz into a “museum” piece instead of a living, evolving art.

2.

By stating that many people consider Marsalis to embody a "retro ideology," the former executive quoted at the end of the third paragraph most likely means that they believe that Marsalis

  1. revived a discredited set of

    Out of Scope: discredited

    Marsalis is definitely trying to revive interest in jazz classics, but would we call jazz classics "a discredited set of ideas"? No, that doesn't match anything we read.

    2% picked this

  2. merely recombined other people's ideas

    Bad Match: recombined

    This retro ideology is supposedly just Marsalis identifying which old jazz songs he thinks are the classics and pushing them on all of us. There's nothing in this paragraph about recombining other people's ideas. That would mean that he is blending different songs together in some new way.

    3% picked this

  3. Correct

    overemphasized strict adherence to tradition

    Why this is right

    We can match up everything in this answer with ideas from the 3rd paragraph. Retro / a look back = tradition strict adherence = unbending / stifling orthodoxy There isn't one word that matches up with over-emphasize, but we know that these critics think that Marsalis emphasizes classicism too much. He's inhibiting the innovative impulses of new jazz musicians.

    Skill tested: Meaning in Context · how this choice captures the passage's function is the move to repeat next time.

    84% picked this

  4. reinvented and reinterpreted traditional forms

    Out of Scope: reinvented / reinterpreted

    We like hearing about "traditional forms", since we're looking for something that sounds like Marsalis is obsessed with the older jazz songs. But there's nothing in this 3rd paragraph about him reinventing or reinterpreting old jazz. That type of language shows up in the 4th paragraph, as the author is defending Marsalis against these critics in the 3rd paragraph. This question stem isn't asking us what the author thinks about Marsalis; it's asking us what that former executive from Columbia thinks, and his sentiment is in line with everything else we heard in the 3rd paragraph.

    10% picked this

  5. seized on a set of

    Out of Scope: inauthentic

    The executive is saying that Marsalis is too obsessed with preserving the past jazz classics. There's nothing here about inauthentic musical ideas.

    1% picked this

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