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Jazz as conversation - Marsalis explores instincts, teamwork behind a good performance
Great jazz requires a strange alchemy of instinct and expertise, of empathy and teamwork from its musicians — a fact few know better than famed artist and composer Wynton Marsalis. Jazz is a conversation, but a nuanced, swift, and complicated one, he said. At Sanders Theatre on Wednesday, Marsalis and a band of all-star musicians both discussed and demonstrated how to achieve that balance in “At the Speed of Instinct: Choosing Together to Play and Stay Together,” the fourth of Marsalis’ six-part lecture series at Harvard that began in 2011. Coming just two day’s after Monday’s bombings at the Boston Marathon, the performance provided a collective respite for the campus. Keep reading »
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Listen up, says Marsalis - Master class at the Boston Arts Academy
As many parents can attest, rousing a child from sleep to make it to the bus stop can be a difficult task. Doing so during a vacation week would seem near impossible. But on Thursday, a group of students from Boston and Cambridge happily rose from bed and made it to class. The reason? Wynton Marsalis was in the house. For an hour and a half the famous trumpeter conducted a master class at the Boston Arts Academy, the city’s only public high school for the visual and performing arts. Keep reading »
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Garth Fagan, Wynton Marsalis pair for new work
About 25 years ago, choreographer Garth Fagan was walking down East Avenue and saw something out of the ordinary. The famous jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis was strolling around, looking rather blue. Marsalis had just performed in Rochester and was having a few band quibbles. “I picked him up and took him to the studio to see a performance,” says Fagan. Keep reading »
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Wynton Marsalis plays homage to Von Freeman
Just moments after Wynton Marsalis took the stage of Orchestra Hall on Tuesday night he addressed a subject on many people’s minds: Chicago tenor saxophonist Von Freeman, who died earlier this month at age 88. “He was a legend,” Marsalis told a crowded house, while a memorial service for Freeman was being held across town, at Christ Universal Temple, on South Ashland Avenue. Keep reading »
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Heat combo: When Wynton Marsalis met Yacub Addy
We first saw Wynton Marsalis on television soloing with a symphony orchestra in 1981. The announcer said he came from New Orleans. “I’m going to work with this man,” my husband Yacub Addy said. I was surprised because Yacub is a traditional Ghanaian drummer of the Ga ethnic group. I couldn’t visualise him working with this classically trained trumpeter, although Wynton is known for jazz, which Yacub loved since he was a teenager in Ghana, dancing to American big band hits on the streets of Accra. His music led him from Ghana to Europe and America, where in 1982, as an artist and manager team, we created his current Ghanaian ensemble Odadaa!. Keep reading »
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Wynton on METRO UK: Jazz fusion is like Tabasco, it works in small doses
This month he appears to be bringing a large chunk of that activity to Britain for one of his biannual visits. Alongside assorted education packages around London and a festival for school bands, Marsalis will conduct a mammoth Jazz at Lincoln Center residency at London’s Barbican and beyond with selected bands. The performances include a collaboration with an African drum troupe, a Harlem-style Abyssinian mass with a 100-voice choir, a Duke Ellington tribute, an exploration of Afro-Cuban jazz, a concert at Birmingham Symphony Hall on July 20 and the British debut of Marsalis’s epic Swing Symphony. Keep reading »
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Wynton’s interview on the Telegraph: It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got swing
Being with Wynton Marsalis is always an education. He’s happiest when he can enthuse about something, or learn something new from whoever he’s speaking to. Right now, sitting over lunch in a Japanese restaurant in New York, he’s off on the topic of jazz’s Anglo-Celtic roots. “Those folk songs and hymns the slaves learnt from their masters were the real basis, the African element was grafted on top, not the other way round,” he says very firmly, “and this is why African and jazz rhythms developed in a different way. Listen, if you clap a marching rhythm, one-two-three-four, you can fit a swing rhythm over the top, like this.” Keep reading »
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WSJ Covers Holiday Under the Stars
Well, I’d say this one calls for a toast: An item on my wish list for 2011 has actually come true. Last year—in this column on Dec. 27, 2010—I made a list of five ways that New York City could be a better place for the arts and audiences in the coming year. Admittedly, some of the wishes were improbable, such as a campaign alerting audiences that standing ovations aren’t the required response to every single show in town. Some things were practical: Why can’t there be an orderly, working cab stand at Lincoln Center? Keep reading »
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Downbeat Celebrates Wynton’s 50th
With a Lincoln Center special airing on PBS, all eyes have turned to a special birthday taking place in the jazz community: Wynton Marsalis turned 50 on Oct. 18. In celebration of Marsalis’ birthday, a number of people in the music shared their thoughts on Wynton and his professional and/or personal impact. Keep reading »
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“Wynton Goes to Harvard” - An Interview with the Wall Street Journal
Wynton Marsalis Goes To Harvard (APRIL 18, 2011, 10:38 PM ET) Pulitzer-prize winning jazzman Wynton Marsalis considers himself both student and teacher of music, which is why it comes as no surprise that his newest undertaking is a two-year lecture series at Harvard University. Beginning on April 28, Marsalis will lecture and perform a class entitled “Music as Metaphor.“ The nine-time Grammy award winner currently serves as the artistic director for Jazz at Lincoln Center, a role he will keep throughout the lecture series. Speakeasy talked with Marsalis about the coming series, his love of last-minute pressures and the concept of improvisation. Is every… Keep reading »