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News Updates – Profiles & Interviews

  • Wynton Marsalis gives spirited take on jazz with ‘Abyssinian Mass’

    Posted on October 24th, 2013 in Profiles & Interviews

    Wynton Marsalis is onto something big. Again. The composer, trumpeter, bandleader, and all-around high priest among contemporary jazz advocates is accustomed to working on a large scale — in terms of compositional scope as well as ensemble size.   Keep reading »

  • Wynton Marsalis Goes Back To Church For ‘Abyssinian Mass’

    Posted on October 19th, 2013 in Profiles & Interviews

    Wynton Marsalis is sipping hot tea in a church conference room before the evening’s performance. His custom-made Monette Raja trumpet — with its built-in mouthpiece and black opal inlays — sits by his side. He’s riffing on one of his favorite subjects: the universality of rhythm.
    “That rolling 6/8 rhythm is in African religious music, it’s in Anglican religious music,” he says, humming a complicated pattern and tapping his fingers on his notebook. “In a slower tempo it would be ‘Greensleeves.’” He scats the melody. “Now stay in that time, here’s the African 6/8 ... now let’s go into the jazz shuffle.” More tapping. “It’s the same rhythm.”

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  • Wynton Marsalis Toots His Own Horn

    Posted on October 8th, 2013 in Profiles & Interviews

    Yes, Wynton Marsalis has soul. The knee-jerk criticism of the 51-year-old jazz trumpeter ever since his self-titled 1981 album has been that, while always technically impeccable, his playing lacks soulful spirit. “I’ve never heard anything Wynton played sound like it meant anything at all,” pianist Keith Jarrett once told The New York Times. And so it’s somewhat ironic that this month should see the debut of both The Spiritual Side of Wynton Marsalis (a collection of spiritually inspired works) and Abyssian: A Gospel Celebration, a nationwide tour.

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  • The Bellingham Herald: Q&A with Wynton Marsalis

    Posted on June 23rd, 2013 in Profiles & Interviews

    Q&A with Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra leader Wynton Marsalis
    The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra is acknowledged as one of the top big bands in the world. Its leader is nine-time Grammy Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning trumpeter / composer Wynton Marsalis, who for much of his 30-plus-year career has been both hailed as the public face of traditional jazz and criticized for what is perceived as a strict, often non-inclusive definition of the genre.

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  • Wynton Marsalis and Suzan-Lori Parks discussing music and American identity

    Posted on March 1st, 2013 in Profiles & Interviews, Video | 1

    On February 28, the Public Forum continued its season of Duets devoted to music with an insightful conversation about our songs, our memories, and America’s troubled relationship to its rich artistic heritage.

    Two of the most thoughtful people in the American arts came together at Joe’s Pub for this Public Forum Duet: Wynton Marsalis (Pulitzer and Grammy-winning composer, musician, author, and Managing and Artistic Director of Jazz at Lincoln Center) and Suzan-Lori Parks (Topdog/Underdog, Porgy and Bess, Master Writer Chair of The Public Theater).

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  • Wynton Marsalis’ Pulitzer-winning ‘Blood on the Fields’ returns

    Posted on February 12th, 2013 in Profiles & Interviews

    Sixteen years ago, newspapers across America riffed on an unexpected theme: For the first time, a jazz composition had won the country’s highest musical honor. “Marsalis swings a Pulitzer” trumpeted USA Today, its message echoing wherever cultural news was reported. Not since Duke Ellington had been snubbed by the Pulitzers in 1965 — prompting two jury members who recommended him for the award to quit — had jazz become so dramatically linked to the award.   Keep reading »

  • Wall Street Journal: Jazzy Wynton Marsalis

    Posted on January 12th, 2013 in Profiles & Interviews

    ACCORDING TO WYNTON Marsalis, jazz “places a premium on originality and individuality.” Personal style has always has been a key element to the genre, to the music itself and beyond. “When people dress well, they play well,” said Mr. Marsalis, 51, in an interview at the gleaming new offices of Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York (JALC).

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  • Finale, Jonathan Kelly, and the Wynton Marsalis Septet

    Posted on January 8th, 2013 in Profiles & Interviews

    The Wynton Marsalis Septet recently collaborated with the Garth Fagan Dance Company on a new piece titled Lighthouse/Lightning Rod. The world premiere performance also included excerpts from Griot New York, the 1991 collaboration between Wynton and Garth Fagan.

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  • Just One Bishop at High Church of Jazz Purity

    Posted on December 7th, 2012 in Profiles & Interviews

    LAST spring, after Wynton Marsalis took over the reins of Jazz at Lincoln Center on a temporary basis because the executive director had resigned, he hinted, as he shook hands with donors at a gala fund-raiser, that he was unhappy with the way the institution had been managed. He likened it to an orchestra without a leader or a musical score.

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  • Two Old Friends Prepare a Three-Part Premiere

    Posted on September 27th, 2012 in Profiles & Interviews | 1

    ROCHESTER — Last week the jazz trumpeter and composer Wynton Marsalis walked into an office building here that once housed a Knights of Columbus chapter, rode an elevator to a high-ceilinged studio and discovered his septet, a 12-member modern dance company, a giant spatula and a 21-foot-tall woman.

    Mr. Marsalis had a cold, but he wasn’t hallucinating. The studio is the home of Garth Fagan Dance, and Mr. Marsalis was there to rehearse. “Lighthouse/Lightning Rod,” his first collaboration with Mr. Fagan since “Griot New York” in 1991, opens at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Thursday. The spatula was one of Martin Puryear’s set pieces for “Griot,” excerpts from which fill out the program in Brooklyn. The sculpture of the woman was a conception of a lighthouse by the artist Alison Saar.

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