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The Telegraph: Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra/Congo Square, Barbican, review
Wynton Marsalis, the celebrated American trumpeter, composer and band-leader, likes to think big. For him jazz is virtuoso musicality, uproarious enjoyment, spiritual edification and cultural memory, all rolled into one. To fulfil that vision he’s created several ambitious multi-movement suites for the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra.
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One of them, Congo Square, opened the orchestra’s current residency at the Barbican. -
Evening Standard: Congo Square: Wynton Marsalis & the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, Barbican Hall
Congo Square is a quiet spot in north-central New Orleans, near Louis Armstrong Park. Tourists take pictures of Louis’s statue there before lunching in the French Quarter. Little over a century earlier, however, it had a very different function.
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Jazz Journal: Wynton Marsalis/Congo Square
Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz At Lincoln Center Orchestra opened their 2012 residency at London’s Barbican Centre yesterday evening with a superb performance that celebrated the very birth of jazz in company with Ghanian drummer Yacub Addy and the band Odadaa!
Congo Square was the public space in New Orleans where African slaves gathered on Sunday afternoons to dance and play, and was the only place in the USA where they could gather freely and celebrate their own music and culture. Inspired by this activity between the mid-1700s and the late 1800s, Marsalis and Ghanaian drum master Yacub Addy’s two-hour suite Congo Square celebrates the joy of that music and marks its influence on the jazz that followed.
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The Guardian: Wynton Marsalis with JLCO and Odadaa” at Barbican
Wynton Marsalis is famously resistant to notions of jazz-fusion. He has denounced attempts to dilute jazz by using funk or rock rhythms, always loudly asserting the primacy of swing in the jazz tradition. African rhythms, however, are rather more problematic for him. These rhythms do not swing in the traditional sense: they do not use swung quavers. Musicologically, they’re as far from his notion of jazz as, say, heavy metal. Yet they are undeniably part of jazz’s DNA.
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Congo Square: Wynton Marsalis & the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, Barbican Hall
The proud son of New Orleans leads New York’s finest jazz repertory orchestra in his latest work inspired by Louisiana slave culture Keep reading »
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Letting Jazz Have a Turn Interpreting the Poets
Jazz at Lincoln Center did something really self-assured last week. It presented two major large-ensemble pieces by members of its orchestra, neither very well known as composers, for a three-night run at the Rose Theater: “God’s Trombones,” by the trombonist Chris Crenshaw, and “Inferno,” by the saxophonist Sherman Irby. Keep reading »
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Lewis Nash All-Stars With Wynton Marsalis in Phoenix
An evening of bebop, swing, Latin and blues celebrated acclaimed drummer Lewis Nash and raised funds for youth programs of Jazz in Arizona. The 35-year-old nonprofit jazz-support organization recently opened The Nash, a performance and youth education center established in Phoenix to honor the musician in his hometown. Keep reading »
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A splendid run for Marsalis’ JALC Orchestra – with 1 singer too many
The most haunting moment of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra’s three-concert Chicago residency came late Friday night, and it barely rose above a whisper. Keep reading »
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Wynton Marsalis heads to Symphony Center for weekend residency
For most of us, turning 50 represents a major personal landmark. For Wynton Marsalis, it’s inevitably a public occasion, if only because for at least two decades he has been the world’s most widely recognized jazz artist. Keep reading »
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Rolling Stone: Paul Simon Gets a Jazz Infusion From Wynton Marsalis
Paul Simon has never been afraid to take a big musical risk. Two years after Simon and Garfunkel broke up at their commercial peak in 1970, he released his self-titled solo debut, which kicked off with “Mother and Child Reunion.” It was the first time many Americans heard reggae, and when they flipped the record they heard the salsa-tinged “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard.” Since then, Simon’s music has gone from gospel (“Loves Me Like a Rock”) and Afrobeat (Graceland) to Latin American percussion-based rock (Rhythm of the Saints) and the doo-wop and Latin sounds on The Capeman. Keep reading »