-
Homegrown Privileges Vanish in Exile
Commissioned by the Lincoln Center in New York City and released in 1997 by Columbia Records, Blood on the Fields is a three-and-a-half-hour jazz oratorio written by [Wynton Marsalis](http://64parishes.org/entry/wynton-marsalis/). The piece considers the lives of Jesse and Leona, an African prince and a commoner, who are deported from their native land and enslaved on a cotton plantation in the American South. Keep reading »
-
Wynton Marsalis: Bending to the Music
“He’s a bad cat, man,” saxophonist Branford Marsalis once commented to me about his trumpet-playing younger brother, Wynton. The adjective was, of course, complimentary. “But I don’t want to be as disciplined as him,” the saxophonist sibling continued. “That just ain’t fun.” Keep reading »
-
Star Studded Cast of Journalists, Artists, Celebrate Pulitzer Centennial
Some of journalism’s biggest names commanding the nation’s most pressing news stories, along with dozens of renowned writers and artists, flocked Sanders Theatre this weekend for a star studded celebration of the Pulitzer Prize’s 100-year anniversary. Keep reading »
-
Pulitzer centennial celebration brings past winners to Cambridge
For many journalists, novelists, playwrights, poets, and composers over the past century, winning the Pulitzer Prize has been a career-capping honor. For many more who have been nominated but have not won, the Pulitzer has floated just beyond reach, an elusive dream that has given rise to that most nagging of all questions: “What if?’’ Keep reading »
-
The History and Systems of Slavery Behind Wynton Marsalis’ Blood on the Fields
Commissioned by the Lincoln Center in New York City and released in 1997 by Columbia Records, Blood on the Fields is a three-and-a-half-hour jazz oratorio written by Wynton Marsalis. The piece considers the lives of Jesse and Leona, an African prince and a commoner, who are deported from their native land and enslaved on a cotton plantation in the American South. Keep reading »
-
The Story Behind the First Pulitzer for Jazz
In 1997, for the first time in the history of the Pulitzer Prize in Music, the award went to a genre intimately bound up with the cultural, social and racial history of this country: jazz. Wynton Marsalis’s “Blood on the Fields,” an epic vocal-orchestral suite that dealt head-on with the tragedy of slavery, became not only the first jazz work to take the highest honor in American music but the first non-classical piece ever to win. Keep reading »
-
For Wynton Marsalis’ 54th birthday an Essay-Interview Written on the Occasion of Blood on the Fields
For Wynton Marsalis’ 54th birthday, I’ll reclaim a piece that’s been on the internet since 2001 via the Jazz Journalist Association website. I put it together in 2005 at the instigation of Steve Cannon and Gathering of Tribes on the occasion of the premiere performance of Blood On The Fields. It contains an essay-review, followed by a long composite interview. Keep reading »
-
Revioew - Wynton Marsalis’ “Blood on the Fields”, Still Genius
A few weeks ago I had the experience—full of both promise and tension—of revisiting a piece of art that I once thought truly great. The fear, of course, is that such things cannot live up to your memory and hopes. Is anything ever as wonderful as it seemed when you first fell in love with it? Keep reading »
-
An Oratorio of History With History of Its Own
By the time of Wynton Marsalis’s 1994 oratorio, “Blood on the Fields,” written for three singers and a 15-piece band, his scale for musical structure and organizational planning was big and getting bigger.
Keep reading »
He was 32 then. Jazz at Lincoln Center hadn’t yet become a constituent part of the larger Lincoln Center organization, and the idea of a dedicated theater for jazz hadn’t even been proposed. But he had already written extended works and had developed a framework for identifying and explaining jazz’s standards of excellence, and for linking the music to the history of black Americans and the notion of cultural survival. Never before had such power resided within one jazz musician, and those who doubted him wanted to be impressed on every possible level — especially after “Blood” won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for music. -
JLCO with Wynton Marsalis and guest artists reprise “Blood on the Fields”
Jazz at Lincoln Center continues its 25th anniversary celebration with a special performance of Blood On The Fields, Wynton Marsalis’ Pulitzer prize-winning jazz oratorio. Eighteen years after its premiere at Alice Tully Hall, the jazz oratorio on slavery and freedom will be performed by the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis. Eric Reed, featured pianist on the premiere and original Blood On The Fields recording, joins the JLCO for this special concert event. Blood on the Fields remains one of Marsalis’ greatest works and reinforces his dictum that “all jazz is modern.” Rising star baritone Gregory Porter, scat-master Kenny Washington, and the great contralto Paula West reprise the vocal roles.
Keep reading »