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Kurt Rosenwinkel’s Guitar Brings a Freshness to the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra
The evening of exceptional music further signals the orchestra’s ongoing push — not only into the past and present of jazz, but the future as well. Keep reading »
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Musical Comfort Food: Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra Focuses on Master Composers
The title of this weekend’s concert at Jazz at Lincoln Center is “Masters of Form,” and as Vincent Gardner, who served as musical director for the first half, announced at the start, the name is a play on words in that it refers to “forms in music, the kind of established forms that we have ingrained in us, like the 12-bar blues” and the 32-bar popular song. Keep reading »
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Max Roach at 100: ‘Inventor of Modern Drumming’ Is Only the Beginning
Over the course of a little more than a year in 1955 and ’56, Max Roach, who was already the premiere jazz drummer of his generation, experienced the death of two of his very closest musical partners. Keep reading »
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Jazz at Lincoln Center Leaves the World Behind
“Sherman Irby’s Musings of Cosmic Stuff,” a new extended work for big band presented this past week at Jazz at Lincoln Center, is a team-up between the most famous man in jazz, Jazz at Lincoln Center’s artistic director, Wynton Marsalis, and perhaps the most easily recognized name, face, and voice in all of science, Neil deGrasse Tyson. It’s a collaboration presided over by a saxophonist, composer, and arranger, Sherman Irby. Keep reading »
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Wynton Marsalis Is Focus as Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra Opens Season
For the opening of the 2023-’24 season, Jazz at Lincoln Center did something it hasn’t done for a long time, if ever: It invited certain correspondents to attend the sound check at 4:30 p.m. at Rose Hall. Keep reading »
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Marsalis Leads The Faithful
This past weekend, to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, which is generally regarded as New York’s oldest Afro-American religious institution, Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Rose Hall was transformed into a kind of spiritual multiplex. Gospel choirs issued forth from every performance space, and also in the public atrium in between (where macaroni and cheese was served, presumably to evoke the provisions one might find at a Sunday school picnic). What artistic director Wynton Marsalis usually calls the House of Swing had become the House of Prayer. Keep reading »
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Looking Home to The Crescent City
Wynton Marsalis is rarely predictable. When it was announced that his concert on Tuesday would feature the same edition of the Marsalis Sextet that’s on his new album, “From the Plantation to the Penitentiary,” as well as the singer Jennifer Sanon, who is extensively featured on the album, it was a logical conclusion that Mr. Marsalis would be performing music from the new release.
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A Few of Our Favorite Things
When Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra climaxed their concert Thursday night at the Rose Theater with “Rhapsody in Blue,” they were, in a very literal sense, settling an old score. The last time the JALCO played the “Rhapsody” was in November, at an all-Gershwin Gala. That treatment featured the pianist Marcus Roberts as star soloist, but, through no fault of the orchestra or Mr. Roberts, it had to be the worst version of Gershwin’s classic that I’ve ever heard. Keep reading »