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Wynton Marsalis Goes to Washington
Even a day later, Wynton Marsalis couldn’t explain why he was crying so hard during the speech he gave last Monday night at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. “Man, I don’t know,” he told me. “I’m not really a person that’s effusive. I’m a quiet type of person. Dick Vermeil”—the notoriously teary ex-NFL coach—“that’s not me.” Keep reading »
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Wynton and Willie: An Unlikely Musical Pair
Wynton wears crisp suits, reads sheet music and is the musical director of New York’s Jazz at Lincoln Center. Willie wears crumpled jeans, wings it onstage and runs his concert venue, Willie’s Place, out of a truck stop in Abbott, Texas. So what exactly do these music legends have in common? The blues, of course. Wynton Marsalis, 46, and Willie Nelson, 75, are the two men on the new CD “Two Men With the Blues,” a live recording culled from two concerts they played at Lincoln Center last year. Keep reading »
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Wynton Marsalis and the temple of jazz
Wynton Marsalis is scheduled to do an interview about Frederick P. Rose Hall, Jazz at Lincoln Center’s $128 million new permanent home and performance space. But the interview can’t get started because Marsalis, who has been JLC’s artistic director since its founding in 1991, can’t stop staring at the temporary stage in the Allen Room, one of Rose Hall’s three sumptuous theaters. Keep reading »
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Trumpeter Unmuted
Oct. 18 issue - Wynton Marsalis gives a piece or two of his mind to NEWSWEEK’s Allison Samuels.
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Wynton Marsalis Gets Kind Of Blue
There’s a recurring song on Wynton Marsalis’s formidable new trilogy, “Soul Gestures in Southern Blue,” called “So This Is Jazz, Huh?” It is both a challenge and a history lesson. Yeah, the song argues, this is jazz: a system of African-American mythmaking guided by the blues, with a rhythmic chain stretching back to pre-Civil War New Orleans and beyond. Keep reading »