WYNTON MARSALIS brings the JLCO to the Bandshell with a very special kid-friendly repertoire for our annual Ezra Jack Keats Family Concert, a celebration of the groundbreaking children’s author (and notable Brooklynite). As always, Keats’ stories will be read during the break—this time, by Mr. Marsalis himself.
Stroller parking, ice cream, and stylistic authenticity will be available on site.

Michael Feinstein, vocals, piano
Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks (big band)
Wynton Marsalis, trumpet
Vocalists: Nellie McKay, Connie Evingson, Sachal Vasandani

During the 1930s, when times were tough, big bands criss-crossed the U.S. by road and rail, their tunes ballyhooed via radio. Their stars were household names. Their beat—which was swing—was the default groove for dancers. Band singers like Frank Sinatra, Billy Eckstine, Ivie Anderson, Dan Grissom, and Dick Powell inflamed hearts around the globe. Their music was the soundtrack of the age, and it will be celebrated over two nights as Michael Feinstein and Wynton Marsalis highlight the history and the music of one of the most exciting and crucial crossover movements in the mix of jazz and American popular song.

Dance Instructor: Adam Brozowski teaches Jazz and Lindy Hop with special guest Norma Miller.
DJ: Dawn Hampton

A classic, the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra opens Midsummer Night Swing’s 25th anniversary with a celebration of its own 25th. The JLCO formed when Wynton Marsalis and his septet joined forces with the surviving players of the Duke Ellington Orchestra, creating a group that knows that some jazz masterpieces are meant to be danced to. This beautiful big band will bring back the glory of ballrooms past.

Show Times:
2 shows per night.

1st house: Doors Open 5.30pm, Support 6.15, WM Quintet 7.30pm
2nd house: Doors Open 9.30pm, WM Quintet 10.30pm, Late Late Set: midnight-late

Ahmad Jamal opens Jazz at Lincoln Center’s (JALC) season with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra (JLCO) with Wynton Marsalis, embedding his quartet including Reginald Veal, Herlin Riley, and Manolo Badrena to perform new arrangements of Jamal’s innovative works and intoxicating rhythms.

How does a 100-year-old foundation take the lead on innovation? Judith Rodin, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, will discuss its support of innovative programs and the impact it has had in the U.S. and globally. The session continues when musician Wynton Marsalis joins Dr. Rodin for a lively conversation on what we can learn from innovative practices in the arts. The discussion will be punctuated with performances by Mr. Marsalis and a trio from Jazz at Lincoln Center.

Since Wynton Marsalis composed and recorded In This House, On This Morning two decades ago, he has remained committed to projecting a theme of universal humanism – and raising a joyful noise – while reflecting the form of the African American church service. Never has Marsalis coalesced the codes of sacred and secular expression more successfully than with the 2008 extended work Abyssinian Mass, commissioned to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the Abyssinian Baptist Church on West 138th Street in Harlem. This weekend, Jazz at Lincoln Center revisits this masterwork, augmenting the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis with tap dancer extraordinaire Jared Grimes, sermonizing from the Reverend Calvin O. Butts, III, and the 70-voice gospel choir, Chorale Le Chateau, conducted by Damien Sneed.

The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis collaborates with the Sachal Jazz Ensemble, master musicians from Pakistan who incorporate ancient instruments, such as sitar, sarod, tabla, and dholak into the sounds and rhythms of iconic jazz repertoire. This collaboration is JALC’s latest installment in a string of cross-cultural investigations, which have paired the JLCO with musicians from Ghana and Spain, among others, as the organization actualizes its mission to make jazz available globally by interfacing the sounds of jazz, grounded firmly in American values of blues and swing expression, with an international array of musical languages and configurations. 2012 Oscar-winning director Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy is currently filming this remarkable ensemble for a documentary that will be released in 2014, which will conclude with the Sachal Jazz Ensemble’s highly anticipated collaboration with the JLCO.

The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis performs choice instrumental arrangements from the books of such key Swing Era units as Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Benny Goodman, and Tommy Dorsey. Performing the band singer function is the sensational 23-year-old 2010 Thelonious Monk Competition winner Cécile McLorin Salvant, whose ability to refract the styles of such iconic performers of that era as Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday and Valaida Snow with 21st century freshness, expressivity, and soulfulness gives new meaning to Marsalis’ mantra “all jazz is modern.”

Jazz at Lincoln Center presents newly commissioned works by reed section members Ted Nash, a key contributor since 1999, and Victor Goines, who has been with the JLCO since the beginning. Following his acclaimed 2007 Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra release Portrait In Seven Shades, Nash leads the band through his latest piece “The Presidential Suite,” comprising six movements reflecting, he relates, on “important and inspiring speeches by world leaders” that “use the intonation, the ups and downs of the voice, to form the thematic material, and the spirit and message to shape the intensity of the arrangements.” For the occasion, Goines presents “Crescent City,” a meditation on his hometown of New Orleans. The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra serves as the basis and context of these new works.

When his sons – who themselves would become professional musicians – were young, the late great pianist-composer Dave Brubeck (1920-2012), whose mother was a piano teacher, used a variety of approaches to instruct them, among them disguising himself as a mustached, absent-minded alter ego by the name of Professor Nooseknocker. For its second Jazz For Young People concert of the 2013-14 season, Jazz at Lincoln Center brings out the heavy artillery – the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis – to bring forth its own two decades of experience in presenting interactive, amusing, family-friendly shows to introduce and illuminate Brubeck’s extraordinary life to young and old alike.

For the first of two “Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra Hosts” concerts of the 2013-14 season, JLCO trombonist-arrangers Chris Crenshaw and Vincent Gardner bring their skills to the tunes of pianist Mulgrew Miller and saxophonist Kenny Garrett, whose paths have intersected during tenures of varying length with Mercer Ellington, Woody Shaw, and Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. As both masters have primarily focused on small ensembles in presenting their respective voices over the last two decades (Miller with the Wingspan combo – with which Garrett has recorded – and a series of crackling trios; Garrett in quartet and trio contexts after a long run with Miles Davis), it will be fascinating to hear them interact with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis’ unique sound and sensibility.

The JLCO with Wynton Marsalis explores Brubeck’s extraordinary legacy with fresh arrangements that illuminate the breadth and scope of his body of work. Brubeck is credited with bringing jazz to the mainstream in the ’50s and ’60s and releasing the first jazz album to sell over a million copies. His several hundred songs and numerous works provide an extended palette from which to choose.

For the second “Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra Hosts” concert of the 2013-14 season, music director Wynton Marsalis and drummer Ali Jackson present the compositions of a pair of Philadelphia-born, post-Boomer virtuosos— bassist Christian McBride and guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel. Rosenwinkel’s JALC debut will culminate a musical relationship that began two decades ago at Smalls in Greenwich Village, where Rosenwinkel refined his individualistic guitar sound and influential compositional concept, blending dense harmonies, gorgeous melodies, and complex forms with, as Jackson states, “a very conscious and present understanding of the blues and what the blues are in jazz music.” Himself the leader of a big band that earned a 2012 GRAMMY® Award, McBride will continue a relationship with JALC that began in 1995 (not long after he’d emerged as an all-time great on his instrument), when Marsalis, whom he met in high school during the latter ‘80s, commissioned him to write “Bluesin’ in Alphabet City.” The full Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra appears.

The JLCO with Wynton Marsalis draws from its already deep well of Ellingtonia and conjures new arrangements that illuminate the depth and complexity of the maestro’s all-modernistic, all-the-time corpus. Ellington’s distinctly democratic vision sets the stage for an evening sure to be modern in many contexts.