Wynton Marsalis hosts compelling online conversations with fellow artists in The Arts, Undistanced, presented by Washington Performing Arts
This spring, Pulitzer-winning composer, trumpet virtuoso, band leader, and educator Wynton Marsalis teams up with Washington, D.C. – based nonprofit arts presenter Washington Performing Arts in The Arts, Undistanced: Online Artist Conversations Beyond Boundaries, a series of video interviews to be offered free to the public on the Washington Performing Arts website.
A companion series to Washington Performing Arts’s paid-admission Home Delivery Plus series of multi-genre online performances, The Arts, Undistanced will feature host Marsalis in candid and enlightening conversations with fellow performing artists: opera singer J’Nai Bridges, jazz singer Veronica Swift, and classical cellist Steven Isserlis. With no prescribed topics or boundaries of genre, The Arts, Undistanced transcends the typical interview format to engage deeply, artist to artist, with key issues in our society and culture and with the ever-evolving roles and impacts of the arts.
The series premieres with the J’Nai Bridges conversation on Friday, March 12, at 4:30PM on Facebook Live, YouTube, and the Washington Performing Arts website. Premiere dates for the remaining episodes are still to be announced, but will take place shortly before the guest artists’ premiere dates on Home Delivery Plus: May 21 for Steven Isserlis (in a trio performance with pianist Evgeny Kissin and violinist Joshua Bell) and May 28 for Veronica Swift.
(Note: All episodes of The Arts, Undistanced are pre-recorded.)
Wynton Marsalis and Washington Performing Arts have a history of collaboration dating back to Marsalis’s early years as a solo artist. Washington Performing Arts first presented Marsalis in concert in 1983, and was also the D.C. concert presenter of such Marsalis career milestones as Blood on the Fields (1997) and Suite for Human Nature (2004), along with the premiere of the revised edition of Blues Symphony (2015). Through Washington Performing Arts’s wide-ranging arts education programs, Marsalis has also contributed great amounts of time, energy, and knowledge to aspiring high school and college musicians over the years. The Arts, Undistanced takes the Marsalis–Washington Performing Arts collaboration into the online space for the first time, offering the possibility of the partnership’s widest reach and impact to date.
The Arts, Undistanced is made possible through the generous support of an anonymous donor and Northern Trust.