News Updates

Jazz Journal: Wynton Marsalis/Congo Square

Posted on July 12th, 2012 in Review

Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz At Lincoln Center Orchestra opened their 2012 residency at London’s Barbican Centre yesterday evening with a superb performance that celebrated the very birth of jazz in company with Ghanian drummer Yacub Addy and the band Odadaa!

Congo Square was the public space in New Orleans where African slaves gathered on Sunday afternoons to dance and play, and was the only place in the USA where they could gather freely and celebrate their own music and culture. Inspired by this activity between the mid-1700s and the late 1800s, Marsalis and Ghanaian drum master Yacub Addy’s two-hour suite Congo Square celebrates the joy of that music and marks its influence on the jazz that followed.

The Guardian: Wynton Marsalis with JLCO and Odadaa” at Barbican

Posted on July 12th, 2012 in Review | 1

Wynton Marsalis is famously resistant to notions of jazz-fusion. He has denounced attempts to dilute jazz by using funk or rock rhythms, always loudly asserting the primacy of swing in the jazz tradition. African rhythms, however, are rather more problematic for him. These rhythms do not swing in the traditional sense: they do not use swung quavers. Musicologically, they’re as far from his notion of jazz as, say, heavy metal. Yet they are undeniably part of jazz’s DNA.

Congo Square: Wynton Marsalis & the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, Barbican Hall

Posted on July 11th, 2012 in Review

The proud son of New Orleans leads New York’s finest jazz repertory orchestra in his latest work inspired by Louisiana slave culture   Keep reading »

Heat combo: When Wynton Marsalis met Yacub Addy

Posted on July 9th, 2012 in Profiles & Interviews

We first saw Wynton Marsalis on television soloing with a symphony orchestra in 1981. The announcer said he came from New Orleans. “I’m going to work with this man,” my husband Yacub Addy said.
I was surprised because Yacub is a traditional Ghanaian drummer of the Ga ethnic group. I couldn’t visualise him working with this classically trained trumpeter, although Wynton is known for jazz, which Yacub loved since he was a teenager in Ghana, dancing to American big band hits on the streets of Accra. His music led him from Ghana to Europe and America, where in 1982, as an artist and manager team, we created his current Ghanaian ensemble Odadaa!.

Wynton on METRO UK: Jazz fusion is like Tabasco, it works in small doses

Posted on July 9th, 2012 in Profiles & Interviews

This month he appears to be bringing a large chunk of that activity to Britain for one of his biannual visits. Alongside assorted education packages around London and a festival for school bands, Marsalis will conduct a mammoth Jazz at Lincoln Center residency at London’s Barbican and beyond with selected bands. The performances include a collaboration with an African drum troupe, a Harlem-style Abyssinian mass with a 100-voice choir, a Duke Ellington tribute, an exploration of Afro-Cuban jazz, a concert at Birmingham Symphony Hall on July 20 and the British debut of Marsalis’s epic Swing Symphony.

Wynton’s interview on the Telegraph: It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got swing

Posted on July 9th, 2012 in Profiles & Interviews

Being with Wynton Marsalis is always an education. He’s happiest when he can enthuse about something, or learn something new from whoever he’s speaking to. Right now, sitting over lunch in a Japanese restaurant in New York, he’s off on the topic of jazz’s Anglo-Celtic roots.
“Those folk songs and hymns the slaves learnt from their masters were the real basis, the African element was grafted on top, not the other way round,” he says very firmly, “and this is why African and jazz rhythms developed in a different way. Listen, if you clap a marching rhythm, one-two-three-four, you can fit a swing rhythm over the top, like this.”

Video: Wynton Marsalis Quintet live at The Greene Space, NYC

Posted on June 6th, 2012 in Video | 3

June 5, 2012. Wynton Marsalis speaks with WQXR’s Elliott Forrest at The Greene Space.
Personnel: Wynton Marsalis (trumpet); Walter Blanding (sax); Dan Nimmer (piano); Carlos Henriquez (bass); Willie Jones III (drums).

Wynton and Paul Simon on CBS This Morning

Posted on May 30th, 2012 in News | 4

Famed jazz instrumentalist and composer and CBS News cultural correspondent Wynton Marsalis recently sat down with the 70-year-old Simon - musician-to-musician - to talk about how Simon became one of the most important artists of his generation.