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Jazz Mogul Wynton Marsalis: Sing Your Own Song, But Don’t Forget About That Swing
After finishing his lecture-performance at the Pulitzer Centennial Celebration at Harvard University on Saturday, jazz musician and educator Wynton Marsalis imparted a piece of wisdom to me: the Internet is not shortening our attention spans. Keep reading »
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Star Studded Cast of Journalists, Artists, Celebrate Pulitzer Centennial
Some of journalism’s biggest names commanding the nation’s most pressing news stories, along with dozens of renowned writers and artists, flocked Sanders Theatre this weekend for a star studded celebration of the Pulitzer Prize’s 100-year anniversary. Keep reading »
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Pulitzer centennial celebration brings past winners to Cambridge
For many journalists, novelists, playwrights, poets, and composers over the past century, winning the Pulitzer Prize has been a career-capping honor. For many more who have been nominated but have not won, the Pulitzer has floated just beyond reach, an elusive dream that has given rise to that most nagging of all questions: “What if?’’ Keep reading »
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Wynton Marsalis and Geoffrey Ward to Conclude Season’s Morning Lecture Series
Each Sunday, Wynton Marsalis and Geoffrey and Diane Raines Ward meet for breakfast at the Wards’ home. Over coffee and homemade biscuits, they talk about everything from politics to the weather, but the most important topic is jazz. Keep reading »
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The challenge Nicola Benedetti threw down to get Wynton Marsalis to write a ‘wild’ violin concerto
Scottish violinist Nicola Benedetti was 17 when she met American jazz legend Wynton Marsalis. A rising classical star, she was on her own in New York for the first time for a performance at Lincoln Center. Keep reading »
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Art is About Elegant Form: An Interview with Albert Murray by Wynton Marsalis
From Murray Talks Music: Albert Murray on Jazz and Blues by Albert Murray, edited by Paul Devlin (University of Minnesota Press, 2016). Used by permission of the publisher. Copyright 2016 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota. All rights reserved. Keep reading »
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Marsalis Muses On His First Concerto (For, Yes, Violin)
HIGHLAND PARK, Ill. — When jazz musicians venture into the world of classical music, such undertakings often get tagged — sometimes pejoratively — as “crossover” projects. But for renowned trumpeter and composer Wynton Marsalis, the managing and artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, working in the classical realm does not mean crossing over to some foreign stylistic territory but rather returning to familiar musical ground, as should be evident when his Concerto in D (for Violin and Orchestra) receives its American premiere July 12 at the Ravinia Festival by violinist Nicola Benedetti, guest conductor Cristian Măcelaru, and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Keep reading »
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The History and Systems of Slavery Behind Wynton Marsalis’ Blood on the Fields
Commissioned by the Lincoln Center in New York City and released in 1997 by Columbia Records, Blood on the Fields is a three-and-a-half-hour jazz oratorio written by Wynton Marsalis. The piece considers the lives of Jesse and Leona, an African prince and a commoner, who are deported from their native land and enslaved on a cotton plantation in the American South. Keep reading »
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Wynton Marsalis, violin virtuosa talk about their U.S. premiere work at Ravinia
So what is America’s most prominent and powerful jazzman doing writing a classical violin concerto? In fact, the Violin Concerto that Wynton Marsalis composed for Scottish violin virtuosa Nicola Benedetti, which will receive its American premiere with her as soloist with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on next Tuesday night at Ravinia, is the latest in a series of works that the multi-talented trumpeter, composer, educator and artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center has written for classical symphony orchestra. Keep reading »
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The Story Behind the First Pulitzer for Jazz
In 1997, for the first time in the history of the Pulitzer Prize in Music, the award went to a genre intimately bound up with the cultural, social and racial history of this country: jazz. Wynton Marsalis’s “Blood on the Fields,” an epic vocal-orchestral suite that dealt head-on with the tragedy of slavery, became not only the first jazz work to take the highest honor in American music but the first non-classical piece ever to win. Keep reading »