-
Wall Street Journal: Jazzy Wynton Marsalis
ACCORDING TO WYNTON Marsalis, jazz “places a premium on originality and individuality.” Personal style has always has been a key element to the genre, to the music itself and beyond. “When people dress well, they play well,” said Mr. Marsalis, 51, in an interview at the gleaming new offices of Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York (JALC).
Keep reading » -
Finale, Jonathan Kelly, and the Wynton Marsalis Septet
The Wynton Marsalis Septet recently collaborated with the Garth Fagan Dance Company on a new piece titled Lighthouse/Lightning Rod. The world premiere performance also included excerpts from Griot New York, the 1991 collaboration between Wynton and Garth Fagan.
Keep reading » -
Just One Bishop at High Church of Jazz Purity
LAST spring, after Wynton Marsalis took over the reins of Jazz at Lincoln Center on a temporary basis because the executive director had resigned, he hinted, as he shook hands with donors at a gala fund-raiser, that he was unhappy with the way the institution had been managed. He likened it to an orchestra without a leader or a musical score.
Keep reading » -
Two Old Friends Prepare a Three-Part Premiere
ROCHESTER — Last week the jazz trumpeter and composer Wynton Marsalis walked into an office building here that once housed a Knights of Columbus chapter, rode an elevator to a high-ceilinged studio and discovered his septet, a 12-member modern dance company, a giant spatula and a 21-foot-tall woman.
Mr. Marsalis had a cold, but he wasn’t hallucinating. The studio is the home of Garth Fagan Dance, and Mr. Marsalis was there to rehearse. “Lighthouse/Lightning Rod,” his first collaboration with Mr. Fagan since “Griot New York” in 1991, opens at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Thursday. The spatula was one of Martin Puryear’s set pieces for “Griot,” excerpts from which fill out the program in Brooklyn. The sculpture of the woman was a conception of a lighthouse by the artist Alison Saar.
Keep reading » -
Garth Fagan, Wynton Marsalis pair for new work
About 25 years ago, choreographer Garth Fagan was walking down East Avenue and saw something out of the ordinary. The famous jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis was strolling around, looking rather blue. Marsalis had just performed in Rochester and was having a few band quibbles.
“I picked him up and took him to the studio to see a performance,” says Fagan.
Keep reading » -
Wynton’s interview on EBONY - Entertainment and Culture
In 1987, Grammy Award-winning trumpeter Wynton Marsalis directed a summer concert series entitled “Classical Jazz at Lincoln Center” in New York City. That modest series has grown into the impressive, multi-venue performance venue known as Jazz at Lincoln Center: the world’s largest not-for-profit arts organization dedicated to jazz in the world, with year-round concerts, educational events, band competitions, film programs and multimedia broadcasts and webcasts.
Keep reading »
As JALC prepares to celebrate its twenty-fifth anniversary with its season premiere later this month, EBONY talked with Marsalis, who serves as JALC’s Managing and Artistic Director, about the venue’s evolution, his uncompromising devotion to the music and his continuing mission to spread the gospel of jazz…by any digital means necessary. -
BT River of Music: Wynton Marsalis interview for London 2012
Acclaimed trumpeter Wynton Marsalis and his elite big-band jazz players will be a highlight on the Americas stage at BT River of Music, writes Adam Sweeting. Keep reading »
-
Heat combo: When Wynton Marsalis met Yacub Addy
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.
Keep reading »
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
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.
Keep reading » -
Wynton’s interview on the Telegraph: It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got swing
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.
Keep reading »
“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.”