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Wynton Marsalis Featured In Vogue Magazine
Wynton Marsalis loves the sound of New York City. For the 48-year-old jazzman, there’s a thrilling harmony in the jangle of the streets. “If you listen beneath the surface of noise—the construction, the sound of the traffic, beneath the rumble of the subway—you can get down to the different interactions between people,” he says.
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Wynton on Downbeat: Jazz is life music
In the past thirty years, I have had the good fortune to teach thousands of bands and an incalculable number of students in diverse settings. Though each situation is unique, students share many of the same concerns in pursuit of a more profound relationship with music and with life through music. Every style of music presents distinct challenges which demand the development of different skills. Jazz requires creativity, communication and community.
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Wynton Marsalis’s Enduring Opus
Toddlers filled a classroom one recent Saturday morning inside Frederick P. Rose Hall. Most sat in a circle brandishing toy shakers, some wandered off in the stagger of the newly walking. Welcome to WeBop!, Jazz at Lincoln Center’s program for children 8 months to 5 years old, at which singer Patrice Turner cleverly fit the words to the children’s book “Goodnight, Moon” into John Coltrane’s “Central Park West.”
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A life in music: Wynton Marsalis
On inauguration day in Washington earlier this year, the Wynton Marsalis Quintet played a private party at the White House in honour of President Obama. The two men are the same age, but long before Obama came to prominence, Marsalis had been a national figure and so while he says “as a liberal and a Democrat I, of course, feel that things are better in America”, he is experienced enough to know that change, particularly in the areas he cares about most, might not come as quickly as he would like.
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Ellis Marsalis and Sons Plan Rare Family Performance at Jazz Festival
Except in their living room back home in New Orleans, there have been only a few times when the entire Marsalis family has gathered in one spot to make music together. On Monday, Ellis Marsalis—the father and guiding spirit of America’s first family of jazz—and his four music-playing sons will appear at the Kennedy Center for their first joint appearance in Washington. Keep reading »
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Wynton Marsalis Goes to Washington
Even a day later, Wynton Marsalis couldn’t explain why he was crying so hard during the speech he gave last Monday night at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. “Man, I don’t know,” he told me. “I’m not really a person that’s effusive. I’m a quiet type of person. Dick Vermeil”—the notoriously teary ex-NFL coach—“that’s not me.” Keep reading »
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Playing with a jazz great
Marsalis and Timothy Dwight Master Robert Thompson held a “musical conversation” in front of a full house at the United Church on the Green Thursday afternoon. The event, which was free and open to the public, featured Marsalis — a well-known American jazz artist and the recipient of nine Grammy awards and a Pulitzer Prize in Music — combining a discussion of his musical predecessors with performances on the trumpet. Keep reading »
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Let’s treasure the old along with the new
(CNN)—On the dawn of the most historic inauguration of our time, we nervously await “change we can believe in.”
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Politicians and pundits analyze every pre-presidential utterance and come to quick conclusions about what will happen under the new administration. -
Third Screen: An Interview with Wynton Marsalis
Al Hirt may have given Wynton Marsalis his first trumpet. His dad may have stressed the value of meaningful education. New Orleans may have inspired him and surrounded him with the power of music growing up. His “Blood in the Fields” oratorio may have given him the Pulitzer Prize. And Brooklyn, he tells me, may have been the place where he first put together his world view. But no one village could have raised this child. For one thing, he doesn’t stand still. For another—trust me on this—if you think he’s a virtuoso on the trumpet, wait till you hear the virtuosity of the concert he’s doing for Martin Luther King and the Inauguration Monday night at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. It has jazz greats. It has dance legends. It has Jessye Norman, Angela Bassett, and Courtney Vance. And it has as its centerpiece a live conversation on jazz and democracy between Marsalis and retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor who, according to Marsalis, “is just a country girl at heart who loves Bob Wells and the Texas Playboys.” I caught up with Marsalis by phone while he was on the road this weekend, somewhere between New York and Charleston, and we, too, talked jazz and democracy ... Keep reading »
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Wynton interviewed by BBC for “Notes to President Obama”
BBC World News America is asking personalities from various walks of life to tell president-elect Barack Obama what they think he should do when he takes up his new job on 20 January.
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