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Musician Wants to Bring Music Back to New Orleans
New Orleans is known around the world as a birthplace of jazz. Hurricane Katrina scattered many of the city’s musicians and artists across the country. Fewer than 300 of the city’s pre-Katrina population of over 2,000 musicians have returned. But the city, as part of its recovery effort, is trying to get more of them back.
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Revitalizing the culture of New Orleans is the goal of the Bring Back New Orleans Cultural committee. -
Wynton’s woes
Wynton Marsalis is the first jazz musician to win the Pulitzer Prize in music. He’s got a basketful of Grammys. And he’s become the music director of the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, which lands in Chicago for two gigs this weekend.
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So is there anything he can’t do? You bet. He can’t get his kids to stay awake during a symphony concert. -
Wynton sounds off - Marsalis expounds on post-Katrina creativity, the Bring New Orleans Back Commission and all that jazz
Wynton Marsalis, the most prominent New Orleans jazz trumpeter since Louis Armstrong, first toured Hurricane Katrina’s devastation in October. His take on the state of the city? “We’re in bad shape,” he said, “but it was better than I thought it was, based on what I’d heard.” Keep reading »
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Transcript form Wynton’s interview for Fox News Sunday
The holiday spirit alive and well in New Orleans. It’s been almost four months since Hurricane Katrina of ravaged the Gulf Coast. Now residents and businesses are slowly returning to New Orleans.
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Interview: From Marsalis, Jazz Profiles in Verse for Kids
Wynton Marsalis has put down his horn and picked up his pen for his latest project. It’s a book called “Jazz A-B-Z,” and in it Marsalis shares his deep knowledge of jazz in all its forms with children. Marsalis jitterbugs his way through the alphabet profiling 26 jazz legends through a variety of poetic forms. Keep reading »
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Maestro Marsalis
Wynton Marsalis marries jazz and classical music like no one else. SOME years ago, surveying the historic divide between classical music and pop, a critic observed, “Jazz, once the arch-fiend threatening the whole fabric of musical society, is now allowed to be respectable, as a sort of first cousin to serious music who prefers to live apart.” Keep reading »
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The Return of the Broadway Boogie-Woogie
THE choreographer Garth Fagan and Wynton Marsalis, the co-founder and artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, go way back. They met in the 1980’s when Mr. Fagan, a jazz aficionado, took his dancers to New York clubs to hear Mr. Marsalis play. “I knew we could learn from him,” Mr. Fagan said in a recent conference call with Mr. Marsalis. “I sensed we saw things the same way.” Eventually he invited Mr. Marsalis to a rehearsal at the company’s headquarters in Rochester.
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New York Diarist: Strength in Swing
Immediately following the landing of Hurricane Katrina, I received hundreds of phone calls from all over the world. They offered sympathy and resources. I don’t get those phone calls now. The ones I receive now are rife with disgust at bureaucratic fumbling, with rage at an unspecified they who are in charge of everything from predicting which levees would break to choosing which people will return. They made it happen.
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35 Who Made a Difference: Wynton Marsalis
“We’re blues people. And blues never lets tragedy have the last word.” This is an utterly characteristic statement by Wynton Marsalis, the trumpeter, composer and jazz impresario. He spoke those words in a television interview shortly after Hurricane Katrina devastated his hometown of New Orleans. Within days he was playing in gigs to raise money for Katrina victims, including a huge benefit concert, “Higher Ground,” produced by Jazz At Lincoln Center, of which he is the artistic director. It has raised more than $2 million. Bob Dylan once remarked that a hero was “someone who understands the degree of responsibility that comes with his freedom.” By that measure, Marsalis is a hero bona fide.
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Native Son: Wynton Marsalis
Born in New Orleans in 1961, trumpeter Wynton Marsalis is the most prominent member of one of the city’s esteemed jazz families. He has won nine jazz and classical Grammys since 1983, and he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1997 for his jazz opera Blood on the Fields. He is the artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York.
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