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Wynton looks at roots of Jazz
Growing up in New Orleans, jazz trumpet phenom Wynton Marsalis took the bubbling local music scene for granted. Now, 10 years into Marsalis’s high-profile career, the music he is playing serves as a reminder of the importance – and continued vibrancy – of the Crescent City’s storied jazz and blues tradition. Keep reading »
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Marsalis adds blues to his music
Dressed casually in a T-shirt and sweats, trumpeter Wynton Marsalis opened the door to his Seattle hotel room during a recent stop on a concert tour that brings him to Detroit’s Orchestra Hall tonight. Keep reading »
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Marsalis: Mastering Two Modes
Considering the impact trumpeter Wynton Marsalis had on the music scene when he was so young, it might be assumed that he started playing the instrument at about the age of, oh, 2 or 3 maybe. Keep reading »
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Dealing with Those Bluses
IN HIS CONCERT performances a few years back, Wynton Marsalis dispensed jazz music like it was cod liver oil. He would make the horn sound spitting mad, then offer miniature jazz-history lessons, lashing out at what he believed were lower forms of music. This is good for you, ignorant swine. Keep reading »
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Coolin’ in with Wynton Marsalis
Wynton Marsalis, a musician without whom it would have been hard to imagine last year or even the whole past decade, explains what jazz is - and isn’t, why under no circumstances you can call Sting a jazz musician, and why Miles Davis is the most tragic figure in Western music of the 20th century, why no one today wants to study the music of Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane and, last but not least, why Wynton himself is not planning to record another classical album in the near future Keep reading »
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Marsalis adds brassy clauses to ‘Shannon’s Deal’
Eight-time Grammy-winning musician Wynton Marsalis, who cut his first record at only 18, has at age 27 carved out another facet in his versatile career: scoring television movies. Keep reading »
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Trumpeter Marsails personifies jazz
TALENT, VISION and determination have made the brilliant trumpeter Wynton Marsalis a provocative figure in jazz, with a productive parallel career in classical music. Keep reading »
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Trumpet master Marsalis doubles as a jazz teacher
NEW YORK - Commerce vs. education – that’s the tug of war influencing the music young people are exposed to. Or at least that’s the view of young trumpet virtuoso Wynton Marsalis. Keep reading »
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What Jazz Is - and Isn’t
My generation finds itself wedged between two opposing traditions. One is the tradition we know in such wonderful detail from the enormous recorded legacy that tells anyone who will listen that jazz broke the rules of European conventions and created rules of its own that were so specific, so thorough and so demanding that a great art resulted. This art has had such universal appeal and application to the expression of modern life that it has changed the conventions of American music as well as those of the world at large. Keep reading »
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Born Out of Time
JUST eighteen when he made his debut with Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis answered the prayers of those who feared that the clock was running out for jazz, as it clearly already had for the blues. Keep reading »