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Rolling Stone: Crosby, Stills and Nash Work Out With Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra
On January 27th, 1970, Miles Davis recorded a version of the medieval whisper “Guinevere” from Crosby, Stills and Nash’s 1969 debut album, Crosby, Stills & Nash. Davis’ take was in the manner of his recently-cut, not-yet-released album, Bitches Brew – 18 minutes of electric turmoil with a buzzing current of sitar and only passing references to David Crosby’s original melody. It was a rare instance of Davis losing his way in an astutely chosen song. His “Guinevere” stayed in the can until 1979, when it appeared on the anthology Circle in the Round. Keep reading »
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Jazz as conversation - Marsalis explores instincts, teamwork behind a good performance
Great jazz requires a strange alchemy of instinct and expertise, of empathy and teamwork from its musicians — a fact few know better than famed artist and composer Wynton Marsalis. Jazz is a conversation, but a nuanced, swift, and complicated one, he said.
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At Sanders Theatre on Wednesday, Marsalis and a band of all-star musicians both discussed and demonstrated how to achieve that balance in “At the Speed of Instinct: Choosing Together to Play and Stay Together,” the fourth of Marsalis’ six-part lecture series at Harvard that began in 2011. Coming just two day’s after Monday’s bombings at the Boston Marathon, the performance provided a collective respite for the campus. -
Listen up, says Marsalis - Master class at the Boston Arts Academy
As many parents can attest, rousing a child from sleep to make it to the bus stop can be a difficult task. Doing so during a vacation week would seem near impossible. But on Thursday, a group of students from Boston and Cambridge happily rose from bed and made it to class.
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Revioew - Wynton Marsalis’ “Blood on the Fields”, Still Genius
A few weeks ago I had the experience—full of both promise and tension—of revisiting a piece of art that I once thought truly great. The fear, of course, is that such things cannot live up to your memory and hopes. Is anything ever as wonderful as it seemed when you first fell in love with it? Keep reading »
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An Oratorio of History With History of Its Own
By the time of Wynton Marsalis’s 1994 oratorio, “Blood on the Fields,” written for three singers and a 15-piece band, his scale for musical structure and organizational planning was big and getting bigger.
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He was 32 then. Jazz at Lincoln Center hadn’t yet become a constituent part of the larger Lincoln Center organization, and the idea of a dedicated theater for jazz hadn’t even been proposed. But he had already written extended works and had developed a framework for identifying and explaining jazz’s standards of excellence, and for linking the music to the history of black Americans and the notion of cultural survival. Never before had such power resided within one jazz musician, and those who doubted him wanted to be impressed on every possible level — especially after “Blood” won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for music. -
Wynton Marsalis teaches Loyola jazz students lessons in music, life
Lost in concentration, Wynton Marsalis prowled the stage of Loyola University’s Louis J. Roussel Performance Hall, dissecting a student big band’s rendition of the jazz standard “Take the ‘A’ Train.” The New Orleans-born, Pulitzer Prize-winning jazz trumpeter did not necessarily like all that he heard. Keep reading »
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An Unforgettable Evening With Wynton Marsalis, Family And Friends
It was obvious when Mr. Ellis Marsalis took a seat in the center of a sold-out audience last night at Loyola’s Louis J. Roussel Performance Hall that the evening would be a special one. No one could have guessed that the performance by his son, Wynton, would turn into the once-in-a-lifetime event it became.
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The younger Marsalis, 51, performing as part of Loyola University’s Presidential Centennial Guest Series, opened the set with his composition “Free to Be.” Accompanying the nine-time Grammy-winning trumpeter and Managing and Artistic Director of Jazz at Lincoln Center was a world-class ensemble featuring Loyola alum Victor Goines (clarinet and saxophone), Carlos Henriquez (bass), Ali Jackson (drums), and Dan Nimmer (piano), who traded solos to resounding applause. Marsalis was thoughtful and gracious, grabbing a towel at stage left for Jackson, and musing at length on the importance of his upbringing, and the basic values of integrity and equality instilled in him by his father. -
Forces of Nature: Lightning, Water, Music and Movement
A lighthouse guides a ship to safety. A lightning rod diverts a bolt from a structure by providing a direct path to the ground. Still, the opening images of “Lighthouse/Lightning Rod,” a new work by the choreographer Garth Fagan, with loose, exuberant music by the jazz composer and trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, hint at danger as much as at security. Dancers, wearing aquatically themed purples and blues, move spontaneously, as if caught in a riptide: with little warning, they change direction, hopping forward on one leg while taking freestyle strokes in the air with a single arm or collapsing and dangling their fingers toward the floor. Without being too heavy-handed, Mr. Fagan shows that the waters surrounding his “Lighthouse,” as the first section is named, are anything but tranquil.
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Wynton Marsalis plays homage to Von Freeman
Just moments after Wynton Marsalis took the stage of Orchestra Hall on Tuesday night he addressed a subject on many people’s minds: Chicago tenor saxophonist Von Freeman, who died earlier this month at age 88.
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“He was a legend,” Marsalis told a crowded house, while a memorial service for Freeman was being held across town, at Christ Universal Temple, on South Ashland Avenue. -
Wynton Marsalis’s Swing Symphony, Barbican, review
The LSO and virtuoso trumpeter Wynton Marslis’s Lincoln Centre Jazz Orchestra combined for a fitting climax to the latter’s Barbican residency, writes Ivan Hewett. Keep reading »