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Sizzling backup a bonus gift on jazzman’s birthday
The coolest shindig in town Wednesday night had to be Wynton Marsalis’s 46th birthday concert. About 1,050 Victorians celebrated with the most famous jazz trumpeter alive, joining his quintet to sing Happy Birthday to the boss.
Marsalis, natty in a tan three-piece suit, got into the fun himself on this unplanned encore with a solo spanning buttery bop flurries and echoes of Dixieland. Then, after offering a few notes to the audience sitting stage right, the trumpeter—seeming both pleased and faintly embarrassed—strolled off.
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Wynton Marsalis puts Seattle jazz kids to the test
“When I tell you something,” said jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, wearing a suit and tie Saturday afternoon at the Paramount Theatre, “it’s with love, like you were my own son or daughter. Don’t take it as negative, but I am going to tell you something.” Keep reading »
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Marsalis hits the high notes in small-group show
“If I see something and you see something, it’s there,” explained trumpeter Wynton Marsalis Saturday, during his richly satisfying show at the Paramount Theatre. “And if it’s there, we’re both there, too. So there’s no ‘they.’ That’s why [this tune] is called ‘Find Me.’ “ Keep reading »
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Channeling the Granddaddy of Skid-Dat-De-Dat
In the recorded literature of jazz — and of American music, really — there is no greater document than the stack of three-minute sides made by Louis Armstrong for the OKeh label in the mid- to late 1920’s. Leading two successive bands billed as his Hot Five (and, briefly, a Hot Seven), Armstrong delivered a series of performances bursting with bravura and invention, in the process introducing a heroic new language of improvisation.
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Taking Coltrane’s Music and Making It Their Own
Jazz at Lincoln Center began its new season on Thursday with the first of three nights devoted to the music of John Coltrane. The occasion doubled as an early celebration of what would have been Coltrane’s 80th birthday (Sept. 23) — cake was served during intermission — and an opening salvo for the organization’s third year of programming in Frederick P. Rose Hall at Columbus Circle. It was a success on both counts.
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Bill Charlap Remembers Thelonious Monk, a Revolutionary Who Knew How to Swing
Early in the course of “Brilliant Corners,” the 92nd Street Y’s concert of Thelonious Monk’s music on Thursday night, the pianist Bill Charlap offered a succinct appreciation of Monk’s singular place in jazz. “He was a revolutionary within a revolution,” Mr. Charlap said. The revolution, he went on to explain, was bebop, which Monk helped foment but never fully embraced.
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Marsalis returns to Vitoria
The trumpeter Wynton Marsalis fulfilled his promise and returned last night to the International Festival of Jazz in Vitoria to complete and premier exclusively a work dedicated to the city, his personal tribute to the city was rewarded with a statue commemorating the first ever Pulitzer Prize in Jazz.
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Wynton Marsalis and Paco de Lucia in Vitoria-Gasteiz
El Festival Internacional de Jazz de Vitoria ofreció ayer una imagen única y, probablemente, irrepetible: Paco de Lucía, a la guitarra, y Wynton Marsalis, a la trompeta, sobre el mismo escenario compartiendo y fusionando su arte ante un pabellón repleto de público. La escena se hizo esperar, pero no defraudó. Antes, Paco de Lucía subió al escenario y, en solitario, con la guitarra y sillas vacías a su alrededor, se reencontró con el público de Vitoria, el mismo con el que hace dos años compartió su recién otorgado Príncipe de Asturias de las Artes.
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Marsalis’s ‘Congo Square,’ With the Lincoln Center Orchestra
Wynton Marsalis has composed a number of extended works during his tenure as artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, usually with the stated ambition of capturing some aspect of the African-American experience. On Thursday night at the Rose Theater, he conducted his latest such effort, “Congo Square,” featuring the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra and Odadaa!, a nine-piece Ghanaian percussion and vocal troupe.
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The Washington Post on Wynton’s “Congo Square”
The Washington Post has just published an article about Congo Square.
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The last work from Wynton and Yacub Addy will be performed May 4, 5 and 6 at Rose Theater