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The Magic of Wynton Marsalis
Magic was in the air as The Wynton Marsalis Quartet took the stage Sunday night, when the preeminent trumpeter in jazz music today strode confidently to that stage and began to whistle. This was just the beginning of an unexpected opener - an obscure Ornette Coleman’s composition - ‘Remnant” - a request from an audience member that was given a loving and virtuosi treatment.
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Marlsais’ young players bask in the spotlight
It may be a bit early to place Wynton Marsalis firmly in the same role as drummer Art Blakey, whose Jazz Messengers band helped launch the careers of many great young artists (including Marsalis himself). Keep reading »
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Old Friends Get Together, Feeling Right at Home
When Wynton Marsalis performs with his septet in New York these days, it is a special occasion. He toured Europe with the band a few years ago, but his duties at Lincoln Center as well as his ambitions to compose large works for big ensembles reached critical mass in the late 1990’s. So the septet faded into the background.
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But it’s good to be reminded of what it achieved. On Wednesday, at Rose Theater, the band entered from stage left, the musicians chanting in a slow single-file entrance, moving and stomping their feet in parade rhythm. As soon as they took their positions and dug into the tune—it was Mr. Marsalis’s “Ain’ No”—they flooded the acoustical space in the room. -
Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra: The Music of Paul Whiteman
To appreciate how Paul Whiteman’s Orchestra advanced music after the Ragtime Era an understanding of what preceded the First World War is required. Before recorded sound there was a piano in every house, John Philip Sousa’s Marching Bands, Ringling Circus Bands, Community Bands, School Bands performed for every holiday or event in America. Keep reading »
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Sound Portraits Influenced by the View From the Train
When jazz bands played one-nighters in long lists of fourth-tier American towns, trains were a major part of their logistical life. But trains naturally crept into jazz composers’ aesthetic lives, too. At least, this was the case with Duke Ellington, who worked so much about the outside world into his music.
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Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra Featuring Wynton Marsalis: A Love Supreme (2005)
In the last year there’s been a resurgence of interest in John Coltrane’s epochal A Love Supreme. First saxophonist Branford Marsalis’ quartet released a live DVD with an incendiary version of the suite, demonstrating with the same instrumentation how an ensemble could be reverent without being imitative, capturing the essence of the piece without sounding like a weak copy. Keep reading »
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A Children’s Lesson About Seasons and People
“Suite for Human Nature,” which opened at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Rose Theater on Thursday night, is a gently jazz-educational cross between the trenchant lessons of ancient myth and the gentler storytelling of children’s suites like “Peter and the Wolf.” Keep reading »
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Marsalis’s ‘Human Nature’: Engaging Fairy Tale
“Suite for Human Nature” seems a terribly dull title for a jazz fable, especially one as whimsical and charming as Wynton Marsalis’s latest extended work, which had its world premiere at the Lincoln Theater on Friday night. The renowned trumpeter and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer has written more ambitious and complex orchestral pieces, but none more playfully engaging and family-friendly. Keep reading »
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Wynton Marsalis’s Glancing Blow
Back in 1970 Miles Davis provided music for a documentary on Jack Johnson, the African American boxer who reigned during the first two decades of the past century. The result sounded like Miles Davis music circa 1970—funky, brashly electric and defiantly anachronistic. Keep reading »
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Movement and Music, Both Jazz and Both Live
Just as jazz music comes in many sonic varieties, so jazz dancing can assume many shapes in space. That became clear on Wednesday night in “Jazz in Motion,” a Jazz at Lincoln Center presentation with works by four choreographers, three of them offering premieres.
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