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Imaginary Jazz Encounters The Real Thing
Stravinsky’s ‘‘Histoire du Soldat’’ is not the modest theater piece it first appears to be. Its newness, or better its anti-oldness, encapsulates more or less everything 20th-century composers have ever tried to do. Keep reading »
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The Devil Is in Details of ‘Soldier,’ ‘Fiddler’ Tales
It was a winter of rains and floods. But Royce Hall was full for a performance of Stravinsky’s “Histoire du Soldat” (Soldier’s Tale). The concert began an hour late because the trombonist was stranded on a flooded street. Keep reading »
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Wynton Marsalis on Billy Taylor’s Jazz at the Kennedy Center
When the producers of the NPR program “Billy Taylor’s Jazz at the Kennedy Center” edit the show that was taped with guest Wynton Marsalis at the Terrace Theater Monday night, they’ll have trouble deciding what to emphasize: the trumpeter’s words or his music. Keep reading »
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Big Band, Big Premiere, Big Tour, Big Marsalis
Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra have spent the last several months touring the world, and on Thursday night at Alice Tully Hall, over several hours of technically perfect playing, it showed. Mr. Marsalis and the orchestra, who will be performing again tonight as part of Jazz at Lincoln Center, were completely at ease moving through difficult music; the sharp juxtapositions Mr. Marsalis throws around in his pieces were never forced, and horn and percussion riffs were tossed in the air with the precision of a piece of industrial equipment stamping out a metal part. And at least one musician nodded off to sleep. Keep reading »
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Marsalis’s ‘Train’: It’s The Rail Thing
The Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra’s performance at Constitution Hall on Friday included the Washington premiere of Wynton Marsalis’s first major composition since “Blood on the Fields” was awarded the Pulitzer Prize last year. Keep reading »
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A Mixed Marriage of Ghosts and Jazz
Zhongmei Li specializes in the merging of styles that range from the traditional dances she learned in her native China to the Western modern dance she studied in New York. In her new ‘‘Portrait Enchantress,’’ the centerpiece of a program presented by the Zhongmei Dance Company on Saturday night at the Brooklyn Center at Brooklyn College, Ms. Li pushes that goal to the limits. Keep reading »
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A Tribute to Bechet, With Tunes, of Course
Eight horn players sat toward the front of the stage in a neat semicircle, on folding chairs; they shot one another sidelong glances and joked with one another, and except for the tuxedos, they looked as though they could have been in rehearsal. This was the lasting image from Thursday night’s concert at Alice Tully Hall, when Jazz at Lincoln Center put on its Sidney Bechet centennial concert, ‘‘The Wizard at 100.’’ Keep reading »
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Gershwin Variations Raise Spirits and Cash
For a jazz band, a concert program of George Gershwin’s music is like prime rib to a hound. There isn’t a reasonably educated jazz performer around who hasn’t internalized ‘‘Embraceable You,’’ or at least Charlie Parker’s rewriting of it; after Louis Armstrong’s and Miles Davis’s versions, every trumpet player knows the songs from ‘‘Porgy and Bess.’’ Keep reading »
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Marsalis Shows Um Jazz Band A Lighter Touch
Wynton Marsalis walked onstage unannounced Saturday, at the end of a performance by the University of Miami faculty quintet. The music had been very good up to that point, and the sold-out audience at Gusman Hall on the university campus appreciated what it was hearing. Keep reading »
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Keeping a Stageful of Stars to a Single Beat
The drummer Elvin Jones, who was the implacable rumble suffusing the John Coltrane Quartet, has been celebrating his 70th birthday at the Blue Note this week. In the opening set on Tuesday, with a front line full of guests, the musicians reveled in simple, profound minor-key dirges taken from the post-1960 Coltrane school of hypnotism. Keep reading »