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News Updates – Barbican%20centre

  • They took me in like I was their son’: Wynton Marsalis on jazz’s great tradition

    Posted on August 9th, 2014 in Profiles & Interviews

    At the end of his performance at the Barbican with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, Wynton Marsalis made a little speech. The next piece, he announced, was a number that Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers used to play. Marsalis then recalled how he himself had played with the Jazz Messengers as an 18-year-old trumpet prodigy. He described how much he had learned from the drummer, who was then approaching 60, and especially about ‘the sacrifices you have to make to play this music’. Then the band roared into ‘Free for All’ by Wayne Shorter.

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  • Wynton Marsalis Trumpets Youth, Musical Diversity At Annual London Residency

    Posted on July 4th, 2014 in Review

    The solo played by U.S. jazzman Wynton Marsalis to close his now-annual residency at London’s Barbican this week was a rare personal moment in what was otherwise a master class in sharing the limelight.
    In lieu of a full-fledged encore with his 14-strong Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra (JLCO), Marsalis entertained with a small combo, delighting an already bouncing crowd with swooping scales of trumpet.

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  • Wynton Marsalis/Sachal Jazz Ensemble review – lively east-west fling

    Posted on July 1st, 2014 in Review

    Wynton Marsalis and his Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra joined Pakistan’s legendary movie-soundtrack band, the Sachal Jazz Ensemble, for a lively east-west fling in the closing stages of the trumpeter’s UK tour.   Keep reading »

  • Wynton Marsalis’s Swing Symphony, Barbican, review

    Posted on July 26th, 2012 in 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 »

  • The Telegraph: Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra/Congo Square, Barbican, review

    Posted on July 12th, 2012 in Review

    Wynton Marsalis, the celebrated American trumpeter, composer and band-leader, likes to think big. For him jazz is virtuoso musicality, uproarious enjoyment, spiritual edification and cultural memory, all rolled into one. To fulfil that vision he’s created several ambitious multi-movement suites for the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra.
    One of them, Congo Square, opened the orchestra’s current residency at the Barbican.

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  • Evening Standard: Congo Square: Wynton Marsalis & the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, Barbican Hall

    Posted on July 12th, 2012 in Review

    Congo Square is a quiet spot in north-central New Orleans, near Louis Armstrong Park. Tourists take pictures of Louis’s statue there before lunching in the French Quarter. Little over a century earlier, however, it had a very different function.

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  • Jazz Journal: Wynton Marsalis/Congo Square

    Posted on July 12th, 2012 in Review

    Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz At Lincoln Center Orchestra opened their 2012 residency at London’s Barbican Centre yesterday evening with a superb performance that celebrated the very birth of jazz in company with Ghanian drummer Yacub Addy and the band Odadaa!

    Congo Square was the public space in New Orleans where African slaves gathered on Sunday afternoons to dance and play, and was the only place in the USA where they could gather freely and celebrate their own music and culture. Inspired by this activity between the mid-1700s and the late 1800s, Marsalis and Ghanaian drum master Yacub Addy’s two-hour suite Congo Square celebrates the joy of that music and marks its influence on the jazz that followed.

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  • The Guardian: Wynton Marsalis with JLCO and Odadaa” at Barbican

    Posted on July 12th, 2012 in Review | 1

    Wynton Marsalis is famously resistant to notions of jazz-fusion. He has denounced attempts to dilute jazz by using funk or rock rhythms, always loudly asserting the primacy of swing in the jazz tradition. African rhythms, however, are rather more problematic for him. These rhythms do not swing in the traditional sense: they do not use swung quavers. Musicologically, they’re as far from his notion of jazz as, say, heavy metal. Yet they are undeniably part of jazz’s DNA.

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  • Congo Square: Wynton Marsalis & the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, Barbican Hall

    Posted on July 11th, 2012 in Review

    The proud son of New Orleans leads New York’s finest jazz repertory orchestra in his latest work inspired by Louisiana slave culture   Keep reading »

  • Heat combo: When Wynton Marsalis met Yacub Addy

    Posted on July 9th, 2012 in Profiles & Interviews

    We first saw Wynton Marsalis on television soloing with a symphony orchestra in 1981. The announcer said he came from New Orleans. “I’m going to work with this man,” my husband Yacub Addy said.
    I was surprised because Yacub is a traditional Ghanaian drummer of the Ga ethnic group. I couldn’t visualise him working with this classically trained trumpeter, although Wynton is known for jazz, which Yacub loved since he was a teenager in Ghana, dancing to American big band hits on the streets of Accra. His music led him from Ghana to Europe and America, where in 1982, as an artist and manager team, we created his current Ghanaian ensemble Odadaa!.

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