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News Updates – Congo Square

  • Drummer Yacub Addy dies

    Posted on January 22nd, 2015 in News | 1

    Ghanaian drummer Yacub Addy, a master of African music who founded Odadaa!, worked with jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis and became a National Heritage Fellow in 2010, died of a heart attack on Dec. 18 at the age of 83. He lived in Latham.

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  • 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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  • 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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  • Wynton on METRO UK: Jazz fusion is like Tabasco, it works in small doses

    Posted on July 9th, 2012 in Profiles & Interviews

    This month he appears to be bringing a large chunk of that activity to Britain for one of his biannual visits. Alongside assorted education packages around London and a festival for school bands, Marsalis will conduct a mammoth Jazz at Lincoln Center residency at London’s Barbican and beyond with selected bands. The performances include a collaboration with an African drum troupe, a Harlem-style Abyssinian mass with a 100-voice choir, a Duke Ellington tribute, an exploration of Afro-Cuban jazz, a concert at Birmingham Symphony Hall on July 20 and the British debut of Marsalis’s epic Swing Symphony.

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  • Wynton’s interview on the Telegraph: It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got swing

    Posted on July 9th, 2012 in Profiles & Interviews

    Being with Wynton Marsalis is always an education. He’s happiest when he can enthuse about something, or learn something new from whoever he’s speaking to. Right now, sitting over lunch in a Japanese restaurant in New York, he’s off on the topic of jazz’s Anglo-Celtic roots.
    “Those folk songs and hymns the slaves learnt from their masters were the real basis, the African element was grafted on top, not the other way round,” he says very firmly, “and this is why African and jazz rhythms developed in a different way. Listen, if you clap a marching rhythm, one-two-three-four, you can fit a swing rhythm over the top, like this.”

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  • Jazz At Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis return to the Barbican in July 2012

    Posted on May 18th, 2012 in Concerts | 1

    The world-renowned Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis return to the Barbican for their second International Associate residency in July 2012. Following on from their critically acclaimed visit in 2010, the second residency will give audiences the opportunity to experience music performed by some of America’s finest jazz musicians in concerts, workshops, masterclasses, professional development events and talks.

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  • As Seen on 60 Minutes

    Posted on June 26th, 2011 in Video | 4

    Free download of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis performing Wynton’s composition “Sanctified Blues” from Congo Square during their Cuban tour, a sneak preview from the JLCO’s upcoming CD “Five Nights In Havana“, coming out in 2012.

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