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Blue Engine Records Releases The Abyssinian Mass
New York, NY – February 3, 2016– Raise your voices and lift your hearts as Blue Engine Records releases The Abyssinian Mass by the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis featuring Damien Sneed, Chorale Le Chateau and Special Guest Reverend Dr. Calvin O. Butts, III on March 18, 2016. The Abyssinian Mass — a landmark collaboration of jazz, gospel, instrumentation and vocals — marks Marsalis’s first original recorded composition in six years. Keep reading »
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“Abyssinian: A Gospel Celebration” - Live Webcasts From The House of Swing
Raise your voices and lift your hearts as the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis, Damien Sneed, and the 70-piece Chorale Le Chateau webcast live only Abyssinian: A Gospel Celebration, an historic hand–clappin’, tambourine-slappin’ celebration scheduled to take place October 24th, 25th and 26th at 8PM ET.
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Wynton Marsalis Goes Back To Church For ‘Abyssinian Mass’
Wynton Marsalis is sipping hot tea in a church conference room before the evening’s performance. His custom-made Monette Raja trumpet — with its built-in mouthpiece and black opal inlays — sits by his side. He’s riffing on one of his favorite subjects: the universality of rhythm.
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“That rolling 6/8 rhythm is in African religious music, it’s in Anglican religious music,” he says, humming a complicated pattern and tapping his fingers on his notebook. “In a slower tempo it would be ‘Greensleeves.’” He scats the melody. “Now stay in that time, here’s the African 6/8 ... now let’s go into the jazz shuffle.” More tapping. “It’s the same rhythm.” -
Wynton Marsalis personally compiles and produces “The Spiritual Side of Wynton Marsalis”
Rich collection of spiritually inspired works recorded 1988 to 2002, originally released on Columbia Records and Sony Classical, available everywhere October 22.
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Concurrent with 16-city “Abyssinian: A Gospel Celebration Tour,” October 3-27, featuring the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis, conductor Damien Sneed, and 70-voice Chorale Le Chateau -
Abyssinian: A Gospel Celebration U.S. Tour Dates
Marsalis’ Abyssinian Mass, a landmark collaboration of jazz, gospel, instrumentation and vocals, tours U.S. performing arts centers and churches.
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Reviews and Photos from Wynton’s Third Harvard Lecture “Meet Me at the Crossroad”
Wynton Marsalis recently gave the third of six epic lectures that he is slated to give at Harvard University. He promised that this one wasn’t going to be 4 and half hours long, as the last one was. When he got started, the result was part history lesson, part concert, part spoken-word poetry reading. Three hours into the show, his agenda became clear: He was telling a timeless story about love. For Charlie “Yardbird’’ Parker, inventor of bebop. For Bessie Smith, teller of the low-down nasty truth. For Woody Guthrie, who sang about running from the law. For all those who sang about being both broke and broken-hearted. For every artist who cared more about art than celebrity.
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The melding of American music
A crossroad is a possible turning point, perhaps from the past, or from tradition, or from another direction. But to Wynton Marsalis, the legendary musician and artistic director of jazz at Lincoln Center, a crossroad is an intersection meant to be celebrated, which is exactly what he did in his combination performance and lecture at Harvard Monday evening. Keep reading »
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Wynton Marsalis returns to Harvard University for third lecture in series
Wynton Marsalis continues his two-year lecture series at Harvard with an exploration of root styles of American music in Sanders Theatre on Feb. 6. Currently the artistic director of jazz at Lincoln Center, Marsalis is an accomplished musician, composer, bandleader, and educator who has made the promotion of jazz and cultural literacy his hallmark cause.
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Marsalis Leads The Faithful
This past weekend, to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, which is generally regarded as New York’s oldest Afro-American religious institution, Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Rose Hall was transformed into a kind of spiritual multiplex. Gospel choirs issued forth from every performance space, and also in the public atrium in between (where macaroni and cheese was served, presumably to evoke the provisions one might find at a Sunday school picnic). What artistic director Wynton Marsalis usually calls the House of Swing had become the House of Prayer. Keep reading »
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Abyssinian 200: A Celebration
On April 10, 11, 12 & 19, Jazz at Lincoln Center celebrates The Abyssinian Baptist Church’s bicentennial with Abyssinian 200: A Celebration, a special mass and world premiere of music written by Wynton for the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra and the Abyssinian Baptist Church Choir.
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