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Latin Grace and Drive Bonding With Jazz
Creolization is such a profound, unceasing force in the United States that it is often overlooked, the way a great vista becomes blank after time. Keep reading »
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Interview with Wynton Marsalis Musical Director, trumpet
Really, soloing is just like talking. You don’t know exactly what you’re going to say but you have an idea and then, as it starts to come out of your mouth, you start to organize it. You even organize the sound of a sentence as you go along. You give, you take some and you give some. And even when you’re listening to somebody, you’re waiting for the time for them to stop, or even if they don’t stop, you’re waiting for a certain moment. 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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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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Dizzy Gillespie, the Man and the Music
Sometimes concerts break up into small parts of great brilliance, and Jazz at Lincoln Center’s ‘‘Dizzy’s Big-Band Bop,’’ the opening concert of its season and a tribute to the orchestral work of Dizzy Gillespie, did just that. Keep reading »
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Marsalis Unbound
Following a limited number of concert performances, Wynton Marsalis’s Pulitzer Prize-winning composition “Blood on the Fields” has finally arrived on CD, allowing it the wider audience it deserves. Keep reading »
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A Swinging Travelogue, With Ellington as Guide
How Chinese is Duke Ellington’s ‘‘Chinoiserie,’’ how African is his ‘‘Liberian Suite’‘? Do they become more so by a particularly forceful rendering of a little pentatonic melody, a particularly dense malleting of the tom-toms? Keep reading »
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For Basie, Red Hot Blues
The blues settled into Alice Tully Hall on Thursday night with the arrival of the singer Dennis Rowland. Mr. Rowland was there to play the role of Jimmy Rushing and Joe Williams for Jazz at Lincoln Center’s show, ‘‘Swingin’ the Blues for Count Basie.’’ Keep reading »
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Wynton Marsalis has turned the hardships of slavery into sublime jazz
A three-hour oratorio about the history of slavery where the audience comes out whistling the tunes has to count as some kind of a triumph. Blood on the Fields by Wynton Marsalis - who wrote both the music and the libretto, and who performs the work at the Barbican on Tuesday with his Lincoln Centre Jazz Orchestra and the three featured vocalists of John Hendricks, Miles Griffith and Cassandra Wilson - is an extraordinary achievement by any standards. Keep reading »