-
Higher Ground benefit concert reviewed on New York Times
True to New Orleans ritual, “Higher Ground”—the benefit for Hurricane Katrina relief at the Rose Theater on Saturday night—opened with a processional and wound up with a parade.
Keep reading » -
Big-Band Music Without the Weight of Nostalgia
You have to work a little at understanding Thad Jones, the trumpeter and composer. He arrived in New York in 1954, a decade after bebop exploded. He spent nine years playing and arranging with the Count Basie band, and made some lovely but generally overlooked small-group records under his own name. In the mid-1960’s, when so much jazz was open-ended, small-group expressionism, he directed all his energies toward an immaculately sculptured big band.
Keep reading » -
Don Quixote Rides Again, With an Ellingtonian Sidekick
More than two hours of original jazz music was played at Rose Theater on Thursday night. It was shaped around stories from “Don Quixote” and scored for 15 musicians and 2 singers, with a professional actor reading about 5,000 words of Cervantes in and around 23 songs and instrumental sketches. It was ambitious, well played, deeply Ellingtonian - and completely indigestible.
Keep reading » -
Old Friends Get Together, Feeling Right at Home
When Wynton Marsalis performs with his septet in New York these days, it is a special occasion. He toured Europe with the band a few years ago, but his duties at Lincoln Center as well as his ambitions to compose large works for big ensembles reached critical mass in the late 1990’s. So the septet faded into the background.
Keep reading »
But it’s good to be reminded of what it achieved. On Wednesday, at Rose Theater, the band entered from stage left, the musicians chanting in a slow single-file entrance, moving and stomping their feet in parade rhythm. As soon as they took their positions and dug into the tune—it was Mr. Marsalis’s “Ain’ No”—they flooded the acoustical space in the room. -
Sound Portraits Influenced by the View From the Train
When jazz bands played one-nighters in long lists of fourth-tier American towns, trains were a major part of their logistical life. But trains naturally crept into jazz composers’ aesthetic lives, too. At least, this was the case with Duke Ellington, who worked so much about the outside world into his music.
Keep reading » -
A Children’s Lesson About Seasons and People
“Suite for Human Nature,” which opened at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Rose Theater on Thursday night, is a gently jazz-educational cross between the trenchant lessons of ancient myth and the gentler storytelling of children’s suites like “Peter and the Wolf.” Keep reading »
-
Movement and Music, Both Jazz and Both Live
Just as jazz music comes in many sonic varieties, so jazz dancing can assume many shapes in space. That became clear on Wednesday night in “Jazz in Motion,” a Jazz at Lincoln Center presentation with works by four choreographers, three of them offering premieres.
Keep reading » -
With Built-In Tension, Jazz Swings to the Past
Ralph Ellison, who was lured away from the trumpet to become a writer, once explained that in jazz there is a “cruel contradiction implicit in the art form.” It is a contradiction between the individual and the group, between solitary assertion and collective cooperation.
Keep reading »
A “true jazz moment,” Ellison said, “springs from a contest in which each artist challenges all the rest,” in which the very nature of the player’s identity is at stake. That is the drama of solo riffs, of call-and-response interchanges, of daring high-wire improvisations. -
Soaking Up the Spaces at a New Jazz Center
Some basic impressions of Jazz at Lincoln Center’s new space, which opened last night: It is a sophisticated, cosmopolitan, fairly expensive-feeling experience; it is flexible and alive.
Jazz has so many different connotations for different people. But at least some part of this three-theater complex, taking up the fifth and sixth floors of the Time Warner Center on Columbus Circle, could ring the bells of recognition of someone who had never been to a jazz performance before and only possessed the received wisdom of photographs and album covers: yes, this seems right; this is jazz. And it contains enough attention to detail to impress those who have spent the better part of their lives hearing it, too.
Keep reading » -
The Making of a Jazz Statesman
As Jazz at Lincoln Center prepares for the first concert tonight at its new digs—three theaters in the Time Warner Center on Columbus Circle—Wynton Marsalis, its trumpet-playing star and artistic director, is behaving increasingly statesmanlike. Keep reading »