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A Home That Jazz Can Call Its Own
FOR many months, Wynton Marsalis has written in a spiral-bound red notebook. The notes, in a small, neat pencil script, deal with how to create the new $128 million performing arts complex for Jazz at Lincoln Center, of which he is the artistic director. Keep reading »
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Wynton interviewed by the New York Times Magazine
Do you feel personally responsible for the acoustics at your deluxe new home, Frederick P. Rose Hall?
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Acoustics is like a draft pick. Until you get out and start playing games, you don’t know how it’s going to go. -
Wynton Marsalis Simplifies Matters
In all outward signs, Wynton Marsalis’s new album, “The Magic Hour,” represents a change in his career. It’s on a new label: last year, Mr. Marsalis signed with Blue Note after more than 20 years and 30 jazz records with Columbia/Sony. It also presents a new band, at least new to most listeners, who are used to the septet he has played with for more than a decade. But most strikingly, it is a statement about simplicity, a virtue that has often escaped him. Keep reading »
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Marsalis, Clinton and Others Dissect Jazz at Symposium
Wynton Marsalis, the artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, has talked for some years about his desire to gather an intellectual community around jazz.
Last night at the Walter Reade Theater at the center, Mr. Marsalis and his organization scored a coup in the name of intellectualism and publicity: a symposium, with an invitation-only audience of about 200, on the subject of jazz and American democracy, including the former president and part-time saxophonist Bill Clinton.
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A New Orleans Jazzman Gets the Marsalis Treatment
The work of the New Orleans drummer and composer James Black sounds as if it was written after the 1950’s, but that’s about as far as you can guess. Because Black was a drummer, he was particularly sensitive to rhythm-section clichés; some of his tunes used diabolical time-signature changes, but his melodies flowed through them in such a way that those changes didn’t trip up the listener. Keep reading »
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Working Together, Taking Different Roads
It’s true: the Marsalises have been overexposed to the ends of the earth. One might have looked at the enormous profile on Wynton Marsalis in the current issue of The Atlantic Monthly, noticed the recent PBS special about the family, then seen a full-family concert coming up and rightly wondered why nobody else in jazz was apparently worth paying attention to.
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The Rhythm of Flamenco Wins American Hearts
The latest of Jazz at Lincoln Center’s excursions into foreign music was ‘‘Flamenco Nights,’’ Thursday’s concert at Alice Tully Hall, and the connecting of flamenco to jazz went off well, if a little stiff-jointed at the American end. Keep reading »
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A NIGHT OUT WITH: Wynton Marsalis; A Trumpeter, His Tie and Friends Who Love to Hang
THE trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, who on Monday night was due at a party downtown, at a dinner Midtown and at a jam session in Harlem, keeps a frenetic schedule befitting a political candidate. But, said Mr. Marsalis, who has three sons by two former girlfriends, he would never be able to run for office. Keep reading »
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Paying Tribute to a Master With His Own Hard Music
The drummer Art Blakey, who died in 1990, ushered Wynton Marsalis into a contender’s position in the jazz world, bringing him into the dynastic Jazz Messengers group at the age of 17 in 1979. So when Mr. Marsalis and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra paid tribute to Blakey at Alice Tully Hall on Friday night, there was bound to be more sentiment than in the usual jazz repertory concert. Keep reading »
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Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra Looks to Link Jazz and Tango
Jazz at Lincoln Center has always had an educational edge to its concerts, but now Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra are teaching more obscure lessons. Keep reading »