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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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Imaginary Jazz Encounters The Real Thing
Stravinsky’s ‘‘Histoire du Soldat’’ is not the modest theater piece it first appears to be. Its newness, or better its anti-oldness, encapsulates more or less everything 20th-century composers have ever tried to do. Keep reading »
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The Classical Wynton Marsalis Turns Up Again
‘MAN, that’s hard to play,’’ the trumpet virtuoso Wynton Marsalis said recently. ‘‘That’s what goes through the minds of trumpet players when they hear it.’’ Mr. Marsalis, the artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, was speaking of a piece outside his usual domain, Stravinsky’s 1918 masterpiece ‘‘L’Histoire du Soldat’’ (’‘The Soldier’s Tale’‘). 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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A Mixed Marriage of Ghosts and Jazz
Zhongmei Li specializes in the merging of styles that range from the traditional dances she learned in her native China to the Western modern dance she studied in New York. In her new ‘‘Portrait Enchantress,’’ the centerpiece of a program presented by the Zhongmei Dance Company on Saturday night at the Brooklyn Center at Brooklyn College, Ms. Li pushes that goal to the limits. Keep reading »
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A Tribute to Bechet, With Tunes, of Course
Eight horn players sat toward the front of the stage in a neat semicircle, on folding chairs; they shot one another sidelong glances and joked with one another, and except for the tuxedos, they looked as though they could have been in rehearsal. This was the lasting image from Thursday night’s concert at Alice Tully Hall, when Jazz at Lincoln Center put on its Sidney Bechet centennial concert, ‘‘The Wizard at 100.’’ 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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Keeping a Stageful of Stars to a Single Beat
The drummer Elvin Jones, who was the implacable rumble suffusing the John Coltrane Quartet, has been celebrating his 70th birthday at the Blue Note this week. In the opening set on Tuesday, with a front line full of guests, the musicians reveled in simple, profound minor-key dirges taken from the post-1960 Coltrane school of hypnotism. 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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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 »