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Jazz at Lincoln Center and Sony Music Team Up for Blue Engine Records
Jazz at Lincoln Center has shelves upon shelves of recordings from concerts it has presented since its founding in 1987, including a studio recording featuring the pianist Chick Corea, a musical Mass with a gospel choir written for the 200th anniversary of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York and concerts with the saxophonists Sherman Irby and Ted Nash. Keep reading »
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Wayne Shorter Goes Solo With the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra
When the saxophonist Wayne Shorter has come through town over the past 15 years or so, he has generally been with his quartet, a group that plays soul-drilling, gonzo-Zen interventions on about 50 years’ worth of his music. There is much open space in these performances, much insight and mystery, a settling into a zone between direction and indirection. Apart from Mr. Shorter’s stature as a small-group composer in jazz — the best, pretty much — the alert and unscripted way the quartet operates has for many listeners represented a current ideal for how jazz works and what it can contain: immediacy, collectivity, discipline, freedom. Keep reading »
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‘Blues Symphony’ by Wynton Marsalis Has Its New York Premiere
Classical composers have long been lured by the jazz tradition, with George Antheil and George Gershwin among the first to write jazz-influenced orchestral works. Jazz musicians have also written for traditional orchestras, and contemporary artists including Steve Coleman and Henry Threadgill have recently been commissioned by the American Composers Orchestra to cross genres. Keep reading »
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A Latin Musician Translates a Meeting of Cultures
The reality that jazz and Afro-Latin music have been mixed for a century can sometimes lead to the myth that a musician trained in one tradition is effectively trained in the other, and that fluency runs both ways at all times, in all places. And so you might have looked at an advertisement for the Panamanian singer Rubén Blades collaborating with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, as he is doing through Saturday night at the Rose Theater, and thought, sure, Latin jazz.
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Sharing a Jazzy Working Holiday
The close of the year is a time for many things: cozy reunions, warm nostalgia, extravagant splurges. If you’re Wynton Marsalis, artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, it’s also a time to set up shop in a smallish room and get back to work, as if you had ever stopped. Keep reading »
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An Oratorio of History With History of Its Own
By the time of Wynton Marsalis’s 1994 oratorio, “Blood on the Fields,” written for three singers and a 15-piece band, his scale for musical structure and organizational planning was big and getting bigger.
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He was 32 then. Jazz at Lincoln Center hadn’t yet become a constituent part of the larger Lincoln Center organization, and the idea of a dedicated theater for jazz hadn’t even been proposed. But he had already written extended works and had developed a framework for identifying and explaining jazz’s standards of excellence, and for linking the music to the history of black Americans and the notion of cultural survival. Never before had such power resided within one jazz musician, and those who doubted him wanted to be impressed on every possible level — especially after “Blood” won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for music. -
‘Cotton Club Parade’ Will March Onto Broadway
After two popular engagements at City Center, “Cotton Club Parade” – a musical revue celebrating the Harlem nightclub during the Duke Ellington era – will move to Broadway this fall, its producers announced on Wednesday. With minimal spoken text, this 90-minute show recreates many of the big-band swing and blues numbers of the Cotton Club during the 1920s and ‘30s, with the score including works by Jimmy McHugh and Dorothy Fields (“I Can’t Give You Anything but Love”), Harold Arlen (“Stormy Weather,” “I’ve Got the World on a String”) and Ellington (“Rockin’ in Rhythm,” “Cotton Club Stomp”).
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Just One Bishop at High Church of Jazz Purity
LAST spring, after Wynton Marsalis took over the reins of Jazz at Lincoln Center on a temporary basis because the executive director had resigned, he hinted, as he shook hands with donors at a gala fund-raiser, that he was unhappy with the way the institution had been managed. He likened it to an orchestra without a leader or a musical score.
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Forces of Nature: Lightning, Water, Music and Movement
A lighthouse guides a ship to safety. A lightning rod diverts a bolt from a structure by providing a direct path to the ground. Still, the opening images of “Lighthouse/Lightning Rod,” a new work by the choreographer Garth Fagan, with loose, exuberant music by the jazz composer and trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, hint at danger as much as at security. Dancers, wearing aquatically themed purples and blues, move spontaneously, as if caught in a riptide: with little warning, they change direction, hopping forward on one leg while taking freestyle strokes in the air with a single arm or collapsing and dangling their fingers toward the floor. Without being too heavy-handed, Mr. Fagan shows that the waters surrounding his “Lighthouse,” as the first section is named, are anything but tranquil.
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Two Old Friends Prepare a Three-Part Premiere
ROCHESTER — Last week the jazz trumpeter and composer Wynton Marsalis walked into an office building here that once housed a Knights of Columbus chapter, rode an elevator to a high-ceilinged studio and discovered his septet, a 12-member modern dance company, a giant spatula and a 21-foot-tall woman.
Mr. Marsalis had a cold, but he wasn’t hallucinating. The studio is the home of Garth Fagan Dance, and Mr. Marsalis was there to rehearse. “Lighthouse/Lightning Rod,” his first collaboration with Mr. Fagan since “Griot New York” in 1991, opens at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Thursday. The spatula was one of Martin Puryear’s set pieces for “Griot,” excerpts from which fill out the program in Brooklyn. The sculpture of the woman was a conception of a lighthouse by the artist Alison Saar.
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