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Just a Couple of Guys Dressed in the Blues
Willie Nelson was halfway through a flinty and casually gripping guitar solo on “Rainy Day Blues” when everything clicked into place. It was his fifth song at the Allen Room on Friday night, and the bright young rhythm section onstage was finally locking in. At Mr. Nelson’s right elbow Wynton Marsalis shot the saxophonist Walter Blanding Jr. a knowing glance, one eyebrow appreciatively raised. After a somewhat tentative start, the concert hit its groove.
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“What is an arranger” reviewed by the New York Times
When Wynton Marsalis goes onstage tomorrow in an outlandish outfit — say, a pink shirt, yellow pants and a purple tie — he’ll be making a statement. Not a fashion statement, but a statement about arrangement.
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Beloved Styles, Crossing and Colliding
For months the American Composers Orchestra has been touting an adventurous collaborative program with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. But as the concert on Thursday night at the Rose Theater showed, bold collaborations are sometimes easier to plan than to pull off.
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Channeling the Granddaddy of Skid-Dat-De-Dat
In the recorded literature of jazz — and of American music, really — there is no greater document than the stack of three-minute sides made by Louis Armstrong for the OKeh label in the mid- to late 1920’s. Leading two successive bands billed as his Hot Five (and, briefly, a Hot Seven), Armstrong delivered a series of performances bursting with bravura and invention, in the process introducing a heroic new language of improvisation.
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Taking Coltrane’s Music and Making It Their Own
Jazz at Lincoln Center began its new season on Thursday with the first of three nights devoted to the music of John Coltrane. The occasion doubled as an early celebration of what would have been Coltrane’s 80th birthday (Sept. 23) — cake was served during intermission — and an opening salvo for the organization’s third year of programming in Frederick P. Rose Hall at Columbus Circle. It was a success on both counts.
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Coltrane 101: Echoes of a Giant
JAZZ AT LINCOLN CENTER’S more ambitious concerts, while playing to an audience impressed by flash and smoothness, never completely lose their pedantic side; they’re always functioning in part as lessons. But sometimes that doesn’t sound so appealing. The cost of living is rising faster than salaries, and now even pleasure is work? And whose jazz history is this, anyway? Doesn’t jazz activate a loose, adaptable kind of intelligence that teaches you to be suspicious of someone else’s agenda? Keep reading »
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Wynton Marsalis: The Once and Future King of Jazz at Lincoln Center
Hollering the blues, backed by a tambourine and twangy acoustic guitar, Mr. Marsalis was a study in contradictions. He was invoking rustic folk traditions while attired in a Brooks Brothers tuxedo and white tie. And he was sounding a note of abject despair while basking in the glow of 1,400 admirers, some of whom had paid as much as $2,500, as part of the fifth annual spring gala of Jazz at Lincoln Center.
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Jazz in America, To the Beat Of a Smooth One-Man Band
‘OH Lord,’’ Wynton Marsalis cried from the stage of the Apollo Theater. ‘‘Oh Lord,’’ he repeated, in an unsteady but soulful voice. ‘‘What have I done?’’ Keep reading »
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Bill Charlap Remembers Thelonious Monk, a Revolutionary Who Knew How to Swing
Early in the course of “Brilliant Corners,” the 92nd Street Y’s concert of Thelonious Monk’s music on Thursday night, the pianist Bill Charlap offered a succinct appreciation of Monk’s singular place in jazz. “He was a revolutionary within a revolution,” Mr. Charlap said. The revolution, he went on to explain, was bebop, which Monk helped foment but never fully embraced.
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Marsalis’s ‘Congo Square,’ With the Lincoln Center Orchestra
Wynton Marsalis has composed a number of extended works during his tenure as artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, usually with the stated ambition of capturing some aspect of the African-American experience. On Thursday night at the Rose Theater, he conducted his latest such effort, “Congo Square,” featuring the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra and Odadaa!, a nine-piece Ghanaian percussion and vocal troupe.
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