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LSO/Pappano/Balsom review – elephant honks kick off Wynton Marsalis’s trumpet showcase
Rather like the American quilts whose fabric embeds a story, Wynton Marsalis’s new Trumpet Concerto is a patchwork of the history of the instrument and some of its most celebrated exponents, from Louis Armstrong to Frenchman Maurice André. Over six movements, spanning 35 minutes, Marsalis has stitched together myriad styles and characteristics, jumping continents and name-checking composers and players en passant, with a metaphorical doffing of the “Derby hat” mute in tribute. Keep reading »
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New Yorkers salute groundbreaking night with glittering eloquence
New York’s Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra amble on to the Barbican’s stage every couple of years and are always greeted by delighted audiences as if they were long-lost relatives bearing gifts. Tuesday’s curtain-raiser to the jazz orchestra’s current residency was a typically graceful blend of swing grooves that ticked over like an immense and perfectly balanced engine, ensemble parts played with languid rigour, and concise improv that both embellishes compositions and cherishes their shapes. The night’s theme was the tightly drilled but expansive 30s big-band jazz of Benny Goodman – the most ecstatically popular western dance phenomenon until the coming of rock’n’roll – which those long-honed JLCO virtues could hardly have fitted better. Keep reading »
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Wynton Marsalis: trumpeting controversial ideas of classicism
In June 1986, Wynton Marsalis and Miles Davis were booked to play at the inaugural Vancouver international jazz festival, when the 24-year-old trumpeter took it upon himself to gatecrash Davis’s gig, trumpet in hand and ready to play. Keep reading »
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Wayne Shorter/JLCO review – bravura and cool as jazz giant comes to town
Wynton Marsalis’s spirited and long-running Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra often devote their shows to the legacies of pioneers, late or living – but they could hardly have picked a more charismatic guest for the opening night of their current Barbican residency. The work of Wayne Shorter, the 82 year-old saxophonist with a sound as unique as a thumbprint and one of jazz’s greatest small-band composers, was hailed on Thursday in a series of offbeat mini-concertos in which he was principal improvising soloist. Keep reading »
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LSO/Gaffigan review – Nicola Benedetti does her best with unrestrained Marsalis
Wynton Marsalis is a very busy musician. On the night Nicola Benedetti was premiering his violin concerto in London, Marsalis was in Princeton, on tour with his Jazz at Lincoln Centre Orchestra. So one could understand if he feared he might not get the time to write another violin concerto. Perhaps that’s why he seemed to be throwing everything he had at this one. Keep reading »
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Wynton Marsalis/Sachal Jazz Ensemble review – lively east-west fling
Wynton Marsalis and his Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra joined Pakistan’s legendary movie-soundtrack band, the Sachal Jazz Ensemble, for a lively east-west fling in the closing stages of the trumpeter’s UK tour. Keep reading »
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Review: Wynton Marsalis Quintet at Ronnie Scott’s
It’s easy to caricature Wynton Marsalis as the Brian Sewell of jazz, a fogey-ish cultural conservative who’ll gleefully disparage most innovations of the past half century. But, in art criticism terms, he’s closer to Robert Hughes. He’s a disappointed modernist: thrilled by the jazz avant garde of the 20s to the 50s, unimpressed by the postmodern fusions and wilful abstractions that followed. Keep reading »
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Heat combo: When Wynton Marsalis met Yacub Addy
We first saw Wynton Marsalis on television soloing with a symphony orchestra in 1981. The announcer said he came from New Orleans. “I’m going to work with this man,” my husband Yacub Addy said.
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I was surprised because Yacub is a traditional Ghanaian drummer of the Ga ethnic group. I couldn’t visualise him working with this classically trained trumpeter, although Wynton is known for jazz, which Yacub loved since he was a teenager in Ghana, dancing to American big band hits on the streets of Accra. His music led him from Ghana to Europe and America, where in 1982, as an artist and manager team, we created his current Ghanaian ensemble Odadaa!. -
50 great moments in jazz: Wynton Marsalis goes back to basics
Like Sonny Rollins, Keith Jarrett and the late Miles Davis, Wynton Marsalis is one of a handful of jazz instrumentalists whose name is known beyond the world of the jazz cognoscenti. But unlike the other three, Marsalis has polarised opinion more than any other jazz artist of the last 30 years.
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A consummately skilful trumpeter, an ambitious large-scale composer and a shrewd campaigner for jazz, he has become one of the biggest international stars of a tradition that was already being marginalised by rock and pop-influenced jazz by the time he burst on to the scene as a teenage virtuoso in the early-80s. -
Swing Symphony World Premiere, JALC’s Barbican Residency Reviewed
During the dates June 9-13, 2010 Wynton and the JLCO premiered “Swing Symphony” (Symphony No. 3) with Sir Simon Rattle and the Berliner Philharmoniker at the Berliner Philharmoniker.
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