It is midafternoon on a recent weekday and jazz legend Wynton Marsalis is driving across the Southwest, taking the call on speakerphone that his 1985 album, “Black Codes (From the Underground),” has been inducted into the 2023 class of the National Recording Registry.

“Where are we now?” he asks fellow passengers in the car. “New Mexico?”

“New Mexico,” a voice confirms.

Travel has been hectic of late. Marsalis, trumpeter, bandleader, the managing and artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York and perhaps the most internationally recognized jazz musician of the era, has just wrapped up a tour in Asia with multiple stops in South Korea and Japan.

The man is 61. He’s been working gigs for 48 years, since he was a 13-year-old child prodigy on Bourbon Street. He’s recorded more than 60 jazz and classical albums, won the Pulitzer Prize, 9 nine Grammys and been a star of numerous documentaries, not least Ken Burns’ “Jazz.”

Now, he’s on the road again, heading east into the middle of America, empty desert stretching out in all directions.

“We left Los Angeles at 12 o’clock midnight — I mean, Santa Barbara — and now it’s 1:51 p.m., where we are, and we’re just in New Mexico.” He’s got time to chat, he laughs.

“Black Codes” is one of 25 pieces inducted into the NRR this year, ranging from 1908 mariachi recordings to a 2012 release of a classical piece by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Ellen Taaffe Zwilich. The Library has nearly 4 million recordings; only 625 are in the NRR.

“Black Codes” is the first recording by Marsalis to make the list. He points out that after a career that spans five decades, the Library selected an album he recorded when he was 23.

“People like it, it’s an OK record,” he allows. “But it’s some (expletive) before I even learned how to play.”

This doesn’t come across as false modesty given his straightforward, cheerfully profane delivery, but as a common assessment of most people of a certain age — who among us wants to be reminded of our work product in our early 20s?

Still, he’s happy to reconstruct the basics.

The album was recorded in New York over four days in 1985. It was his sixth record. It’s seven songs of hard-swinging jazz that addressed, if in abstract fashion, the lingering societal effects of the Black Codes, the notorious post-Civil War laws that his native Louisiana and other Southern states used to keep black citizens in a violent state of oppression. One of his brothers, Branford, himself a renowned musician, played sax. His youngest brother, Jason, then just 7, is pictured on the album cover as a school student.

“A lot of 20th-century civil rights cases were based on the Black Codes, on laws that tried to politically undress the achievements of the Civil War,” Marsalis explains.

“From the Underground” refers to Black resistance to those laws: “No matter how defeated things seem, there’s always an idea in the pursuit of freedom that is subversive to anti-democratic thinking. I was very conscious of that (when recording).”

The album cover wasn’t subtle. It’s a schoolroom photograph of a lone black child (the aforementioned Jason Marsalis), gazing at a blackboard where the “Three-Fifths Compromise” — the constitutional measure that described enslaved Black people as three-fifths of a human being — was written out in chalk as the lesson of the day. Part of it is erased. Replacing it are words also written in chalk: “Black Codes (From the Underground).” A trumpet rests on the teacher’s desk.

On the album, the family and cultural inspirations are also practical.

Marsalis drew on his father’s history as a jazz musician and teacher in New Orleans, particularly a 1960s song called “Magnolia Triangle,” for the melody line of the title cut. The bass line was inspired by the classic New Orleans standard “Hey Pocky A-Way,” by The Meters.

“We live here for whatever our time is, and people represent us in different ways,” Marsalis is saying, the miles whizzing past. “The art forms, of course, speak across time. They tend to speak more successfully than philosophy because philosophy has to be written in a symbolic language that’s easily misconstrued. Art is much more direct.”

by: Neely Tucker
Source: Library of Congress Blogs

Ann Arbor, MI - April 29, 2023
By Wynton Marsalis

(download the full transcript in PDF)

NOW’S THE TIME

Thank you Board of Regents and President Ono for the pleasure and honor of addressing this year’s graduates.

Class of 23. You have finally made it to the finish line, congratulations. As you congregate here to the rightful chorus of kudos from family, friends, mentors, professors and others, please take in the size, the grandeur, and the pomp of this - your graduation from the mighty University of Michigan.

As you scour the stadium for the approving eyes of beloved and valued persons, I hope you also feel the presence of an extended support system that opened for membership long ago with the very first graduating class of 1845 which culminates in your induction this morning. From henceforth, this moment delineates the timeline of your life: in college, before college, after college. 

Although all eyes are upon you, you are not a destination, you are a connector forever spanning what was, and what will be. In actualizing the dreams and aspirations of parents, ancestors and alumni, you are also an inspiration to younger relatives, future graduates and those (not yet on the path of higher education) who wish to follow. 

You are a bridge… a powerful translator between the generations: of your family, of this institution, and of our way of life. As a musician traveling up and down this bountiful country for over 40 years, having done close to two hundred gigs in the last two alone, I have had the opportunity to speak to all sorts of people from every walk and stage of life. This is what our post Covid conversations have taught me: We desperately need your participation to silence the loud and messy divisiveness that has come to define our national life. I would love to stand here and keep things light and breezy, blow a tune or two…..but this precarious moment demands your attention. 



In this time, the tearing apart of families, the battling of genders, and unrestrained vilification of the “other” has become a public sport. Our landscape is littered with profiteers who demonize your actual support system (here surrounding you) to flatter you into a consumer relationship by ascribing special value to your youth. Think about it. Youth, in and of itself, is not a value. It is not a quality like intelligence or humanity, or soul. Don’t be fooled graduates.

Because you are a bridge in the unrelenting cycle of life, you need a strong constitution and a willingness to invest in your position as emissary of the past to the future and as translator of the future to the past. The deeper the divide — the more crucial the need.

From the moment a bridge is constructed, everything from daily traffic, to the corrosive forces of the elements, to the pitiless passage of time itself conspires to degrade its integrity. A bridge needs be flexible yet firm and its structural and functional health requires consistent care.



May you take down your toll gates, keep the lanes of communication open and invest in your relationships with elders and youngsters *with the same intensity and interest* you show for people your own age. You will be responsible for bridging unforeseen transitions from one crisis to the next, from one time to the next and from one way of being to the next. Your ecosystem requires your presence. Be present.

Look around carefully on this day. Drink in the memories of each street and building, pub, club, classroom, store and house. Every pathway holds the stories of hundreds of thousands, no, millions of students who have passed this way. You too will return as alumni, as parents, artists, donors and professors to experience what the many of us who embrace you in this very moment feel. We are the audience and you are center stage but, no audience — no stage. 



In this time of technology-as-Demi God (second only to money), on the cusp of ubiquitous AI technology that promises everything from writing epochal masterpieces to going to the bathroom for you - some, confusing information with knowledge, are already prepared to rethink the value of learning itself. “Hmmmm….If the computer works and thinks for you, why you can live a life of absolute leisure?” goes the reasoning. Don’t be fooled graduates. 



Because you have the recipe, doesn’t mean you can cook the meal. At some point a person has to show you how to breathe life into those instructions. And eventually, you may transcend the recipe with the power of your own creative imagination and your own unique brand of feeing, but that’s not a given.



May you never lose your sense of taste to the degree that you would choose prepackaged, nutritionless, over-preserved food products to a downhome meal prepared with skill, love and interest in your well being. 

Look around and feel the convening strength of a class this size. Let’s consider all the personal and collective resources that have been invested and expended to get you to this moment… all of the dreams you ride on. The collective dream is the most powerful force on earth. Today’s commencement, down to the placement of chairs on this dais, is the result of a collective dream called the University of Michigan. And from that collective vision, every one of you dreamt, at some point, of this day. And here we are: from Engineering to Public Policy, Law to Business to Nursing, all the disciplines represented here form component parts of a whole that has prepared you to undergird the building blocks of our way of life. If those foundations are nurtured and in balance, we are healthy and thriving. If not, we struggle. That’s why we need y’all at the table. It’s plain and evident. You are the avant garde of our optimism. Your collective success will mean that this education has been brought to bear to solve the pressing and overwhelming problems of our time. Forget the forced hipness of apathy, we need your enthusiasm, your willingness and your solutions.

I have played Hill Auditorium over twenty-something times, presented by UMS over these past thirty seven years. Teaching and playing with students and interacting with professors, coaches, alumni, kids and parents alike. They have always demonstrated great warmth and deep feeling of community. It is one of the defining relationships of my professional career and a partnership that has given me great pleasure and pride. UMS is the finest college presenting organization in this nation because students, professors and alumni alike actually attend the fantastic art that is presented from around the world. They fill Hill with a bristling intergenerational energy that is all too rare. It is in the spirit of this feeling that I remain hopeful and vigilant.

IN THIS TIME, our country is actually crying out for a new collective dream. We need a new belief and a massive unapologetic assertion of integrity. There is just simply *too much trash in this system*: a pornographic cultural mainstream that sells sexualized and violent products to kids under the guise of music and film; a contemptuous corrupt leadership in all political parties and from all walks of life posing as public servants, boasting and preening while wasting billions of overprinted dollars that have been siphoned off of the hide of America with increasing velocity and shameless arrogance; incendiary and lightweight punditry from fraudulent news outlets on both sides delivering cynical entertainment under the banner of serious journalism; paper-thin celebrities and narcissistic “influencers” peddling pixie dust as holy water. 

It is now and finally, just too much to bear. This headlong descend into shameless decadence and unchecked commercialism has created an anxiety and isolation that is increasingly destroying the mental health of our young, that is causing us to murder each other over minor disputes, to gun down young children in schools, to desire empty transactional lives, and ultimately to interface more eagerly and meaningfully with gadgets and devices than with people. We are numbed into accepting the unacceptable without blinking an eye. Don’t be fooled graduates.

Because the dimensions of understanding are not binary, there is no simple right and wrong. We need a revolution in thought and feeling through collective participation. An entire nation cannot hold itself hostage and become an armed perimeter in fear of itself. Our planet is multi dimensional and people all over it want to know you. We need indefatigable volunteers in the cause of the people… not just our people.

This democracy cost a lot of people a lot. It would be a tragedy of historic proportion to squander that inheritance because our young couldn’t envision an America better than the mess we’ve made of it for you. Because our young didn’t have the will and desire to throw off the shackles of deeply rooted corruption and come together in the cause of mutual freedoms, because they’re too busy playing make-believe games… or they’re lost in a make-believe world… or too distracted by wondering who likes them on an app.

May you never become numb to the depravation and poverty, the misery and lack of opportunity that besets so many of your less fortunate and less aware fellow citizens. May you never lose the sense that a collective will can create unimagined change to better the lives of more and more citizens. You are needed out here. Hello! We desperately need you and your creativity, your conscience and your consciousness. 


The genius alto saxophonist Charlie Parker wrote a defining blues of the bebop style entitled Now’s the Time. If you believe in the ascendency of humanity, please loudly declare your intentions. And spend your lives making those dreams, whatever they may be, a reality. Class of 23, I know you can help put us on the good foot. We need your very best and we need it now.

Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis performs its last show of the 2022-23 concert season with a performance that pays homage to three of America’s most influential figures in jazz – the greats Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, and Dave Brubeck. The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra (JLCO) with Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Youth Orchestra (JLCYO) honor these titans of jazz, who along with their integrated bands, traveled the globe to perform as cultural ambassadors.

Each show will open with a special 20-minute performance by the JLCYO, led by trumpet player and composer Tatum Greenblatt, featuring 23 emerging musicians from New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. For nearly a decade, the JLCYO has been transforming countless aspiring artists from the New York metropolitan area into pro-level musicians through training and mentorship, repertoire exposure, and performance opportunities. This show will showcase musicians Gianna Ciaburri, trumpet, Elijah Allen, trumpet, Isreal Stahl, trumpet, Brian Mulvey, trumpet, Christian Miesegaes, trumpet, Priyanka Magavi, trombone, Madeline Makarewicz, trombone, Ava Zaijfe, trombone, Sebastian Lightcap, trombone, Lorenzo Jose, alto saxophone, Maria Taveras, alto saxophone (6/1), Stephanie Tateiwa, alto saxophone (6/2 & 6/3), Giles Underwood, tenor saxophone, Domenic Rigazzi, tenor saxophone, Felipe Feldman, baritone saxophone, Ezra Moran, guitar, Ellis Feder, guitar, Bix Cole, piano, Charles Dutta, piano, Laura-Simone Martin, bass, Charles Ruble, bass, Jeremy Baun, drums, Noah Buckner, drums.

Under the music direction of Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Managing and Artistic Director Wynton Marsalis, this concert pays tribute to the global travels and influence of Ellington, Gillespie and Brubeck. These final season concerts for the JLCO end a year-long exploration on the international reach of jazz.

A free pre-concert lecture, led by JALC’s Director of Public Programs Seton Hawkins, will take place prior to each show at 7:00pm ET.

For additional information and to purchase tickets, visit Jazz.org. For live streaming information, visit JazzLive.com.

Jazz at Lincoln Center Announces 28th Annual Essentially Ellington High School Jazz Band Competition & Festival Winners 2023

First Place Winner:
Osceola County School for the Arts (Kissimmee, FL)

Second Place Winner:
Susan E. Wagner High School (Staten Island, NY)

Third Place Winner:
New World School of the Arts (Miami, FL)

New York, NY (May 13, 2023) Jazz at Lincoln Center today announced the three top-placing high school jazz bands in the nation and more than 35 other individual and section awards in the prestigious 28th Annual Essentially Ellington High School Jazz Band Competition and Festival at Frederick P. Rose Hall, home of Jazz at Lincoln Center and the hallmark program for the largest jazz education network in the world. Wynton Marsalis presented awards to each of the 15 finalist high school jazz bands. Osceola County School for the Arts took home the first-place trophy and an award of $5,0000. Susan E. Wagner High School accepted second place and an award of $2,500. New World School of the Arts accepted third place with an award of $1,000. The remaining bands were each awarded $500. All monetary awards are to be used for improving the jazz education programs of each respective high school.

“It is emotional for me to hear our young people play during Essentially Ellington. Just to see some of them playing by memory, understanding how difficult it is for them to face their nerves, the things they have to do to not let the ensemble down and the difficulty of what is being played… To think that competing against people is important—you realize as you get older that that is not what’s important,” said Wynton Marsalis, Managing and Artistic Director of Jazz at Lincoln Center. “The things we take away from these experiences have nothing to do with competition. It has everything to do with coming together with people.”

In addition to highlighting the best high school jazz bands, Henry Koban Payne from Lower Merion High School in Ardmore, Pennsylvania, won the 11th Annual J. Douglas White Essentially Ellington Student Composition and Arranging Contest. His original composition, “Too Selfish” was recorded by the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra on Wednesday, May 10. Koban Payne also received a $1,000 cash prize, a composition lesson with Grammy Award-winning musician and Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra member, Ted Nash, and a free trip to New York City for the weekend.

The three-day festival provided students with a Q&A with Wynton Marsalis, section-specific masterclasses, jam sessions with Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra members, pre-performance rehearsals, and more. The weekend culminated in Saturday night concerts on the iconic Jazz at Lincoln Center stage where each top-placing band performed with their choice Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra member as a featured soloist. The night also featured the world-renowned Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra led by Wynton Marsalis – whose members served as mentors for the finalist bands throughout the weekend – performing repertoire to be featured as part of next year’s Essentially Ellington program.

The Essentially Ellington band program includes access to free sheet music, instruction by legendary musicians, regional festivals, educational resources, and the chance of a lifetime to play on the stage of Frederick P. Rose Hall in New York City. At the start of the school year, the Essentially Ellington program provided transcribed and published previously unavailable sheet music that bands could submit to apply for the event; traditionally this music was by Duke Ellington and over the years expanded to include Benny Goodman, Dizzy Gillespie, and more. This year, for the first time ever, the musical options include four songs by Afro-Cuban-New York jazz and salsa pioneer Machito.

Photos of the three finalist bands can be found. Credit should be attributed to: Shulamit Seidler-Feller/Jazz at Lincoln Center.

Complete List of Awardees:

1^st PLACE:
Osceola County School for the Arts
Kissimmee, FL
(Director, Jason Anderson)

2^nd PLACE:
Susan E. Wagner High School
Staten Island, NY
(Director, Paul Corn)

3^rd PLACE:
New World School of the Arts
Miami, FL
(Director, Jim Gasior)

OUTSTANDING RHYTHM SECTION:

• New World School of the Arts
• Roosevelt High School
• Osceola County School for the Arts
• Susan E. Wagner High School

OUTSTANDING LATIN PERCUSSION:

• Osceola County School for the Arts
• HONORABLE MENTION SAXOPHONE SECTION:
• Foxboro High School

OUTSTANDING SAXOPHONE SECTION:

• New World School of the Arts
• Orange County School of the Arts

OUTSTANDING TROMBONE SECTION:

• William H. Hall High School
• Plano West Senior High School
• Garfield High School
• Agoura High School

OUTSTANDING TRUMPET SECTION:

• Triangle Youth Jazz Ensemble
• Byron Center High School
• Garfield High School
• Agoura High School

OUTSTANDING BRASS SECTION:

• Bothell High School
• Triangle Youth Jazz Ensemble
• Byron Center High School

OUTSTANDING PEP SECTION:

• Beloit Memorial High School

HONORABLE MENTION PIANO:

• Miles Wisdom – Beloit Memorial High School
• Andre Perlman – New World School of the Arts
• Vuyani Saige – Plano West Senior High School
• Elliot Lydon – Sun Prairie Jazz Ensemble

OUTSTANDING PIANO:

• Avery Allen – William H. Hall High School
• Kai Wong – Beloit Memorial High School
• Nathan Tatsuta – Orange County School of the Arts

OUTSTANDING RHYTHM GUITAR:

• Jasmine Dang – William H. Hall High School

HONORABLE MENTION BASS:

• Eli Schneider – Byron Center High School

OUTSTANDING BASS:

• Rayah Thomas – Triangle Youth Jazz Ensemble
• Tony Severson – Beloit Memorial High School
• Giuliano Liu – Garfield High School

OUTSTANDING DRUMS:

• Ethan Oliver – Triangle Youth Jazz Ensemble
• Jonathan Garrett – Beloit Memorial High School
• Yoshi Stroh – Roosevelt High School
• Liam Earnst – Foxboro High School

OUTSTANDING PERCUSSION:

• Isaiah Bravo – Osceola County School for the Arts

OUTSTANDING FLUTE:

• Shyam Thandullu – Plano West Senior High School

HONORABLE MENTION CLARINET:

• Aaron Mamula – Bothell High School
• Sean McCoy – Triangle Youth Jazz Ensemble
• Juanita Duarte – Sun Prairie Jazz Ensemble

OUTSTANDING CLARINET:

• Chloe Madrak – William H. Hall High School
• Peter Strickland – Garfield High School
• Emma Lacy – Foxboro High School

OUTSTANDING SOPRANO SAXOPHONE:

• Samuel Chung – Orange County School of the Arts

HONORABLE MENTION ALTO SAXOPHONE

• Aaron Mamula – Bothell High School
• Charlee Dobson-Cohen – Roosevelt High School
• Solomon Geleta – Osceola County School for the Arts

OUTSTANDING ALTO SAXOPHONE:

• Ryan Goodman – New World School of the Arts
• Jordan McAllister – New World School of the Arts
• Nicolo Boselli – Plano West Senior High School
• Graham Cobden – Garfield High School
• Max Slonim – Susan E. Wagner High School
• Jack Leiberman – Agoura High School
• Ethan Moehr – Sun Prairie Jazz Ensemble

HONORABLE MENTION TENOR SAXOPHONE:

• Kai Wong – Beloit Memorial High School
• Annette Cortez – Beloit Memorial High School
• Nola Gooch – Foxboro High School

OUTSTANDING TENOR SAXOPHONE:

• Luka Ison – Triangle Youth Jazz Ensemble
• Ryan Kaplan – New World School of the Arts
• Lucas Netto – New World School of the Arts
• Taiyo Fuwa – Roosevelt High School

HONORABLE MENTION BARITONE SAXOPHONE:

• Akash Singh – Bothell High School
• OUTSTANDING BARITONE SAXOPHONE:
• Sarah Ramsden – Beloit Memorial High School
• Samuel Chung – Orange County School of the Arts

HONORABLE MENTION DOUBLER:

• Abi Collier – Byron Center High School
• Trent Horio – Orange County School of the Arts

OUTSTANDING DOUBLER:

• Chloe Madrak – William H. Hall High School
• Peter Strickland – Garfield High School
• Jack Lieberman – Agoura High School

OUTSTANDING TRIPLER:

• Samuel Chung – Orange County School of the Arts
• Emma Lacy – Foxboro High School

HONORABLE MENTION TROMBONE:

• Maddie Makarewicz – William H. Hall High School
• Alex Heidelbaugh – Plano West Senior High School
• Garrett Khatchaturian – Agoura High School
• Jordan Klein – Agoura High School

OUTSTANDING TROMBONE:

• Luke Ramee – Triangle Youth Jazz Ensemble
• Pri Magavi – William H. Hall High School
• Andre Perlman – New World School of the Arts
• Colin Woniewski – Byron Center High School

HONORABLE MENTION TRUMPET:

• Lucas Rivero – New World School of the Arts

• OUTSTANDING TRUMPET:
• Zeb Jewell-Alibhai – Triangle Youth Jazz Ensemble
• Xavier Anderson – Osceola County School for the Arts
• Daniel Portuondo – Osceola County School for the Arts
• Timothy Park – Garfield High School
• Gianna Ciaburri – Susan E. Wagner High School
• Taymar Garlington – Susan E. Wagner High School

OUTSTANDING LEAD TRUMPET:

• Nathaniel Williford – Osceola County School for the Arts
• Aaron Vetter – Sun Prairie Jazz Ensemble

THE COOTIE WILLIAMS AWARD:

• Timothy Park – Garfield High School
• The Ella Fitzgerald Outstanding Soloist Award goes to:
• Kai Wong – Beloit Memorial High School

WINNER OF THE 11^TH ANNUAL DR. J. DOUGLAS WHITE

STUDENT COMPOSITION AND ARRANGING CONTEST:

Henry Koban Payne from Lower Merion High School for his original composition “Too Selfish”

The top-placing bands were chosen by a panel of judges comprising distinguished jazz musicians and historians, Managing and Artistic Director of Jazz at Lincoln Center Wynton Marsalis, jazz arranger and composer Francisco Torres, top jazz drummer Jeff Hamilton, Essentially Ellington alumni and Jazz at Lincoln Center orchestra bass player, Carlos Henriquez, and saxophonist, composer and Essentially Ellington alum Alexa Tarantino.

The 15 Finalists for Essentially Ellington 2023 (in alphabetical order):

• Agoura High School (Agoura Hills, CA)
• Beloit Memorial High School (Beloit, WI)
• Bothell High School (Bothell, WA)
• Byron Center High School (Byron Center, MI)
• Foxboro High School (Foxboro, MA)
• Garfield High School (Seattle, WA)
• New World School of the Arts (Miami, FL)
• Orange County School of the Arts (Santa Ana, CA)
• Osceola County School for the Arts (Kissimmee, FL)
• Plano West Senior High School (Plano, TX)
• Roosevelt High School (Seattle, WA)
• Sun Prairie Jazz Ensemble (Sun Prairie, WI)
• Susan E. Wagner High School (Staten Island, NY)
• Triangle Youth Jazz Ensemble (Raleigh, NC)
• William H. Hall High School (West Hartford, CT)

For more information, please visit: jazz.org/ellington

Additional information may be found at jazz.org | Facebook: facebook.com/jazzatlincolncenter | Twitter: @jazzdotorg | Instagram: @jazzdotorg | YouTube: youtube.com/jalc | Livestream: jazz.org/live

Jazz Live is Jazz at Lincoln Center’s video streaming app, which provides exclusive access to the institution’s live webcasts, a selection of archival performances, and all of the original world-class digital content for which Jazz at Lincoln Center is renowned. The Jazz Live app is available now from Apple (iOS/tvOS), Google (Android/Android TV), Amazon Fire TV, and Roku. For more information and to subscribe, visit jazzlive.com.

Hamilton, NY – May 21, 2023
by Wynton Marsalis

(download the full transcript in PDF)

Thank you, Marietta Cheng for the humbling introduction. Thank you, President Casey, Dean Cushing, Colgate Trustees, and the faculty and staff of Colgate for having me with you today. My fellow honorees, it’s a pleasure to be up here with you.
Class of ‘23, it is a profound honor to address you on this life-defining occasion. I wish you congratulations on the many triumphs that have led you to this point, and an extravagant salutation on redefining yourself as a graduate of Colgate University.
Though the gravitas of this moment is unforgettably marked by colorful banners and ornate regalia, rows of seats packed with all the generations in their Sunday’s finest and fancy hats, proud processional music and very particular parking, most importantly and significantly graduates, you are seated in a cocoon of feeling and surrounded by your people.

Your people have traveled from near and far to be here today. Your people have expended all types of resources to get YOU here. Your people have taught you more than you thought it possible to know, and your people have invested so many quietly powerful prayers to undergird your resolve to complete this journey. They now are here, in this definitive moment, to be with you and for you, to bear witness and to share in the triumph of what you have accomplished.
I want you to allow yourself to feel the embrace of your family, your professors and mentors, and the pride of alumni and future students. And though your journey is singular, you are not alone. We have all gathered here to celebrate your induction into the life of the learned and we will be here to help with your transition into the newfound responsibilities that come with the freedoms of adulthood.
I wish I actually had some masterful insights into what you will find in the world that you are entering. To be honest, when I got here to Hamilton yesterday, I had absolutely no idea that I would find such a soulful community of trumpet players and knowing jazz fans at the ceremonial dinner last night. But there we were, locked in an embrace of mutual admiration. So instead of being oracular today, I will request of you, in thanks for the brevity of my remarks, a few simple things. All of which you can begin to fulfill before you leave this very venue in which we sit, can continue to fulfill at that (always-colorful-in-some-way) post-graduation meal with family and friends, and can easily realize with minimal fuss every day of your lives without wasting time, energy, words or money.

My first request: BE PRESENT. We are here to be with you. Seize the emotional complexity of this day and challenge yourself to understand who surrounds you. Give us your attention with an uncommon focus, and you will be surprised at the things you learn. Experience things as they happen. Life is more interesting when you allow IT to set the banquet table. Don’t curate your life. Be present and let the intensity of your participation shape your feeling– not the act of you observing your participation in your own experience. These are your people—be present.
And presence is connected to place. If Zoom taught us one thing, it was the centrality of geography. There is no adequate replacement for presence. So my second request to you is: please be where you are. You have to be HERE at Colgate University to know how bad the food is… but also to know how good Ray Bros Barbecue is. You have to be here to understand how to run Cardiac Hill but never quite make it into Case. You have to be here to know that President Casey received a much better education in the challenges of dorm life in his late 50s. But guess what, after tomorrow, you no longer have to worry about saying “Hello” to everybody you meet.

Class of ’23 – we are here together BECAUSE of you and FOR you. You are a tough group that has endured the many unanticipated challenges of Covid and its aftermath, yet here you sit ……graduates. And you have learned (from each other) something fundamental that will remain true for your entire lives: every single one of us follows a different path on the road to a deeper understanding, and still the paths to knowledge are as varied as there are individuals in this world.
But we cannot be on all roads at once. When we wish to experience all things at all times, we end up with nothing. This campus, your investment in it, and its investment in you will forever delineate the timeline of your life.
Revel in the general spirit that defines this place. Wherever you may find yourself, take the organic lesson in community building that you have learned here and be where you are.

The world knows that Colgate University is a place, but for you it is also a time. You now know the past as a graduate… the future is unknowable. Though we all work towards the particular future we envision, the present is all we can actually experience. With a world full of different types of people and their differing abilities, agendas, energies, and efforts clanging in a dissonant rush for attention in person and online, the present can be volatile, pressurized, and overwhelming. We anxiously look to escape into dream worlds of an idyllic past or to project ourselves into techno-fantasies about a robotic self-absorbed future through life-like games and overpriced entertainment products. These constructs are perfect because those places are not populated with any actual people, they are simply elaborate simulations, incubators of narcissism where our best choice is always and only….ourselves. I must request of you: Please BE IN TIME. The present is your safest and only practical choice.

Be in time and you will be flexible enough to define yourself and your experience more broadly than your age, hairstyle, clothing, or your favorite popular video, app, or platform. Be in time and you will maintain your equilibrium when the next war or financial crash or mass act of violence occurs. Be in time and you will come to see the value of singing, dancing, cooking, storytelling, playing, laughing, and many other tactile human interactions that are not in our clichéd vision of a technological future. Be in time because the people all around you are the real technological marvels and how we interact with each other is the most fascinating study on this earth. Be in time, and you will never underestimate the impact of your disposition on any tough situation that you may encounter. When asked about hitting a wrong note, trumpeter Miles Davis said, “l don’t know if it’s wrong… until I hit the next one.”
Speaking of Miles I am reminded of the great trumpeter and sage raconteur Dizzy Gillespie who had a request for me that I now, some 40 years later ask of you: be yourself and be fabulous. In 1980, when I was 18 year of age or so, I asked Dizzy Gillespie “how can I find my own personal sound?”. He said, “Well, you have to love yourself.” I said, “But I don’t play with the depth of the great Louis Armstrong.” He replied, “That’s how HE did it.” I said, but I can’t make the trumpet cry like Harry “Sweets” Edison (great trumpeter with the 1930’s Basie orchestra and my mentor since teenhood). Dizzy said, “That’s how HE did it.” I said, “I can’t even think of playing what you play.”

Then Dizzy said, “Miles asked me that same question when he was young (in the 1940’s). I told him ‘Be yourself and stop imitating me. Play slower and lower where you naturally hear things and leave space.’” I later told Miles what Dizzy had divulged. Instead of counterstating it, Miles said, “If you listen to my album Round Midnight, it ain’t nothing but Dizzy slowed down.” A couple of years later, I laughingly relayed this back to Dizzy. His reply: “And Miles sounded fabulous on that recording.” So be yourself and be fabulous.

I reflect on knowing so many of the greatest geniuses of my instrument and having been able to learn from them in such an in-depth and personal way. They have all passed on but they remain even more present as memories and on their fantastic recordings. When I reflect on having met so many families and young students and great people all over the world night after night (including last night), across so many decades, I am filled with an unspeakable gratitude. And that is my last request of you. Be grateful. Ingratitude is the most offensive form of disrespect for those who have been given so much. Don’t let a day go by that you don’t bow your head and acknowledge all that you have been given, all that you give and all the blessings you have received.

When I was a teenager, I decided to stop praying before meals. My mother noticed it and said, “Boy, where is my prayer?” I went into my young conscious thing about not worshipping a European Jesus and so forth and she replied, “I don’t care who or what you pray to, but as arrogant as you are, just the act of bowing your head three times a day is bound to make for a lot of improvements over the years.” I made fun of it at the time and ascribed it to superstition and to being old-fashioned, but I did do the bare minimum out of respect. As these years have rolled by, I have discovered… she was right.

Class of ‘23, it is a profound honor to address you on this life-defining occasion. I am grateful to have been given this opportunity.
Please, be present, be where you are, be in time, be yourself and be fabulous, be grateful… and be cool about it all.

Sunday 12 November
Auditorium Erasmus University Rotterdam

Music has the power to elevate our quality of life, to connect people and broaden our consciousness’, says world-renowned jazz trumpeter, bandleader, composer and educator Wynton Marsalis. Values such as freedom, creativity, collective action, acceptance, gratitude and resilience are a fundamental part of jazz. But in our current society, these same values are in danger of disappearing, and call for continuous defense.

Marsalis has played alongside jazz legends such as Sarah Vaughan, Sonny Rollins and Dizzy Gillespie. He received his first out of many Grammy’s for his performance of Haydn and Mozart, and became a living legend himself. Marsalis has dedicated his career to keeping jazz alive, including its cultural and moral values.

On Sunday 12 November, he will come to Rotterdam to deliver the Nexus Lecture 2023 on music, culture and democracy.

New York, NY (July 31, 2023) – On August 4, 2023, on what would have been Louis Armstrong’s 122 birthday — although many celebrate the trailblazer on July 4, as he was lovingly hailed as a “firecracker baby” by his mother—Blue Engine Records proudly releases Wynton Marsalis Plays Louis Armstrong’s Hot Fives and Sevens. Featuring an all-star band led by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and Jazz at Lincoln Center Managing and Artistic Director Wynton Marsalis, the live album will be available on all major streaming platforms.

Performed at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Rose Theater in 2006, Wynton Marsalis Plays Louis Armstrong’s Hot Fives and Sevens recreates the magic of Armstrong’s seminal ensembles. The lineup, which includes many longtime Marsalis collaborators, features Wycliffe Gordon (tuba, trombone, bass, vocals), Vincent Gardner (trombone), Victor Goines (clarinet), Walter Blanding (saxophones), “Papa” Don Vappie (banjo, guitar), Jon Batiste (piano), Carlos Henriquez (bass), and Ali Jackson (drums).

Originally recorded in the 1920s, Louis Armstrong‘s Hot Fives and Hot Sevens sides are still hailed as some of the greatest and most influential jazz sessions ever captured; musicians obsess over their warmth, wit, and joy to this day. Now, Marsalis — another acclaimed New Orleans trumpeter — reimagines classics from those sessions like “Basin Street Blues,” “St. James Infirmary,” and “Heebie Jeebies” for a whole new generation of audiences.

There are perhaps no better interpreters of Armstrong’s legacy than Marsalis and his fellow musicians; and, through transposing the timeless music of the 1920s to the 21st century, these expert players deliver technically flawless performances and prove Marsalis’ assertion that all eras of jazz are integrated.

TRACKLISTING:

1. Potato Head Blues
2. Twelfth Street Rag
3. Skid-Dat-De-Dat
4. Jazz Lips
5. St. James Infirmary
6. Weary Blues
7. Melancholy Blues
8. Heebie Jeebies
9. Once in a While
10. Ory’s Creole Trombone
11. Basin Street Blues
12. Savoy Blues
13. Cornet Chop Suey
14. Fireworks

PERSONNEL:

Wynton Marsalis – Trumpet & Vocals
Wycliffe Gordon – Tuba, Trombone, Bass & Vocals
Vincent Gardner – Trombone
Victor Goines – Clarinet
Walter Blanding –Tenor & Soprano Saxophones
“Papa” Don Vappie – Banjo & Guitar
Jon Batiste – Piano
Carlos Henriquez – Bass
Ali Jackson – Drums

About Blue Engine Records:
Blue Engine Records, Jazz at Lincoln Center’s platform that makes its vast archive of recorded concerts available to jazz audiences everywhere, launched on June 30, 2015. Blue Engine Records releases new studio and live recordings as well as archival recordings from Jazz at Lincoln Center’s performance history that date back to 1987 and are part of the R. Theodore Ammon Archives and Music Library. Since the institution’s founding in 1987, each year’s programming is conceived and developed by Managing and Artistic Director Wynton Marsalis with a vision toward building a comprehensive library of iconic and wide-ranging compositions that, taken together, make up a canon of music. These archives include accurate, complete charts for the compositions – both old and new – performed each season. Coupled with consistently well-executed and recorded music performed by Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, this archive has grown to include thousands of songs from hundreds of concert dates. The launch of Blue Engine aligns with Jazz at Lincoln Center’s efforts to cultivate existing jazz fans worldwide and turn new audiences on to jazz. For more information on Blue Engine Records, visit blueenginerecords.org

Arts editor HELEN MUSA talks exclusively with legendary trumpeter Wynton Marsalis ahead of his Canberra performances this month.

“FOR an hour or so of jazz, people will see the truth of what we do,” legendary trumpeter and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Wynton Marsalis says ahead of his planned visit to Canberra later this month.

Few musicians on the world stage occupy a position of such responsibility as Marsalis, artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, the first jazz composer to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music and still the only musician to have won a Grammy Award in both jazz and classical categories in the same year – he was just 22 at the time.

With a foot in the two camps of jazz and classical music and a giant reputation, he’s long been in a position to take on the great issues of our time in music and culture.

He was even bold enough to question the role of hip-hop in creating a negative stereotype of African-Americans, although when I catch up with him by Zoom to Verbier in Switzerland, where he’s performing at the town’s 30-year-old music festival, he admits that battle was fought and lost decades ago.

Regarded by some at the more avant-garde end of the jazz spectrum as a musical conservative, even his detractors concede that he has made jazz respectable beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.

Now 61 and keeping up a cracking pace as a working musician, Marsalis is also a noted educator who, in the ’90s, hosted the educational program “Marsalis on Music” on public television, and will make himself available in practical sessions for a masterclass and jazz workshop while he and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra are in residence at the new Snow Concert Hall at Canberra Grammar School.

But it’s not just him. As he says: “All our orchestra members are excellent educators who run jazz programs.”

Marsalis is not just a jobbing trumpeter who takes his place in the line-up with the other members of the band, but he is a significant contemporary composer who uses his broad-ranging knowledge to incorporate classical symphonic elements into his compositions.

In Australia, he’ll perform his 1999 composition “All Rise” with both Melbourne and Sydney Symphony Orchestras and a 100-voice choir, telling me how it blends the sounds of jazz, blues, classical and indigenous music and adding, “I wanted to get the choir to sound like a didgeridoo”.

On Zoom we both try twisting our mouths to see if we can produce the desired effect, with hilarious results.

Raised in a family of jazz musicians in New Orleans, Marsalis was always going to be a musician, but for a long time the question was whether that would be jazz or classical, and indeed he studied trumpet performance for several years at the Juilliard School in New York, where now heads up the Jazz Studies program.

“I love jazz but I also love and play classical music – they are not mutually exclusive,” he asserts.

Over the years, he’s been a regular visitor to the metropolitan cities of Australia, is an avowed fan of Brisbane’s Quigley family who have taught a lot of eminent Australia’s jazz musicians, and his latest recording of his fourth symphony, “The Jungle”, was done in “a quality, collegiate way” with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra.

But he thinks he hasn’t been to the nation’s capital since the late ’80s and says, “I remember its futuristic buildings”.

Canberra will get the 15-musician line-up of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra performing full blast – “that’s why we call it a big band,” he quips – as they cruise through the great jazz masters, from Jelly Roll Morton to Duke Ellington, while performing compositions by band members and Marsalis himself.

They plan to run the gamut of the 100+ year old art form, but it definitely won’t be museum music, for as he says, “improvisation means you can take an old piece and make it new”.

“Improvisation is at the heart of jazz,” he says in an almost pedagogical moment as he defines its component elements – blues, swing and improvisation. All will be on show as he and the band, hellbent on having a fun time in all their concerts – stir up a storm with Canberra audiences.

Wynton Marsalis and Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, Snow Concert Hall, August 17-18.

Source: CBR CityNews

Can a trumpet actually sing? Can a jazz orchestra really speak to you?

If the trumpet is played by and the orchestra is led by Wynton Marsalis, then the answers to both questions are a profound yes.

The house of swing came to Canberra this week and moved everyone who had the privilege of experiencing the world’s best jazz right here in the capital.

In what was an impressive coup for the Snow Concert Hall located in Canberra Grammar School (and for the artistic director of its International Series concerts, flautist Ana de la Vega) the legendary Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra played two sellout nights there to kickstart a national tour.

Marsalis is the managing and artistic director of the orchestra and the ‘house of swing’ is what he affectionately calls its New York City headquarters.

The visit to Canberra included a six-day residency where Marsalis and his team of exceptionally talented musicians held educational workshops for students, who could hardly disguise the awe they were feeling.

Wynton Marsalis has an incredible presence, and not just when he’s on stage.

I was to find that out the day before opening night – which, by the way, was an astounding concert in all its big band improvisational wonder.

He oozes intelligence, speaks in respectful tones and is a very funny, likeable guy.

What is most striking is that while his brilliance shines through every word he says and every note he plays, he is a disarmingly humble man who appears genuinely interested in people.

When he talks to you he gives you all the time in the world, making you feel like you’re the only person in the room.

And for about half an hour I was the only person in the room with him.

What was meant to be a five-minute one-on-one interview at the side of the stage (just after an all-in media conference and just before a band rehearsal) turned into a long walk through the backstage corridors and upstairs into a cosy green room.

Along the way, while introducing me to some band members, he kept telling me to forget about everyone else who was saying we didn’t have much time.

“I feel like you and I can have a good chat about music,” he said as he ushered me in.

While walking to the green room I mentioned how I enjoyed Laura Tingle’s interview with him the night before on the ABC’s 7.30 program.

“I really liked her,” he said. “Good questions.”

They were good questions, but what was I going to ask him?

Wynton made that very easy.

He has lived a big life, mingling with the jazz greats to become possibly the greatest of them all.

He was the first ever jazz player to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music – oh yeah, and he’s also got nine Grammy Awards.

So he has a lot of stories to share and he invited me to allow him to do just that.

He paid reverence to Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk and talked mischievously of Chick Corea and Charlie Mingus.

Tell me about Dave Brubeck, I asked.

Wynton’s face lit up at the mention of the late jazz pianist best known for the groundbreakingly cool Take Five.

“Dave had rainbows in his pockets,” Wynton smiled.

“You always felt better after any time you met him. You felt better than you did before seeing him.

“I was once in Claremont Hotel in Oakland and had come from playing basketball. I came into the lobby and there were a lot of older, really well-dressed people there.

“I was trying to sneak past them because I was all sweaty, and then someone put their hand on me. It was Dave Brubeck.

“He said ‘Hey man’ and I said ‘What’s going on?’ and he just looked at me and said ‘It’s Ellis’s son’ [Ellis is Wynton’s late piano-playing father, who was still alive at the time of this encounter]. He always called me Ellis’s son.

“Then he took me around and introduced me to everyone in the lobby as Ellis’s son.

“Dave was a good man. He was very soulful.”

And what of fellow (but long gone) jazz trumpeter Miles Davis?

“Miles and I, we didn’t get along. I felt he had sold out and he knew that and that’s ok. That actually became the American way,” he said.

The ‘straight-ahead jazz’ proponent Marsalis hated Davis’s embrace of pop styles and thought the seminal Bitches Brew album was a betrayal of jazz music.

“But he still was a genius and he still was brilliant and he still was owed the respect for his genius and his greatness – and I always gave it to him when I saw him in person,” Wynton added.

“There was never a time when I addressed him disrespectfully or did not try to learn something when I was in his presence. He always told me something that would help me learn how to play.

“He was funny too. Miles was also very intelligent. So when you talked with him, he was extremely acute in his understanding of things.”

Had there been a lasting connection with pioneering filmmaker Ken Burns, who introduced Marsalis to a whole new worldwide audience with his 2001 Jazz documentary series?

“I love Ken Burns,” he said.

“He’s one of my best friends. I depend on him. If I have any kind of problem I’ll call him.

“He’s such a genius and so dedicated. I feel so fortunate to be alive at a time with him. He’s for real, man.”

And what about jazz itself? Can it be easily defined as a musical genre?

“It’s not difficult to define it in the broader sense. The difficulty is when you want the definition to be little,” he said.

“It’s almost like biblical stories and things that are allegorical. They’re allegorical because they’re not little.

“If you want it to be little, then no it’s not possible to define it. If you want it to be allegorical and you touch on the fundamentals of it, then yeah it’s easy to do.

“Blues is one element of jazz. Improvisation is another element. Swing is another, and the attitude of swing. Then there’s the Afro-Latin attitude.

“Most of jazz you can find in those things, but that doesn’t mean that literally nothing else can fit in there. It’s not little.”

He talked in terms of jazz being a metaphor for democracy because it celebrates personal freedom and encourages individual expression. And, because it is rooted in the blues, it inspires people to face adversity with optimism.

But does he chill out listening to Bob Dylan or the like?

Shakes his head.

“I love jazz man. I mean, I listen to other music… but I love jazz. I don’t find the need to not love it and l also don’t find the need to not express the love for it.”

by Chris Johnson
Source: Riotact

Wynton Marsalis jumps onto our Zoom call and introduces himself before proceeding to play the trumpet. “I was just playing the trumpet call,” he says. “That was just for you.”

Despite being on a packed international tour – he’s in Switzerland when we speak – Marsalis is playful, relaxed and loquacious. And I soon learn he has stories for days. The acclaimed trumpeter, now 61, began touring internationally at the age of 18, and while he is now used to the gruelling schedule, that wasn’t the case on his first tour. He recalls not packing enough socks. “We were in buses for long rides with Art Blakey and The Jazz Messengers – man, we had, like, 12 hours, 13, 14-hour drives every day,” he tells me. “It was rough – I wasn’t quite prepared.”

Marsalis grew up surrounded by jazz. It’s an overused cliché but in his case it is true – he was destined to be a musician. He was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, during the civil rights movement – the second of six children. His father, Ellis Marsalis Jr, was a jazz pianist, his mother, Dolores, was a music educator, and he grew up surrounded by musicians. When Wynton Marsalis was six, his father’s friend, the trumpeter Al Hirt, gave him his first trumpet. By the age of eight, he had started his musical journey with the Fairview Baptist Church Band, through which he was launched into the world of New Orleans jazz and brass band traditions.

The roll call of mentors and the people he played alongside – including his own father – is a who’s who of the jazz genre. But it wasn’t until the age of 12 that he started to take music seriously. “I started listening to [John] Coltrane and then after listening to him, I listened to Clifford Brown and Miles [Davis] and Freddie Hubbard and different musicians and I wondered if I could play like them,” he says.

A 12-year-old listening to John Coltrane? In the community Marsalis grew up in, many of the jazz greats were friends or played with Marsalis’s father and his friends. “Trane was their idol, so they knew Trane. And McCoy Tyner [who played in the John Coltrane Quartet] was friends with my father,” he says. Marsalis also discovered classical music and at the age of 14 performed with the New Orleans Philharmonic.

His career took off – he went on to become a world-renowned trumpeter, composer and bandleader performing both jazz and classical music. He’s won countless awards, including several Grammys for jazz and classical recordings. He won a Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1997 – the first jazz performer to do so. He’s recorded more than 120 albums and now serves as the artistic director of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra.

“Education of young people and information and sharing that information is a very important, crucial, instrumental part in maintaining your civilisation.”

There’s a video online of a bespectacled 23-year-old Marsalis performing Haydn’s Trumpet Concerto with the Boston Pops Orchestra. Standing centrestage at the Boston Symphony Hall and dressed in a black tuxedo, he plays effortlessly alongside the majority white orchestra. It’s assured playing from the young Marsalis, a combination of natural talent and years of training and practice. In another video, he’s 21 years old and performing alongside Art Blakey and The Jazz Messengers. He’s swapped the tuxedo for a grey three-piece suit, with a burgundy tie and matching pocket square. I’m in awe at the ease with which he plays the trumpet in these two seemingly different genres.

He later tells me his success surprised him. “I feel guilty … just because I’ve got so much publicity and notoriety and stuff, and the musicians who could play better than me were struggling. But they set me up to be successful. I wasn’t surprised about the music. I was surprised about my participation – the music is great. That’s some of the greatest music ever played.”

Marsalis is bringing the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra to Australia this month for a series of concerts on the east coast – some in collaboration with the Melbourne and Sydney symphony orchestras. One of the works being performed is All Rise – composed by Marsalis and first performed with the New York Philharmonic in 1999. The German conductor Kurt Masur commissioned the work, after meeting the 28-year-old Marsalis.

“He said, ‘I was a Nazi soldier’,” says Marsalis. “If you were in Germany at that time and you were a young person, that’s what you were, or you were in jail or dead. And he then became instrumental in the reconciliation with East Germany and West Germany.” After emigrating to New York, Masur was struck by the racism in America and asked Marsalis to write a piece “that deals with the universality of people and their humanity, because I’m not seeing a lot of that”.

Marsalis tells me he was reluctant to write the piece. “I had no training writing for symphonies,” he says. “I had never written … for a big band, a jazz orchestra. And I thought, _Man, I’m not gonna write for the New York Philharmonic._”

Soon afterwards, Marsalis – who was always listening to Duke Ellington’s jazz band compositions – began to write for jazz orchestra, which includes a horn and rhythm section. He then learnt how to write for woodwind and string instruments. “I had grown up playing a lot of orchestral music, but I understood that it was not something you [were] going to pick up,” he says. Masur continued to jokingly tease Marsalis about his refusal to write for the New York Philharmonic, and finally he gave in.

All Rise is a massive jazz symphony that crosses a wide musical terrain, ranging from African chant and New Orleans parade music to symphonic modernism. Marsalis tells me the subject matter and the progression of the work – which is written for a choir and a full band – have existed in jazz and in American music since the 19th century. But perhaps what stands out is how, despite this American foundation, it incorporates sounds from cultures from around the world. As the work progresses through its 12 movements, Middle Eastern sounds are interweaved with blues, Afro-Latin, marches, ragtime and African music and rhythms.

“The piece is very complex in terms of the different forms – what I try to do in it is see how they are all the same,” he says. “That’s the challenge.” It took Marsalis six months to write the work in 1999, a year that he describes as the most productive of his life. “I might have put out 15 records in that one year.”

Marsalis says the symphony reflects a progression of life – from birth to young love to falling victim “to the type of myopic arrogance where you think the whole world is about what you think it’s about”, to deep sorrow, before rising up to a higher level and being reborn. It ends with the 12th movement, “I Am (Don’t You Run from Me)”. “That’s the great consciousness where you understand you are part of a much larger thing,” he says. “That’s why a lot of the music sounds like Middle Eastern music, because at that time there was a big anti-Middle Eastern, anti-Muslim [prejudice]. And my thing was to say, we’re all out here. We’re dealing with our thing. There are many ways to express the same thing. It’s the great ‘I am’ and it ends with the New Orleans march.”

I tell Marsalis what I’m drawn to when I listen to All Rise – that, unlike much mainstream contemporary American music, it seems to be in dialogue with the world and resists parochialism by drawing on sounds from many cultures. But he’s quick to school me on the diversity of sound within American culture.

“When you look at people like Duke Ellington, nobody has ever written or played more diverse music than him. Louis Armstrong, the tradition I come from, they cut across many genres,” he says. “And if you take even a figure in classical music like Leonard Bernstein, he was always trying to figure out what other people’s music was about. Teaching people talking about other people’s music.”

He argues that once music is turned solely into a product, it narrows. “Because what are people going to like? If I’m trying to politic for you to like me, there’s a lot I can’t say. But Duke Ellington wasn’t trying to be politic, he was writing music – so I’m more in that tradition, in that line,” says Marsalis. “And when you look at musicians like him, he wrote over 2000 songs and recorded 800 albums, and he has records like the Liberian Suite, The Afro-Eurasian Eclipse, the Latin American Suite, Togo Brava Suite…”

I realise I am receiving a front row education in jazz – a genre he once described as an “important chronicle of American life set to rhythm and tune”. What is it about this quintessentially American art form that transcends borders and cultures?

It comes from everywhere, he says. “You listen to Horace Silver’s music: the pentatonic scale is like Eastern music. Wayne Shorter’s music, pentatonic music.” He proceeds to sound out the notes while tapping his hand on his thigh to the rhythm. “Doo ting-ting ting-ting ti-king-king ki-king-too-king-king… That’s the ride pattern. Call and response – that’s the basic human way of communicating.” As someone who is not sonically inclined, listening to Marsalis communicate music in this way offers a greater sense of appreciation for what jazz music is able to do.

He’s sharing that love of music with young people while on tour in Australia. Together with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, he’ll be running workshops in Canberra and Sydney. Marsalis believes every child deserves a musical education. “Young people have to be taught to understand the integrity of a thing,” he says. “Education of young people and information and sharing that information is a very important, crucial, instrumental part in maintaining your civilisation. And if it’s not going to be your civilisation – humanity.”

He tells me that beyond learning how to play instruments, a musical education teaches young people how to be human. “One thing is to be patient and to sit in community with other people, in silence and contemplation and reflection,” he says. “These are all parts of being a human being. And education is a part of that.”

For Marsalis, jazz is more than just music – it’s a way of moving through the world. His core beliefs are based on jazz fundamentals: freedom and individual creativity (improvisation), collective action and good manners (swing), and acceptance, gratitude and resilience (the blues).

It’s this ability to come together as human beings that, for Marsalis, makes jazz so special.

“The diversity of personalities – and in jazz, you have the loudest instrument forced to play with the softest instrument,” he says. “… You got the space to improvise, but you’re listening most of the time.”

Marsalis says he is excited to share that collective humanity with Australian audiences through the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. “The depth of the love that we have for each other and how much we enjoy playing with other colleagues,” he says. “And just the depth of our music. And that we believe in … a collective humanity.”

I realise I’ve been on the call with Marsalis for close to two hours and it’s nearly three in the morning in Melbourne. I’m charmed by his humility. Despite receiving every accolade imaginable, he remains acutely aware of the responsibility to share music, as others did with him. “Ultimately, it’s not [about] you,” he says. “You’re representing a lot of other people who taught you and people who come after you – you are part of a continuum. I happened to be a part of that continuum and to be around a lot of the great musicians and artists. It was a good fortune.”

By Santilla Chingaipe
Source: The Saturday Paper

When Wynton Marsalis’s début album appeared on CBS Records in 1982, with its moody, pensive black and white cover portrait of the then twenty-year-old trumpeter, few could have predicted where his career was headed. Sure, he had performed Hayden’s Trumpet Concerto with the New Orleans Philharmonic at fourteen, and further honed his craft in the trumpet chair of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. But his early albums, as good as they were – and some, like Black Codes (From the Underground), were very good – proved far from ground-breaking affairs, exploring as they did the small group sound of Miles Davis’s classic quintet of the 1960s.

If Marsalis’s early music failed to break new ground, he certainly proved the right stuff for the CBS marketing department. With his good looks, trumpet virtuosity, leadership qualities, and a genre-jumping capacity for switching effortlessly between jazz and classical, he was promptly elevated to the next big thing, the leader of a pack of ‘young lions’ – a group that included Terence Blanchard, Christian McBride, Wallace Roney, Marcus Roberts, Roy Hargrove, and brother Branford – spearheading a return to acoustic jazz after a decade of fusion and funk experiments. For the first time in a while, swing was back on the menu.

Fast forward a few decades and the landscape looked far different. The sheer abundance and variety of Marsalis’s work was staggering: ballet scores, soundtracks, concerti, string quartets, the on-going Standard Time series, a seven-CD box of live recordings, and still there was time to head up New York’s Jazz at Lincoln Center. Not least among these achievements was his garnering a Pulitzer Prize in 1997 – the first ever awarded for a jazz score, and a mea culpa of sorts for the Pulitzer board, having denied it to Duke Ellington back in 1965 for his epic jazz opera Blood on the Fields.

Marsalis’s All Rise, which first premièred in the dying days of the last millennium, is of a corresponding scale to Blood on the Fields: a hundred-plus-minute work, cast in twelve movements, scored for orchestra, jazz ensemble, and a hundred-voice chorus. Now designated Symphony no. 1 (it has been followed by three more), it came at the end of a busy year that saw Marsalis release no fewer than ten recordings. Even his hero, the ever-productive Duke Ellington, might have been hard pressed to match that feat.

The gathering of musicians and singers assembled on stage at Hamer Hall, as the audience filed in, was formidable: the sixty-or-so musicians making up the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (MSO) installed to the sides and back of the stage; the fifteen-member Jazz at Lincoln Centre Orchestra front and centre; and the nearly hundred-strong choir arranged in the upper wings and the elevated rear of the stage. By the time conductor Benjamin Northey strode onto the stage, there was a palpable air of expectation that we were in for something special.

The first movement ‘Jubal Step’ began with the choir repeatedly singing ‘Ah Zum’ – a phrase intended to denote the beginning and end in an instant – their voices swelling to a sustained cacophony over dense percussion and strident brass. The strings, when they entered, manifested a dancing quality, filled with joyous urgency that recalled Stravinsky’s use of folk forms in his early ballets. The second movement, ‘A Hundred and a Hundred, a Hundred and Twelve’, shifted gear, its playful approach animated by the jazzy scores of George Gershwin, breezy lounge, the soft shuffle of bossa nova.

All Rise, cast in the form of a twelve-bar blues, is omnivorous in the way it ranges across a century’s jazz, popular, and orchestral music, drawing upon ragtime, blues, spirituals, Latin grooves, folk forms, alongside the work of American composers, most notably Ellington, but also Gershwin, Aaron Copland, Charles Ives, Leonard Bernstein, Gil Evans. At the same time, it conjures the rhythmic sound of trains, wide open spaces, the streets of Storyville. Like a vast patchwork quilt, it has been woven together from scraps of musical cloth – conveying something of jazz’s boundless capacity to absorb and adapt diverse musical styles – with some elements working in harmony, others in conflict.

Of course, not everything worked. The romantic string flourishes and easy-going swing heard in the third movement, ‘Go Slow (But Don’t Stop)’, felt like a misstep. But this was more than made up for by the sheer intensity of the fifth movement, ‘Save Us’, fueled by insistent drums, rhythmic surges, cacophonous passages, wailing voices, discordant saxophones, before being rounded out with a stormy trumpet solo. The opening of the sixth movement, ‘Cried, Shouted, Then Sung’, summoned the classic blues of ‘St James Infirmary’, its dirge-like funeral march animated by blaring clarinet, tambourine, squalling trumpet, rising to a choral chant of ‘Freedom’.

The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra lived up to its reputation as supreme interpreters of this music, its garrulous horns meshing in seamlessly with the strings and percussion of the MSO. The large chorus – massive in sound – was used sparingly but always to dramatic effect, heightening the emotive reach of the music. Michelle Nicolle, a renowned local jazz vocalist, was a standout, her resounding gospel cry of ‘I Say All Rise’ piercing the soul.

All Rise strives for universal themes, embracing joy, pain, sacrifice, and redemption. While its origins lay in a form of music birthed in New Orleans more than a century ago, it roams widely, stylistically endeavouring to blend musical differences into a harmonious whole. Of the many influences present, however, it was the music of Ellington that informed much of its spirit. The dramatic final movement, with its chant of ‘I Am’, sought to bind together the many elements, seeking divine resolution. If the brief coda, with its folksy New Orleans swing, overplayed the composer’s hand, it seems only right to cut him a little slack, in the light of his own family’s long affinity with that city.

Marsalis’s past tendencies toward polemical statements when interviewed – and anyone who has watched Ken Burns’s ten-hour documentary series Jazz will know what I mean – has done him few favours. But the simple fact is, his career belies the neo-conservative tag often levelled at him, despite its being one he has often encouraged. I remember seeing him at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival in 1997, when his septet delivered a breath-taking, hour-long arrangement of John Coltrane’s masterpiece A Love Supreme – far from the act of someone scornful of jazz’s avant-garde tradition. Jazz at Lincoln Center meanwhile has found room in its program to champion the music of Ornette Coleman, Coltrane, and Charles Mingus, elevating their work to the forefront of twentieth-century composition.

In casting a glance back over Marsalis’s forty-plus-year career to date, one is tempted – paraphrasing Walt Whitman – to assert that he indeed contains multitudes. Despite his musical stature, it was humbling to witness his modesty during this performance at Hamer Hall, seated as he was, near-anonymously, amongst the trumpet chairs, contributing brief solos when called for, refusing to grandstand. Only at the very end of the evening, with encouragement, did he step forth to acknowledge and accept the audience accolades. One sensed that we, as audience, were honouring not just a performance, but a life lived in music.

All Rise strives for universal themes, embracing joy, pain, sacrifice, and redemption. While its origins lay in a form of music birthed in New Orleans more than a century ago, it roams widely, stylistically endeavouring to blend musical differences into a harmonious whole. Of the many influences present, however, it was the music of Ellington that informed much of its spirit. The dramatic final movement, with its chant of ‘I Am’, sought to bind together the many elements, seeking divine resolution. If the brief coda, with its folksy New Orleans swing, overplayed the composer’s hand, it seems only right to cut him a little slack, in the light of his own family’s long affinity with that city.

Marsalis’s past tendencies toward polemical statements when interviewed – and anyone who has watched Ken Burns’s ten-hour documentary series Jazz will know what I mean – has done him few favours. But the simple fact is, his career belies the neo-conservative tag often levelled at him, despite its being one he has often encouraged. I remember seeing him at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival in 1997, when his septet delivered a breath-taking, hour-long arrangement of John Coltrane’s masterpiece A Love Supreme – far from the act of someone scornful of jazz’s avant-garde tradition. Jazz at Lincoln Center meanwhile has found room in its program to champion the music of Ornette Coleman, Coltrane, and Charles Mingus, elevating their work to the forefront of twentieth-century composition.

In casting a glance back over Marsalis’s forty-plus-year career to date, one is tempted – paraphrasing Walt Whitman – to assert that he indeed contains multitudes. Despite his musical stature, it was humbling to witness his modesty during this performance at Hamer Hall, seated as he was, near-anonymously, amongst the trumpet chairs, contributing brief solos when called for, refusing to grandstand. Only at the very end of the evening, with encouragement, did he step forth to acknowledge and accept the audience accolades. One sensed that we, as audience, were honouring not just a performance, but a life lived in music.

All Rise ranks as a high-water mark in a compositional career studded with high-water marks, and Melbourne was fortunate to be afforded this rare opportunity to witness such a spirited performance – especially when taking into consideration the vast forces required to mount the work. On this occasion – and it is worth noting that both Melbourne performances sold out well in advance – the combined forces of Wynton Masalis, the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, the MSO, the MSO chorus, the Consort of Melbourne, conductor Benjamin Northey, singers Michelle Nicolle and Emma Pearson, joined together to deliver a concert that will long live in memory, thoroughly meriting the lengthy standing ovation it received on the night. As a wave of euphoria spread through the hall, it appeared few were left untouched by the sheer power and magic of this music.

All Rise (Lincoln Center Orchestra and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra) was performed at Hamer Hall on 25 and 26 August 2023. Performance attended: 25 August.

by Des Cowley
Source: Australian Book Review

The Japan Art Association has announced the five winners of the Praemium Imperiale awards 2023: Vija Celmins in painting, Olafur Eliasson for sculpture, Diébédo Francis Kéré (architecture), Wynton Marsalis in music and Robert Wilson for the theatre/film prize.

The awards, given by the Japan Art Association under the honorary patronage of HIH Prince Hitachi, younger brother of the Emperor Emeritus of Japan, are accompanied by an honorarium of 15 million Yen (c. £90,000). There is also a grant of 5 million Yen for young artists, which was given Rural Studios, led by British architect Andrew Freear, in Newbern, Alabama.

The Praemium Imperiale Awards, given first in 1989, recognise achievements in candidates whose impact reaches beyond their national boundaries. Previous winners in painting included David Hockney, Yayoi Kusama, Shirin Neshat and Cy Twombly. In sculpture: El Anatsui, Louise Bourgeois, Rebecca Horn and Ai Weiwei. Frank Gehry and Kenzo Tange are among the architecture laureates, Plácido Domingo and Steve Reich in music and Merce Cunningham and Martin Scorsese in the theatre/film prize.

The world premiere of Beyond Black Codes featuring big band arrangements of songs from Wynton Marsalis’ highly influential small group albums will open Jazz at Lincoln Center’s 2023-24 season on Sept. 21-23, 2023, at 8:00pm in Rose Theater. Live webcast on September 23 on jazzlive.com

Jazz at Lincoln Center’s opening weekend concerts will draw from small-group Marsalis classics including Black Codes (From the Underground) — which was inducted into the 2023 class of the National Recording Registry — The Magic Hour; Standard Time Vol 2: Intimacy Calling; and other records including five albums re-issued digitally today via Blue Engine Records.

These concerts will feature the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis performing works that reflect Marsalis’s communitarian and intersectional concerns. Pre-concert lectures with Seton Hawkins, Jazz at Lincoln Center Director of Education Resources and Public Programming, will delve into the history of Marsalis’ small groups and explore their musical impact.

Following opening weekend at Jazz at Lincoln Center, the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis will tour Beyond Black Codes throughout the U.S. from Sept. 26-Oct. 8, 2023. See complete tour dates.

Rose Theater in Frederick P. Rose Hall, the home of Jazz at Lincoln Center, is located on Broadway at 60th Street in New York, NY.

Visit jazz.org/blackcodes for tickets and information.

As part of the events ushering in Jazz at Lincoln Center’s 36th season, Blue Engine Records—the organization’s in-house label— today re-issues five Marsalis albums: The Magic Hour ; Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson ; Live at the House of Tribes ; From the Plantation to the Penitentiary ; and He and She. Originally recorded in the 2000s, these five albums—which earned some of the best reviews of the award-winning trumpeter’s career—have been remastered for their return to streaming platforms.

Jazz at Lincoln Center’s 2023-24 season focuses on the concept of community; the broader community of jazz; the numerous communities that nurtured its master practitioners across its timeline; the communities of consciousness that influenced these practitioners; the music’s power to bridge divides and coalesce these distinct communities; and the role of jazz – and the arts writ large – in maintaining the human connection in the digital era. Throughout its 2023-24 season, Jazz at Lincoln Center explores these subjects with concerts featuring the forward-thinking composers, virtuosic improvisers, and ingenious conceptualists that populate the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis. Implicitly or explicitly, season concerts, education programs, advocacy initiatives, and Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra tours directly evoke themes that illuminate, as Managing and Artistic Director Wynton Marsalis puts it, the notion that, “Our music has the exceptional ability to bring people together.”

The organization’s 36th season runs from Sept. 21, 2023 to June 8, 2024 in Rose Theater, The Appel Room, and Dizzy’s Club – all at Frederick P. Rose Hall, the home of Jazz at Lincoln Center, located on Broadway at 60th Street in New York, NY. In addition to 24 unique live concerts throughout Frederick P. Rose Hall and more than 350 nights of music at Dizzy’s Club, the organization will offer webcast performances via the Jazz Live app, in-person and virtual education programs, and Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis tour dates worldwide.  
 
For a complete listing of Jazz at Lincoln Center’s 2023-24 season concerts, please visit jazz.org/2324season

For the opening of the 2023-’24 season, Jazz at Lincoln Center did something it hasn’t done for a long time, if ever: It invited certain correspondents to attend the sound check at 4:30 p.m. at Rose Hall. It lasted about 40 minutes. At 7 p.m., the head of JALC’s education department, Seton Hawkins, hosted a pre-concert discussion with a longtime trombonist and arranger with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, Vincent Gardner, and then the actual concert kicked off at 8 p.m.

Something I heard at the soundcheck really intrigued me. As usual, the artistic director, Wynton Marsalis, used the opportunity to rehearse some key tunes as well as portions of others. Near the end, the Jalco played a segment from a larger piece that was unlike almost anything I’ve ever heard played by the orchestra, or almost any contemporary jazz orchestra, for that matter. It was a bouncy, two-beat slice of what could only be called big band dixieland, reminiscent of the old Bob Crosby band. What would the rest of this piece sound like, and how could they possibly transition in and out of it? Stay tuned.

For the first show of the new season, the Jalco chose to focus on the works of Mr. Marsalis. Generally, once every few years, he will choose to unveil a major piece of new music, usually a long-form extended composition. This time, though, the idea was to take shorter pieces from nearly a 40-year timespan and expand them into full-on orchestral arrangements for the 15-piece orchestra.

The concert was titled “Beyond Black Codes,” a reference to the 1985 “Black Codes (From the Underground),” perhaps the best-remembered of Mr. Marsalis’s early albums — and that was also the opening number, the only piece arranged by Mr. Marsalis himself. When adapting small-group works for larger ensembles, rather than getting heavier with the added instrumental presence, somehow they tend to get lighter and more user-friendly, as with the Jalco’s interpretation of John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme.”

“Black Codes” was originally one of Mr. Marsalis’s more progressive pieces, which seemed to exist in that transitional moment of the 1960s, somewhere between bebop and free jazz, a kind of compositionally driven, open-ended bop. Considering the musical content, as well as the titular reference to a rather brutal fact of African-American history, Mr. Marsalis didn’t want to soften its edges, but rather use the larger framework to bring out its inner meaning. “Black Codes” is still dark and menacing as well as swinging, and Abdias Armentos soloed on soprano saxophone, in honor of Mr. Marsalis’s older brother, Branford Marsalis, on the 1985 album.

Mr. Marsalis returned to the “Black Codes” album a few tunes later with “Phryzzinian Man,” another piece that evokes Andrew Hill, Wayne Shorter, and other mid-’60s composer-bandleaders exploring, in their own way, the space beyond bebop. As arranged by bassist Carlos Henriquez, this was the most modal tune of the evening, with an alto saxophone solo by Alexa Tartinino, subbing for Ted Nash, that had to be one of the most abstract improvisations I’ve ever heard on the stage at Rose Hall.

If the point of the evening was to illustrate the breadth and scope of Mr. Marsalis’s music over the course of what has already been a long career — he turns 62 in a few weeks — then it more than achieved that. While the “Black Codes” compositions are perhaps his furthest “out,” other works elucidated songs from all over the history of jazz. “Marthaniel,” written for pianist Marcus Roberts on the 1992 “Citi Movement (Griot New York),” has now become, in trumpeter Marcus Printup’s chart, a full-on orchestral concerto for blues piano, and one of the most soulful works the orchestra has ever played.

“Marciac Fun,” also arranged by Mr. Henriquez, from the 2000 “Marciac Suite,” shows the international range of this music. Inspired by a festival in France, the piece started with a Brazilian samba feel, and then, as it proceeded, gradually showed what a street parade in Rio has in common with a Mardi Gras street parade in New Orleans, complete with a section reminiscent of the Crescent City march “High Society.”

Several pieces also underscore Mr. Marsalis’s connection to the world of dance: “Awakening,” from the 1999 “Sweet Release & Ghost Story,” arranged by Ted Nash, is one of many he has written for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and other organizations.

“Speed,” from the 2007 “Here…Now,” also for Ailey, as arranged by Vincent Gardner, was inspired by an Olympic champion sprinter, Florence Griffith Joyner. It’s a highly baroque and staccato piece, in something of a concerto grosso format, in which, as Mr. Gardner described it in the pre-concert talk, seven members of the orchestra, reflecting Mr. Marsalis’s original septet, play in call and response with the larger ensemble.

In the second half, I did get to hear the whole of that mysterious two-beat number from the soundcheck: It turned out to be the ending of “Swingdown, Swingtown,” also from “Citi Movement.” As arranged by Sherman Irby, it reminded me of those occasions when the Jalco has played the music of Benny Carter, especially when he conducted the orchestra himself, and also the brilliant “Kansas City Suite” that he wrote for Count Basie.

Unlike the Ailey pieces, “Swingdown” was for social dancing rather than formal choreography, and it swung mightily in the 1940s big band dance music tradition. And then, all of a sudden, we were in a highly heterophonic, New Orleans-style dixieland moment: I was waiting for this, and yet I still couldn’t figure out how we got into it. As I scratched my head and looked around Rose, all I could see were 1,233 heads nodding to the beat, and 1,233 feet patting.

by Will Friedwald
Source: The New York Sun

MONTREAL — Bebop revivalist, classical virtuoso, educator, and music director, Wynton Marsalis could be called a man of many careers had he never written a note. Yet the American trumpeter is a prolific composer, often in an idiom that subtly combines the traditions of classical and jazz. The Orchestre symphonique de Montréal and its principal trumpet, Paul Merkelo, made a positive case for Marsalis’ stylistically multilingual Trumpet Concerto in its Canadian debut Aug. 19 in the Maison symphonique.

Comprising six movements and lasting 35 minutes, the score scans as a suite rather than an organized concerto. Many are the references and evocations. The soloist gets things started with a brash fanfare — said by the composer to emulate an elephant call — and seldom steps back in a first movement animated by percussion and redolent less of the African outdoors than a busy American turnpike.

The following Ballad gives voice to Marsalis the melodist and confirmed admirer of Louis Armstrong. Oboe and tuba, neither noted as jazz instruments, make significant contributions. After a syncopated third movement of Latin inspiration, the self-descriptive Blues exploits muted sonorities to alluring effect. The waltzing (and ostensibly Gallic) fifth movement is quickly superseded by a wild finale brimming with ideas and atavistic sonorities that reminded this listener of The Rite of Spring. Or perhaps, as the composer would have it, “a circle dance groove from Jewish traditions of Eastern Europe.”

Amid this hubbub, Merkelo himself was required to be something of a one-man band, realizing various Marsalis-class technical feats, and without many bars of rest. To call the performance (recorded for release on osm.ca) an encyclopedia of trumpet playing is not much of an exaggeration. Merkelo used three instruments (swapping the C trumpet for a B-flat model in jazzy and/or Latin passages and a D trumpet for the concluding pyrotechnics) and five mutes (cup, straight, wa-wa, plunger, and old-fashioned hat). It would impossible to list all the admirable specifics. One striking plus was the gleaming quality of the high range. For all the virtues this trumpeter brings to his day job, he is a soloist at heart. OSM music director Rafael Payare was on the podium, eliciting the many colors and rhythms of the score without turning it into a free-for-all.

Merkelo is the third trumpeter to take on the piece — following Michael Sachs (in April with the Cleveland Orchestra under Franz Welser-Möst) and Håkan Hardenberger (July with the Verbier Festival Orchestra under Christoph Eschenbach) — and he’s booked to play it in Cape Town in 2024. One wonders how the concerto will fare on the wider circuit, given its length and technical demands. Perhaps a more manageable reduction would be advisable. A college dictionary, if you will, instead of an encyclopedia!

Rather than match the Marsalis with a repertoire standard, the OSM saw fit to program Accelerando, a 2016 exercise in the eponymous tempo indication by the late Spanish-born Montrealer José Evangelista. Open intervals in the quiet beginning — including the basso-profondo rumbling of an octobass — could hardly fail to bring to mind the start of Strauss’ Also sprach Zarathustra. Matters became more rhythmic as this 15-minute piece (intended to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Montreal métro system) progressed. As in much of Evangelista’s oeuvre, Western harmonies are used sparingly.

Heartily applauded if slenderly attended, this afternoon concert was one of 26 presented under the aegis of the OSM’s annual well-packed Virée classique festival. Around suppertime, I heard another Marsalis opus: A Fiddler’s Tale, a 1998 tribute to Stravinsky’s L’histoire du soldat, which likewise deploys a narrator and an instrumental septet.

In this case the protagonist is a violinist who, under the influence of the Devil, abandons her own music of “soul and glow” in favor of a more commercial career. And then returns to the South to meet up with her Uncle Bud and a certain Savior. I think. Despite patches of vivid wordplay (“We are going to jam us some zeros, baby”) and the earnest efforts of narrator Nantali Indongo to summon different voices, the story was hard to follow, even with a printed text. Add Southern accents and you can imagine the dilemma for francophones.

Happily, Marsalis has a keen ear for quirky dissonance. Musical numbers, some in a Stravinskian neoclassical style, constituted the true salvation of this 70-minute presentation, given to a crowd of about 120 on the stage of Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier. Former OSM assistant conductor Dina Gilbert led a crack squad made mostly of OSM regulars, including associate principal trumpet Stéphane Beaulac, who made a vivid impression. If the title role of the Fiddler was performed with less distinction by Marianne Dugal, the fault might lie partly in violin writing that (not unlike Stravinsky’s) stressed methodical double-stops in the middle range.

By Arthur Kaptainis
Source: Classical Voice North America

Featuring the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis
Oct 27–28 • 8PM
Rose Theater

Embark on a voyage through time and space as the JLCO unveils a celestial event like no other. The world premiere of saxophonist and composer Sherman Irby’s JALC-commissioned work Musings of Cosmic Stuff promises to take you on a sonic journey spanning billions of years, from microscopic particles to awe-inspiring supernovas.

Narrated by renowned astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, and led Irby alongside by the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis, Musings of Cosmic Stuff will transport you to extraordinary musical destinations while transcending the boundaries of music and science.

Reserve your tickets for this one-of-a-kind event today!

The Coastal Jazz and Blues Society presents the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis at the Orpheum at 8 pm on October 10.

WHEN WYNTON MARSALIS and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra play an all-Marsalis program at the Orpheum on October 10, it will mark a significant departure from their usual practice: honouring the giants of the jazz past by reconstructing their music for the jazz present.

Previous JLCO concerts and recordings have honoured such foundational figures as Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, bebop and post-bop innovators Charlie Parker and Charles Mingus, and even relative radicals like fusion pioneer Chick Corea and free-jazz mastermind Ornette Coleman. But as the ensemble’s artistic director since 1991, Marsalis has always been shy of presenting his own work with the band in such a comprehensive fashion.

With Marsalis due to turn 62 this fall, should we see this change of focus as some kind of career overview or retrospective?

Not on your life.

“I’m not a nostalgic person,” Marsalis says, with typical directness. “I’m not like ‘It was great in those days.’ That was never my thing. ‘The older cats could really play and the young ones can’t play.’ That’s not my perspective.

“I don’t really think about life in that way,” he continues. Sure, some of the pieces on the program might be, in their original form, like a Polaroid of where Marsalis was at when he wrote them, but the trumpeter and composer says that while they’ve changed, he’s changed, and life moves ever onward, everything is part of some greater continuum.

“I don’t really see that the time is passing and that 40 years went by. Life is brief.”

“You know, if somebody sees a picture of you in an Afro—an Afro from 1977, you know what I mean?—and they ask ‘Man, what was it like in the ‘70s?’ Well, it was like nothing except like how it is now,” he explains. “I was alive, and Afros were the style that we wore. And then when we stopped wearing Afros, gradually, we wore something else. But it wasn’t like all of a sudden people stopped wearing Afros and the quality of life changed to be like a movie about the 1980s.

“I don’t think anybody looks at their life in terms of what they did in a decade. I think they look at in terms of their life: when their kid was born; when they had an operation; when their parents died; when they got married and they got divorced; when they lost a job; when they got a job… You know what I mean? When they realized something. So for me it’s like that. I don’t really see that the time is passing and that 40 years went by. Life is brief. I know many musicians that have passed away, and in they end, they would say ‘Life is short. Is that it?’ It’s almost like university. Like, shit, it goes by fast.”

After briefly commiserating over the fact that we’re both in our 60s—“I was 19 for about 20 years,” Marsalis says, laughing—we return to the question of why the JLCO is concentrating on its leader’s work on its current tour.

“It wasn’t at my suggestion,” Marsalis allows. But once the idea came up the other musicians in the JLCO embraced it, and even took on some programming responsibilities. “I went through maybe 400, 500 songs that I had and just picked things with different forms….And when I’d picked all the songs, Carlos Henriquez, our bassist, called me and said ‘Hey, you don’t have enough songs from Black Codes on here,” he notes, alluding to his 1985 artistic breakthrough, Black Codes (From the Underground). “‘You need to do “Phryzzinian Man” or you need to do these other numbers. You can’t do this without those songs.’ So there’s just a process that we use when we’ve been programming a season.”

Marsalis often speaks of jazz as the ultimate artistic expression of American democracy, and a prime manifestation of that can be found that eight of the JLCO’s 15 musicians have been involved in arranging his tunes for its current tour. Historically, arrangers have played almost as large a part in the evolution of big-band jazz as composers, and given that Marsalis defines the JLCO’s mission as “giving an orchestral voice to small-band music” that’s also the case here. But most of the classic big bands relied on one or two in-house arrangers for their scores. Having eight is either a luxury or a possible source of fragmentation, and Marsalis is obviously proud of the fact that with the JLCO, it’s the former.

“A lot of arrangers have come out of the band,” he says, “and we’ve played each others’ arrangements now for years. I think that makes the band unique in the history of our music; there’s never been a band with that many arrangers. And when we did the shows with Chick [Corea] and Wayne [Shorter], every time a new arrangement would come in, they’d be like ‘Who did that? Who did that one?’ ’Cause when I’d tell them we had eight or nine arrangers, they’d say ‘Of course!’”

Beyond that, the JLCO is essentially the Berlin Philharmonic of jazz: every chair is occupied by someone who’s at the very peak of their profession, yet aware that their collective success depends upon the quality of their listening as well as the intensity of their virtuosity.

“That’s how every collaboration is,” Marsalis concurs. “It’s like a large family: you can’t eat all the food just because you’re hungry. In society you have to eat a portion that is commensurate to what’s available and what’s allowable to eat. In democracy, there has to be a lot of self-assessment and self-policing—and in our music, because we have all these kinds of open forms and the freedoms we do have, we always have to be cognizant and aware of each other.”

So it’s a case of “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs”?

“Most definitely,” the bandleader says. “That’s what we’re negotiating all night!”

by Alexander Varty
Source: STIR Arts & Culture

In an interview with KMHD, Marsalis talks working with Portland jazz artists, the orchestra’s new material and his band’s internal integrity.

Wynton Marsalis is a world-renowned trumpeter, bandleader, composer and a leading advocate of American culture. Whether you know him from one of his 100-plus recordings, his position as director of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra or as a collaborator on Ken Burns’ ”Jazz” documentary for PBS, you are likely to recognize that he is one of the go-to commentators on where jazz has been, and where it is going.

Presently, Marsalis works to ensure the legacy of jazz will continue to inspire for generations to come through his emphasis in education and outreach.

Marsalis brings the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra to Portland on Saturday, Oct. 7, with their season opener “Beyond Black Codes.” The music draws from small-group Marsalis classics including “Black Codes (From the Underground)” — which was inducted into the 2023 class of the National Recording Registry — “The Magic Hour; Standard Time Vol 2: Intimacy Calling,” and other records, including five albums re-issued digitally via Blue Engine Records. The concert will feature the 15-piece band performing works that reflect Marsalis’s communitarian and intersectional concerns.

Listen to the conversation by clicking play here Play

By Meg Samples
Source: KMHD Radio

Wynton Marsalis, internationally acclaimed musician, composer, educator, and a leading advocate of American culture, discusses what he says to kids who want to be musicians, what makes the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra unique, and what he is trying to tell the world through his music.

Listen to “Wynton Marsalis on the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra and the Future of Jazz” on Spreaker.

Wynton and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra perform in Seattle at the Paramount Theatre on October 5th. Info at stgpresents.org, wyntonmarsalis.org, and jazz.org.

Recorded in 2006 but not released until now, Wynton Marsalis Plays Louis Armstrong’s Hot Fives Hot Sevens was recorded live at the Rose Theater, the largest of three performance rooms at the Jazz at Lincoln Center facility. House label Blue Engine Records has now released this concert for streaming.

These performances are based on a series of recordings Armstrong made in Chicago for Okeh Records with the Hot Five—Louis’s first recording ensemble — beginning in 1925. Those recordings changed not just music but also how jazz was consumed. While some of the musicians had played together for years—the band included Armstrong’s wife, Lil Hardin Armstrong, on piano—the sole purpose of the group was to record this music; they never performed live under this name. This music itself was made to be recorded, distributed worldwide on 78rpm records, then played on the newly portable folded-horn Victrolas. It was a whole new way for jazz to be consumed.

From 1925 through 1928, Louis Armstrong recorded 55 sides credited to Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five and Hot Seven. (On a few other sides, the Hot Five were credited as sidemen.) The original members, in addition to Louis and Lil, were Johnny Dodds on clarinet, Johnny St. Cyr on guitar and banjo, and Kid Ory on trombone. When Ory was away playing with King Oliver’s band, John Thomas replaced him. For the May 1927 sessions, the group was joined by drummer Baby Dodds (Johnny Dodds’s brother) and Pete Briggs on tuba, forming the Hot Seven. For the 1928 sessions, everyone but Louis was replaced.

Armstrong is often described as having codified two primary elements of jazz: blues and swing. These recordings are where and when it happened. Wynton—another great New Orleans trumpet player and a scholar of jazz history—has studied this music. In Ken Burns’s definitive documentary Jazz, he comments in depth, often picking up his horn to demonstrate. “You listen to his sound and all the musicians imitated him,” Marsalis comments. “He had that jump and bounce in his playing. … The art of swing is the art of balance, of constant compromise. Swing is the rhythmic identity of the music.”

This program contains 14 Hot Five and Hot Seven compositions. Wynton uses nine musicians and doesn’t try to copy the original sound. As the liner notes say, “Rather than faithfully copying Armstrong’s classic recordings note for note or using the same arrangements, Marsalis wisely chose to do like Armstrong did and not exactly what he did.”

Wynton had the advantage of working with musicians he has played alongside for years: Wycliffe Gordon on trombone, Victor Goines on clarinet, Walter Blanding on saxophones, and a young (in 2006) Jonathan Batiste on piano. The nine musicians credited rotate depending on the arrangements. The performances feel energetic and significant. It must have been especially rewarding to hear this music live. You can hear the level of talent, hear and sense the musicians’ enthusiasm.

Five of these songs have “Blues” in their titles, including “Savoy Blues,” and of course “Basin Street Blues.” Armstrong brought improvised instrumental soloing to the fore with his trumpet and cornet; until these sides were made, jazz was dominated by simultaneous group improvisation. Armstrong also seems to have invented “scat” singing, which he was known for for the rest of his lengthy career, on the song “Heebie Jeebies,” included here. Another important facet of Armstrong’s personality that permeated his music was his outsized sense of humor. Marsalis and his band pick up on it, too, underlined by Wycliffe Gordon’s sassy scat delivery.

Marsalis and his band play and sing the heck out of all the differing moods contained in this music. Yes, there is a bounce to it all, and it all swings like hell, even slow, sad numbers like “St. James Infirmary Blues.” Some of the songs are longer than the original Armstrong recordings; the album-concluding “Fireworks” runs 5:46 compared to the original timing of 3:07. The difference is mainly extra solos; the tempi are usually very close. Some of the songs on the new Marsalis versions include drums. Only Armstrong’s Hot Seven session, with Baby Dodds, included drums.

Wynton Marsalis Plays Louis Armstrong’s Hot Fives Hot Sevens takes what was old and re-creates it anew. Is this classical music? Not in the sense of a Baroque string quartet, but in another sense, yes: This music includes several of the foundational building blocks of jazz. Marsalis and JALC have inhabited and presented a huge variety of music over the years, but this album is at the core of their mission: true, like ice, like fire.

by Sasha Matson
Source: Stereophile

Wynton Marsalis is widely regarded as one of the world’s greatest — if not the greatest — trumpeters, which he repeatedly demonstrated with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra on Sunday afternoon at the Lied Center for Performing Arts.

But the 90-minute concert demonstrated that Marsalis, who while billed along with the orchestra, insists on being a member of the 15-member ensemble that is filled with jazz masters, each who got a turn or two in the spotlight for solos that displayed their improvisational skill and top-level musicianship.

In the case of McCoy Tyner’s “Man from Tanganyika,” which opened the second set, it first showcased trombonist Chris Crenshaw, the song’s arranger. Crenshaw came out carrying a tuba — “it’s a friendly instrument,” Marsalis quipped — to set the basis for the modal jazz piece that featured a handful of impressive solos, including a lyrical flight by Sherman Irby on flute and a captivating exploration of rhythm and tone from drummer Obed Calvaire.

But the orchestra always takes a trip through the history of jazz, on Sunday reaching back to 1929 for Duke Ellington’s “The Mooche,” which found Marsalis using a mute to make his trumpet “talk” in a period perfect rendition of the clarinet-drenched number.

Ellington returned with the third movement from his 1959 “Queen’s Suite” that showed, in Marsalis’s words, “the sound of five saxophones and how beautiful they sound together.”

Those steps through history — the program included songs from the ’50s through the ’90s — bore out something the engaging Marsalis, who talked on hand-held microphone from the back row of the bandstand, said during the show:

“One interesting things about jazz is we don’t have a generation gap,” Marsalis said. “We don’t association being old with unhip. Those guys we played with from (Duke Ellington’s) orchestra were some of the hippest cats ever.”

That remark was followed by a tribute to one of JLCO’s hippest, the late baritone saxophonist Joe Temperley, who, Marsalis said, “came to the U.S. (from Scotland) running from the Beatles.” That tribute featured the soulful, smoky baritone of Temperley’s replacement Paul Nedzela, both on the melody line and a lovely solo.

The program also included a pair of Marsalis compositions: the title cut form his 1985 Grammy-winning album “Black Codes (From the Underground)” and “Awakening,” a piece from a ballet he helped create with a Chinese choreographer, which opened with flutes and clarinets creating a Chinese-sounding passage.

The concert, which one attendee described to me as a spiritual experience, ended with trombonist Vincent Gardner’s “Up From Down,” on which, in case it wasn’t already obvious, Marsalis showed why he’s the world’s best, with a mind boggling, technically ultra proficient solo. That was matched by Irby on alto sax before the orchestra blasted the final notes of another of its great Lied performances.

by L. Kent Wolgamott
Source: The Lincoln Journal Star

“Sherman Irby’s Musings of Cosmic Stuff,” a new extended work for big band presented this past week at Jazz at Lincoln Center, is a team-up between the most famous man in jazz, Jazz at Lincoln Center’s artistic director, Wynton Marsalis, and perhaps the most easily recognized name, face, and voice in all of science, Neil deGrasse Tyson. It’s a collaboration presided over by a saxophonist, composer, and arranger, Sherman Irby.

In the last few years especially, Jazz at Lincoln Center has grown very international — last year there were jazz-fueled voyages through the music of Pan America and the Middle East, as well as a singularly excellent concert spotlighting Duke Ellington’s travel-inspired creations. Now, JALC is taking it a step further and leaving the world behind to travel through the far-flung reaches of international space.

The title conveys the overall wittiness of the music: “musings” and “cosmic” are very serious terms, but “stuff” is casual and informal. Previous jazz musings of cosmic stuff have often tended to be as deadly serious as a science class. John Coltrane’s “Venus and Mars” is far from the most light-hearted piece of music that the jazz messiah ever composed, but conversely some of Sun Ra’s astral voyages have allowed for levity.

Much interstellar jazz finds its point of departure in 1960s avant-garde and free music, but Mr. Irby grounds his compositions in familiar turf: swinging flag wavers, ballads, and blues, the kind of music that big bands have done best for a hundred years now.
Nearly every subsection of the suite has a clear-cut sound and identity: “Movement I: The Prime Singularity (aka the Notorious CMB)” is an explosive big bang of a big band opener. “Movement II: The Nuts and Bolts of Matter” employs exotic sounds in a tropical, Latin style. “Movement VII: A Long, Raging Goodbye” opens like a spiritual, with Ted Nash soloing on alto saxophone before the rest of the saxes, then the entire band joins in like a collective prayer. “Movement V: Waltz of the Silver River” is, as the title implies, in an understated 3/4.

During a pre-concert Q&A with JALC’s Caleb Smith, Mr. Irby talked about how he prepared to compose the work by reading as many books on astrophysics and cosmic stuff as he could get his eyeballs on. Through both the music and the narration, Mr. Irby makes references not only to science but to spirituality and literature, in that the title of “Movement IX: The Evidence of Things Not Seen” is a reference to the Old Testament as well as to James Baldwin.

At other points, he paraphrases T.S. Eliot’s iconic line, from “The Hollow Men,” about the world ending “not with a bang, but with a whimper.” When Mr. Tyson tells us, “It’s not only that we are alive in the universe, the universe is alive within us, we are stardust brought to life, and empowered by the universe to figure it out, and we’ve only just begun,” we can’t help but think of popular songs by the likes of Hoagy Carmichael, Joni Mitchell, and yes, the Carpenters.

The first half concludes with “Movement VI: The Spherical Universe of the Drum.” It’s become a tradition to end a jazz set with a percussion solo, but this is much more: It starts with a persistent, African-sounding beat played by drummer Obed Calvaire, over which Vincent Gardner’s muted trombone and the composer’s alto sax chase each other. Then, he truly gives us what we least expect, a capsule history of jazz that starts with a 19th century-style march inspired by John Philip Sousa.

Having time-warped us back to about 1900, the march theme is heard again in the jazzed-up style of early New Orleans bands, now in a jaunty two-beat with clarinetist Victor Goines evoking George Lewis and Mr. Marsalis summoning the ghost of Bunk Johnson. From there we modulate forward to the swing era, and the work becomes a Fletcher Henderson- style swing number, with brass and reeds interacting in call-and-response fashion, and a big-toned tenor saxophone solo by Abdias Armenteros.

Like the characters in Ovid’s “Metamorphosis,” it then transforms into a fast bop number, with Mr. Marsalis trumpeting like Dizzy Gillespie. Next is a Latin piece with Mr. Calvaire, pianist Dan Nimmer, and bassist Carlos Henriquez laying down a clave beat. Finally, we think we’re going to get the expected drum solo by Mr. Calvaire, but in sparks a blues section by the rest of the group, which includes wailing solos by Mr. Goines, now on tenor, guest trumpeter Bruce Harris, and trombonist Vincent Gardner.

There follows a contemplative, introspective section for Mr. Nimmer and then a fiery duet of Mr. Calvaire’s drums and Elliot Mason’s trombone. Taking the other Eliot at this word, it ends quietly, with Mr. Calvaire reprising the percussion pattern that had launched the piece 15 minutes earlier. When the Lincoln Centurions include this work in a retrospective concert years from now, this will be the movement that they select.

At one point, Mr. Tyson’s narration speaks of “gravity’s relentless rhythm,” and Messrs. Irby and Calvaire have just illustrated how rhythm and the drummer connect all forms of jazz to each other. Likewise, throughout, the text reminds us that the microscopically small — atoms, protons, quarks — are intrinsically part and parcel of the very large: stars, black holes, solar systems. “If stars were people, galaxies would be their cities,” the narration asserts.

At two and a half hours with intermission, “Cosmic Stuff” is one of the longer original jazz compositions commissioned by JALC; it’s even longer than Gustave Mahler’s famously long third symphony. Yet by breaking it up and adding a human voice with Mr. Tyson’s narration, the work becomes very listenable and engaging. Indeed, he establishes the tone of the piece with his very first words: “The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.”

by Will Friedwald
Source: The New York Sun

Designed to Explore and Nurture Connection Between Jazz, American Art, Visual Art, and the American Experience

New York, NY and Bentonville, AR (NOV 6, 2023) — Building off their 2019 collaborative concerts entitled Portraits of America, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and Jazz at Lincoln Center announce a unique creative partnership aimed to enrich the experiences of jazz and visual arts for audiences of all ages and levels of appreciation. Funded through a $1.15M gift from the Alice L. Walton Foundation, the partnership seeks to engage audiences and create connections between the visual and performing arts.

Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas and Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York, New York share the belief that arts education is for all. With combined rich histories of producing education initiatives and live events, the organizations have together developed a range of multi-sensory experiences for audiences to dive deeper into our nation’s cultural identity through the lenses of jazz and American art. From a new music and visual art education program for grade school children, to the release of new music from the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis, to original multi-media content, these new programs highlight the connection between jazz, visual art, and the American experience.

“Jazz is a uniquely American art form and pairing it with masterworks of American visual art creates a sensory experience and educational opportunity for all ages,” says philanthropist Alice Walton. “I’m delighted that the Alice L. Walton Foundation can help support Wynton’s vision in pairing these art forms through bringing together Crystal Bridges and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra.”

“Alice Walton’s work to keep art accessible to all is heroic. It is an honor and privilege to continue working with her and developing a partnership with Crystal Bridges,” said Wynton Marsalis, Jazz at Lincoln Center Managing and Artistic Director. “Music and visual art both stand alone as inspirational, but when combined, the expressions are uniquely powerful. Jazz at Lincoln Center’s collaboration with Crystal Bridges celebrates bringing cultures together.”

Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and Jazz at Lincoln Center began their creative journey together in 2019 with Portraits of America: A Jazz Story. These concerts, which took place at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Rose Theater in New York, NY, found the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis performing original compositions that were inspired by beloved works from Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art’s collection.

Now, Jazz at Lincoln Center’s in-house record label, Blue Engine Records, will turn those critically acclaimed performances into an album. Additionally, Jazz at Lincoln Center is at work on a Portraits of America concert film and an original video series that brings a wide range of musicians—from New York, Arkansas, and beyond—to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art to stage intimate, spontaneous performances inspired by pieces in the museum’s collection.
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and Jazz at Lincoln Center collaborative events launched on October 24-26, 2023, as school groups from the Northwest Arkansas area visited Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art to explore the connection between jazz and visual art. As students toured the collection spanning five centuries of American artworks from early American to the present, a lineup of musicians, curated by Jazz at Lincoln Center, performed works influenced by the collection.

About Crystal Bridges
The mission of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art is to welcome all to celebrate the American spirit in a setting that unites the power of art with the beauty of nature. Since opening in 2011, the museum has welcomed more than 10.8 million visitors across its spaces, with no cost for admission. Crystal Bridges was founded in 2005 as a non-profit charitable organization by arts patron and philanthropist, Alice Walton. The collection spans five centuries of American masterworks from early American to current day and is enhanced by temporary exhibitions. The museum is nestled on 120 acres of Ozark landscape and was designed by world-renowned architect Moshe Safdie. A rare Frank Lloyd Wright-designed house was preserved and relocated to the museum grounds in 2015. Crystal Bridges offers public programs including lectures, performances, classes, and teacher development opportunities. Some 300,000 school children have participated in the Willard and Pat Walker School Visit program, which provides educational experiences for school groups at no cost to the schools. Additional museum amenities include a restaurant, gift store, library, and five miles of art and walking trails. In February 2020, the museum opened the Momentary in Downtown Bentonville (507 SE E Street), conceived as a platform for the art, food, and music of our time. In 2026, Crystal Bridges will complete a nearly 100,000 square foot expansion that will allow the museum to expand access for all. For more information, visit CrystalBridges.org. The museum is located at 600 Museum Way, Bentonville, Arkansas 72712.

About Jazz at Lincoln Center
The mission of Jazz at Lincoln Center is to entertain, enrich and expand a global community for Jazz through performance, education and advocacy. With the world-renowned Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra and guest artists spanning genres and generations, Jazz at Lincoln Center produces thousands of performance, education, and broadcast events each season in its home in New York City (Frederick P. Rose Hall, “The House of Swing”) and around the world, for people of all ages. Jazz at Lincoln Center is led by Chairman Clarence Otis, Managing and Artistic Director Wynton Marsalis, and Executive Director Greg Scholl. Please visit us at jazz.org follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter @jazzdotorg; watch our free, global webcasts on the JazzLive app; and enjoy concerts, education programs, behind-the-scenes footage, programs and more at youtube.com/jazzatlincolncenter.

About the Alice L. Walton Foundation
Founded in 2017, the Alice L. Walton Foundation works to enhance the quality of life for individuals through providing access to offerings that improve well-being and create diverse and inclusive communities. The foundation focuses on philanthropist Alice Walton’s commitment to increasing access to the arts, improving education outcomes, enhancing health, and advancing economic opportunity for all. Through this work, the foundation strives to deliver meaningful and lasting change to individuals and communities most in need.

New York, NY (Nov. 7, 2023)— On Nov. 17-18, the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis returns to the intimate and iconic Appel Room in Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Frederick P. Rose Hall for the latest installment of the Journey Through Jazz concert series.

For this Journey Through Jazz performance, the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra is led by JLCO Music Director and trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, acclaimed vocalist Catherine Russell, and JLCO saxophonists Ted Nash and Abdias Armenteros. Through personal stories and music performed by the JLCO, the co-leaders illuminate their personal connections to musical scenes around the world and the wide variety of inspirations that have shaped them as musicians.

Ticket prices for these unique performances are pay-what-you-choose starting at $10.00. Purchases are limited to two seats per order online, over the phone, and in person at the box office.

Journey Through Jazz takes place on Nov. 17 at 7:00 p.m. and 9:00 p.m., and on Nov. 18 at 4:30 p.m. and 7:00 p.m. Frederick P. Rose Hall, the home of Jazz at Lincoln Center, is located on Broadway at 60th Street in New York, NY.

Visit jazz.org/jtj for tickets and information. Live webcast on Nov. 17 on jazzlive.com

Jazz at Lincoln Center’s 2023-24 season focuses on the concept of community; the broader community of jazz; the numerous communities that nurtured its master practitioners across its timeline; the communities of consciousness that influenced these practitioners; the music’s power to bridge divides and coalesce these distinct communities; and the role of jazz – and the arts writ large – in maintaining the human connection in the digital era. Throughout its 2023-24 season, Jazz at Lincoln Center explores these subjects with concerts featuring the forward-thinking composers, virtuosic improvisers, and ingenious conceptualists that populate the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis. Implicitly or explicitly, season concerts, education programs, advocacy initiatives, and Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra tours directly evoke themes that illuminate, as Managing and Artistic Director Wynton Marsalis puts it, the notion that, “Our music has the exceptional ability to bring people together.”

The organization’s 36th season runs from Sept. 21, 2023, to June 8, 2024 in Rose Theater, The Appel Room, and Dizzy’s Club – all at Frederick P. Rose Hall, the home of Jazz at Lincoln Center, located on Broadway at 60th Street in New York, NY. In addition to 24 unique live concerts throughout Frederick P. Rose Hall and more than 350 nights of music at Dizzy’s Club, the organization will offer webcast performances via the Jazz Live app, in-person and virtual education programs, and Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis tour dates worldwide.

For a complete listing of Jazz at Lincoln Center’s 2023-24 season concerts, please visit jazz.org/2324season.

Jazz at Lincoln Center Health and Safety Guidelines

We believe in the power of music to uplift, inspire, and create a sense of community. We very much look forward to welcoming you to the House of Swing at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Frederick P. Rose Hall this season and are committed to employing all measures to ensure your safety as well as the safety of our artists and staff. Learn more about our health and safety guidelines, COVID-19 Liability Waiver, and enhanced refund policy on jazz.org.

Ticket Information

Ticket prices for Journey Through Jazz performances are pay-what-you-choose starting at $10.00. Purchases are limited to two seats per order online, over the phone, and in person at the box office.

(*) Please note that a $3.50 Jazz at Lincoln Center Facility Fee applies to ALL ticket purchases, with the exception of $10 Hot Seats when Hot Seats are available. A $7 handling fee also applies when purchasing tickets from CenterCharge or when purchasing tickets online via jazz.org.

All single tickets for Rose Theater can be purchased through jazz.org 24 hours a day or through CenterCharge at 212-721-6500, open daily from 10:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. Tickets can also be purchased at the Jazz at Lincoln Center Box Office, located on Broadway at 60th Street, Ground Floor.

Box Office hours:
Monday-Saturday: 1:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. (or 30 minutes past curtain)
Sunday: 12:00 p.m. noon to 6:00 p.m. (or 30 minutes past curtain).

Produced and arranged by Marcus Printup; Released on Dec. 15

Featuring special guest vocalists: Catherine Russell, Denzal Sinclaire, Vuyo Sotashe and more.

First four songs out on all streaming platforms today: “Go Tell it On The Mountain,” “Christmas Time Is Here,” “Caroling, Caroling,” and “What Child Is This”

New York, NY (December 8, 2023) – In celebration of the most wonderful time of the year, Blue Engine Records—Jazz at Lincoln Center’s (JALC) in-house record label—proudly presents the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra (JLCO) with Wynton Marsalis‘ new collection of holiday music: Big Band Holidays III. Produced and arranged by acclaimed JLCO member, trumpeter and composer Marcus Printup, the eight-song album features music recorded over the past decade during Jazz at Lincoln Center’s titular holiday series and spotlights an intergenerational roster of guest vocalists, including Catherine Russell, Denzal Sinclaire, Vuyo Sotashe, and more.

Released in two bundles – the first four songs out today (Dec. 8), the second, Dec. 15 – the album includes holiday classics reimagined for America’s premier big band, including “This Christmas,” “Caroling, Caroling,” and “Go Tell It on the Mountain.” Big Band Holidays III is the perfect addition to everyone’s holiday playlist and an ideal soundtrack to celebrate the season with loved ones.

Big Band Holidays III
Streaming December 8, 2023:
01. Go Tell It on the Mountain
02. Christmas Time Is Here
03. Caroling, Caroling (featuring vocalist Denzal Sinclaire)
04. What Child Is This (featuring vocalist Vuyo Sotashe)

Streaming December 15, 2023:
05. All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth (featuring vocalist Denzal Sinclaire)
06. This Christmas
07. I’m Still Here This Christmas
08. No Room at the Inn (featuring vocalist Catherine Russell)

Big Band Holidays concerts have been a New York City tradition among jazz lovers and families for more than a decade. Every December, the critically acclaimed Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis and an all-star roster of guest vocalists explore the canon of holiday standards and perform both new and traditional arrangements of Yuletide favorites. Blue Engine Records has assembled highlights from these historical performances to make them available for digital streaming.

Producer and arranger Marcus Printup says, “The holidays are a time when all generations come together, and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra’s annual Big Band Holidays represents that unity and community.” Reflecting on “Christmas Time Is Here,” he says, “I remember watching A Charlie Brown Christmas as a child and always loving this song. It has a somber, yet optimistic feeling which I tried to portray in this arrangement. The unison cup muted trumpet melody represents the choir singing on the original recording by Vince Guaraldi in 1965. Victor Goines takes a masterful and virtuosic solo on the clarinet, followed by a deeply soulful and introspective trombone solo by Vincent Gardner. I added an interlude (before the outgoing bridge and melody are restated) that represents optimism and hope.”

BIG BAND HOLIDAYS III TRACKLISTING:
01. Go Tell it On The Mountain
02. Christmas Time is Here
03. Caroling, Caroling (featuring vocalist Denzal Sinclaire)
04. What Child is This (featuring vocalist Vuyo Sotashe)
05. All I want for Christmas is My Two Front Teeth (featuring vocalist Denzal Sinclaire)
06. This Christmas
07. I’m Still Here This Christmas
08. No Room at The Inn (featuring vocalist Catherine Russell)

BIG BAND HOLIDAYS III PERSONNEL:
THE JAZZ AT LINCOLN CENTER ORCHESTRA WITH WYNTON MARSALIS

REEDS

• Sherman Irby (alto saxophone, alto flute)
• Ted Nash (alto saxophone, piccolo)
• Victor Goines (tenor saxophone, clarinet)
• Walter Blanding (tenor saxophone)
• (*) Camille Thurman (tenor saxophone)
• Joe Temperley (baritone saxophone)
• Paul Nedzela (baritone saxophone, bass clarinet)

TRUMPETS

• Ryan Kisor
• Marcus Printup
• Kenny Rampton
• Wynton Marsalis
• (*) Bruce Harris
• (*) Greg Gisbert

TROMBONES

• Vincent Gardner
• Christopher Crenshaw
• Elliot Mason
• (*) Jacob Melsha

RHYTHM SECTION

• Dan Nimmer (piano)
• Carlos Henriquez (bass)
• (*) James Chirillo (guitar)
• (*) Ali Jackson (drums)
• (*) Willie Jones III (drums)
• (*) Charles Goold (drums)

FEATURED GUESTS

• Catherine Russell
• Denzal Sinclaire
• Vuyo Sotashe

(*) Indicates substitute orchestra member

New York, NY (Dec. 13, 2023)- To commemorate the centennial of the legendary musician drummer-composer, bebop pioneer, and activist Max Roach (1924-2007), the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis premieres new arrangements of works by the iconic artist at Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York, NY on Jan. 19-20 at 8:00 p.m.

Following the performances at Jazz at Lincoln Center, the world-renowned big band tours the Max Roach Centennial Celebration throughout the U.S., Jan. 21-28. See tour dates listed below.

Exclusively for this centennial celebration, the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra features music direction from Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra drummer Obed Calvaire to honor the legendary artist whose groundbreaking performances and social activism continue to impact music, culture, and socio-artistic expression.

“You could take four bars from Max and come up with a lifetime of vocabulary on the instrument – playing bebop,” says Calvaire. “That’s how much he’s influenced our music. He was just a genius and there will never be another Max Roach.”

No jazz musician embodied political activism more thoroughly than Max Roach – a master of rhythmic and tonal design on the drum set and a pioneer in the deployment of odd meter. “He’s one of the great freedom fighters in the history of jazz,” says Jazz at Lincoln Center Managing and Artistic Director Wynton Marsalis.
“An unbelievable drum virtuoso, Max invented the modern style of drum.”

Visit jazz.org/maxroach for more information.

Max Roach Centennial Celebration
Featuring the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis

Tour Dates:

January 19-20, 2024
Jazz at Lincoln Center
New York, NY

January 21, 2024
Kimmel Center
Philadelphia, PA

January 23, 2024
Moss Arts Center
Blacksburg, VA

January 24, 2024
Mickey L. Burnim Fine Arts Center
Elizabeth City, NC

January 25, 2024
Modlin Center for the Arts
Roanoke, VA

January 26, 2024
Music Center at Strathmore
North Bethesda, MD

January 27, 2024
Staller Center for the Arts
Stony Brook, NY

January 28, 2024
Symphony Hall
Boston, MA

Masters of Form: Duke, Jelly Roll, and Mingus, in Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Rose Theater on Feb. 2-3, 2024, at 8:00 p.m., features the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis; performing masterfully structured pieces from musical architects Duke Ellington, Jelly Roll Morton, and Charles Mingus.

The concert event also features the world premiere of “Usonian Structures,” a new suite by award-winning jazz composer, arranger, and saxophonist Andy Farber, inspired by architectural structures of the immortal architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

“Frank Lloyd Wright and Usonia, the design philosophy he created, have long served as an inspiration for my new work,” said Farber. “The name ‘Usonia’ was derived from ‘United States of North America,’ but Wright was also influenced by other cultures and applied it to his work – as jazz musicians have done throughout history.” He continued, “each movement of ‘Usonian Structures’ has been inspired by one of Wright’s iconic designs: the Unity Temple in Oak Park, Illinois; Taliesin in Spring Green, Wisconsin; the Ennis, Storer, and Freeman houses of Los Angeles, California; Fallingwater in Mill Run, Pennsylvania; Johnson Wax Headquarters in Racine, Wisconsin; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City; and various Usonian style homes. I look forward to premiering this piece with Wynton and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra.”

On the other half of the Masters of Form: Duke, Jelly Roll, and Mingus concert, the JLCO, music directed by trombonist Vincent Gardner, emphasizes the brilliant layering that musical architects Duke Ellington, Jelly Roll Morton, and Charles Mingus applied in their compositions.

Ticket information can be found on jazz.org/form

Jazz at Lincoln Center’s 2023-24 season focuses on the concept of community; the broader community of jazz; the numerous communities that nurtured its master practitioners across its timeline; the communities of consciousness that influenced these practitioners; the music’s power to bridge divides and coalesce these distinct communities; and the role of jazz – and the arts writ large – in maintaining the human connection in the digital era. Throughout its 2023-24 season, Jazz at Lincoln Center explores these subjects with concerts featuring the forward-thinking composers, virtuosic improvisers, and ingenious conceptualists that populate the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis. Implicitly or explicitly, season concerts, education programs, advocacy initiatives, and Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra tours directly evoke themes that illuminate, as Managing and Artistic Director Wynton Marsalis puts it, the notion that, “Our music has the exceptional ability to bring people together.”

The organization’s 36th season runs from Sept. 21, 2023, to June 8, 2024 in Rose Theater, The Appel Room, and Dizzy’s Club – all at Frederick P. Rose Hall, the home of Jazz at Lincoln Center, located on Broadway at 60th Street in New York, NY. In addition to 24 unique live concerts throughout Frederick P. Rose Hall and more than 350 nights of music at Dizzy’s Club, the organization offers webcast performances via the Jazz Live app, in-person and virtual education programs, and Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis tour dates worldwide.

For a complete listing of Jazz at Lincoln Center’s 2023-24 season concerts, please visit jazz.org/2324season

Jazz at Lincoln Center spreads good cheer this holiday season as the world renowned Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra (JLCO) with Wynton Marsalis featuring guest vocalist Ashley Pezzotti perform Big Band Holidays throughout the U.S. Music directed by veteran JLCO member Marcus Printup, the 12-city tour commences in Athens, GA on Nov. 27, concluding with a five-date homecoming engagement at Rose Theater in Fredrick P. Rose Hall, the home of Jazz at Lincoln Center (located on Broadway at 60th St. in New York City), Dec. 13-17.

Sunday Dec. 17 features a 2 p.m. Relaxed Performance. These performances provide an opportunity for children and adults with autism, learning difficulties, or other sensory and communication needs to enjoy our programming with their families in a more relaxed environment.

Says Printup, “The holidays are a time when all generations come together, and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra’s annual Big Band Holidays tour represents that unity and community. In addition to a few holiday classics, we’ll be featuring brand new arrangements of “Do You Hear What I Hear,” “Jingle Bells,” “Little Drummer Boy,” “Let it Snow,” “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer,” “O Holy Night,” “Silent Night,” and “Snowbird,” an original composition by this year’s fabulous young vocalist Ashley Pezzotti. We look forward to swinging you into the holiday spirit!”

No Jazz at Lincoln Center season would be complete without the perennial Big Band Holidays concert, offering fresh, swinging arrangements of Christmas classics by JLCO members, plus a surprise tune or two. This year, Pezzotti joins an all-star roll call of predecessors that includes Samara Joy, Dianne Reeves, Cécile McLorin Salvant, Gregory Porter, Kurt Elling, René Marie, Vuyo Sotashe, Veronica Swift, and Catherine Russell.

For additional information and to purchase tickets, visit Jazz.org/BBH
For live streaming information, visit jazzlive.com

2023 Big Band Holidays U.S. Tour:

November 27 | Athens, GA – University of Georgia Performing Arts Center
November 28 | Columbia, SC – Koger Center for the Arts
November 29 | Gainesville, FL – Curtis M. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts
November 30 | Fernandina Beach, FL – First Baptist Church (Amelia Island Chamber Music Festival)
December 2 | Orlando, FL – Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts
December 3 | Palm Beach, FL – Walter S. Gubelmann Auditorium
December 5 | Memphis, TN – First Baptist Church Broad
December 6 | Philadelphia, MS – Marty Stuart’s Congress of Country Music
December 7 | Auburn, AL – Woltosz Theatre at Gogue Performing Arts Center
December 8 | Atlanta, GA – Atlanta Symphony Hall
December 9 | Chapel Hill, NC – Memorial Hall at University of North Carolina
December 10 | Charleston, SC – Charleston Gaillard Center

Jazz at Lincoln Center’s 2023-24 season focuses on the concept of community; the broader community of jazz; the numerous communities that nurtured its master practitioners across its timeline; the communities of consciousness that influenced these practitioners; the music’s power to bridge divides and coalesce these distinct communities; and the role of jazz – and the arts writ large – in maintaining the human connection in the digital era. Throughout its 2023-24 season, Jazz at Lincoln Center explores these subjects with concerts featuring the forward-thinking composers, virtuosic improvisers, and ingenious conceptualists that populate the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis. Implicitly or explicitly, season concerts, education programs, advocacy initiatives, and Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra tours directly evoke themes that illuminate, as Managing and Artistic Director Wynton Marsalis puts it, the notion that, “Our music has the exceptional ability to bring people together.”

The organization’s 36th season runs from Sept. 21, 2023 to June 8, 2024 in Rose Theater, The Appel Room, and Dizzy’s Club — all at Frederick P. Rose Hall, the home of Jazz at Lincoln Center, located on Broadway at 60th Street in New York, NY. In addition to 24 unique live concerts throughout Frederick P. Rose Hall and more than 350 nights of music at Dizzy’s Club, the organization will offer webcast performances via the Jazz Live app, in-person and virtual education programs, and Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis tour dates worldwide.

For a complete listing of Jazz at Lincoln Center’s 2023-24 season concerts, please visit jazz.org/2324season

Over the course of a little more than a year in 1955 and ’56, Max Roach, who was already the premiere jazz drummer of his generation, experienced the death of two of his very closest musical partners. Both Charlie Parker and Clifford Brown died tragically, and utterly avoidably, at the ages of 34 and 25, respectively. Those incidents changed Roach, helping fan the flames of rage that were already burning within him; more positively, they helped increase his determination to achieve as much as possible within whatever time he had left.

As drummer Obed Calvaire stated at the start of last Friday’s “Max Roach Centennial” concert, Roach (1924-2007) was “the inventor of modern drumming, also an activist, pedagogue, arranger, and family man.”

A new documentary, “Max Roach: The Drum Also Waltzes,” shows that no musician of the 20th century made better use of time — both in performance and long-term, as in a career — than Roach. For the South Carolina-born, Brooklyn-raised drummer, inventing modern jazz drumming was only the beginning.

This film by Sam Pollard and Ben Shapiro includes a touching and telling sequence in which Roach demonstrates bebop rhythm to a class full of young children. Perhaps not coincidentally, what Roach described as the “Mop Mop” figure was incorporated by guest drummer Joe Farnsworth into “Pies of Quincy” at the Jazz at Lincoln Center concert “Max Roach Centennial” this past Saturday.

“The Drum Also Waltzes” is the latest in a series of documentaries by Mr. Pollard on prominent topics involving African Americans, including films on the Negro baseball league, the persecution of Martin Luther King Jr. by the FBI, and excellent profiles of Arthur Ashe and Sammy Davis Jr. At the start of the film, Mr. Pollard tells us how he started filming Roach in the early ’90s, both in formal interviews as well as following him and his family around the streets of New York. At the same time, Mr. Shapiro was recording extensive audio conversations with Mr. Roach.

This material forms the backbone of the new film. The interviews are illuminated by copious historic footage of Roach and his various ensembles in performance and rehearsal.

Early in the story, Roach tells us, “We started the so-called bebop movement” — by “we” he means Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, and Miles Davis.

Yet even when you compare the drummer’s lifetime of work to that of any of the others who lived to reach middle age or elder statesman status, Roach’s accomplishments are staggering. Gillespie went on to perfect the modern jazz big band and incorporate Afro Latin elements; Davis pioneered hard bop and then fusion.

Roach, though, literally never stopped coming up with exciting new ideas for collaborations and ensembles: After establishing the quintessential combo of the mid-1950s, with Clifford Brown and Sonny Rollins, he went on to experiment with the use of 3/4 time in jazz, brought the music together with the civil rights movement, added a Gospel choir, and pioneered the solo drum recital. In his final years, he went alternatively more African, with his M-Boom percussion collective; more European, with works for symphony orchestra and a hybrid jazz small group that incorporated a string quartet; and more contemporary, in a meeting with hip-hopper Fab 5 Freddy, who is also Roach’s godson.

The film doesn’t shrink from the maestro’s dark side. As Jimmy Heath, one of many on-screen interviewees who are no longer with us, states plainly, “Max had devils too.” The drummer’s son, Daryl Keith Roach, quotes him as saying that if he didn’t have the drum as an outlet of his emotions, he would have probably used a gun instead. His rage was fueled in particular by the epically tragic death of Clifford Brown as well as in response to the indignities of being a Black man, especially an artist, in Jim Crow’s America.

His most famous wife, singer-songwriter Abbey Lincoln, talks frankly about how Roach was both supportive and abusive, comments that are amplified by singer Dee Dee Bridgewater. Trombonist Julian Priester tells a chilling story that makes me wonder why Charles Mingus and Buddy Rich have more terrible reputations for being violently aggressive.

The Jazz at Lincoln Center concert was a particular triumph for three newer members of the orchestra. Drummer Obed Calvaire served as musical director for the first time; guest vocalist Shenel Johns captured Abbey Lincoln’s eloquently passionate outcries on “Freedom Day” and “Driva’ Man” from “We Insist! Freedom Now Suite”; and alto saxophonist and flautist Alexa Tarrantino soloed memorably on “Freedom Day” and elsewhere.

The two-act concert featured all Roach compositions, starting with “The Drum Also Waltzes,” a piece that combines European and African aspirations, and also included two of Roach’s works for jazz ensemble and gospel choir, which utilized the eight-voice Chorale Le Chateau directed by Damian Sneed. Mr. Calvaire concluded with an original work written in Roach’s memory, which drew upon percussion traditions from his Haitian heritage and also summoned up the sound of the M’Boom collective, with all the saxophonists pounding tambourines and the trombones whacking conga drums.

This was a concert that easily deserves to be released via JALC’s Blue Engine label. In the meantime, the orchestra is performing the concert up and down the East Coast for the next five nights, and the New Jersey Center for the Performing Arts is presenting a memorial concert starring singer Cassandra Wilson and another Roach collaborator, poet Sonia Sanchez.

Over the course of a career that lasted nearly 60 years, Max Roach showed how drums could not only play whole new rhythms and beats and drive an ensemble in ways that no one had previously thought possible, but could laugh and cry and even waltz.

by Will Friedwald
Source: The New York Sun

The title of this weekend’s concert at Jazz at Lincoln Center is “Masters of Form,” and as Vincent Gardner, who served as musical director for the first half, announced at the start, the name is a play on words in that it refers to “forms in music, the kind of established forms that we have ingrained in us, like the 12-bar blues” and the 32-bar popular song.

“But it also alludes to those people who create forms that challenge us,” he added, “the architects, the people who do that in music and in other disciplines, including architecture. We’re talking about all those great people who have taken what we know and shown us that we don’t know anything at all about it.”

The main event of the two-act performance was the premiere of “Usonian Structures,” an original eight-part suite commissioned by Jazz at Lincoln Center from composer, saxophonist, conductor, and educator Andy Farber — with, the program tells us, “the generous support of Jody and John Arnhold.” This particular concert was originally scheduled for April 2020, but was pushed back by almost four years by the pandemic.

In the first act, Mr. Gardner led the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra through six classic works by five of jazz’s greatest composers, from two early masters, Jelly Roll Morton and Duke Ellington, to more modern-era giants, Charles Mingus and Wayne Shorter.

Morton’s 1930 “Little Lawrence” (arranged by Victor Goines) gave us New Orleans-style hot jazz on a foundation of ragtime, wherein Mr. Gardner switched to tuba and guided the orchestra through a succession of shorter strains. Ellington’s 1940 “Harlem Air Shaft” is a swinging riff number that’s also famously a beautiful piece of programmatic music, using the image of the center of a tenement block to paint a vivid picture of uptown life.

Mingus’s “Don’t Be Afraid, The Clown’s Afraid Too” (arranged by Sy Johnson and Ron Westray) also incorporated visual elements, sounds that suggested a circus and a parade, and told a distinct narrative. Shorter’s “Infant Eyes” (arranged by Wynton Marsalis) was a rapturous, tranquil piece that used nearly the entire orchestra in short solos playing off each other.

The first half also included a 2010 composition by the orchestra’s lead alto saxophonist, Sherman Irby, “Twilight Sounds (for Norman Lewis).” Originally part of a program of original works inspired by painters and paintings, it starts with a boppish line heard from multiple horns in counterpoint, and from there makes use of a balance between chaos and control. It repeatedly suggested a train falling off the track and then somehow getting back on. This came as close as I’ve heard the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra come to sounding like a free-jazz era large form ensemble like that of Sun Ra or William Parker, including an Eric Dolphy-inspired bass clarinet solo from Chris Lewis.

Andy Farber took to the stage at the start of Act 2 to explain that “Usonian Structures” was inspired by the life and work of Frank Lloyd Wright, the title referring to Lloyd’s acronym for the United States of North America.

The first piece, “Oak Park Overture,” took its cue from Wright’s use of triangles, represented in the music by three-note triads played at the start by the trumpets, including some orchestral colors we associate with American classicists like Aaron Copland. The second, “Unity Temple,” Wright’s most celebrated House of Worship, elaborated on an idea from gospel music, call-and-response. The piece was essentially Sherman Irby offering a short phrase — the kind that was once called a “break” rather than a solo — which was answered in kind by the full ensemble. Mr. Farber described it as a “Sherman sermon.”

The fourth movement, “So Cal Sci Fi,” elaborated on Wright’s use of “textile blocks,” in houses particularly in the Los Angeles area, which are prominently seen in film and television. The piece might have been subtitled “Henry Mancini In the Twilight Zone,” in that it started with a quirky, disjointed intro from the flutes and woodwinds leading in and out of a lushly cinematic theme featuring pianist Dan Nimmer, as well as a solo on the rare bass trumpet by Elliot Mason, one of the orchestra’s longtime trombonists.

“Music of the Stream,” inspired by Wright’s iconic Fallingwater house in Pennsylvania, put us in mind of painting more than architecture, with verdant colors in a circular pattern that coalesced into a big-toned tenor saxophone solo by one of the orchestra’s younger members, Abdias Armenteros. “Toadstools & Typewriters” likewise spotlighted Chris Lewis on tenor, starting with ascending fifths that, as inspired by Wright’s Johnson Wax Headquarters building at Racine, Wisconsin, are meant to convey a feeling of being underwater.

Like Ellington and Morton a century ago, Mr. Farber made consistently creative use of the blues form throughout the 60-minute work, particularly in the last piece, “Guggenheim: Prelude & Blues.” For the finale, Mr. Farber illuminated the connection between one of the most complex and unusual buildings ever constructed and the basic blues — he elaborated on how the skylight is divided into 12 parts and he was thus motivated to write a 12-note motif. The piece went through distinct subsections, stopped and started and changed tempos, as in the transition between solos by guest guitarist James Chirillo and then trumpeter Marcus Printup. The final solo statement of the night was from baritone saxophonist Paul Nedzela.

Overall, this may be my favorite long-form original Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra work since Wynton Marsalis’s “Big Train” (1999); here’s hoping there’s a proper recording soon.

Wright’s concept was to build houses that were “simple and utilitarian” with “no attics, no basements, and little ornamentation.” It might be ironic that Mr. Farber’s compositions were about more than form itself, but were richly layered, each with different musical textures and rhythms that made all eight movements immediately different from each other.

Yet, in many ways, the simplest movement, “Usonian Home: Pipe & Slippers,” was among the most effective, a gently swinging, low-key piece in the tradition of Neal Hefti’s great works for Count Basie’s New Testament band, like “Li’l Darlin’” and “Softly with Feeling.” It started with a three-note motif as an intro and point of departure, with Mr. Chirillo reprising Freddie Green’s essential contribution to the Basie beat, and wound around a muted solo by trumpeter Kenny Rampton. For jazz lovers, this was musical comfort food.

by Will Friedwald
Source: The New York Sun

Jazz St. Louis’ 2024 Gala Swing For Tomorrow’s Stars will feature Wynton & Branford Marsalis! The hottest jazz event in the world takes place at Jazz St. Louis on February 21, 2024 and The Chase Park Plaza on February 22, 2024. This two-night fundraising event will secure the future of Jazz St. Louis’ impactful educational programs for students in the St. Louis area.

If you would like to purchase tickets over the phone, contact the Jazz St. Louis box office at (314) 571-6000. Representatives are available by phone or in person 11 am – 5 pm Tuesdays through Fridays, and 2–5 pm on Saturdays. The Harold & Dorothy Steward Center for Jazz, home of Jazz St. Louis, is located at 3536 Washington Avenue in the Grand Center Arts District.

Section 1 tickets include valet parking, a sunset Cocktail Hour with student performance in Zodiac Room, dinner with student performance in Starlight Room, and premium seating for the performance of a generation in Khorassan Ballroom.

Sections 2–5 tickets include the performance in Khorassan Ballroom. Your section determines your proximity to the stage for this historic event.
More info on jazzstl.org

New Yok, NY (Feb. 9, 2024) – Throughout March, the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis – an ensemble of 15 virtuoso instrumentalists, unique soloists, composers, arrangers, and educators – performs an unprecedented variety of styles and genres with characteristic flair and authority.

Featuring the renowned big band and inviting a diverse roster of guest artists, each concert takes place in Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Rose Theater, located at Frederick P. Rose Hall, home of Jazz at Lincoln Center, at 60th Street and Broadway in New York City.

On March 8-9, at 8:00 p.m., the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, with Music Director Wynton Marsalis and guest saxophonists Joe Lovano and Walter Blanding, explores the widely influential corpus of Wayne Shorter, whose 2015 JALC residency resulted in an acclaimed live album issued on Blue Engine Records, the official label of Jazz at Lincoln Center.

Marsalis praises Shorter as a “purveyor of pentatonic perfection; master of blues-inflected melodies; hero of vertical and horizontal harmonic implications; giant of saxophone regardless of register; improviser-extraordinaire in any and all musical environments; mercurial wit and biting humorist with uncommon humility and depth of understanding, seer, reader, and interpreter of ancient and modern myth…jazz messenger.”

For more information, visit jazz.org/WayneShorter

Brothers Wynton and Branford Marsalis will join forces next Wednesday and Thursday for a pair of extremely rare performances together that will benefit Jazz St. Louis’ educational programs and community engagement events.

Victor Goines, president and CEO of Jazz St. Louis, a longtime member of Wynton’s band and lifetime friend of both brothers, will also perform.

But they’re not exactly sure just yet what they’re going to play.

“Whatever it is we do, it will be something that we know how to do,” Wynton says with a laugh.

Of course, they know how to do plenty. The Marsalis brothers and Goines have known each other since they were children growing up in New Orleans, playing in their elementary school honors band and being taught by Wynton and Branford’s father, the venerable jazz pianist and educator Ellis Marsalis.

“We have, what, 50 years (together)? And in the case of Branford and I, our whole lives,” Wynton says. “So we have a vocabulary that we’ve worked out over decades — an understanding of the music and the tradition and all of that.”

So don’t sweat the repertoire. Whatever they play, it’s bound to be great.

The two-night affair, titled Swing for Tomorrow’s Stars, begins on Wednesday, Feb. 21, with a performance in the intimate confines of Jazz St. Louis’ home base, the Harold & Dorothy Steward Center for Jazz. It’s a high-ticket affair that is already sold out. At press time, a few tickets remained for Thursday night’s concert which will be held at the Chase Park Plaza’s Khorassan Ballroom.

As part of the event, jazz great David Sanborn, who grew up in Kirkwood, will receive the inaugural Steward Center Lifetime Achievement Award of Excellence.

Music programs are often the first things to get cut from school curricula, an unfortunate fact. Had they not existed when the Marsalises and Goines were young, “I probably wouldn’t be a musician right now,” Goines says. So Jazz St. Louis’ educational programs not only fill an important need, they are offered to students free of charge.

“When they finish their regular school in the daytime, we have a taxi cab pick them up and bring them to Jazz St. Louis,” Goines says. “They study here for four hours, we feed them at the end of the day, put them back in taxi cabs and send them home.

“It’s very important that we do this because it gives them a competitive edge to be able to go to the next level; to have the confidence and skill sets necessary to move on to be a musician from middle school to high school to college and begin to perform or pursue a career as a professional.”

Both Marsalis brothers are vocal about ensuring jazz gets its rightful place in the study of American culture and supporters of music education. Wynton is not only the managing and artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, but also director of jazz studies at the Juilliard School and president of the Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation. Three weeks ago, Branford was named artistic director for the Ellis Marsalis Center for Music in New Orleans. He’s also an artist in residence at North Carolina Central University.

Of jazz education, Wynton says, “I think the next step in the evolution of the music would be communities investing in institutions to say ‘This music is important. It’s from this country. There are objectives that it has that we would like to see magnified.’”

Wynton has come to the aid of music education in St. Louis for years, both formally and informally. He’s performed benefits at Jazz St. Louis and the Sheldon and also had a long relationship with Lincoln Senior High School in East St. Louis when Ron Carter was the jazz band director.

When Wynton was still a young player, he performed in St. Louis and was approached by Carter, whom he recalls saying, “Man, you gonna come to St. Louis and not come teach my trumpet players?” He replied, “Man, I’m 18. I’m damn near the age of your high school students.” But he did it and continued doing it for years.

Marsalis also reels off names of a dozen or so great St. Louis-area musicians, most of whom he’s known since they were students, including trumpeters Keyon Harrold, Russell Gunn and Jeremy Davenport. “I’ve seen so many great St. Louis musicians and had so many great experiences in St. Louis,” he says. ‘It’s very much a community. I’m with them, with the community. I’m with what goes on in St. Louis.”

Helping kids develop their skills is “how Victor and I grew up in New Orleans, with adults struggling to teach kids something — to strive for more,” he says.

Goines quotes Ellis Marsalis, who, as director of the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts, said, “We weren’t trying to teach music. We were just trying to teach students, and the music teaches them how to be better people.”

As the interview nears its end, Wynton demurs from talking up his own current projects and focuses back on the matter at hand. “What’s on my mind now is what we’re doing in St. Louis,” he says. “Tomorrow’s stars. We’re swinging for them.”
More info: jazzstl.org

by Daniel Durchholz
Source: St. Louis Post-Dispatch

The Blue Note Jazz Club and Jazz at Lincoln Center – two renowned New York cultural institutions – come together for a landmark collaboration and unity. Jazz at Lincoln Center will hold a residency during the forthcoming 2024 Blue Note Jazz Festival, in which the legendary Wynton Marsalis performs six nights at the Blue Note Jazz Club June 11-16.

These performances mark a historic event as Marsalis – Managing and Artistic Director of Jazz at Lincoln Center – headlines the Blue Note for the first time since 1991, and these two iconic cultural centers unite.

The upcoming residency features the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis performing June 11-13, and Wynton Marsalis with Future of Jazz Septet on June 14-16. Tickets are on sale now HERE and HERE, respectively.

Marsalis’ historic shows highlight this year’s Blue Note Jazz Festival, marking its 13th anniversary this summer with performances at venues across New York City. As part of the Jazz at Lincoln Center residency events, two ensembles from the organization’s High School Jazz Academy will also grace the Blue Note stages. The Jazz at Lincoln Center Youth Big Band, directed by Julius Tolentino perform on June 15, and the award-winning Jazz at Lincoln Center Youth Orchestra, directed by Tatum Greenblatt perform on June 16.

No figure looms larger in the story of jazz than Duke Ellington whose artistic development and sustained achievement are among the most spectacular and influential in the history of music.

On May 9-11, commemorating the 125th birthday of Duke Ellington —America’s most prolific composer of the 20th century in both number of pieces and variety of forms— the top 15 high school-aged jazz bands from across the country will converge at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s home, Frederick P. Rose Hall, in New York, NY.

Students will spend three days immersed in workshops, jam sessions, rehearsals, and performances, and compete for top honors in Jazz at Lincoln Center’s 29th annual Essentially Ellington High School Jazz Band Competition & Festival, the nation’s premier jazz education event.

The 2024 Essentially Ellington High School Jazz Band Finalists:

• Agoura High School (Agoura Hills, CA)
  Directed by Chad Bloom

• Alexander W. Dreyfoos School of the Arts (West Palm Beach, FL)
  Directed by Christopher M. De León

• Beloit Memorial High School (Beloit, WI)
  Directed by Chris Behrens

• Bothell High School (Bothell, WA)
  Directed by Philip Dean

• Byron Center High School (Byron Center, MI)
  Directed by Marc Townley

• Garfield High School (Seattle, WA)
  Directed by Jared Sessink

• King Philip Regional High School (Wrentham, MA)
  Directed by Michael Keough

• Newark Academy (Livingston, NJ)
  Directed by Julius Tolentino

• Orange County School of the Arts (Santa Ana, CA)
  Directed by John Reynolds

• Osceola County School for the Arts (Kissimmee, FL)
  Directed by Jason Anderson

• Plano West Senior High School (Plano, TX)
  Directed by Preston Pierce

• Roosevelt High School (Seattle, WA)
  Directed by Hannah Mowry

• Susan E. Wagner High School (Staten Island, NY)
  Directed by Paul Corn

• Triangle Youth Jazz Ensemble (Raleigh, NC)
  Directed by Gregg Gelb

• Youth Jazz Ensemble of DuPage (DuPage, IL)
  Directed by Robert Blazek

These finalists were selected from more than 100 high school jazz bands that submitted recordings of three tunes from the Essentially Ellington library.

In celebration of Duke Ellington’s 125th birthday, Jazz at Lincoln Center offers eight never-before-available scores, representing each decade of Ellington’s career, beginning in the 1920s and ending in the 1970s, to thousands of high schools participating in the Essentially Ellington program.

“Duke is our most comprehensive and prolific composer. Jazz at Lincoln Center commemorates his 125th year and celebrates the fantastic young people and band directors inspired by his music and approach to life,” said Wynton Marsalis, Managing and Artistic Director of Jazz at Lincoln Center. “Congratulations to this year’s Essentially Ellington finalist bands. As you participate in the competition and festival, be part of a learning experience but also have a good time; Duke’s music’s most basic concern is uplift of the human spirit.”

In addition to highlighting the top high school jazz bands, the festival will recognize the winner of the 12th Annual Essentially Ellington Dr. J. Douglas White Student Composition and Arranging Contest. The 2024 winner is Ori Moore from Durham Academy in Durham, NC. Moore will receive a $1,000 cash prize and his winning composition, entitled “Fallin’,” will be recorded by the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. The prize also includes a trip to the 2024 Competition & Festival weekend for a composition lesson with Grammy Award-winning artist and Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra member Ted Nash.

“The students, band directors, and communities in the Essentially Ellington program have made this competition and festival the most innovative jazz education event in the world,” said Todd Stoll, Vice President, Education at Jazz at Lincoln Center. “Your dedication to furthering this art form is an achievement. Congratulations and we look forward to seeing you all and hearing you play.”

Essentially Ellington Festival events, including the final concert featuring the top-placing bands and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, will stream live on jazzlive.com. Tickets will be available for purchase in April. For more information, visit jazz.org/ee.

Since its inception in 1987, Jazz at Lincoln Center has produced an extensive range of jazz educational and advocacy programs for all ages. For the 29th year, the organization’s Essentially Ellington program spreads the message of Duke Ellington’s music, leadership, and collective orientation, providing high school ensembles with free transcriptions of original Duke Ellington recordings – accompanied by rehearsal guides, original recordings, professional instruction, and more – to thousands of schools and community bands in 58 countries. More than 7,000 high school bands have benefitted from free charts and resources. The three-day festival provides students access to workshops, jam sessions, rehearsals, and performances. This year’s competition judges are Managing and Artistic Director of Jazz at Lincoln Center Wynton Marsalis, Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra Alto Saxophonist Sherman Irby, top jazz drummer Jeff Hamilton, and acclaimed trumpet player Terell Stafford.

In conjunction with the national festival each year, the Essentially Ellington program includes non-competitive Regional Festivals around the country and provides schools with free transcriptions of original recordings by Duke Ellington and other seminal big band composers and arrangers, teaching materials, and other free resources. It has also served as a major talent incubator, with many alumni going on to form a new generation of professional musicians.

The program aims to promote appreciation for jazz music and American vernacular music and has served as a major talent incubator for many alumni who have gone on to form a new generation of professional musicians — with alumni including the likes of Grammy Award-winning artist Samara Joy, Grammy-nominated bassist and composer Carlos Henriquez, trumpeter and Blue Engine Records recording artist Summer Camargo, award-winning saxophonist Alexa Tarantino, Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, and internationally acclaimed pianist Aaron Diehl.

A very special thanks to Jody and John Arnhold for their extraordinary support of Jazz at Lincoln Center, including its education initiatives.

Founding leadership support for Essentially Ellington is provided by the Jack and Susan Rudin Educational and Scholarship Fund and Gail and Alfred Engelberg.

Leadership support is provided by the Hearst Foundations, Inc.; the Augustine Foundation; and the Weissman Family Foundation.

Major support is provided by the Ella Fitzgerald Charitable Foundation and the Charles Evan Hughes Memorial Fund.

Generous support is provided by Michelle Deal Winfield and the Susan Rudin Charitable Fund.

Jazz at Lincoln Center proudly acknowledges its major corporate partners: The Movado Group Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Nike, and the Coca-Cola Company.

Wynton Marsalis and his 15-member Lincoln Center band finally made it to Merrill Auditorium in Portland Thursday night for a sold-out concert that was rescheduled from April due to illness.

Marsalis led the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, also known as the JALCO, from his usual seat at the rear of the group. Now 62 years old, the once “Young Lion” of the resurgence of jazz in the 1980s still shows a lot of enthusiasm for what he does in bringing a variety of classic sounds and a bit of music education to audiences around the world. The JALCO presentation may seem a bit formal, but the excitement of well-played live jazz by the impeccably dressed, all-male orchestra still came through at Merrill.

Not surprisingly, given Marsalis’ longstanding affection for the music of the legendary jazz giant Duke Ellington (1899-1974), a career-spanning selection of the master’s work (that Marsalis compared favorably to the accomplishments of J.S. Bach) was featured prominently in the 90-minute performance presented by Portland Ovations.

An early favorite was “The Mooche,” an Ellington piece from 1928 easily identified by its soaring clarinet lines and, in this arrangement, semi-comical mute trumpet exclamations (provided by Marsalis). “Harlem Air Shaft,” a transitional work, encapsulated the great composer’s sense of hard swing in an arrangement that showed how Ellington pushed at the boundaries set by earlier forms of jazz while also being able to connect with audiences on a popular level.

Ellington and partner Billy Strayhorn’s “Portrait of Ella Fitzgerald” featured a lyrical trumpet solo by Marcus Printup while the “Chinoiseire” segment of “The Afro-Eurasian Eclipse” suite confirmed that the Duke could cross over into the world of mid-20th-century post-bop jazz in his later period. Walter Blanding’s extended tenor sax solo added fire to the modal churn created by pianist Dan Nimmer, bassist Marty Jaffe and drummer Obed Calvaire.

Bebop and beyond drummer/composer Max Roach (1924-2007) has been receiving substantial attention by the JALCO and others on the occasion of his centennial year. His “Another Valley” was an early favorite in a Ted Nash arrangement that emphasized the trombones of Chris Crenshaw and Elliot Mason. Both offered some of the most adventurous soloing of the evening.

Roach’s “Blues Waltz” added the baritone sax of Paul Nedzela for some grit, while an arrangement of Jelly Roll Morton’s “Little Lawrence” added tuba to get at that jaunty feel amid the syncopations of early jazz. A break into a more swinging middle section, though well played, felt gratuitous. But a return to the Morton style soon followed.

Two movements from a new work by Andy Farber, Marsalis noted, sought to find inspiration in the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright. The first section featured a fiery alto sax solo by Nash, a standout for many years with the JALCO, while the second brought out a later-period Count Basie-style sophisticated swing that was smooth and breezy and just about wonderful.

An encore on Roach’s “Four-X” sent the crowd home after another entertaining and enlightening evening from Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra.

by Steve Feeney
Source: Portland Press Herald

At the root of Swing for Tomorrow’s stars – the two-day star-studded extravaganza of a fundraising gala for Jazz St. Louis – is an honored promise.

“This event came about because when I was selected to be President and CEO of Jazz St. Louis back in August of 2022, I was encouraged by Wynton [Marsalis] to consider myself for the position,” said Victor Goines. “One of my stipulations [to him] was, ‘If I go to Jazz St. Louis, you are going to have to do a gala for me.’” And without hesitation, he accepted.”

Goines is now entering his second year at the helm of the globally recognized organization. The rich legacy of jazz and shared French heritage instantly connected the New Orleans native to our region.

“The first thing I noticed when I arrived in St. Louis was the fleur-de-lis,” Goines said. “When I saw it, I said, ‘oh, this is just like home.’ We share the Mississippi River too – and people have been going up and down that river since the birth of jazz. So, to bring this event together like this was a no brainer in fact.”

Once the seed for Swing for Tomorrow’s Stars was planted, it bloomed into something magical. Wynton Marsalis and his big brother Branford will share the stage in a co-headlining capacity for the first time in more than three decades. St. Louis’ own David Sanborn will be honored for a lifetime commitment to jazz. Comedian, actor and St. Louis native Joe Torry will serve as master of ceremonies.

“I am over the moon about this particular event,” Goines said. “It has been truly a thrill to be involved in it and it has been evolving day to day.” Tickets for the performance at the Harold and Dorothy Steward Center for Jazz on February 21st have sold out.

“It is going to involve two of our legends in jazz – Branford and Wynton Marsalis – coming to a place they have visited throughout their entire career to actually help us raise resources for tomorrow’s stars,” Goines said.

The ties that bind the Marsalis brothers to the region have super strength – particularly with Wynton.

“In fact, it was in 2014 when the renovations of Jazz St. Louis took place. The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra – which I am a member of – came here as part of that celebration. This is just an extension of that,” Goines said. “And then if you go all the way back to Lincoln High School in East St. Louis when Ron Carter was the band director, it was a regular stop on Wynton’s tours coming through St. Louis.”

The Jazz St. Louis bond is made even stronger through Goines. “Wynton and I went to kindergarten together,” he said. “Branford has been an inspiration to me for my entire life as a saxophonist and clarinetist.” And for the past 30-plus years, Goines has shared the bandstand with Wynton as a member of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra.

Both jazz giants in their own right, the musical styles of Branford and Wynton can vary like night and day. Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra pays homage to the big band and swing era. Wynton directs them and curates their music in a manner that jazz purists truly appreciate. Older brother Branford helped usher in a new era for the art form with the infusion of hip hop, most famously through his pioneering collective Buckshot LeFonque – which featured East St. Louis’ own Russell Gunn on trumpet.

“Jazz is one of those things that allows you to realize that you can have people growing up in the same household, and come from the same upbringing and go in various directions,” Goines said. “Jazz is an art form that allows you to express your individuality.

Some of his fondest musical memories include the occasions where Branford and Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra would have intersecting tour schedules. Whenever they were both in the same city, Goines would encourage Branford to join in with Wynton.

I am always asking them, ‘Y’all play something together so we can see where it’s going to go,’” Goines said. “We all have sibling rivalry, but at the same time they have sibling type of love for each other. When they play, you can hear the history of the legacy of their mother, their father, the family, our city, their study. Their differences actually bring them back to their similarities.”

Goines calls the Marsalis brothers two of the most creative musicians of our time.

“If you ever had the chance to hear them play together, you know that no two have ever played together like them,” Goines said. “Being from New Orleans, the root of our music is collective improvisation.”

Their father, the late famed music educator Ellis Marsalis Jr. gets much of the credit for their respective careers. Goines says that their mother Delores Marsalis also played a major role.

“Mr. Marsalis influenced them so much – not only musically, but as educators,” Goines said. “And Mrs. Marsalis was brilliant. She had six sons, so she had to be brilliant – and she had to improvise. She was just a phenomenal woman who cannot be left out of the ingredients that made these two young men who they are today.”

A huge part of the Marsalis DNA is being keepers of jazz music’s flame – and paying their time and talents forward for the sake of the genre’s future generations.

“As an organization, we are heading towards our north star and we do not have time to waste,” Goines said. “Through funds raised from the gala, the students of our community will have an opportunity not to just study music – but to be involved in programs that will help them become great learners, great thinkers and great leaders for America and for the world.”

by
Source: The St. Louis American

Thursday was an historic night in St. Louis, as jazz giants Wynton and Branford Marsalis, playing together for the first time in many years, performed to a capacity audience at the Chase Park Plaza. The previous evening, the Marsalis brothers played to a more intimate crowd at the Harold & Dorothy Steward Center for Jazz, home of Jazz St. Louis, in Grand Center. The two-night event, Swing for Tomorrow’s Stars, was a fundraising gala benefiting Jazz St. Louis and its educational programs.

Both nights featured a set by the Marsalises as part of a six-piece combo of jazz all-stars, plus a warmup set by stand-up comedian and St. Louis native Joe Torry (not to be confused with former Cardinals manager Joe Torre) and a ceremonial presentation of the Steward Center Lifetime Achievement Award of Excellence to saxophone legend David Sanborn.

At the Chase, the hotel’s legendary Khorassan Ballroom was transformed into a concert venue complete with stage-flanking video screens to capture up-close shots for those in the cheap seats in back, which were not at all cheap, as guests paid hundreds and in some cases thousands to be in attendance. It was a dressy affair, as well-heeled jazz aficionados mingled at cash bars waiting for the event to start, and the place was crawling with the town’s jazz musicians — Kendrick Smith, Pops Jackson, Bennett Wood, Bernard Terry, Dustin Shrum, Danny Campbell, Bernard Long, Jr., Charlie Cerpa, Bob Bennett, John Covelli, Evan Palmer, Miles Cole and many others.

The show opened with Jazz St. Louis president and CEO Victor Goines pitching the organization’s jazz academy and community engagement programs for middle and high school students. Goines, himself a celebrated saxophonist, grew up as childhood friends and lifelong musical collaborators with the Marsalis brothers, and it was Wynton who originally urged Goines to take the top job at Jazz St. Louis in 2022.

Torry, during his brief standup set, talked about the St. Louis tradition of fried rice, going to high school at Soldan, and kids these days expecting money transfers immediately: “I had to wait two weeks for a $35 money order!” he said. He also led a singalong, assigning dueling scatting parts for men and women, much to the chagrin of the musicians in the crowd who bristled that Torry was snapping on the one and the three.

Kirkwood native David Sanborn took the stage to accept his lifetime achievement award, saying, “I’m so glad I’m alive to receive this!” Sanborn did not perform as part of the event, but talked about sneaking into jazz clubs in the city’s Gaslight Square when he was a kid, describing an unmarked bar called the Other Side as “literally a hole in the wall” where he started sitting in with the band at age 15. “I wouldn’t trade my life for anything in the world,” Sanborn told the crowd. “The great thing about music, you never get to the end of it.”

Once the Marsalises took the stage, a star-struck audience was held in the legends’ sway for a scintillating hour-long set backed by Goines on saxophone, Dan Zimmer on piano, Carlos Henriquez on bass, and Obed Calvaire on drums, all members of Wynton’s Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra.

They opened with a Wynton original, “Free to Be,” and for his solo, Wynton immediately wandered into the crowd, playing off-mic, strolling among the front rows improvising with expressive, playful phrasing.

When introducing the Duke Ellington standard “Caravan,” Wynton said, “I want to evoke the memory of the great St. Louis Pied Piper of Jazz, Mr. Clark Terry,” recalling receiving tutelage from Terry as a 13-year-old and later playing with him in New York at 17 when Terry introduced him to the plunger mute. Wynton worked that mute on “Caravan” before his brother Branford took over the song on soprano sax, cracking his brother up with gonzo phrasing and melodic leaps.

“This music is the classic dimension of our way of life,” Wynton told the audience, mentioning how Wynton, Branford and Goines were students of the Marsalises’ father, Ellis Marsalis, Jr. “We saw him teaching anywhere he could, and we’re so honored to be here in his name and in recognition of what he knew the music was capable of doing.”

A soundcheck song sung by Wynton’s daughter did not materialize during the actual show, but the men continued shifting moods and tempos, mixing swing with hard bop, at times playing with incredible velocity, and when the three old childhood companions locked in together, the chemistry and communication were unmistakable. Wynton even sang a little on the slow-blues of “Baby, It’s All Right,” which he said was a reaction to the crowd’s mood. “I was afraid to sing some blues for y’all,” he said, “but y’all are so enthusiastic, you’re giving me the confidence to stand up here and make a fool out of myself!”

St. Louis mayor Tishaura Jones popped out to officially declare the occasion to be Wynton and Branford Marsalis Day in St. Louis, complete with plaques and photos on stage, as she reminded everyone that St. Louis has the second biggest Mardi Gras celebration outside of the Marsalises’ and Goines’ hometown of New Orleans. (Another mayor, New York City Mayor Eric Adams, was in attendance the night before at Jazz St. Louis.)

For a show-stopping finale, the band marched off the stage and down the center aisle of the crowd followed by St. Louis’s own Saint Boogie Brass Band, forming a second line parade as a surprised crowd clapped along. The parade ended out in the lobby where the group formed a circle of New Orleans-style jazz, with Wynton leading a call-and-response of blats, using his hand as a wah-wah mute, while as much of the crowd that could fit into the space danced around the perimeter. It was all over much too quickly as Branford and the rest of the band vanished into the wings.

But Wynton, ever the great jazz ambassador, stuck around to shake hands with the beaming Saint Boogie players, capping a great evening for Jazz St. Louis and an amazing night to remember for everyone else.

by Steve Leftridge
Source: Riverfront Times

Alison Balsom gives the UK premiere of Wynton Marsalis‘ Trumpet Concerto with the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO) and its Chief Conductor Designate Sir Antonio Pappano at the Barbican (11 April), with subsequent performances at Bristol Beacon (12 April); Philharmonie, Cologne (23 April) and Elbphilharmonie, Hamburg (30 April).

The work was co-commissioned by The Cleveland Orchestra, Verbier Festival, London Symphony Orchestra, Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal and Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra. Alison Balsom first performed the work earlier this month with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Cristian Măcelaru and she cannot wait to join forces with the LSO and Pappano to bring it to UK audiences and beyond.

Alison Balsom commented, “I believe this to be the most important and impactful piece written for the trumpet in the last two hundred years or so. With its pioneering and extensive display of what we now know the trumpet is capable of, the piece shows the many characters the trumpet can inhabit, and the boundaries it joyfully disregards. It’s a huge challenge and includes every possible technical difficulty – but it’s all written and orchestrated so well, and with a musical point behind every idea, that it’s a pleasure to play from start to finish. The trumpet starts the piece with the most pre-historic ‘horn’ sound imaginable – wild elephant calls, travelling through the ancient and traditional with fanfares and ceremonial passages, jazz and the blues, Mexican flaring trumpet, mid-20th Century Copland-esque moments, the New Orleans church, all the trumpet mutes you can think of, the 19th century cornet/ Paris Conservatoire tradition, and finally a virtuosic tour de force Moto perpetuo. No one on earth understands the potential of the instrument more than Wynton Marsalis. The combination of his mastery of the trumpet and his sophisticated compositional style, coupled with my passion for championing the work, make this a pretty special and historic moment for both the trumpet, and the wider music world. I am doing less projects and concerts these days but am so excited to share this masterpiece with the world.”

The work is in 6 movements and is 35 minutes long. Marsalis himself describes the piece as follows:

“March begins with the blaring trumpeting of an elephant and a couple of big footsteps in response. The trumpet is partnered with timpani as it is in so many classical symphonies. A lyrical minor 7th phrase and its repeated triplet response provides a contrasting counter theme. We are soon introduced to some magical elements, like alternate fingerings and flutters and growls that give added flavour to our palette of expression.

Ballad is about a love feeling and the trumpet is partnered with oboe. The arpeggiated minor 7th lyrical phrase from the first movement is expanded into a fully developed strain and the fanfare triplets are transformed through higher registration and intention to evoke the youthful romanticism of doo wop. We continue in unabashed, openly romantic style of instrumental singing gifted to the world by Louis Armstrong and subsequently developed by many great trumpeters of all styles.

The solitary yet razor-sharp attack of the Spanish-inflected trumpet is a definitive aspect of the international trumpet sound. Mexican Son addresses the music of the Afro-Hispanic diaspora and begins with a recasting of the first movement main theme. We proceed into a Spanish Bolero with plucked, bowed and bounced strings over and under which trumpet and bassoon converse. Woodwind call and responses lead us into a modern Habanera and the trumpet sings with an accompanying retinue of French Horn counter lines. In the end, those Horns chant “Aum” as trumpet incants a prayer-cadenza that connects us to our ceremonial role as ambassadors to the afterlife (still signified by buglers’ solemn playing of Taps at the passing of soldiers).

Blues is a call and response, the principal mode of blues communication, as it is also the very definition of concerto. We begin with the introspection of a single note drone and woodwinds weaving pentatonic-based melodies through the various registers. A middle section features church evocations and the tension between secular and sacred that the blues always brings. In this iteration, the trombones and French horns preach a serious sermon, while the trumpet is that jokester always playing around during service. Trumpet answers the seriousness with playful vocalisms over the two-beat dance groove of a country string band. The preaching becomes more serious while the trumpeter triples down on irreverence. In the end, the transcendence of seriousness is acknowledged with an open brass chorale. We return to the lonesome blues with an impassive introspection that walks the pentatonic road connecting East to West and end with solitary violin drone with woodwinds and muted trombone weaving dispassionate colours.

French Pastoral is a brief lyrical waltz inspired by the legacy of French trumpet playing. This is a quirky, rubato three-way conversation with contrapuntal voices weaving in and out of tempo, register, timbre and key to create an impressionistic tapestry.

Harlequin two-step focuses in on the magical, ‘joker/trickster’ element that has been an undertone of the entire piece. Trumpet players like to defy authority. We like to play games and pranks. This movement opens the percussion toolbox to create mayhem and barely controlled chaos whilst the trumpet dances through it all. It develops themes from the other movements and is rooted in a circle dance groove from the Jewish tradition of Eastern Europe. Things build up and break down and build up again and again, but when all is said and done, we end up back in the jungle where that old elephant breaks loose. And with that final fanfare, the elephant saunters away and we realize that it all began when she first broke loose.”

Performance dates and information:

• Thursday 11 April, 7pm, Barbican, London
• Friday 12 April, 7pm, Bristol Beacon, Bristol
• Tuesday 23 April, 8pm, Philharmonie, Cologne
• Tuesday 30 April, 8pm, Elbphilharmonie, Hamburg

Source: Rebecca Driver Media Relations

New York, NY (FEBRUARY 9, 2024) – Throughout March, the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis – an ensemble of 15 virtuoso instrumentalists, unique soloists, composers, arrangers, and educators – performs an unprecedented variety of styles and genres with characteristic flair and authority.

Featuring the renowned big band and inviting a diverse roster of guest artists, each concert takes place in Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Rose Theater, located at Frederick P. Rose Hall, home of Jazz at Lincoln Center, at 60th Street and Broadway in New York City.

On March 8-9, at 8:00 p.m., the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, with Music Director Wynton Marsalis and guest saxophonists Joe Lovano and Walter Blanding, explores the widely influential corpus of Wayne Shorter, whose 2015 JALC residency resulted in an acclaimed live album issued on Blue Engine Records, the official label of Jazz at Lincoln Center. Marsalis praises Shorter as a “purveyor of pentatonic perfection; master of blues-inflected melodies; hero of vertical and horizontal harmonic implications; giant of saxophone regardless of register; improviser-extraordinaire in any and all musical environments; mercurial wit and biting humorist with uncommon humility and depth of understanding, seer, reader, and interpreter of ancient and modern myth…jazz messenger.”
For more information, visit jazz.org/WayneShorter

Budding music enthusiasts and their families can celebrate Women’s History Month with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, featuring Music Director Chris Crenshaw and guest vocalist Tammy McCann, as they share the music of The Queen of Gospel, Mahalia Jackson. Her impassioned delivery and spirituality continues to inspire artists and listeners of all ages. This edition of the family concert series, which has been a Jazz at Lincoln Center staple for decades, takes place on March 15 at 3:00 p.m.
For more information, visit jazz.org/mahalia

On March 22-23 at 8:00 p.m., guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel, one of the most respected composers and improvisers of the 21st century, performs the world premiere of Community and Continuum, his Jazz at Lincoln Center-commissioned program of newly arranged original music alongside the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis.
For more information, visit jazz.org/rosenwinkel

Jazz at Lincoln Center’s 2023-24 season focuses on the concept of community; the broader community of jazz; the numerous communities that nurtured its master practitioners across its timeline; the communities of consciousness that influenced these practitioners; the music’s power to bridge divides and coalesce these distinct communities; and the role of jazz – and the arts writ large – in maintaining the human connection in the digital era. Throughout its 2023-24 season, Jazz at Lincoln Center explores these subjects with concerts featuring the forward-thinking composers, virtuosic improvisers, and ingenious conceptualists that populate the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis. Implicitly or explicitly, season concerts, education programs, advocacy initiatives, and Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra tours directly evoke themes that illuminate, as Managing and Artistic Director Wynton Marsalis puts it, the notion that, “Our music has the exceptional ability to bring people together.”

The organization’s 36th season runs from Sept. 21, 2023, to June 8, 2024, in Rose Theater, The Appel Room, and Dizzy’s Club – all at Frederick P. Rose Hall, the home of Jazz at Lincoln Center, located on Broadway at 60th St. in New York, New York. In addition to 24 unique live concerts throughout Frederick P. Rose Hall and more than 350 nights of music at Dizzy’s Club, the organization offers webcast performances via the Jazz Live app, in-person and virtual education programs, and Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis tour dates worldwide.

For a complete listing of Jazz at Lincoln Center’s 2023-24 season concerts, please visit jazz.org/2324season

Jazz at Lincoln Center announced that its signature fundraiser Gala event celebrates NEA Jazz Master, Kennedy Center honoree, multi-GRAMMY award-winner Tony Bennett and takes place Wednesday, April 17, 2024, at 7:00 p.m. in the organization’s home, Frederick P. Rose Hall, located on Broadway at 60th Street, New York, New York. Proceeds from Celebrating Tony Bennett, a one-night-only benefit performance, support Jazz at Lincoln Center’s mission to entertain, enrich, and expand a global community for jazz through performance, education, and advocacy.

This year’s Gala celebrates Tony Bennett’s unique contributions to jazz. Through his dedication to excellence and his insistence on quality, Mr. Bennett became an invaluable keeper of the flame who upheld the elemental virtues and perennial magic the Great American Songbook represents.

The Celebrating Tony Bennett Gala concert features performances anchored by the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis and a roster of special guest artists including vocalists Rubén Blades, Kristin Chenoweth, Norm Lewis, Kurt Elling, Ekep Nkwelle, Robbie Lee and Bernadette Peters; pianist Bill Charlap; and tap dancer Jared Grimes performing songs Mr. Bennett elevated to classics.

On the Rose Theater stage, the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis and featured guests perform beloved repertoire selections which may include “The Best is Yet to Come,” “Watch What Happens,” “I Get Along Without You Very Well,” “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” “It Amazes Me,” and “All the Things You Are.”

A festive dinner and dancing in Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Ertegun Atrium and skylined Appel Room follow the performance. The evening culminates in an after-party at Dizzy’s Club with the Danny Jonokuchi Big Band, whose titular band leader has contributed multiple arrangements for artists in live performance with Mr. Bennett. Mr. Jonokuchi leads his ensemble as they play selections from his album Voices as well as beloved Tony Bennett tunes.

Gala ticket prices begin at $1,500; table prices, $35,000. For tickets, please contact the Jazz at Lincoln Center Events Office at 212-245-6570 or jalcgala@jazz.org

A limited number of concert-only tickets at $150 to $200 are available for purchase at jazz.org 24 hours a day or by calling Center Charge at 212-721-6500, open daily from 1:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Tickets can also be purchased at the Jazz at Lincoln Center Box Office, located on Broadway at 60th Street, Ground Floor. Box office hours are Monday-Saturday from 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. (or 30 minutes past curtain) and Sunday from 12:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. (or 30 minutes past curtain).

Over the past few months, Wynton Marsalis and Jazz at Lincoln Center have presented three programs of newly commissioned music by composers of varying connection to the organization. In October, there was “Musings of Cosmic Stuff” by Sherman Irby, a regular member of the reed section. In February, we heard “Usonian Structures” by Andy Farber, a composer, arranger, saxophonist, and bandleader with close ties to the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra.

This weekend, the Jalco is teaming with Kurt Rosenwinkel, a composer and guitarist who has performed with the orchestra only once before.

This is a healthy thing. Not that the Jalco was in any danger of growing stale or repeating itself, but Mr. Rosenwinkel’s playing and his music bring a new freshness to the mix — a composer from outside of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra experience, and, indeed, an instrument that has been very rarely featured in jazz big bands in general.

If you were to play me some of Friday night’s music on a blindfold test, I might not have recognized it was the Jalco, though the playing of certain key soloists — especially Messrs. Marsalis and Irby and the trombonist Vincent Gardner — is always unmistakable.

Upon entering the house in his sporty black beret, Mr. Rosenwinkel remarked that the experience was a new one for him as well; he’d never been asked to prepare a program of his own original music for a 16-piece jazz orchestra.

Many of his artistic decisions were likewise unexpected: most big band jazz — or even jazz in general — is fast, uptempo numbers, leavened only by the occasional slower ballad. This weekend’s concert features just as much down-tempo music; he even opened with a tranquil movement as part of a short suite titled “Chico and Harriet: Love Beyond the Worlds.”

The first mini-movement was soft and serene, but with a distinct melody, expressed by Mr. Rosenwinkel over the orchestra, in which each line seemed to be in two parts — a phrase, followed by a brief pause, and then a corresponding phrase. The second movement, like much of the evening, was artistically aligned with the best of 1960s big band jazz, such as that by Oliver Nelson and the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Orchestra; this was an aggressive theme in a jazz waltz template. The third and final movement — the entire piece was roughly 15 minutes — was slow and bluesy.

The second piece, “Homage á Mitch,” dedicated to Mitch Borden, the founder of Smalls Jazz Club on Sheridan Square in the West Village, a locus of much worthwhile new musical activity in this century. It started out as a ballad, spotlighting the trombone section, with Eliot Mason and Chris Crenshaw in addition to Mr. Gardner, and grew more aggressive as it progressed.

The first set concluded with “Filters,“ a fast and staccato, boppish variation on the standard “You Stepped Out of a Dream,” though I confess I might not have recognized that had not Mr. Gardner mentioned it in the pre-concert talk. This, like many pieces Friday night, stressed unusual combinations in the reed section, including alto saxophonist Alexa Tarrantino on piccolo. Mr. Rosenwinkel stretched out over the rhythm section, as did big-toned tenor saxophonist Abdias Armentos. It ended with a thunderous drum solo by Obed Calvaire.

The second act began with “Sagrada Familia (Continuum),” another piece that couldn’t be comfortably categorized as a ballad or a swinger, but seemed to be both at the same time. As the title implies, Mr. Rosenwinkel announced that it was inspired by the ideals of family and continuity. It could have been one of the better late 1960s TV detective or spy show themes, growing increasingly intense.

“Path of the Heart,” an out-and-out ballad, began with pianist Joe Block, probably the orchestra’s youngest member and substituting for an ailing Dan Nimmer, plinking a slow series of high A’s at the top of the keyboard as the orchestra came in around him. Like nearly all the pieces of the evening, it didn’t feel like a repeating series of choruses — the way so much jazz structure usually does — but rather a through-composed work. Mr. Rosenwinkel’s music is an ideal choice for the orchestra in that he has a true sense of narrative.

The evening wound up with a piece that Mr. Rosenwinkel originally recorded as “Hope and Fear” on his 1996 album “The Enemies of Energy,” but, not wanting to be a downer, has retitled “Knowledge and Wisdom” in its orchestral incarnation. It started in a swirling, kaleidoscopic pattern, and eventually settled into a different groove entirely, fast and funky.

Throughout, Rose Hall’s keen acoustics were especially appreciated; at times, the electric guitar stood distinct from the orchestra, and at others they blended seamlessly. It was gratifying to see many younger people in the house as well as the orchestra; in addition to Joe Block, virtually all the members of the reed section were born well after the orchestra itself.

It was an evening of exceptional music, and further signaled the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra’s ongoing push — not only into the past and present of jazz, but the future as well.

by Will Friedwald
Source: The New York Sun

New York, NY (April 2, 2024) — Jazz at Lincoln Center and Managing and Artistic Director Wynton Marsalis proudly announce the organization’s 37th season of concerts and the 20th anniversary of the home of JALC, Frederick P. Rose Hall, colloquially known as The House of Swing, which houses Rose Theater, The Appel Room, and Dizzy’s Club. The 2024-25 season features JALC‘s customary mix of thematic concerts presenting the forward-thinking composers, virtuosic improvisers, and ingenious conceptualists that populate the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis in collaboration with noted guest artists, and appearances by major figures in jazz and its related genres.

The leitmotif of Jazz at Lincoln Center’s 2024-25 season is a celebration of integration. The concerts acknowledge and honor the diverse backgrounds of the brilliant master practitioners who established and developed the sound of jazz from its origins to the present day. The net effect is a testimony to the power of jazz to illuminate the multiracial democratic ideals of America, bridging generational, ethnic, and cultural divides.

“Segregation marred the early presentation of jazz, which is a hybrid music with many tributaries, and its legacy still remains with us,” Marsalis says. “Since we started Jazz at Lincoln Center, we’ve never segregated ourselves from any form or era of music. We’re reaffirming that by programming the music according to its aesthetic value, not some social equation that has landed us where we are now as a country, as if racism and segregation had never existed within it – even though we know it did and does. We want to realize more aspects of what jazz is and not constantly try to ask it to be what it is not. Our music has always brought people together. We’ve come a long way, though we still have a long way to go.”

Jazz at Lincoln Center’s 37th season, which runs from September 19, 2024, to June 14, 2025, features programs and events throughout The House of Swing, Frederick P. Rose Hall, located on Broadway at 60th Street in New York, NY. In addition to 24 unique concerts at the 1233-seat Rose Theater, seven concerts at the 467-seat Appel Room, and more than 350 nights of music at Dizzy’s Club, Jazz at Lincoln Center offers webcast performances, in-person and virtual education programs, and Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis tour dates worldwide.

Jazz at Lincoln Center’s 2024-25 season concert schedule is available on jazz.org/24-25 .

“The entire season is a celebration of the 20th anniversary of Frederick P. Rose Hall,” Marsalis says. “Over those 20 years, thousands of musicians, representing all communities of jazz, have performed under the Jazz at Lincoln Center banner.”

On the 20th anniversary of Frederick P. Rose Hall, 2024 Grammy Award winner Bryan Carter leads his 30+ piece Jazz at Pride Orchestra for the world premiere of Rustin in Renaissance (The Appel Room, October 18-19, 2024). Originally planned for the 2023-24 season, this multidisciplinary celebration of the life and times of Bayard Rustin (1912-1987), who organized the March on Washington in 1963, honors his impact on civil rights, economic justice, and music history through a captivating program that reflects his work as a key advisor to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., an effective international practitioner of Gandhian pacifism, and a talented singer and recording artist.

That same weekend, Rubén Blades with Boca Livre & Editus Ensemble (October 18 – 19, 2024) features Panamanian legend Rubén Blades delighting audiences with his multi-lingual mastery of phrasing and song interpretation. His iconic expression strikes every chord from subtle and understated to warm and exuberant. For this Rose Theater performance, the Grammy Award-winning vocalist, composer, and activist reveals dimensions of his music he hasn’t shared in 20 years. Integrating Brazilian harmony alongside Boca Livre and a classical approach to salsa alongside Costa Rica’s Editus, Blades proffers a fresh take on his signature Afro-Cuban sound. Rubén Blades with Boca Livre & Editus Ensemble is co-presented by Jazz at Lincoln Center and Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.

As the 2024-25 season progresses at The House of Swing, the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis – an ensemble of 15 virtuoso instrumentalists, unique soloists, composers, arrangers, and educators whose mandate is to coalesce and animate an unprecedented variety of styles and genres – demonstrates with characteristic flair and authority Marsalis’s abiding conviction that jazz from every era is grist for contemporary expression. Towards that aspiration, the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra performs ten unique concerts throughout the season in Frederick P. Rose Hall that span the history of jazz, decade by decade, from the 1920s until the present.

Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra launches JALC‘s 2024-25 season at Rose Theater with Hot Jazz and Swing (September 19-21, 2024). Music director Loren Schoenberg guides the orchestra through works identified with key bands of the 1920s and ’30s, from Fletcher Henderson and Duke Ellington to Xavier Cugat and Paul Whiteman.

The nascent years of jazz are also the subject of Jazz Americana (February 7-8, 2025). Music-directed by Wynton Marsalis, the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra navigates the various tributaries of American Roots music. In keeping with its long-standing practice, the JLCO and commissioned arrangers address choice cuts from the blues, gospel, country, and bluegrass genres and seminal recordings by New Orleans emigres Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver, Sidney Bechet, and the New Orleans Rhythm Kings that established much of early jazz vocabulary, as well as Duke Ellington‘s New Orleans-influenced music of the 1920s.

Only two decades after the first jazz recordings spread its message around the world, pathbreaking avatars Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, Tadd Dameron, Woody Herman, Charlie Barnet, and, of course, Charlie Parker, were developing the harmonically and rhythmically advanced concepts of bebop that remain at the core of contemporary jazz expression. Their thrilling, kinetic works are the subject of Bebop Revolution (November 8-9, 2024), in which the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, music directed by JLCO trombonist Vincent Gardner, toggles between big band and combo configurations.

The “cool” component of Cool School & Hard Bop (January 16-18, 2025), which integrates small group and big band music, addresses primarily arrangements of compositions by Miles Davis, Gerry Mulligan, John Lewis, George Shearing, Bud Powell, and John Carisi that appeared on 11 recordings made in 1949 and 1950 by the Miles Davis Nonet. The pieces, which foreshadowed a widespread 1950s jazz sensibility that retained bebop’s depth of harmony and complete musicianship while smoothing out the rhythmic line, were collated into an album titled Birth of the Cool in 1957. Of the endeavor, Stanley Crouch wrote, “The mutual attempt to consciously draw upon the evolving blues- and swing-based [Black] American tradition as well as the art music of Europe was new; it was a kind of integration devoutly to be wished by many Americans, in and out of music.” Music directed by JLCO alto saxophonist Sherman Irby and pianist Joe Block, the program shows that the cool and hard bop categories were fluid, as is apparent in the creative tension in the Modern Jazz Quartet, co-led by Lewis and soulful vibraphonist Milt Jackson, and the decidedly hot sound put forth by mid-‘50s groups like the Miles Davis Quintet with John Coltrane, the Max Roach-Clifford Brown Quintet, the Horace Silver-Art Blakey edition of the Jazz Messengers, and the fierce 1959-1961 iterations of Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers with trumpeter Lee Morgan that highlighted compositions by tenor saxophonists Benny Golson and Wayne Shorter.

Wayne Shorter‘s compositions for Weather Report, which he co-founded with keyboard wizard Joe Zawinul in 1971, also factor into The JLCO Plays the ’70s (May 29-31, 2025). Mirroring the sonic sprawl of that artistically eclectic era, the program, music-directed by JLCO saxophonist Ted Nash, includes new arrangements of music associated with iconic recordings by Betty Carter; Dexter Gordon; Woody Shaw, and Don Ellis; Chick Corea; the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Orchestra; the Toshiko Akiyoshi-Lew Tabackin Orchestra; Charles Mingus; Ornette Coleman; Duke Ellington; and jazz-adjacent pieces by James Brown, Earth, Wind & Fire, Blood, Sweat & Tears, and the Fania All-Stars.

Several concerts denote Jazz at Lincoln Center’s commitment to the music of its own time. Contemporary Jazz Masterpieces (music from the ’90s and aughts) (April 25-26, 2025), features music by, among others, Joanne Brackeen, Charlie Haden, Terence Blanchard, Pat Metheny, and Mulgrew Miller, arranged by JLCO’s multi-talented personnel.

The substantial contributions of the world-class improvisers, composers, and arrangers of Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra to the contemporary soundtrack is the subject of Best of the JLCO (June 13-14, 2025). Music directed by Wynton Marsalis and featuring his select pieces, the climactic concert of the 2024-25 season also showcases works by veteran band members Chris Crenshaw, Vincent Gardner, Victor Goines, Carlos Henriquez, Sherman Irby, Ted Nash, Dan Nimmer, and Marcus Printup, who have broadened and enriched its vast book of music over the past two decades.

Throughout Frederick P. Rose Hall, Jazz at Lincoln Center‘s second annual Unity Jazz Festival (January 10-11, 2025) presents a host of contemporary bands representing a 360-degree spectrum of 21st century jazz and jazz-adjacent approaches.

Another long-standing member of JALC’s extended family, master clarinetist-saxophonist-composer Paquito D’Rivera presents a retrospective of his luminous career at Rose Theater: Paquito D’Rivera: 70+ Years in Music (April 18-19, 2025). A native of Havana, Cuba, where he developed his exemplary musicianship, and a U.S. resident since 1980, D’Rivera is perhaps the foremost living exponent of coalescing the musical dialects of the New World with jazz and classical music. An alumnus of Dizzy Gillespie‘s Pan-American-oriented United Nations Orchestra during the 1980s, D’Rivera, 76, will render the multiple dialects he’s mastered along the way with idiomatic clarity and creative spirit. Joining the maestro and his long-standing quintet (trumpeter Diego Urcola, pianist Alex Brown, bassist Oscar Stagnaro, and drummer Eric Doob) are special guests Chucho Valdés (with whom D’Rivera played in Irakere, the Cuban super-group, during the ’70s); Colombian harp maestro Edmar Casteñeda; the great Italian jazz singer Roberta Gambarini; guitarist Yotam Silberstein; Héctor del Curto on bandoneon; Roberto Vizcaino on percussion; Victor Provost on steel pan; and the Young People’s Chorus of New York City.

Kingston, Jamaica-born pianist Monty Alexander, a close friend of JALC, observes his 80th birthday at Rose Theater (January 24-25, 2025). Alexander traces the different phases of his storied career, wherein he’s continually explored the intersection of Jamaica’s various popular and folk music idioms with American jazz. The chronology begins with Alexander‘s early involvement with mento (Jamaica’s calypso music) and with its cross-pollination with New Orleans rhythm-and-blues during the early years of ska and reggae; his development into one of the foremost practitioners of swinging American jazz; and his incorporation of steel pan as he integrated the rhythms that animate both dialects in the groups Ivory and Steel and Kingston Express. Alexander convenes a world-class ensemble, including master New Orleans drummer and JLCO alumnus Herlin Riley, and many others.

Jump In The Line! Celebrating Harry Belafonte with René Marie (October 25-26, 2024) is the charismatic singer’s homage to the iconic Jamaica-born calypsonian-actor-political activist (1927-2023) who staked his money and his life on the front line of the civil rights movement’s struggles for racial integration during the 1950s and ’60s. For this two-night run at The Appel Room, she presents a stellar septet including trombonist and JLCO alumnus Wycliffe Gordon and trumpeter Etienne Charles, who has arranged a cohort of Belafonte’s most beloved calypso hits, curated to engage the hearts and minds of both his long-time fans and more recent admirers.

Some of today’s best-and-brightest young jazzfolk deliver their inspired take on Dave and Iola Brubeck’s iconic jazz musical The Real Ambassadors: The Untold Story, albeit with some never-before-heard stories, presented in partnership with the Louis Armstrong House Museum and The Brubeck Family (April 4-5, 2025). The groundbreaking 1962 album, featuring Louis Armstrong, addressed the then-contemporaneous struggle for integration at the height of America’s civil rights movement. An activist for social justice throughout his career, Brubeck canceled a 25-date tour of colleges and universities across the American South after 22 schools had refused to allow his Black bassist Eugene Wright to perform. This new take on the classic program will feature many rising stars familiar to Jazz at Lincoln Center audiences, along with Grammy-nominated trombonist and composer Chris Brubeck (Brubeck Brothers Quartet). Joining the program are trumpeter Alphonso Horne; vocalists Shenel Johns, Vuyo Sotashe, C. Anthony Bryant, and 2024 Grammy Award-winner Nicole Zuraitis; pianist and arranger Chris Pattishall; Camille Thurman on saxophone and vocals; Endea Owens on bass; music director Jake Goldblas on drums; and award-winning actor Daniel J. Watts serving as narrator and host.

Perhaps the most beloved institution at The House of Swing is Big Band Holidays (December 18-22, 2024), in which the JLCO swings a choice selection of Christmas music arranged by band personnel. For this year’s 34th annual celebration, music directed by Chris Crenshaw, rising star singers Ekep Nkwelle and Robbie Lee front the band on an extended run (December 18-22, 2024).

Dianne Reeves: With Love features the luminous five-time Grammy Award-winning singer and NEA Jazz Master Dianne Reeves at Rose Theater (February 14-15, 2024), presenting her annual celebration of that mysterious force called love – fulfilled, unrequited, and spiritual. Revealing an approach to melody and phrasing as skilled as it is spontaneous, the supreme vocalist and expert song interpreter shares songs of rapture and anguish, of romance and heartbreak, delivering cherished standards and surprise repertoire.

Charismatic clarinet virtuoso Anat Cohen celebrates her 50th birthday at The Appel Room (March 14-15, 2025). Cohen convenes a flexible tentet that includes cello, accordion, and (her brothers) trumpeter Avishai Cohen and saxophonist Yuval Cohen, configured in various sizes, performing charts that facilitate her compelling, authoritative stories in mainstem jazz from Benny Goodman to post-bop, and including klezmer, chamber, rock, choro, and other Brazilian idioms.

Virtuoso tenor saxophonist-composer Joshua Redman, a household name in jazz since he launched his career in the mid-‘90s, returns to Rose Theater with the Joshua Redman Group featuring Gabrielle Cavassa (November 15-16, 2024). This new project marks the first time that Redman, an unsurpassed melodist, has collaborated with a vocalist. Cavassa is a New Orleans-based rising star, who, Redman says, “has an expressive quality and an intimacy and a vulnerability in her sound that is singularly captivating.” Performing material from his latest album where are we, his first on the venerable Blue Note label, the band marches across the United States, asking us to take a critical examination of what we find: “where are we is a meditation on the power and importance of place — the unique human beauty created when we locate ourselves in shared physical spaces together with others; the loss, anomie, and angst suffered when we divide ourselves unnaturally and unjustly apart,” says Redman. Selections include Coltrane’s “Alabama,” Betty Carter’s “New England,” and “Chicago Blues,” a nod to Count Basie and Jimmie Rushing’s classic “Goin’ to Chicago,” and the Redman original “After Minneapolis (face toward mourning).”

In Christian McBride and Friends featuring Benny Green & Gregory Hutchinson (May 2-3, 2025, Rose Theater), eight-time Grammy Award-winning bassist, composer, and imaginative band leader Christian McBride leads his world-renowned trio in tribute to pathbreaking bassist Ray Brown (1926-2002). Fellow Ray Brown mentees Benny Green and Greg Hutchinson join McBride in Rose Theater to perform with foundational clarity, high energy, and their signature hard-swinging feel, interpreting selections from Brown’s illustrious career, including his pivotal associations with Dizzy Gillespie and Oscar Peterson. From the mid-1970s until his death, Brown led numerous bands, including, during the mid-90s, his trio with Green and Hutchinson, and Super-Bass, his trio with bassists McBride and John Clayton. (McBride recorded four albums with Green’s popular trio between 1991 and 1994.) The second set spotlights McBride’s new quintet, featuring emerging jazz players meticulously selected by McBride himself, comprising Nicole Glover, Ely Perlman, Mike King, and Savannah Harris, performing original works.

Blues Jam (February 21-22, 2025) celebrates modern legends of the blues. Familiar names, new faces, and surprise guests stack the stage at Rose Theater, delivering nimble finger picking, bold vocals, and a deep and down-home pocket. The evening-long jam sessions feature rotating ensembles comprising blues heroes and the new generation of expert practitioners and songwriters who keep this beloved tradition shuffling into the future.

The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis performs the fourth annual edition of its popular Journey Through Jazz concerts, presented in The Appel Room and digitally captured for wider distribution. Journey Through Jazz Series VI (November 22-23, 2024) features music direction from JLCO bassist Carlos Henriquez and focuses on the coalescing of Afro-Cuban rhythms and melodies into the mainstream of jazz expression in the aftermath of the Second World War. The repertoire may include Chico O’Farrill’s “Afro-Cuban Jazz Suite,” Mario Bauzá‘s “Tanga,” and more from the Latin jazz cannon.

Music directed by JLCO pianist Dan Nimmer, Journey Through Jazz Series VII (February 28-March 1, 2025) addresses the evolution of combo swing from the Great Depression through the Second World War. Joined by vocalists to be announced, the Jazz at Lincoln Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis will subdivide into different configurations to perform fresh, idiomatic interpretations of repertoire associated with the Benny Goodman Trio and Quartet, various small groups led by Duke Ellington and Count Basie, and various all-star aggregations billed as Jazz at the Philharmonic, which Norman Granz debuted in 1944 and continued to produce on an international scale into the 1970s.

In sum, the 2024-25 season showcases a distinguished cast of characters who fully embody Jazz at Lincoln Center‘s self-imposed challenge to represent the highest aspirations of jazz. Marsalis sums up: “We celebrate the masters, whose music, philosophy, and spirit of mentorship continue to influence everything we do as an organization, and we create opportunities for you to enjoy the next stellar generation of musicians.”

Education

Jazz at Lincoln Center serves the largest jazz education program network in the world. Its initiatives build on the organization’s 37-year history of promoting education in jazz performance and appreciation. These programs reach all populations, from infants to seniors, and advance JALC’s belief that jazz education is for all – regardless of experience, ethnicity, or socioeconomic status.

The goal of each program is for participants to learn the communal history of jazz in a sociopolitical context, receive guidance on better communication of personal objectives while maintaining balance in a group, and gain awareness of the mission of jazz musicians today – building on the aspirational foundation laid down by earlier generations.

With the lodestar composer, pianist, and orchestra leader Duke Ellington as a foundational guide, Jazz at Lincoln Center continues to produce an extensive range of educational and advocacy programs for all ages, not only on the campus of The House of Swing, but through outreach to thousands of public and private schools across the United States that serve a broad cross-section of American children and teenagers. “We have a lot of work to do, in all of our schools, teaching our kids how to listen and identify excellence,” Marsalis says.

Celebrating its 30th anniversary, Jazz at Lincoln Center‘s signature education program, the Essentially Ellington High School Jazz Band Competition & Festival (EE), takes place on May 8-10, 2025. During this banner year, the program continues to spread the message of Duke Ellington’s music, leadership, and collective orientation, providing six free transcriptions of original Duke Ellington recordings – along with four original transcriptions of Gerry Mulligan‘s music – to high school ensembles across thousands of schools and community bands in 58 countries. In addition to sheet music, the program also provides rehearsal guides, original recordings, professional instruction, and more, free of charge to member schools. The popular Regional EE Festivals return in 27 locations across the United States, in addition to two in Australia.

The family-oriented Jazz for Young People concerts, held live and in-person in Rose Theater, have been a Jazz at Lincoln Center mainstay since the early 1990s. The 2024-25 season events are What is the Jazz Age?, hosted by Catherine Russell (October 25-26, 2024); and Who is Gerry Mulligan?, featuring the Future of Jazz Orchestra (April 4-5, 2024).

Other highlights of the 2024-25 Education season include:

· Swing University, an online program that serves a global jazz community with jazz appreciation classes on a wide variety of topics during summer, fall, winter, and spring terms.

· WeBop, an interactive program for families with children ages 8 months to 7 years old, hosting in-person classes beginning in October 2024.

· Let Freedom Swing, in-school educational concert programs focused on history, civics, and social justice, held as in-person concerts in schools across New York City, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Miami, London (UK), and at Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, AR.

· 4th Jack Rudin Jazz Championship, an invitational for 10 collegiate jazz bands takes place at Jazz at Lincoln Center on January 12-13, 2025.

· The award-winning Middle School and High School Jazz Academies.

· A Closer Listen, a free virtual program featuring jazz experts and enthusiasts holding in-depth discussions on jazz works.

JazzLive

The vast majority of Jazz at Lincoln Center’s 2024-25 season concerts – and many sets from Dizzy’s Club – will be broadcast in real time on Jazz at Lincoln Center’s subscription streaming service JazzLive, which can be accessed via smart TV, mobile device, and desktop platforms. Learn more at jazzlive.com.

Blue Engine Publishing continues to release more compositions and arrangements by JLCO members and Wynton Marsalis from the library of Jazz at Lincoln Center.

Blue Engine Records

Throughout the 2024-25 season, Blue Engine Records – Jazz at Lincoln Center’s in-house label – continues to issue both new and archival releases via streaming and physical formats. These include music featuring the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis as well as releases from emerging jazz stars. Certain season concerts will also be made available shortly after their performance dates as streaming recordings, in an effort to keep jazz lovers around the world abreast of happenings at Frederick P. Rose Hall, home of Jazz at Lincoln Center.

Jazz at Lincoln Center and JLCO Touring Throughout the summer of 2024, Jazz at Lincoln Center builds upon its successful outdoor concert initiatives from the summer of 2021 and continue to create collaborative concert events through September with organizations throughout New York City and environs beyond, with MoCA Westport, Caramoor, Times Square Alliance, Lincoln Center, and more.

The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis, which, Marsalis has observed, “might be the most flexible and all-encompassing ensemble in the history of our music,” tours extensively throughout the 2024-25 season, revisiting symphonic works from Marsalis’s distinguished corpus, presenting new commissions, and delving into JALC’s vast book of modern jazz arrangements.

The orchestra collaborates with various organizations in the United States and abroad to perform Marsalis’s large-scale works and engage in residency activities.

Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis undertakes its fourth residency in eight years in Chautauqua, New York (August 17-23, 2024), with two performances of Wynton Marsalis’s All Rise, and 10 education events and lectures. During the summer of 2024, JLCO performs in Binghamton, NY; Wolf Trap in Vienna, VA; and Skaneateles, NY.

The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis tours in China and Taiwan (October 8-November 4, 2024), featuring performances of Wynton Marsalis’s The Jungle in Shanghai, conducted by Long Yu.

The Jazz at Lincoln Center tours Big Band Holidays with singers Ekep Nkwelle and Robbie Lee and Music Director Chris Crenshaw (December 1-15, 2024).

The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis tours the Midwestern United States (January 21-February 2, 2025).

The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis tours Europe (March 10-April 5, 2025), featuring performances of Marsalis’s The Jungle.

Dizzy’s Club

Jazz at Lincoln Center’s world-renowned Dizzy’s Club, one of the three main performance venues at Frederick P. Rose Hall, produces world-class jazz performances nightly, often reflecting and augmenting the programming in Rose Theater and The Appel Room.

Throughout the opening months of the 2024-25 season, performances include a Dizzy Gillespie Birthday Celebration led by trumpeter Jon Faddis on the 20th anniversary of The House of Swing; Herlin Riley‘s now annual Thanksgiving week run; Ulysses Owens, Jr. Big Band; and the cabaret-oriented Songbook Sundays series. Dizzy’s iconic Thursday-Saturday evening Late Night Sessions, featuring some of the most talented emerging artists in jazz, continues. The club also launches a new Big Band Mondays series on August 5 featuring the Ted Nash Big Band.

Health and Safety Guidelines

We believe in the power of music to uplift, inspire, and create a sense of community. We very much look forward to welcoming you to The House of Swing at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Frederick P. Rose Hall this season and are committed to employing all measures to ensure your safety as well as the safety of our artists and staff. Learn more about our health and safety guidelines at jazz.org.

Ticket Information

Current Jazz at Lincoln Center subscribers are invited to explore our TAKE 3,4,5 package or Create Your Own subscription for all Rose Theater and Appel Room concerts and enjoy 10% off single ticket prices. The TAKE 3,4,5 package allows subscribers to create a custom concert package of three or more performances across the season, personalized to individual interests and schedules, across both venues.

Current subscribers with a fixed seat package from a previous season enjoy a 15% discount off single ticket prices through a Create Your Own Subscription, and all other subscribers who create their own series receive a 10% discount off single ticket prices in addition to all other subscriber benefits.

In order to preserve the best seats, current subscribers can take advantage of a priority period beginning today through Friday May 17, 2024 before single sale tickets go on sale to the general public on June 18, 2024.

Becoming a subscriber is the best way to get the best seats at the guaranteed best prices for the entire season, as single ticket prices will increase based on demand as concerts approach. Subscribers also have the benefit of utilizing free, unlimited ticket exchanges to manage their schedule.

For more information on 2024-25 season subscriptions, please call the Subscription Services hotline at 212-258-9999, e-mail subscriptions@jazz.org, or visit jazz.org/subs.

Membership Discount

Jazz at Lincoln Center offers a robust Membership program with a wide array of benefits, including deep discounts on concert tickets. Jazz at Lincoln Center memberships start at $100.00 and members receive VIP single ticket pre-sale access and discounted tickets to Jazz at Lincoln Center-produced concerts in Rose Theater and The Appel Room on the day of the event. Tickets must be purchased at the Jazz at Lincoln Center Box Office or online beginning at 12:01 a.m. on the performance day or by calling the membership phone line. Members must show their valid membership card or log in to jazz.org using their account credentials to receive this discount. Subject to availability. Learn more and sign up at jazz.org/membership.

VIP single ticket pre-sale for donors, members, and subscribers will be available starting Tuesday, June 11, 2024. To access single tickets before the general public, become a Jazz at Lincoln Center member by June 18, 2024.

Pricing

Ticket prices for Rose Theater are $30 and up dependent upon seating section, except as noted below:

Jazz for Young People® tickets in Rose Theater are $10, $20 and $25.

Ticket prices for The Appel Room are $55 and up, dependent on seating section for the 7:00 p.m. and 2:00 p.m. sets, and $45 and up, depending upon seating section for the 9:00 p.m. set on Saturday.

Ticket prices for Dizzy’s Club start at $30, depending on the seating section and the day of the week the performance takes place.

Note: Hot Seats – $10 seats for each Rose Theater performance (excluding Family Concerts and other performances as specified) and select performances in The Appel Room – are available for purchase by the general public on the Wednesday prior to each performance. Tickets are subject to availability; please call 212-258-9877 for available Hot Seats performance dates.

Hot Seats are available only in person at the Box Office, with a maximum of two tickets per person. Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Hot Seats Ticket Discount Program is supported by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

Performance times for both Rose Theater and The Appel Room have changed in the 2024-25 season. Unless otherwise noted, Rose Theater performances will have a 7:30 p.m. start time.

The Appel Room performances on Fridays are at 7:00 p.m. and 9:00 p.m. The Appel Room performances on Saturdays feature a 2:00 p.m. matinee and an evening performance at 7:00 p.m.

*Please note that a $3.50 Jazz at Lincoln Center Facility Fee applies to ALL ticket purchases, with the exception of $10 Hot Seats. A $7 handling fee also applies when purchasing tickets from CenterCharge or when purchasing tickets online via jazz.org.

All single tickets for The Appel Room and Rose Theater can be purchased through jazz.org 24 hours a day or through CenterCharge at 212-721-6500, open daily from 10:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. Tickets can also be purchased at the Jazz at Lincoln Center Box Office, located on Broadway at 60th Street, Ground Floor.

Box Office hours:
Monday-Saturday: 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. (or 30 minutes past curtain)
Sunday: 12:00 p.m. noon to 6:00 p.m. (or 30 minutes past curtain).

Single tickets go on sale June 18, 2024.

A very special thanks to Jody and John Arnhold for their extraordinary support of Jazz at Lincoln Center and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra.

Leadership support for Jazz at Lincoln Center is provided by America’s Cultural Treasures, a sponsored project of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.

Leadership support is also provided by Dalio Philanthropies; Howard Gilman Foundation, Inc.; the Estate of Robert Menschel; and Mellody Hobson and George Lucas.

Leadership support for the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra is provided by Michele and Mark Mandel; the Perry and Donna Golkin Family Foundation; and the Zou Family Fund.

Leadership support for Jazz at Lincoln Center’s concert season is provided by Lynne and Richard Pasculano.

Jazz at Lincoln Center proudly acknowledges its major corporate partners:
The Movado Group Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Nike, and the Coca-Cola Company. The Movado Group Foundation is The Official Timekeeper of Jazz at Lincoln Center.

Artists, schedules, and venues are subject to change.

JAZZ AT LINCOLN CENTER 2024-25 SEASON CONCERT CHRONOLOGY

Hot Jazz & Swing: The JLCO with Wynton Marsalis
September 19–21, 2024
7:30 p.m.
Rose Theater
The JLCO with Wynton Marsalis welcomes audiences back to The House of Swing for the 2024-25 season with revitalized arrangements of classic 1920s and 30s tunes, with music direction by saxophonist, composer, and award-winning scholar Loren Schoenberg.

Bryan Carter’s “Rustin in Renaissance”
October 18–19, 2024
Friday night sets are at 7:00 p.m. and 9:00 p.m.
Saturday sets are at 2:00 p.m. and 7:00 p.m.
The Appel Room
Join 2024 Grammy and Tony Award winner Bryan Carter in honoring the life and legacy of Bayard Rustin as Carter leads the Jazz at Pride Orchestra in front of the backdrop of Columbus Circle in The Appel Room. This event spotlights Rustin’s pivotal role in the Civil Rights Movement and his contributions as an activist and a vocalist.

Rubén Blades with Boca Livre & Editus Ensemble
October 18–19, 2024
7:30 p.m.
Rose Theater
Panamanian legend Rubén Blades returns to Rose Theater, revealing dimensions of his music he hasn’t shared in 20 years. Integrating Brazilian harmony alongside Boca Livre and a classical approach to salsa alongside Costa Rica’s Editus, the Grammy Award-winning singer and composer proffers a fresh take on his signature Afro-Cuban sound. This concert is co-presented by Jazz at Lincoln Center and Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.

Jump In The Line! Celebrating Harry Belafonte with René Marie
October 25–26, 2024
Friday night sets are at 7:00 p.m. and 9:00 p.m.
Saturday sets are at 2:00 p.m. and 7:00 p.m.
The Appel Room
Jazz at Lincoln Center presents a calypso-inspired evening honoring legendary artist and activist, the late Harry Belafonte. Grammy-nominated vocalist and songwriter René Marie brings her artful storytelling to The Appel Room, leading an award-winning ensemble that features trombonist Wycliffe Gordon and trumpeter Etienne Charles.

Family Concert: What is The Jazz Age?
Hosted by Catherine Russell
October 25–26, 2024
Rose Theater
3:00 p.m.
Grammy-nominated vocalist Catherine Russell brings her vibrant energy to Rose Theater, exploring the Roaring 20s with her ensemble. Families are invited to delve into the era of change with swinging rhythms and timeless classics from Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington.

Bebop Revolution: The JLCO with Wynton Marsalis
November 8–9, 2024
7:30 p.m.
Rose Theater
Bebop Revolution, led by trombonist and composer Vincent Gardner and members of the JLCO, pays tribute to the innovative and hard-swinging origins of bebop. Featuring big band and small ensemble arrangements, the event honors legends like Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, and Mary Lou Williams.

Joshua Redman Group feat. Gabrielle Cavassa
November 15–16, 2024
7:30 p.m.
Rose Theater
Tenor saxophone legend Joshua Redman returns to Jazz at Lincoln Center, leading his ensemble featuring award-winning New Orleans-based vocalist Gabrielle Cavassa. Experience a moving evening of selections from his recent Blue Note Records release where are we.

Journey Through Jazz Part VI with Carlos Henriquez
The JLCO with Wynton Marsalis
November 22–23, 2024
Friday night sets are at 7:00 p.m. and 9:00 p.m.
Saturday sets are at 2:00 p.m. and 7:00 p.m.
The Appel Room
The JLCO with Wynton Marsalis and Grammy-nominated bassist and composer Carlos Henriquez continue their exploration of Afro-Cuban sounds and influences. Experience bright horn lines and bold harmony, beautiful lyricism, and the elastic syncopation of clave as Henriquez and his fellow artists share the stories behind patterns, melodies, and illustrious histories of the music. Part of the Lynne and Richard Pasculano Jazz Series.

Big Band Holidays: The JLCO
December 18–22, 2024
December 18-19: 7:00 p.m.
December 20: 7:30pm
December 21: 2:00 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.
December 22: 2:00 p.m.
Rose Theater
The annual fan-favorite celebrates its 35th year. Featuring music direction by JLCO trombonist and brilliant arranger Chris Crenshaw and critically acclaimed vocalists Ekep Nkwelle and Robbie Lee, this swinging seasonal classic showcases new arrangements of classic timeless holiday tunes.

The Unity Jazz Festival
January 10–11, 2025
Events take place throughout Frederick P. Rose Hall, home of Jazz at Lincoln Center
The Unity Jazz Festival makes its triumphant return to The House of Swing after its successful 2024 debut. Enjoy sets in the Ertegun Atrium, Dizzy’s Club, and The Appel Room across two electrifying evenings of live performances from emerging talents and jazz legends.

Cool School & Hard Bop: The JLCO with Wynton Marsalis
January 16–18, 2025
7:30 p.m.
Rose Theater
Featuring iconic works from Miles Davis, Art Blakey, Max Roach, and more, Cool School & Hard Bop — music-directed by JLCO saxophonist Sherman Irby and pianist Joe Block — explores the enduring appeal of mid-century jazz through striking arrangements, mellow tones, virtuosic vocabulary, and a commitment to the blues.

Monty Alexander
January 24–25, 2025
7:30 p.m.
Rose Theater
Legendary pianist and composer Monty Alexander returns to Rose Theater to celebrate his 80th birthday. His sets feature an explosive and internationally acclaimed lineup of improvisers including New Orleans legend and JLCO alum drummer Herlin Riley.

Jazz Americana: The JLCO with Wynton Marsalis
February 7–8, 2025
7:30 p.m.
Rose Theater
Experience the roots of jazz with The JLCO with Wynton Marsalis and special guests. Explore early influences, blending blues, gospel, and bluegrass with reimagined classics from Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver, Sidney Bechet, and the New Orleans Rhythm Kings.

Dianne Reeves: With Love
February 14–15, 2025
7:30 p.m.
Rose Theater
This Valentine’s Day, celebrate love with NEA Jazz Master Dianne Reeves at Rose Theater. Experience an unforgettable evening with the Grammy Award-winning icon who shares songs of rapture and anguish, of romance and heartbreak.

Blues Jam
February 21–22, 2025
7:30 p.m.
Rose Theater
Join Jazz at Lincoln Center for a night with blues legends at Rose Theater. Featuring Grammy Award winners, local New Orleans heroes, and rising talents, this jam session showcases the timeless allure of the blues tradition with a modern twist.

Journey Through Jazz Part VII with Dan Nimmer
The JLCO with Wynton Marsalis
February 28–March 1, 2025
Friday night sets are at 7:00 p.m. and 9:00 p.m.
Saturday sets are at 2:00 p.m. and 7:00 p.m.
The Appel Room
Featuring music direction by JLCO pianist Dan Nimmer, Journey Through Jazz: Part VII captures the energy and charm of combo swing music from the late 1920s to mid-’40s, spotlighting works from Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and Jazz at the Philharmonic. Part of the Lynne and Richard Pasculano Jazz Series.

Anat Cohen: Journeys
A 50th Birthday Celebration
March 14–15, 2025
Friday night sets are at 7:00 p.m. and 9:00 p.m.
Saturday sets are at 2:00 p.m. and 7:00 p.m.
The Appel Room
Celebrate Grammy Award-winning Anat Cohen’s 50th birthday with an eclectic performance in The Appel Room. From early swing to post-bop and Brazilian choro, Cohen showcases her mastery in various musical genres with different combinations of her ensemble, which features her brothers and frequent collaborators bassist Avishai Cohen and saxophonist Yuval Cohen.

The Real Ambassadors: Armstrong and Brubeck
April 4–5, 2025
Friday night sets are at 7:00 p.m. and 9:00 p.m.
Saturday sets are at 2:00 p.m. and 7:00 p.m.
The Appel Room
Dave and Iola Brubeck’s 1962 album, The Real Ambassadors, featuring Louis Armstrong, lands in The Appel Room with new arrangements from pianist Chris Pattishall and fresh perspectives from an award-winning ensemble, including Chris Brubeck, Alphonso Horne, Shenel Johns, Vuyo Sotashe, C. Anthony Bryant, Nicole Zuraitis, Camille Thurman, Endea Owens, Jake Goldblas, and actor Daniel J. Watts. In partnership with the Louis Armstrong House Museum.

Family Concert: Who is Gerry Mulligan?
April 4–5, 2025
Rose Theater
3:00 p.m.
Jazz at Lincoln Center’s critically acclaimed series for young music fans returns to Rose Theater in tribute to baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan. Experience the impact of Mulligan’s innovations and the heart of his expansive artistry as the members of JALC’s Future of Jazz Orchestra share music and anecdotes from his career.

Paquito D’Rivera: Celebrating 70+ Years in Music
April 18–19, 2025
7:30 p.m.
Rose Theater
NEA Jazz Master, reedist Paquito D’Rivera brings the electric fusion of Havana to life with unparalleled improvisation, syncopated harmonies, and virtuosic orchestration. Special guests include Chucho Valdés, Edmar Castañeda, Roberta Gambarini, Yotam Silberstein, Héctor del Curto, Roberto Vizcaino, Victor Provost, and the Young People’s Chorus of New York City.

Contemporary Jazz Masterpieces: The JLCO with Wynton Marsalis
April 25–26, 2025
7:30 p.m.
Rose Theater
The JLCO with Wynton Marsalis celebrate cutting-edge standards and contemporary masterpieces that ignite the senses with spontaneity, virtuosity, and an unwavering passion for the music. Featuring compositions by Joanne Brackeen, Charlie Haden, Terence Blanchard, Pat Metheny, and Mulgrew Miller, this event promises to be an unforgettable evening.

Christian McBride & Friends
May 2–3, 2025
7:30 p.m
Rose Theater
Experience the master bassist in two distinct ensembles. “Remembering Ray Brown” features McBride alongside pianist Benny Green and drummer Greg Hutchinson and pays homage to the hard-swinging hero of the music. Then, McBride’s innovative quintet featuring saxophonist Nicole Glover, guitarist Ely Perlman, pianist Mike King, and drummer Savannah Harris takes the stage to perform original works.

The JLCO Plays the 70s
May 29–31, 2025
7:30 p.m.
Rose Theater
The JLCO time-travels to the 70s, performing new arrangements of classic recordings from Weather Report; Betty Carter; Dexter Gordon; Chick Corea; the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Orchestra; the Toshiko Akiyoshi-Lew Tabackin Orchestra; Charles Mingus; Ornette Coleman; James Brown; Earth, Wind, and Fire; Blood, Sweat, and Tears; and more, with music direction by JLCO’s saxophonist Ted Nash.

Best of the JLCO with Wynton Marsalis
June 13–14, 2025
7:30 p.m.
Rose Theater
Comprising of world-class improvisers, arrangers, and composers, the JLCO with Wynton Marsalis has redefined big band music. Music directed by Marsalis, Best of the JLCO showcases works and arrangements from orchestra members Chris Crenshaw, Vincent Gardner, Victor Goines, Carlos Henriquez, Sherman Irby, Ted Nash, Dan Nimmer, and Marcus Printup.

There is no holding back Wynton Marsalis. As well as being a virtuoso trumpeter and leading jazz musician, he has thrown himself into composing major new works in the classical tradition, including an ambitious range of concertos and symphonies.

His latest symphony, “The Jungle”, had its premiere in 2016 and this live recording was made in Melbourne in 2019. Following that, the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra is currently in the middle of its big-band European tour, taking the symphony to 16 cities, ending on July 9 at the Barbican in London.

The “jungle” in the title of the Symphony No 4 is New York City, which Marsalis believes is “the most fluid, pressure-packed and cosmopolitan metropolis the modern world has ever seen”. That is what we get in his music, a very substantial (more than an hour in duration) symphony of irrepressible energy, grit and drive.

It was hard to see how Marsalis’s last symphony hung together, so profuse was its abundance of ideas. “The Jungle” is more coherent in tone, despite rolling together jazz, blues, big band and classical, but the downside is that it feels reluctant to let up for moments of calm. After the urban racket of the New York cityscape, the quiet ending, as the music dissolves, comes as a surprise.

Where this symphony scores well is its virtuosity. Although the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra conducted by Nicholas Buc sounds hard-pressed, the jazz elements are high-octane and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, with Marsalis as trumpeter par excellence, shows off its bravura.

by Richard Fairman
Source: Financial Times

The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra signalled its balance of orchestral jazz spectacle and nightclub intimacy from the start. A fanfare of trumpets was answered by a sheen of reeds before a froth of swapped phrases unfolded over springy walking-bass swing. Ensemble muscle established, Wynton Marsalis emerged from the trumpet section, improvising intensely, chorus after chorus, with just the rhythm section accompanying him.

Marsalis, a superb technician, welds classic jazz references into a modal jazz palette. As his solo unfolded, he injected the growls, slurs and blares of jazz’s formative years into a stream of modernist lines, holding the audience in his palm. But he is not the orchestra’s only star turn. Dan Nimmer on piano came next, with offbeat stabs and soulful asides, then Elliot Mason on trombone, broody, sharp-edged and technically astute. A poised ballad showcased trumpeter Marcus Printup’s lyricism and control.

Fifteen strong voices are melded into this disciplined jazz orchestra, and each one is capable of giving a century of jazz history a twist, both in their playing and in their original work. Those first two unannounced numbers were from the three-part “Offertory” of Marsalis’s Abyssinian Mass, a large-scale work celebrating the 200th anniversary of Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church. The final part, “(You Gotta Watch) The Holy Ghost”, closed the first set with an array of gospel piano riffs, orchestrated squeaks of saxes and drummer Obed Calvaire slapping off-kilter beats on tambourine; his bass drum delivered rhythmic support.

Elsewhere in the forward-looking first set, trombonist Chris Crenshaw’s “Conglomerate” from his The Fifties: A Prism referenced cool school voicings and had baritone sax and trumpet duetting in a piano-free quartet. The otherworldly vibe of Wayne Shorter’s “The Three Marias” gained an orchestral shape alongside sour sustains from Chris Lewis’s soprano sax. Printup’s “Great Love (For Joe)” was dedicated to JLCO’s late baritone saxophonist Joe Temperley. Paul Nedzela on baritone sax enchanted with his upper-register control, warm-hearted balladry and final unaccompanied flourish.

The second half showcased the orchestra’s grasp of jazz history alongside mastery of Duke Ellington’s sonic palette. “Trombonio Bustoso Issimo”, an in-depth showcase for Mason’s fluent trombone, was followed by “Big Fat Alice’s Blues”, a feature for Sherman Irby’s alto sax. Irby, relaxed, spacious and unhurried, moved from Ellingtonia to modernism and raised the crowd. Later, Alexa Tarantino delivered an equally sustained performance on clarinet on one of four excerpts from Ellington’s Toot Suite.

Modal jazz was referenced with McCoy Tyner’s “The Man from Tanganyika”, Jelly Roll Morton by an impromptu jam, and the finale was a roaring blues. The encore, with Marsalis and rhythm section alone, segued Morton’s “Dead Man’s Blues” with the modern jazz balladry of “Embraceable You”. Rodgers and Hart’s “Blue Room” ended the evening, scored by Eddie Durham in the 1930s, and now bought to life by the reeds and brass of this remarkable band.

by Mike Hobart
Source: Financial Times

It would be a dull soul who didn’t enjoy at least some aspects of Wynton Marsalis’s new Trumpet Concerto, especially as its UK premiere was delivered with such panache by Alison Balsom and the London Symphony Orchestra. The music exudes joy and energy throughout its six movements. And the virtuosic demands it makes on the soloist — from the Nellie the Elephant trumpetings that open the piece, through enharmonic trills, flutter tonguing, glissandos and mercurial passagework to the deft application of what seemed like 50 different mutes — are hair-raising. As is the stamina required. For 35 minutes Balsom hardly had a bar’s rest, and her technique never faltered.

All that said, for me the piece didn’t add up to much more than a collection of pastiches, mostly taking jazz and blues idioms from the mid-20th century and pumping them up with orchestral textures that were baggy and often too blaring even for a trumpet soloist. A lot of it was clearly intended to be playful, but the piece’s patchwork structure was hard to grasp and Marsalis’s own voice even harder to detect.

The programme note spoke of his wanting to pay tribute to the styles and personalities of fondly remembered trumpeters from different eras and genres. Along the way, however, he seems to have forgotten to include himself.

Antonio Pappano conducted the concerto with model efficiency, but what happened after the interval was in a different league of emotion, depth and inspiration. It was a sumptuous performance of Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloé, so vividly and dramatically characterised that the ballet seemed to play out in my mind’s eye as the piece progressed — and it has been decades since I saw it danced in the theatre.

Pappano brought remarkable clarity and precision to those little passages where Ravel seeks to mirror some tiny detail in the Greek myth. And player after player delivered ravishingly evocative solos. But it was the sheer sweep of the performance, and the luscious fullness of the climactic moments, that really drew one in. And what superb singing from the Tenebrae choir: almost another orchestra, so varied and subtle were their timbres.

by Richard Morrison
Source: The Times

There may be things that Wynton Marsalis does not know about the trumpet – but from the UK premiere of his new concerto, presented by Alison Balsom, the LSO and Antonio Pappano at the Barbican last night, it’s hard to imagine what.

It opens with a fanfare: not from the Angel Gabriel, but from that original trumpeter, the elephant. From this opening call until its final return joyously surrounded by the sounds of nature, this six-movement ride through the Trumpet According to Marsalis takes in a succession of references to irresistible styles – blues, Mexican, waltz, the two-step – and to great players such as Louis Armstrong and Maurice André.

It places astonishing demands on the soloist in terms of virtuosity, ingenuity, ensemble work and sheer stamina, and the intricate rhythms keep the orchestra and conductor on their toes. Balsom, wielding two trumpets in succession, was resplendent every inch of the way, and Pappano brought the work a taut, fierce energy.

Marsalis seems to have hit a magic jackpot here, pouring his whole musical self into the concerto while also enrapturing the audience. You don’t often find a huge new piece being greeted with an ovation like this. There are more chances to hear it, including Bristol tonight and the LSO’s tour in Germany thereafter, and this summer Balsom is playing it in the Edinburgh International Festival.

For the second half Pappano took up a theatrical work that in more than two decades at the Royal Opera House he would not have conducted because it is a ballet: Ravel’s complete Daphnis et Chloé (1912). It is based on an erotic pastoral story by the second-century Greek writer Longus, and Ravel dreamed up for it a gloriously lavish orchestration that includes two harps, celesta, wind machine and a wordless chorus (which was slightly hidden behind the orchestra, one of the Barbican’s many spatial challenges perhaps being the accommodation of such unusual forces).

Pappano galvanised a high-heat performance that brought out the Grecian sunshine and the intense, obsessive dance rhythms, and the LSO first flautist Gareth Davies shone bright in the “Syrinx” solo. A special secret weapon was the choir Tenebrae, which brought the chromatic a cappella transition to Part Two a rare, pure clarity.

Pappano is not officially in post as the LSO’s new music director until September, but already seems to have stepped smoothly into Sir Simon Rattle’s vacated shoes. It is one lucky orchestra.

by Jessica Duchen
Source: iNews

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.

Conceived for Michael Sachs, principal trumpet of the Cleveland Orchestra, and premiered last year by him, the multifaceted piece has been picked up by English trumpet soloist Alison Balsom. Her performance of it – first with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra and now with the London Symphony Orchestra under Antonio Pappano – is testimony to her own virtuoso technique. In the Beacon Hall, Balsom delivered it with cool poise.

The most arresting sounds came at the opening: Marsalis’s appropriation of the trumpeting call of an elephant, repeated three times. A defiant, almost atavistic gesture, it wittily underlined the way air blown through an animal’s trunk and air blown through brass tubing have commonality.

From there on, the mix of classical and jazz, blues and Latin American, was a more discursive meandering – the soloist occasionally in dialogue with orchestral principals – yet with no vein of musical thought ever really settling in before the piece moved on. By the last movement, Harlequin Two-Step, the essential playfulness of Marsalis’s approach came into its own. Following chirruping birdsong and high string harmonics with their hint of a return to the jungle, the sharp tension Balsom and Pappano brought to the coda was welcome; suddenly nothing was predictable. But the elephant call did get the final blast.

Intriguing as the Marsalis concerto was, it inevitably paled by comparison with the LSO’s scintillating realisation of Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé, in the complete score the composer himself called a “symphonie choréographique”. Pappano, the orchestra’s chief conductor designate, was in his element here, shaping the undulating lines to maximise their grace and sensuousness, with the wordless voices of Tenebrae adding that extra touch of colour, notably as they crested Ravel’s radiant waves of sound.

The LSO luxuriated in it all, enjoying the new relationship with the Bristol Beacon – but it was the four flutes, whose exotic tones so suffuse the whole, who took the honours. Bouquets, thrown ballet-style, to them for simply wondrous playing.

by Rian Evans
Source: The Guardian

With Simon Rattle having departed and plans for a new concert hall in the City of London long shelved, the London Symphony Orchestra could be forgiven for feeling down in the dumps. Instead, the announcement of its 2024-25 season showed all the signs of an organisation powering forwards.

This will be the first season with Antonio Pappano as chief conductor. The line-up of concerts is impressive, not least because Pappano himself will be conducting a high proportion of them. But the announcement also included a new endowment for the young composers’ scheme and a proposed redevelopment of the orchestra’s home at LSO St Luke’s on the fringes of the City.

English music is to the fore in Pappano’s plans next season, but for this latest concert, as chief conductor designate, he had other priorities. The main work was the new Trumpet Concerto, given its premiere last year in Cleveland, by Wynton Marsalis, star jazz trumpeter in his own right — though not here at the Barbican, as the soloist was Alison Balsom.

Marsalis already has four flamboyant symphonies to his name and his new concerto is in much the same vein. The ideas tumble forth, bold and brassy, starting out with the soloist trumpeting like an elephant and taking in a Spanish bolero, an eastern European two-step, a waltz and much, much more.

The effect is dazzling and exhausting at the same time, like being caught on an out-of-control carousel at a funfair, watching bright lights flash past at dizzying speed. The downside is that it is hard to grasp why one passage of music should follow another or why this or that eye-catching orchestral effect is whisked away before it can make an impact. (With such a surfeit of ideas, maybe Marsalis could auction some off to other composers who do not have many of their own.)

The solo part reads like a textbook of every virtuoso trumpet exercise crammed into just over half an hour and Balsom duly shone in it. This exuberant concerto will be back in the UK when it gets a further performance at this summer’s Edinburgh Festival.

From Marsalis’s throw-the-kitchen-sink-at-it orchestral writing to Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé was not such a big step. Pappano and the LSO performed the complete ballet with a high quality of playing that suggested rehearsal time had been generous. This was Pappano at full throttle, as if he was in the Royal Opera House, full-blooded and exciting. Who would have thought that hiring a professional choir like Tenebrae to sing the “oohs” and “aahs” in this piece would make such an effect? But it really did.

by Richard Fairman
Source: Financial Times

Of all our orchestras, the London Symphony Orchestra is the closest to America in its brazen, sassy sound, and it has always been welcoming to American composers and conductors. So it was inevitable that when the new trumpet concerto from virtuoso jazz trumpeter, composer and band-leader Wynton Marsalis received its British premiere, it would be given by the LSO. It took place on Thursday night in front of a packed and rapt audience, with Britain’s star trumpeter Alison Balsom as soloist, and the orchestra’s soon-to-be Chief Conductor Antonio Pappano on the podium.

A nine-time Grammy winner, Marsalis has assumed the mantle of the jazz tradition, and sometimes it sits heavy on him. The 62-year-old is insistent on the art form’s civilising qualities, using its discipline and lofty aspirations to art as a stick to beat hip hop – a stance that has made him a few enemies. As director of Jazz at Lincoln Centre Orchestra, he has made it his life’s mission to ensure that jazz reaches every school and town in America. But he also celebrates the uproariousness and spontaneity of old-time jazz in his native New Orleans.

Just occasionally, we caught a whiff of that on Thursday – not least at the concerto’s opening, when Balsom unleashed an amusing elephant’s whoop to launch things – but rude energy was mostly held at arm’s length. Marsalis’s aim was to lead us through all the different “voices” of the trumpet, so after an exuberant New Orleans-style street march we were led into what seemed like a half-forgotten ballad from the Great American Songbook, a Mexican village band, then a blues number. All this one might have predicted; less predictable was the brief excursion into a waltz, which we learned was meant to evoke the French trumpet tradition of Maurice André, before an up-tempo two-step carried us energetically over the finish line.

It was all done with great skill, each picture-postcard evoked in vivid orchestral colours. Balsom’s high-wire virtuosity and lyrical grace were complemented by beautifully turned solos from numerous orchestral players. The problem was that – apart from one or two striking moments of still reflection – each musical idea was hurried off-stage quickly by the next, so one could never savour anything. It felt like an enjoyable and somewhat dreamy musical travelogue, which rarely engaged the feelings. I never thought I’d hear a blues from Wynton Marsalis that was so entirely free of traditional bluesiness.

From that fantasy America, we moved to Ravel’s fantasy of ancient Greece, as expressed in his sumptuous, 50-minute-long ballet score Daphnis and Chloé. The big set-pieces like the sunrise in Part 3 were ecstatically gorgeous, but they are not so hard to bring off. The challenge is the numerous short episodes in the middle, which can seem bitty without the dance to guide our feelings. Pappano was clearly aware of this, and made sure that the delicious, pirouetting flexibility of these moments didn’t compromise the dramatic sweep of the whole. That, plus the dazzling virtuosity of the players and sumptuous sound of the choir Tenebrae made for something truly magnificent.

by Ivan Hewett
Source: The Telegraph