Wynton Marsalis's Blog, page 83

Garth Fagan and Wynton Marsalis reunite for the world premiere of Lighthouse/Lightning Rod

Brooklyn, NY/August 28, 2012—For the first time since their BAM debut more than 20 years ago, Garth Fagan and Wynton Marsalis return to premiere their new piece, Lighthouse/Lightning Rod along with excerpts from their first work, the beloved Griot New York.

Lighthouse/Lightning Rod is set to an original score by Wynton Marsalis, is performed live by the Wynton Marsalis Septet, and features scenic design by celebrated visual artist and Guggenheim fellow Alison Saar. The Wynton Marsalis Septet is comprised of Dan Nimmer, Piano; Reginald Veal, Bass; Ali Jackson, Drums; Victor Goines, Saxophone, Clarinet; Wess “Warmdaddy” Anderson, Alto Saxophone; and Eliot Mason, Trombone in addition to Marsalis.

The piece explores the juxtaposition and illusion of security and danger in three sections; Lighthouse, Memories, and Lightning Rod (working titles). The choreography examines emotional response to the stress and anxiety created by the inherent danger/safety that each of these three structures represents. Probing their physical, intellectual, mythical, and cultural place in our ever-shrinking global society, Fagan focuses on the balance necessary to live within these structures while maintaining meaningful relationships of depth, conflict, integrity, and truth. This balance will be struck in Saar’s sculptural sets, translating the space between attracting and repelling, simultaneously courting danger while offering sanctuary, the lighthouse becoming a figure of protection.

Griot New York premiered in 1991 during BAM’s Next Wave Festival and explores contemporary urban life and humankind’s triumph over adversity through the lens of a griot—a traditional West African storyteller. Esteemed members of African communities, griots interpret events in terms of their deepest, most enduring values, and are responsible for transmitting the history of their people to following generations. Embodying this narrative practice, Griot New York depicts life events by crossing borders of time, geography, ethnicity, and style in a poetic and nonlinear manner. The piece is set to Marsalis’ melodic and haunting jazz score, Citi Movement (Griot New York), which was created specifically for this work and explores all aspects of jazz music, from the waltz to big band to calypso. Using the original backdrop of Martin Puryear’s looming and minimalist set designs, the music and dance create an aural and visual cacophony of the cityscape and the harmonies that emerge from the conflicts and compromises of urban life.

The opening performance will also mark the 30th Anniversary of the BAM Next Wave Festival and the 40th Anniversary of Garth Fagan Dance with cocktails and a gala dinner at Skylight One Hanson following the performance.

Lighthouse/Lightning Rod and Griot New York (excerpts)

Garth Fagan Dance

Wynton Marsalis Septet

Concept and choreography by Garth Fagan

Original music composed and arranged by Wynton Marsalis

Scenic design by Alison Saar

Costume design by Mary Nemecek Peterson Lighting design by Jeff McRoberts

BAM Howard Gilman Opera House (30 Lafayette Ave)

Sep 27*—29 at 7:30pm; Sep 30 at 3pm

Tickets start at $20
*30th Next Wave Gala

Artist Talk with Garth Fagan and Wynton Marsalis Moderated by Anna Kisselgoff

Sep 28, post-show (free for same-day ticket holders)

Wynton Marsalis plays homage to Von Freeman

Just moments after Wynton Marsalis took the stage of Orchestra Hall on Tuesday night he addressed a subject on many people’s minds: Chicago tenor saxophonist Von Freeman, who died earlier this month at age 88.

“He was a legend,” Marsalis told a crowded house, while a memorial service for Freeman was being held across town, at Christ Universal Temple, on South Ashland Avenue.

“Von inspired so many musicians. If you’re a jazz musician, you don’t think of coming to this city without thinking of Von, trying to catch him, hear him.”

In every jazz city, Marsalis added, certain musicians command special reverence, setting exalted standards for everyone else – local artists and visiting stars alike.

“They know thousands of tunes,” said Marsalis, in dedicating his performance to Freeman. “So that’s what we’re going to play – tunes.”

For the next couple of hours, Marsalis led his quintet through some of the most beloved standards in the American canon, a fitting tribute to the immortal “Vonski,” as everyone called him.

Through the years, Marsalis has visited here regularly leading the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, so opportunities to hear him in small-group contexts have been rare. This performance, then, served to remind listeners of how formidable a soloist Marsalis can be when given more time and space to play, and how much he savors the interplay among a few well-chosen musicians.

Though Marsalis’ septet of the 1990s (which he revives periodically) remains his most celebrated ensemble outside the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, the quintet setting offers a very different dynamic than either one. If the big band emphasizes corporate virtuosity and the septet a radiant blending of horns, the quintet trains a spotlight on Marsalis and reedist Walter Blanding (with significant contributions from pianist Dan Nimmer, bassist Carlos Henriquez and drummer Ali Jackson).

“Sweet Georgia Brown” may have been dismissed as treacle long ago by many jazz devotees, but Marsalis refuses to give up on the piece, in fact launching his Freeman tribute with it. But Marsalis’ approach proved so light and lithe, so melodically buoyant and delicate in tone, that indeed the old warhorse was lifted from the realm of cliché. If the Harmon mute on Marsalis’ horn gave the music-making a silvery elegance, the man’s rigorous re-working of the song showed that practically any standard tune can yield tremendous flights of improvisation.

This was a lesson that saxophonist Freeman delivered for years every Tuesday night, leading jam sessions at the New Apartment Lounge on the South Side, and Marsalis in effect restated it.

Few contemporary trumpeters use the plunger mute with Marsalis’ degree of control and dexterity, and his plunger technique was front and center in “Comes Love.” The whinnying high notes, low-register growls and sighing mid-range pitches evoked a long tradition of plunger-mute playing, but Marsalis brought his own New Orleans sensibility to it. Toward the end of the tune, he played an extended blues solo, the plunger mute cupped in one hand and constantly bobbing and weaving across the bell of his horn. A whole lexicon of sound – whispers and cries and laments – came forth.

In this piece, and others, reedist Blanding proved a worthy foil to Marsalis, who long has performed with Blanding in the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. The tenor saxophonist’s tone was deep and dark in “Comes Love,” his melodic ideas copious in “Tennessee Waltz.” The latter might not have seemed an obvious choice for a quintet of jazz musicians, but Marsalis and the band found plenty of common ground between three-quarter time and a swing-rhythm aesthetic.

Not everything in this program, however, was about standard tunes. The quintet pushed the calendar forward with the ferocious syncopations and hard-edged dissonances of Marsalis’ “Number 8” and reached back to the dawning of jazz composition with Jelly Roll Morton’s “Tom Cat Blues.”

Near the end of the evening, Marsalis again cited saxophonist Freeman in introducing “Look Down That Lonesome Road,” which Marsalis sang as a hushed blues.

As the tune wound down to a close and the band played the last few phrases, Marsalis softly chanted, “Von Freeman, Von Freeman, Von Freeman,” the name eventually disappearing into silence.

A haunting benediction from one master musician to another.

Source: Chicago Tribune

Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis and Bobby McFerrin opening night concerts

Jazz at Lincoln Center opens a milestone 25th Anniversary season with a host of celebratory offerings at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Frederick P. Rose Hall.

On September 13-15 at 8pm in Rose Theater, Bobby McFerrin returns to Jazz at Lincoln Center to perform, for the first time, with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis.

This opening night concert will explore the wide-reaching influences that have shaped McFerrin’s unprecedented musical approach and will feature new arrangements by members of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. On September 13, following the opening night concert, the organization will open its doors to the public for a post-concert celebration featuring a cash bar and a free performance by drummer Bryan Carter and his band in The Atrium.

As part of the opening night events, Jazz at Lincoln Center will unveil a visual art exhibition depicting the origins and development of the world’s largest cultural institution devoted exclusively to jazz. The exhibition, featuring works installed throughout Frederick P. Rose Hall, will be open to the public during the entire season.


Jazz at Lincoln Center’s new season celebrates the organization’s range and depth of programming and education initiatives that have reached millions of people around the world for 25 years. Click here for a complete schedule of Jazz at Lincoln Center’s 25th Anniversary season concerts and events

Where:

Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Frederick P. Rose Hall is located in the Time Warner Center in New York, New York.

Tickets:


Ticket prices for the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis and Bobby McFerrin are $10, $30, $50, $75, $95 or $120 dependent upon seating section.

Note: Hot Seats, $10 orchestra seats for each Rose Theater performance (excluding Jazz For Young People concerts), are available for purchase to the general public on the Wednesday of each performance week.Subject to availability.

Hot Seats are available only by walk up at the Box Office, maximum of two per person.

Watch Wynton Marsalis Quintet with Lucky Peterson live from Jazz in Marciac

Missed our first Marciac LIVESTREAM on July 31st?

Well, you’re in luck. Join the Wynton Marsalis Quintet, with special guest Lucky Peterson LIVE this Saturday.

Date: Saturday, August 4, 2012

Time: 5pm (EST); 11pm (CEST); 2pm (PST)

Where to watch: http://new.livestream.com/wyntonmarsalislive/luckypeterson

Musicians: Wynton Marsalis, trumpet; Walter Blanding, saxophones; Dan Nimmer, piano; Ali Jackson Jr., drums; Carlos Henriquez, bass; Lucky Peterson, guitar, organ, vocals

Don’t forgot to check out The Marciac Suite CD

This recording captures the varied, bracing flavors of Marciac’s paté (including the duck that got away), its armagnac, its striking sunflower fields and, most of all, the hospitality and soulfulness of its people. Get yours today

SPECIAL OFFER

Limited Edition Wynton Marsalis T-Shirt

Commemorate the Mariac Jazz Festival with this Limited Edition Wynton Marsalis t-shirt. Printed on a black 100% cotton t-shirt, the front design includes three photos and Wynton’s personal signature while the back captures the iconic sunflowers that carpet the fields of Southern France. A unique commemorative item that will not be found anywhere else.

$19.99 USD plus shipping and handling (processing through PayPal). Limited quantities available – secure yours today.

Offer Expires August 31, 2012, orders ship September 1, 2012.

Watch “Swing Symphony” LIVE from Marciac, France

Join Wynton, and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra in Marciac France for a LIVE performance from the comfort of your living room. They will be performing Swing Symphony with Orchestre National du Capitole de Toulouse, under the direction of Wayne Marshall. No passport required!

When: Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Time: 11pm (CEST); 5pm (EST); 2pm (PST)

Where to watch: http://new.livestream.com/wyntonmarsalis/MarciacSwingSymphony

Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra:

Wynton Marsalis, trumpet; Ryan Kisor, trumpet; Marcus Printup, trumpet; Kenny Rampton, trumpet; Vincent R. Gardner, trombone; Elliot Mason, trombone; Chris Crenshaw, trombone; Sherman Irby, alto saxophone; Ted Nash, alto and soprano saxophones, clarinet; Walter Blanding, tenor and soprano saxophones, clarinet; Victor Goines, tenor and soprano saxophones, Bb clarinet, bass clarinet; Tony Lustig, saxophone, bass clarinet; Dan Nimmer, piano; Carlos Henriquez, bass; Ali Jackson, drums

Are you missing The Marciac Suite from your music library? Celebrate midsummer in the town at the heart of Jazz in Marciac

Written for his septet, the suite captures the varied, bracing flavors of Marciac’s paté (including the duck that got away), its armagnac, its striking sunflower fields and, most of all, the hospitality and soulfulness of its people. Get yours today

The Telegraph: Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra/Congo Square, Barbican, review

Wynton Marsalis, the celebrated American trumpeter, composer and band-leader, likes to think big. For him jazz is virtuoso musicality, uproarious enjoyment, spiritual edification and cultural memory, all rolled into one. To fulfil that vision he’s created several ambitious multi-movement suites for the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra.

One of them, Congo Square, opened the orchestra’s current residency at the Barbican. The piece evokes the slave songs that took place in Congo Square in New Orleans centuries ago, and refracts them through the jazz that those songs eventually spawned. It was jointly created over many years by Marsalis and Yacub Addy, a Ghanaian long-resident in New York. Addy was on stage for this performance with his singing percussionist group Odadaa!

Together the two bands were spectacular. On one side, the serried ranks of the JLCO, impeccably turned out in cream suits and colour-coordinated ties. On the other, the nine members of Odadaa! in colourful cotton smocks and hats, and surrounded by exotic percussion: a hammock-style xylophone, bells struck with mallets, and drums of every shape and size.

You’d think these two worlds would be like oil and water. And occasionally the composers made them seem exactly that, by leading a joyous Ghanaian number to its climax – hymn-like harmonies from the voices soaring over a seething tumult of polyrhythms in the drums – and rudely cutting it off with an uproarious swing number from the band. It was a tremendous jolt, which produced yelps of delight from the packed audience.

But more often it was a question of subtle give-and-take. The ancient African principle of call-and-response was much in evidence, used with infectious wit. A shouted phrase from the singers on the Ghanaian side might be answered by a whooping trombone phrase on the right. Sometimes the entire orchestra would croon softly in response to a single voice from the left, in delicious colours of muted brass and piccolo. In the more rhythmicised numbers, one was aware of Ghanaian syncopations pushing against the subtly different form of syncopation in jazz, each accommodating the other.

Source: The Telegraph

Evening Standard: Congo Square: Wynton Marsalis & the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, Barbican Hall

Congo Square is a quiet spot in north-central New Orleans, near Louis Armstrong Park. Tourists take pictures of Louis’s statue there before lunching in the French Quarter. Little over a century earlier, however, it had a very different function.

Slaves flocked there from miles around on a Sunday to speak the languages, play the drums and dance the dances of their West African homeland. Nobody is more aware of this spot’s deep historical, musical and sociological significance than Wynton Marsalis, the proud son of New Orleans who leads New York’s finest jazz repertory orchestra. Last night the trumpet virtuoso opened a fortnight’s residency at the Barbican with his latest work, Congo Square, a fantastic orchestral suite that filled the platform with musicians.

On stage left, in colourful tribal robes, were the nine African singers and hand-drummers of Ghanaian master-drummer Yacub Addy, the suite’s co-composer. At stage right, in snappy business suits, the 16-piece city slickers of the LCJO. The result was an orgy of cross-cultural rhythms as America’s present met its African past. Five stars? Yes, because a musical marriage as meaningful as this has never been realised before. Outstanding solos came from tenorist Walter Blanding, flautist Ted Nash, pianist Dan Nimmer, and trumpeters Marcus Printup, Kenny Rampton (ex-Count Basie) and London-based Jay Phelps, guesting nervelessly.

On the African side the drum interplay had magical control and their diva Imani Gonzales’s one vocal was charming. Wynton spent the evening conducting. His first solo was not until after the interval and was masterly, but the arrangements were the real meat of an exhilarating evening. Time and again those expert teams tossed the ball to and fro without dropping a beat.

This month’s residency includes workshops, masterclasses and more Marsalis concerts, featuring the world premiere of his Abyssinian Mass, with 60-voice choir; A Midsummer Night’s Swing Dance; and an evolutional Swing Symphony in which the LCJO meets the LSO conducted by Sir Simon Rattle. But last night’s triumph won’t be easy to match.

Source: “Evening Standard”: http://www.standard.co.uk/arts/music/...

Jazz Journal: Wynton Marsalis/Congo Square

Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz At Lincoln Center Orchestra opened their 2012 residency at London’s Barbican Centre yesterday evening with a superb performance that celebrated the very birth of jazz in company with Ghanian drummer Yacub Addy and the band Odadaa!

Congo Square was the public space in New Orleans where African slaves gathered on Sunday afternoons to dance and play, and was the only place in the USA where they could gather freely and celebrate their own music and culture. Inspired by this activity between the mid-1700s and the late 1800s, Marsalis and Ghanaian drum master Yacub Addy’s two-hour suite Congo Square celebrates the joy of that music and marks its influence on the jazz that followed.

A feast for the eye as much as the ear, the concert presented a neat visual history of jazz development as well, juxtaposing the brilliant, free-flowing coloured robes of the African ensemble Odadaa! with the suited and booted JLCO in their big band lineup. It was a snapshot of how the music was shaped by one culture meeting another and the music too delivered this message powerfully.

Integrating elements of gospel (which showed Marsalis as an accomplished vocalist in the opening minutes of the concert) with traditional African drumming, storytelling through song and a range of big band swing arrangements that offered shades of the Ellington and Basie big bands, Congo Square felt occasionally a little disjointed as a concept to sustain over 120 minutes, but when it worked, it worked supremely well.

If the first half was rousing in its scope and breadth of sound, the second half of the concert lifted the spirits to new heights. An impressive 15-minute sequence of synchronised drumming from Yacub Addy and Odadaa! became hypnotic with its pulse and energy; a beautiful ballad like something Billie Holiday would croon soothed and seduced, leading the audience towards the finale.

A thunderous piece called War fully integrated the sound of big band jazz with furious African drumming, then the mood was tempered with Peace before everyone involved in the evening’s performance slowly walked off stage, playing as they went, carrying the fading sounds of Congo Square with them, and bringing the capacity audience to its feet with enthusiastic applause.

With future concerts in July featuring an Abyssinian Mass, an Afro-Cuban Fiesta and the UK première performance of his Swing Symphony (Symphony No 3), Marsalis can’t be accused of a narrow focus in his range of projects for this current residency. Congo Square was an ideal opener, celebrating the birthplace of jazz in the 20th century, and delivering some magnificent sounds and sights along the way.

Source: Jazz Journal

The Guardian: Wynton Marsalis with JLCO and Odadaa” at Barbican

Wynton Marsalis is famously resistant to notions of jazz-fusion. He has denounced attempts to dilute jazz by using funk or rock rhythms, always loudly asserting the primacy of swing in the jazz tradition. African rhythms, however, are rather more problematic for him. These rhythms do not swing in the traditional sense: they do not use swung quavers. Musicologically, they’re as far from his notion of jazz as, say, heavy metal. Yet they are undeniably part of jazz’s DNA.

The Congo Square project, which kicks off a mammoth series of Lincoln Center events at the Barbican, sees Marsalis confront this paradox. It’s a collaboration between a jazz ensemble and an African drum troupe, named after the only square in New Orleans where slaves were allowed freely to play their own instruments. Marsalis acknowledges it has been one of his most difficult musical challenges, taking him far out of his comfort zone.

The nine members of Yacub Addy’s Ghanaian outfit Odadaa! (all colourful dashikis and hausa hats) share the stage with Marsalis’s 15-piece orchestra (all pale Brooks Bros suits and tan brogues). For much of the concert, however, they seem oblivious to each other. Each piece starts with the Ghanaians hollering call-and-response chants while bashing out fiendishly complicated rhythms, sometimes in arcane time signatures (7/4, 12/8). Just when you think the jazz musicians are about to join in, the Africans stop and Marsalis’s band start playing an unrelated piece of music, reverting to a straight, Nelson Riddle-style 4/4 swing rhythm. If it’s supposed to be a musical conversation, it’s one in which neither side seem to be listening.

Occasionally, as the concert progresses, the two sides of the stage converge. Just before the interval, two members of Odadaa! superimpose two complex cowbell patterns upon each other – one in 6/8, the other in 4/4 – and the jazz band starts riffing over this polyrhythm. Later there are hints at the spacier afro-jazz explorations of Pharoah Sanders or Randy Weston. But usually the attempts at unity see the jazz band honking in a fairly rudimentary manner over the African rhythms: the Lincoln Center’s fine soloists rarely let rip in the way they often do over swing rhythms.

As an investigation of jazz’s African roots, it’s a failure, albeit a fascinating and entertaining one. It also reminds us that, were our ancestors as fusion-phobic as Marsalis, jazz would never have existed in the first place.

Source: The Guardian

Heat combo: When Wynton Marsalis met Yacub Addy

We first saw Wynton Marsalis on television soloing with a symphony orchestra in 1981. The announcer said he came from New Orleans. “I’m going to work with this man,” my husband Yacub Addy said.

I was surprised because Yacub is a traditional Ghanaian drummer of the Ga ethnic group. I couldn’t visualise him working with this classically trained trumpeter, although Wynton is known for jazz, which Yacub loved since he was a teenager in Ghana, dancing to American big band hits on the streets of Accra. His music led him from Ghana to Europe and America, where in 1982, as an artist and manager team, we created his current Ghanaian ensemble Odadaa!.

In 1984 Odadaa! first appeared at the New Orleans jazz festival. Yacub wanted to visit New Orleans since he heard Louis Armstrong talk about his hometown during his visits to Accra in 1953 and 56. We visited Congo Square, an open area in Louis Armstrong Park outside the French Quarter, where we were told African slaves used to play on Sunday afternoons. “What rhythm did the slaves play here?” Yacub asked. No one could tell him.

From the early 1700s to the mid-1800s, Congo Square was the only place in America where African slaves and free-people were allowed to perform their own music and dance. It was because of these regular Sunday afternoon gatherings that African music combined with European music in New Orleans to become the foundation of a line of American musics – jazz, blues, R&B, soul, funk, hip-hop, and so on.

In January 1993, more than a decade after we had seen him on television, Yacub and I met Wynton in the dressings rooms at President Clinton’s Inaugural Festival on the Washington Mall. The two musicians liked each other immediately and Yacub told him they would work together, even though Wynton was unfamiliar with African music.

In 2003 Wynton and Yacub did their first project, a series of original works by Yacub, Wynton, Coltrane and Ellington, titled Africa Jazz, performed by Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra (JLCO) and Odadaa!. Both artists discovered how difficult it is to combine their two groups. Their musical forms share elements of syncopation and improvisation, but have very different timing and structure: JLCO performs from sheet music; Odadaa! plays by ear and from memory.

“What music did the slaves play in Congo Square?” Yacub asked when Wynton first arrived at our home to begin working on Africa Jazz. He said no one really knows, but he was sure they could capture that spirit. Their second and significantly larger project, Congo Square, was born.

Jazz at Lincoln Center announced the premiere would take place in Congo Square during the French Quarter festival in April 2006, and four days later, Hurricane Katrina struck. We were all devastated, and Wynton was consumed organising a concert to raise funds for the musicians affected. When it was complete, we decided we would go ahead with the Congo Square premiere.

They decided upon universal themes dealing with the family and the two basic human conditions of peace and war. Yacub contributed the traditional and original works for each theme, taught Wynton the bell patterns on which each rhythm is based, how the bell combines with the drums, and where the other instruments come in. Wynton responded with composition and orchestrations that included concepts Yacub raised of extended family, spirituality, and the all-important bell patterns. They included two pieces from Africa Jazz, which evolved after considerable work into “Ring Shout” and “Place Congo”.

Yacub added the Ga processional Kolomashi, created as protest music during Ghana’s independence struggle, to Wynton’s New Orleans second-line parade music for the opening “Ring Shout”. Wynton’s lyrics express protest at the treatment of the community during Katrina.

Bamai is a difficult rhythm that comes from Yacub’s long-deceased father’s medicine music Ga Akong, played to “call” one of the spirits or jinn that would embody him in trance. In the first rehearsal for Africa Jazz, the idea to combine it with Wynton’s new orchestral piece came immediately to Yacub, who started playing the master or lead drum part on the very instrument used by his father’s drummers all those years ago – a white obrenten drum that is older than he is. It took years before Wynton understood what Yacub was doing. The result is one of my favourite parts of Congo Square.

Through the enormous efforts of many, nine months after Katrina, the vision became a reality. On a Sunday afternoon, in April 2006, a traditional second-line parade through the streets of the historic Treme neighborhood drew a jammin’ local crowd into Congo Square for the performance on a stage constructed for the occasion. Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra and Odadaa! played together like family. With survivors of Katrina and the spirits of our ancestors, we celebrated our common heritage.

Audiences of all kinds celebrated Congo Square’s beauty and power in 25 concerts through the US and Canada, including the Montreal jazz festival, and Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York. A late-night recording of the concert in JALC’s Rose Hall was released as a 2-CD set, currently available on iTunes.

Yacub, Wynton and all the artists, love playing this piece – there’s nothing like it. And we’re happy London audiences will have the opportunity to experience the jubilant, dynamic, swingin’ Congo Square.

Source: The Guardian