Jazz Articles about Wynton Marsalis

Wynton Marsalis / LCJO at the Kimmel Center: December 11, 2005

by Victor L. Schermer
December 25, 2005

Wynton Marsalis / Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra Kimmel Center, Philadelphia, PA December 11, 2005

On this wintry Sunday evening, three musical phenomena converged at the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia: Wynton Marsalis, The Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra (hereinafter “LCJO ), and “The Harlem Nutcracker, a composition of Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn based on Tchaikowsky's famed “Nutcracker Suite. The result was a highly charged and delightful evening of big band music-making. Let's take them one ...

Wynton Marsalis: Live at the House of Tribes

by Greg Thomas
December 12, 2005

The most exhilarating live date by Marsalis since his mammoth seven-CD release Live at the Village Vanguard in 1999, Live at the House of Tribes is a brilliant blowing session captured in 2002 at a tiny club in New York's Lower East Side that he frequents with a small group every winter. The audience of just fifty or so is heard right through, co-signing the instrumental declarations and exclamations of the leader, his long-time partner in swing, ...

Wynton Marsalis: Live at the House of Tribes

by Mark F. Turner
August 27, 2005

The undeniable fact about trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, whether you're a fan or critic, is that he plays as if every note is his last-- with purpose, verve, and total commitment. This consummate energy is documented on this new live release which was recorded in December 2002 at the House of Tribes on New York's Lower East Side. The elements for the recording were just right with a seasoned band, swinging music, and an enthusiastic crowd of jazz fans.

The Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra: A Love Supreme

by Jack Bowers
February 8, 2005

I have to start this review with a confession. I've never heard John Coltrane's original recording of A Love Supreme. Sorry; Trane and I parted ways after some of his earlier successes ( Blue Train, Settin' the Pace, Giant Steps, My Favorite Things ), so I must appraise the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra's re-creation of the saxophonist's “monumental work" strictly on its own merits. As big band jazz goes, this is pretty good, thematically engaging and musically ...

Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra: A Love Supreme

by Jim Santella
February 1, 2005

Getting into the spirit of John Coltrane's seminal suite of reverential devotion, the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra explores classic jazz from an emotional angle. They swing, and they move cohesively with a big band's full sense of itself; however, the orchestra does not succeed fully in bringing the kind of emotional feeling to the forum that Coltrane had intended. The band is more interested in pursuing its rhythmic groove and maintaining its balanced orchestration than in creating emotional impact.

Wynton Marsalis: Unforgivable Blackness

by Riel Lazarus
January 12, 2005

Who better to invoke the past in tune than Wynton Marsalis? After all, the stick-in-the-mud trumpet virtuoso reveres the days of yore as few others playing today, proffering them nightly before sellout crowds the world round. So when the gig came up to score Ken Burns' new documentary, Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson , the choice was simple, almost ordained. As evidenced by the title, boxer Jack Johnson's life was a dervish of accomplishment ...

Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra featuring Wynton Marsalis: A Love Supreme

by John Kelman
January 7, 2005

In the last year there's been a resurgence of interest in John Coltrane's epochal A Love Supreme. First saxophonist Branford Marsalis' quartet released a live DVD with an incendiary version of the suite, demonstrating with the same instrumentation how an ensemble could be reverent without being imitative, capturing the essence of the piece without sounding like a weak copy. Now brother Wynton has addressed the piece, reinterpreting it in a larger context with the Lincoln Center Jazz ...