Since the program launched with a series of concerts in 1987, it has become a major force in New York and beyond. Marsalis’s leadership of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra has been a remarkable achievement, the focus of his artistic career. On The Fifties: A Prism, a 2020 album by the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, the ensemble gets into a kind of big band version of Ornette Coleman’s bent blues style on “Pursuit Of The New Thing,” and Marsalis never seems lost. He is not an avant-gardist in spirit himself, not even a little, but he speaks enough of that language to get by when necessary. That mention of Don Cherry is a surprise, but if you dig deep enough into Marsalis’s discography, there are occasional nods to the avant-garde. And anyway, Marsalis himself put up some at least token resistance to being defined as a strict aesthetic conservative, telling Crouch, “What I’m trying to do is come up to the standards all of these trumpet giants have set - Armstrong, Gillespie, Navarro, Brown, Miles, Freddie Hubbard, and Don Cherry. Meanwhile, I’ve been able to come up with 10-15 records a month worth sharing with you all for five years straight. ![]() “His arrival, and what it signals, is especially important because there has been - as there always is - talk about the decline of jazz, and more than a few have sworn they’ve seen the art gurgling on its deathbed.” Now, you could argue that the four most important words in that sentence are “as there always is.” People are forever asserting that jazz is dead. The liner notes, by Stanley Crouch, helped drive home the message. In between, though, were four tracks on which the Marsalis brothers went to jazz fantasy camp, fronting Miles Davis’s 1965-68 rhythm section of pianist Herbie Hancock, bassist Ron Carter, and drummer Tony Williams and even covered “R.J.” from Davis’s E.S.P. It opened with two tracks featuring players his own age - his older brother Branford on tenor sax, Kenny Kirkland on piano, Clarence Seay on bass and Jeff “Tain” Watts on drums - and ended with another performance by that band, albeit with Charles Fambrough stepping into the bass position. His self-titled debut album, released in January 1982, was intended to certify him, right out of the gate, as the new crown prince of acoustic jazz as it was meant to be played, the living link between the glorious past and the promising future. So now I’m thinking about Wynton Marsalis. ![]() ![]() I probably wouldn’t have given it a whole lot of thought, but Jazz at Lincoln Center presented three nights of concerts from November 18-20, including a retrospective of music from the last 40 years of his career and his first small group performances in the venue’s Rose Theater in a decade. That’s a big life milestone for anybody, so congratulations to him for making it, particularly in an era when a lot of famous Black musicians have died in middle age if not earlier. Wynton Marsalis turned 60 last month, on October 18.
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