Wynton Marsalis

From Free net encyclopedia

Image:Wynton Marsalis.jpgWynton Marsalis (born October 18, 1961) is an American trumpeter and composer.

He is among the most prominent jazz musicians of the modern era, and by far the best-known African-American instrumentalist in classical music.

Marsalis has made his reputation with a combination of skill in jazz performance and composition; a sophisticated, yet earthy and hip personal style; an impressive knowledge of jazz and jazz history; and a virtuosity in classical trumpet. As of 2006, he has made 16 classical and more than 30 jazz recordings, and has been awarded nine Grammys, in both genres.

Contents

[edit]

Biography

Wynton was born in New Orleans, Louisiana on October 18, 1961 to Dolores and Ellis Marsalis. He was the second of six sons, one of whom is autistic. Ellis, a music teacher, was a longtime fixture on the New Orleans jazz scene, and several of Wynton's brothers are also notable musicians; saxophonist Branford Marsalis is probably as well known as Wynton.

At an early age Wynton exhibited seriousness about study, an aptitude for music and a desire to contribute to American culture. At age 8 he performed traditional New Orleans music in the Fairview Baptist Church band led by legendary banjoist, Danny Barker. At 14 he was invited to perform with the New Orleans Philharmonic. During high school Wynton was a member of the New Orleans Symphony Brass Quintet, New Orleans Community Concert Band, New Orleans Youth Orchestra, New Orleans Symphony and on weekends he performed in a jazz band as well as in the popular local funk band, the Creators.

At age 17, Marsalis became the youngest musician ever to be admitted to Tanglewood's Berkshire Music Center. Despite his youth, he was awarded the school's prestigious Harvey Shapiro Award for outstanding brass student. When Wynton moved to New York City to attend the Juilliard School of Music in 1978 and began to pick up gigs around town, his talent garnered much attention.

Two years later (in 1980) he joined the Jazz Messengers to study under master drummer and bandleader, Art Blakey. It was in Blakey's band that Marsalis learned the relationship between jazz and democracy: Blakey would often say, "No America, no jazz!" It was from Blakey that Marsalis acquired his concept for bandleading and for bringing intensity to each and every performance. In the years to follow, Marsalis was invited to perform with Sarah Vaughan, Dizzy Gillespie, Harry Edison, Clark Terry, Sonny Rollins, and many other jazz legends.

Marsalis eventually assembled his own band and hit the road, performing over 120 concerts every year for ten consecutive years. His objective was to learn how to play, and to comprehend how best give to his audience. During these years, Marsalis's strong belief in jazz and his vision for the music helped revitalize the art form. Through an exhaustive series of performances, lectures, and music workshops, Marsalis rekindled widespread interest in an art form that had been largely abandoned and redefined out of what he saw as its artistic substance. Marsalis invested his creative energy in the art of jazz and would not be compromised by financial opportunity or critical pressure. Additionally, he garnered recognition for the older generation of jazz musicians and prompted the re-issuance of jazz catalog by record companies worldwide. A quick glance at the better known jazz musicians today reveals many students of Marsalis' workshops: James Carter, Christian McBride, Roy Hargrove, Harry Connick Jr., Nicholas Payton, Eric Reed and Eric Lewis to name a few.

Not content to focus solely on his musicianship, Marsalis devoted equal time to developing his compositional skills. The dance community quickly embraced his works, and he received commissions to create major compositions for Garth Fagan Dance, Peter Martins at the New York City Ballet, Twyla Tharp for the American Ballet Theatre, and for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre.

Marsalis collaborated with the Lincoln Center Chamber Music Society in 1995 to compose the string quartet, At The Octroon Balls, and again in 1998 to create a response to Stravinsky's A Soldier's Tale with his composition, A Fiddler's Tale.

In 1997 he became the first jazz musician to win the Pulitzer Prize in music, for his epic oratorio, Blood on the Fields, on the subject of slavery.

[edit]

Musical Acomplishments

As a composer and performer, Marsalis is also represented on a quartet of Sony Classical releases, At the Octoroon Balls: String Quartet No. 1, A Fiddler's Tale, Reel Time and Sweet Release and Ghost Story: Two More Ballets by Wynton Marsalis. All are volumes of an eight-CD series, titled "Swinging Into The 21st", that is an unprecedented set of albums released in the past year featuring a remarkable scope of original compositions and standards, from jazz to classical to ballet, by composers from Jelly Roll Morton to Stravinsky to Monk, in addition to Marsalis.

At the Octoroon Balls features the world-premiere recording of Marsalis' first string quartet, performed by the Orion Quartet. The work was commissioned by Lincoln Center, and its premiere by the Orion Quartet in 1995 was presented in conjunction with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. A Fiddler's Tale, also commissioned by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center for MARSALIS/STRAVINSKY, a joint project of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and Jazz At Lincoln Center, is work with narration about a musician who sells her soul to a record producer. It was premiered on April 23, 1998, at Hill Auditorium in Ann Arbor, Michigan. A version without narration was included on the album At the Octoroon Balls: String Quartet No. 1. Reeltime is Marsalis' score for the acclaimed John Singleton film Rosewood. This original music, featuring vocal performances by best-selling artists Cassandra Wilson and Shirley Caesar, was never used in the film and is available here for the first time. Sweet Release and Ghost Story offers another world premiere recording of two original ballet scores by Marsalis, written for and premiered by the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and the Zhong Mei Dance Company, both in New York City.

As an exclusive classical artist for Sony Classical, Marsalis has won critical acclaim for the recording In Gabriel's Garden (SK/ST 66244), featuring Baroque music for trumpet and orchestra. It includes performances of Bach's Brandenburg Concerto no. 2 and Mouret's Rondeau, a video of which has been adopted as the new theme for PBS's Masterpiece Theatre. The San Francisco Examiner wrote, "Marsalis continues to define great musicmaking…[the pieces] are all articulated with dazzling clarity and enthusiasm." The album features the English Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Anthony Newman, and was produced by Steven Epstein.

[edit]

Controversy

Marsalis's strongly held views regarding the roots of jazz and its development have generated some negative appraisals from jazz critics and fellow musicians.

Well-known critic Scott Yanow praises Marsalis's talent, but has questioned his "selective knowledge of jazz history (considering post-1965 avant-garde playing to be outside of jazz and 1970s fusion to be barren)."[1] Trumpeter Lester Bowie opined of Marsalis's traditionalism, "If you retread what's gone before, even if it sounds like jazz, it could be anathema to the spirit of jazz." [2] In his 1997 book Blue: The Murder of Jazz (ISBN 0-312-16785-7) Eric Nisenson argues that Marsalis's focus on a narrow portion of jazz's past is stifling the music's growth and preventing any further innovation.

Pierre Sprey (president of jazz record company Mapelshade Records) declares that "When Marsalis was 19 he was a fine jazz trumpeter ... But he was getting his ass kicked every night in Art Blakey's band. I don't think he could keep up. And finally he retreated to safe waters. He's a good classical trumpeter and thus he sees jazz as being a classical Music. He has no clue what's going on now."[3]

Miles Davis stated that Marsalis was "a nice young man, only confused" [4]; Davis was also bothered by what he saw as Columbia Records promotion of Marsalis's music rather than his own, and this was a factor in Davis's departure from Columbia after several decades.

Down Beat magazine's online website says of Marsalis:

For many, Wynton Marsalis saved pure jazz from a morass of pop fusion and noise. Others contend that the trumpeter instilled a regressive notion of the jazz tradition. This debate, not to mention his instrumental proficiency and compositional ambition, has made him one of the most prominent and controversial jazz musicians of the '80s and '90s. [5]
[edit]

Awards and recognitions

Marsalis is an Eagle Scout <ref>Template:Cite web</ref>. He has been awarded the 2005 National Medal of Arts of the United States, the Grand Prix du Disque of the Charles Cros Academy and the Edison Award of the Netherlands, and was elected an honorary member of the Royal Academy of Music in Britain. He has received honorary doctorate degrees from Amherst College and Rutgers University in May 1997, in addition to various recognitions by Brandeis University, Brown University, Columbia University, Johns Hopkins University, the Manhattan School of Music, Princeton University, the University of Miami and Yale University.

Marsalis has toured 30 countries on six continents, and nearly five million copies of his recordings have been sold worldwide.

Pulitzer Prize for Music,
Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Album, Individual or Group 
Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Soloist(s) Performance (with orchestra) 
Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Solo 
Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album for Children 
[edit]

Discography

2005: Live at the House of Tribes

2004: The Magic Hour - Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson

2003: Mark O'Connor's Hot Swing Trio: In Full Swing

2002: All Rise - Trumpet Concertos - Classic Kathleen Battle: A Portrait

2001: Classical Hits - Popular Songs: The Best Of Wynton Marsalis

2000: The London Concert

1999: Reeltime - Mr. Jelly Lord - Standard Time Vol. 6 - Listen to the Storyteller - Sweet Release and Ghost Story: Two More Ballets by Wynton Marsalis - At the Octoroon Balls - String Quartet No. 1; A Fiddler's Tale Suite - Franz Joseph Haydn - Los Elefantes (with Arturo Sandoval) - Big Train|The Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra - Marsalis Plays Monk - Standard Time Vol. 4 -

1998: Classic Wynton - The Midnight Blues Standard Time Vol. 5

1997: Liberty! - Jump Start and Jazz - Blood On The Fields

1996: In Gabriel's Garden

1995: Why Toes Tap: Marsalis on Rhythm - Listening for Clues: Marsalis on Form - Tackling the Monster: Marsalis on Practice (VHS) - Sousa to Satchmo: Marsalis on the Jazz Band - Greatest Hits: Baroque - Joe Cool's Blues (with Ellis Marsalis)

1994: In This House, On This Morning - Greatest Hits: Handel

1993: On the Twentieth Century…: Hindemith, Poulenc, Bernstein, Ravel

1992: Baroque Duet - with Kathleen Battle


1992: Concert for Planet Earth - Blue Interlude - BAROQUE DUET - A film by Susan Froemke * Peter Gelb * Albert Maysles * Pat Jaffe

1991: Levee Low Moan Soul Gestures In Southern Blue Vol. 3 - Uptown Ruler Soul Gestures In Southern Blue Vol. 2 - Thick In The South - Soul Gestures In Southern Blue Vol. 1 - Standard Time Vol. 2: Intimacy Calling

1990: Tune In Tomorrow... The Original Soundtrack - Standard Time Vol. 3: The Resolution Of Romance

1989: COPLAND/VAUGHAN WILLIAMS/HINDEMITH WYNTON MARSALIS, GUEST SOLOIST Crescent City Christmas Card - The Majesty Of The Blues

1988: Best of Wynton Marsalis - The Wynton Marsalis Quartet Live At Blues Alley - Portrait of Wynton Marsalis - Baroque Music for Trumpets

1987: Marsalis Standard Time - Volume I - Carnaval

1986: Tomasi, Jolivet: Trumpet Concertos; more

1985: J Mood

1984: Purcell, Handel, Torelli, more: Trumpet Concertos - Haydn: Three Favorite Concertos — Cello, Violin & Trumpet Concertos

1983: Haydn, L. Mozart, Hummel: Trumpet Concertos

1982: Fathers and Sons Columbia Records # FC 37972.

[edit]

See also

Template:Wikiquote

[edit]

Samples

[edit]

External links

[edit]

References

The Music of Black Americans: A History. Eileen Southern. W. W. Norton & Company; 3rd edition. ISBN 0393971414

[edit]

Footnotes

<references/>de:Wynton Marsalis es:Wynton Marsalis fr:Wynton Marsalis nl:Wynton Marsalis fi:Wynton Marsalis sv:Wynton Marsalis

Retrieved from "http://www.netipedia.com/index.php/Wynton_Marsalis"