Marsalis conducts the best of jazz

By Brian Privett
Arts Editor

Jazz living legend Wynton Marsalis will be bringing big band jazz back to Lexington tonight, conducting the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra through some of the best of classic jazz songs.

The Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra will be performing this evening at the Otis A. Singletary Center at 8. Tickets run $12 for students, $17.50 for faculty and staff and $22.50 for the general public.

The Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra started out as a summer concert series in 1987, with the notion of educating and informing the American public about jazz, a purely American form of music.

Marsalis' association with the Lincoln Center started with this series and he has since moved up to the title of Artistic Director of the Center.

Marsalis was born in New Orleans, where he started to be serious about studying trumpet at the age of 12, playing in marching bands, funk bands and classical youth orchestras.

Out of high school, Marsalis entered the Juilliard School in New York City at the age of 18 and quickly became the famous performance school's top trumpet student.

Then just as quickly as Marsalis' successes came at Juilliard, the same year he stepped out into the spotlight of modern jazz, landing a role with Art Blakely and the Jazz Messengers and began his recording career in 1982, at the tender age of 21.

It has been all uphill since then for Marsalis, who has surpassed all other modern jazz musicians in popularity and awards. He has produced a catalogue of albums and won eight Grammy Awards.

Marsalis has become a outspoken voice in the arts and music education over the past few years, trying to re-introduce Americans to jazz. He has also influenced the modern jazz scene by causing a resurgence of older jazz, like be-bop and big band sounds.

Even though Marsalis overshadows the rest of the members of the Orchestra, all the players are big time and big names. Names like Wess Anderson on sax, Cyrus Chesnut on piano and Ryan Kisor on trumpet stand out as some of the best of modern jazz musicians.

Anderson achieved much acclaim after the release of his first album last year, Warmdaddy in the Garden of Swing and has toured with Marsalis and his band and then with the Wynton Marsalis Septet.

Randall Haywood, trumpet, met Marsalis at age 13 when Wynton invited him to play on a PBS series called, "Marsalis on Music." Since then, Haywood has made it to the ripe age of 16 and plays with the Lincoln Jazz Center Orchestra when not in high school in Jacksonville, Fla.

Under the direction of Marsalis, the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra has not only become a source of influence and has achieved critical praise, but popular success as well.

The group has played everywhere from Japan to the Monterey Jazz Festival and regularly plays towns and cities all over the United States.

The New York Times has said the Orchestra is "... the right musicians playing the right music the right way" and by the Washington Post as "... extraordinarily cohesive and relaxed ... sounds as though it played together every day."

The group's popularity may stem from its songbook, which includes works of some of the most well-known jazz musicians, like Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Thelonius Monk and Jelly Roll Morton.

The Lincoln Center hopes that its jazz program, along with the Orchestra, will help establish jazz as a fine art and specify a jazz canon, or a group of songs that stand out as exemplary jazz.

Tickets are still available for tonight's show, but on a very limited basis. Sponsors, the Student Activities Board, are expecting the show to sell out and said that the public reaction has been very good every since the announcement of the concert.