Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra will take the stage one more time this week at 8:15 p.m. tonight in the Amphitheater for a final performance as part of the Week Nine theme “Rising Together: Our Century of Creativity and Collaboration with Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra.”
While the JLCO took the Amp stage Wednesday and Thursday evenings alongside the Buffalo Philharmonic Chorus and the Music School Festival Orchestra, under the baton of artistic director of the School of Music and conductor of the MSFO Timothy Muffitt to perform Marsalis’ composition “All Rise,” tonight’s performance is a celebration of prolific jazz legend Duke Ellington.
For Deborah Sunya Moore, tonight’s concert is a celebration of jazz and creativity as well as a way to commemorate the sesquicentennial season of the Institution in collaboration with Marsalis.
“On Friday, that’s when we let down our hair and celebrate,” said Moore, the Institution’s chief program officer.
Tonight’s performance, “Duke Ellington at 125,” is the last in the series of collaborations this week and is a commemoration of Ellington’s 125th birthday. The concert will feature a selection of Ellington’s work spanning his career as a musician. Marsalis and the JLCO have a long history of celebrating Ellington’s work and creative legacy. In an interview with Forbes, Marsalis spoke about the legacy of Ellington, deeming him “the highest level of what has come out of the United States of America.”
In a 1999 article for The New York Times, Marsalis wrote about the legacy of Ellington in commemoration of Ellington’s 100th birthday. He described Ellington’s music as a “music that celebrates freedom of expression, freedom of choice. That’s why we love it. It wants us to love being ourselves and to revel in the majesty of life.”
“Duke’s artistic mantra was integrate, integrate, integrate,” Marsalis wrote. “He blended diverse cultural and musical ideas because he understood not only what the country was, but also what it could become.”
Marsalis posited in the article that while Ellington was making music for and about the people of his era, other composers were distancing themselves from the “vibrancy of 20th-century life.” He said much other work from the time period is rather gloomy and he suggested the “horrors of the modern age” may have been too much for them.
“This is not true of Duke Ellington, who learned an important lesson from the blues: the greatest joy is earned in the hardest times,” Marsalis wrote. “Duke knew that truly great art, for all its virtuosity and complexity, also had to be simple and direct.”
“He rose above a basic misunderstanding common to much of modern art: that abstraction is the only way to achieve an up-to-date statement. Duke’s art, like Picasso’s, teaches us that abstraction is only one way, not the way. Duke was more interested in your liking his music than in your understanding it.”
