Our video spotlight shines this week on trumpeter Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, who will be in St. Louis on Saturday, March 13 to perform at the Sheldon Concert Hall. The JaLCO functions as the house band for the jazz program at NYC's Lincoln Center, and as such, they're called upon to perform a wide variety of music, from classic big band arrangements drawn from the catalogs of Basie, Ellington and others to original compositions.
Today's clips span more than a dozen years of the JaLCO's history while also giving a glimpse into their musical range. The first clip is from a 2007 performance in Stuttgart, Germany and features Marsalis, clarinetist Victor Goines and others getting back to basics on a stripped-down number called “Across The Track Blues."
Down below are a couple of excerpts from a July 2009 concert at the Barbican in London that show off the band's ability to navigate skillfully through a more complex, hard-driving contemporary arrangement. In the third clip, which just recently appeared online, we go all the way back to 1997 for an selection from the PBS program Sessions at West 54th that shows the JaLCO backing singer Jon Hendricks on “Soul for Sale," a song that was part of Marsalis' Pulitzer Prize-winning suite about slavery, “Blood on The Fields."
For even more video of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, check out these previous posts.
