Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis

Co-sponsored by the Black Cultural Center

Featuring Shenel Johns, special guest vocalist

Grammy-winning trumpeter Wynton Marsalis leads the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. Made up of 15 of today’s finest jazz musicians, the group performs the music of great jazz composers as well as original works. The orchestra returns to the Moss with a program celebrating the centennial of percussionist Max Roach. 

Considered one of the greatest jazz drummers of all time, Roach used his music to address racial, political, and social issues. A pioneering legend and innovative master musician and bandleader, Roach spanned a diverse range of styles that influenced generations to follow. Roach was an influential member of the Charlie Parker-Dizzy Gillespie Quintet, performed alongside Miles Davis’ seminal Birth of the Cool, and formed the Clifford Brown-Max Roach Quintet. He went on to make albums with his wife, the trailblazing singer and songwriter Abbey Lincoln, going on to say in 1961 to Downbeat Magazine that he would “never again play anything” that did not “have social significance.”

About Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra

The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra (JLCO) has been the Jazz at Lincoln Center resident orchestra since 1988 and spends over a third of the year on tour across the world. Featured in all aspects of Jazz at Lincoln Center’s programming, this remarkably versatile orchestra performs and leads educational events in New York, across the U.S., and around the globe; in concert halls, dance venues, jazz clubs, and public parks; and with symphony orchestras, ballet troupes, local students, and an ever-expanding roster of guest artists. Under Music Director Wynton Marsalis, the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra performs a vast repertoire, from rare historic compositions to Jazz at Lincoln Center-commissioned works.

Throughout the last decade, the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra has performed with many of the world’s leading symphony orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic, Cleveland Orchestra, Philadelphia Orchestra, Czech Philharmonic, Berlin Philharmonic, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, and many others.  Marsalis’ three major works for full symphony orchestra and jazz orchestra, All Rise — Symphony no. 1 (1999), Swing Symphony – Symphony no. 3 (2010), and The Jungle – Symphony no. 4 (2016), continue to be the focal point of Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra’s symphonic collaborations. 

About Wynton Marsalis

Wynton Marsalis (music director and trumpet) is the managing and artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center. He has solidified himself as an internationally acclaimed musician, composer, bandleader, educator, and advocate of American culture. Marsalis made his recording debut as a leader in 1982 and has since recorded 110 jazz and classical albums, four alternative records, and released five DVDs. In total, he has recorded 1,539 songs at the time of this writing. Marsalis is the winner of nine Grammy Awards, and his oratorio Blood on the Fields was the first jazz composition to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music. He’s the only musician to win a Grammy Award in two categories, jazz and classical, during the same year (1983, 1984).

As a composer, his body of work includes over 600 original songs, 11 ballets, four symphonies, eight suites, two chamber pieces, one string quartet, two masses, one violin concerto, and in 2021, a tuba concerto. As part of his work at Jazz at Lincoln Center, Marsalis has produced and performed countless new collaborative compositions, including the ballet Them Twos, for a 1999 collaboration with the New York City Ballet. That same year, he premiered the monumental work All Rise, commissioned and performed by the New York Philharmonic along with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra and the Morgan State University Choir. All Rise was performed with the Tulsa Symphony Orchestra as part of the remembrance of the centennial anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre in June 2021. Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Wynton and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra have released seven full-length albums and four singles on Blue Engine Records. 

This performance is supported in part by gifts from Ms. Constance Cedras and Dr. E. Fred Carlisle and Mrs. Elizabeth A. Obenshain. Additional funding is provided by the Larry and Lindsey Bowman Center for the Arts Excellence Fund.

Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra and Wynton Marsalis first performed at the Moss Arts Center in 2016.