Folk, Blues, and Spirituals The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis

The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra joins Wynton Marsalis for Folk, Blues, and Spirituals, a program rooted in what Marsalis calls “Root American Musics”: blues, folk, gospel, country, and spirituals. The 15-member big band will play Marsalis’s arrangements of fiddle reels, folk songs, blues, and ballads, alongside a return to Big Train. Commissioned by Jazz at Lincoln Center in 1998, the 12-part suite traces trains and their meanings, from the Underground Railroad and westward expansion to the Great Migration and the Glory Train.

New York-based since becoming Jazz at Lincoln Center’s resident orchestra in 1988, the JLCO is led by trumpeter and music director Marsalis. Its work ranges from historic and rarely heard material to new commissions and music by its own members; the orchestra backed Marsalis on Blood on the Fields, which won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize. Its repertoire includes music by Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Charles Mingus, Joe Henderson, Christian McBride, Freddie Hubbard, and Joe Lovano. DownBeat called the ensemble “ridiculously tight, executing tricky maneuvers like a fighter jet,” while the Chicago Tribune praised its “synchronicity.”