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

The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis brings Folk, Blues, and Spirituals to Rose Theater. Marsalis leads the 15-member big band in a program shaped by his arrangements of fiddle reels, folk songs, blues, and ballads. The evening also revisits Big Train, the 12-part suite commissioned by Jazz at Lincoln Center, placing American vernacular sources inside the orchestra’s full ensemble sound.

Based at Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York City, the orchestra takes jazz from “the heart of New York City” to audiences around the world. Its repertoire ranges from rare historic works and new commissions to music by Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Thelonious Monk, Mary Lou Williams, and Charles Mingus. The ensemble has collaborated with symphony orchestras, ballet troupes, students, and guests including Joe Henderson, Christian McBride, Freddie Hubbard, and Joe Lovano; it also backed Marsalis on Blood on the Fields, winner of the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Music. DownBeat calls the band “ridiculously tight,” with “tricky maneuvers like a fighter jet,” while the Chicago Tribune says it “tore through this music as if chasing the wind.”