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Jazz at Lincoln Center and Managing and Artistic Director Wynton Marsalis Tuesday proudly announce the organization’s 35th season of concerts featuring JALC’s customary mix of American-premiere commissions and exclusive collaborations by iconic guest artists from across the globe, as well as celebrations of milestones and major figures in jazz and its related genres.
Jazz at Lincoln Center’s 2022-23 season illuminates, actualizes, and reaffirms the notion of jazz as a global language and the music’s power to bridge divides and coalesce distinct communities. Throughout Jazz at Lincoln Center’s first full season since 2019, JALC presents forward-thinking musicians, virtuosic practitioners, and ingenious conceptualists from Africa, the Middle East, East Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, and North America at the House of Swing to explore jazz as a medium for cultural exchange.
Many of the 2022-23 concerts explore the points of intersection that connect jazz – formed from a confluence of African, American, and European influences after slavery was abolished in the United States – to a global array of musical cultures.
“This season invites audiences to experience different voices from around the world harmonizing in the common language of jazz. For more than thirty years, Jazz at Lincoln Center has combined contrasting viewpoints and styles to create our own unique artistic identity that realizes a world without borders. This is a precarious and divisive time, and humanity desperately needs the wisdom that jazz was born to deliver: come together, be together, stay together. Easier said than done, but no endeavor is more important at this moment,” said Wynton Marsalis.
“JALC’s new season brings international musical minds Chucho Valdés, Naseer Shamma, and Toshiko Akiyoshi together with the JLCO; musicians like Paquito D’Rivera with whom we have a decades-long history; and contemporary artists such as Nduduzo Makhathini who are deeply engaged with the music. We’ll highlight the communal aspects of jazz as we present first-time collaborations in The Appel Room. Concerts in Rose Theater featuring creative geniuses including Cécile McLorin Salvant will signal the importance of past, present, and future of the music.”
Jazz at Lincoln Center’s 35th season runs from September 30, 2022 to June 10, 2023 in Rose Theater, The Appel Room, and Dizzy’s Club – all at Frederick P. Rose Hall, the home of Jazz at Lincoln Center, located at Broadway at 60th Street in New York, NY. In addition to 22 unique live concerts throughout Frederick P. Rose Hall and more than 350 nights of music in Dizzy’s Club, the organization will offer webcast performances, in-person and virtual education programs, and Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis tour dates worldwide.
The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis – an ensemble of 15 virtuosos, composers, arrangers, educators, and unique soloists performing an unprecedented variety of styles that span jazz’s entire documented history – will demonstrate its virtuosic performances throughout the season, on tour across the country, and abroad.
The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis presents several of these cross-cultural investigations. Mideast Meditations showcases new compositions by Marsalis and Naseer Shamma, the eminent Iraqi oud virtuoso-composer-educator. On The Shanghai Suite Marsalis refracts the scales and melodies of Shanghai into songs that sing the dialect of swing. Joined by iconic Cuba-born clarinetist-saxophonist Paquito D’Rivera, the JLCO interprets commissioned pieces by mid-career maestros Elio Villafranca and Edmar Castañeda that explore Afro-Caribbean and Pan-American streams of expression. And, joined by master tenor saxophonist-flutist Lew Tabackin, the JLCO celebrates Japanese-American composer-pianist Toshiko Akiyoshi’s magisterial legacy.
Lodestar Cuban pianist-composer Chucho Valdés celebrates his 81st birthday with a recent masterwork for big band and voices. Brazilian 10-string mandolin wizard Hamilton de Holanda and South African pianist-composer Nduduzo Makhathini commingle their cultural DNA to explore the diaspora of musical language from Africa to the Americas through the slave trade from colonization until the present day. Grammy nominated Carlos Henriquez, bassist of the JLCO, leads a celebration of the respective centennial birthdays of Mambo Kings Tito Puente and Tito Rodriguez with a hand-picked big band.
Also on tap are international encounters on a smaller scale. Iconic Brazilian singer-guitarist Rosa Passos blends her magic with NEA Jazz Masters Ron Carter and Kenny Barron. French guitarist Stéphane Wrembel, a Django Reinhardt specialist, will interpret Reinhardt’s singular canon with French-Guadeloupean songstress Cyrille Aimée, mandolin master Sam Bush, pianist Sean Mason, and others.
An unparalleled, multi-generational cohort of jazz singers –Dianne Reeves, Cécile McLorin Salvant, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Kurt Elling, Johnny O’Neal, Mary Stallings, Samara Joy, and Lucy Yeghiazaryan – grace Jazz at Lincoln Center’s various stages.
Education
Jazz at Lincoln Center serves the largest jazz education program network in the world, and its initiatives are based on the organization’s 35-year history of education in jazz performance and appreciation. These programs reach all populations, from infants to seniors, and advance JALC’s belief that jazz education is for all – regardless of experience.
The goal of each program is for participants to learn the communal history of jazz in a sociopolitical context, receive guidance on better communication of personal objectives while maintaining balance in a group, and gain awareness of the mission of jazz musicians today – building on the aspirational foundation laid down by earlier generations.
With the lodestar composer, pianist, and orchestra leader Duke Ellington as a foundational guide, Jazz at Lincoln Center continues to produce an extensive range of educational and advocacy programs for all ages.
The organization’s signature education program, the Essentially Ellington High School Jazz Band Competition & Festival (EE), takes place May 11-13, 2023. For the 28th year, the program spreads the message of Duke Ellington’s music, leadership, and collective orientation, providing high school ensembles with free transcriptions of original Duke Ellington recordings – accompanied by rehearsal guides, teaching notes, original recordings, professional instruction, and more – to over 7,000 schools and independent bands in 55 countries. Regional festivals return as in-person programs in 20 locations, including five festivals in Australia, as charts and resources continue to be made available to schools worldwide. This year’s music includes the first-ever publication of four works by Afro-Cuban-New York jazz and salsa pioneer Machito from his legendary Kenya album, made available to schools for the first time.
For the second year, Jazz at Lincoln Center presents its popular Journey Through Jazz education concerts for adults hosted by the JLCO, presented in The Appel Room and digitally captured for wider distribution. The first concert focuses on what attributes of America’s indigenous art form make it so compatible with other forms of music, empowering anyone who fully engages with it. The second concert, Jazz Chronicles: Old and New, is devoted to the stories that propagate and perpetuate the oral tradition of jazz, linking contemporary practitioners to past masters.
Other highlights of the 2022-23 Education season include:
- Swing University, which offers jazz appreciation classes on a wide variety of topics, takes place online as summer, fall, winter, and spring terms in order to serve a global jazz community.
- For the first time since early 2020, WeBop, an interactive program for families with children ages eight months to five years old, will return as in-person classes beginning in October of 2022. A number of online classes will still be available.
- The family-oriented Jazz for Young People concerts celebrate two important centennials – Who is Charles Mingus? held live and in-person in Rose Theater (October 22, 2022) and Who is Thad Jones? (March 25, 2023).
- Let Freedom Swing, in-school educational concert programs focused on history, civics, and social justice will be held as in-person concerts in schools in New York City, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, New Orleans, and London (UK).
- 3rd Annual Jack Rudin Jazz Championship invitational for collegiate bands takes place as an in-person event at Jazz at Lincoln Center (January 14-15, 2023).
- The award-winning Middle School and High School Jazz Academies return with in-person classes and performances.
- Free virtual program, A Closer Listen, which features jazz experts and enthusiasts holding in-depth discussions on jazz works, continues to run online.
- Blue Engine Publishing continues with more music from the library of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with compositions and arrangements by JLCO members and Wynton Marsalis.
Touring
Throughout the summer of 2022, Jazz at Lincoln Center will build upon its successful outdoor concert initiatives from the summer of 2021 and continue to create collaborative concert events through September with organizations throughout New York City and environs beyond, with MoCA Westport, Caramoor, Times Square Alliance, Bryant Park, SummerStage, Lincoln Center, and more.
The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis, which, Marsalis has observed, “might be the most flexible and all-encompassing ensemble in the history of our music,” tours its vast repertoire – revisiting symphonic works from Marsalis’ distinguished corpus, presenting new cross-cultural commissions, and delving into JALC’s vast book of modern jazz arrangements – extensively throughout the 2022-23 season.
The orchestra will collaborate with various organizations in the United States and abroad to perform Marsalis’ large-scale works and engage in residency activities.
On three separate occasions during the 2022-23 season, JLCO performs Marsalis’ epic jazz-gospel suite All Rise (1999), scored for the 15-piece JLCO, symphonic orchestra, and choir, in which Marsalis unites disparate elements, Stravinsky to gospel, into a cohesive work without a trace of self-consciousness. On September 8, 2022, the JLCO collaborates with the Los Angeles Philharmonic – which first performed what the Los Angeles Times called an “inspirational jazz symphony with a mission” on September 15, 2001, four days after the tragic events of 9/11 – at the Hollywood Bowl. The following month, JLCO presents successive All Rise residencies at the University of Michigan (October 10-16, 2022) and at Hancher Auditorium at the University of Iowa (October 18- 22, 2022).
Directly following the University of Iowa residency, the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis visits Mexico for concerts in Guadalajara, Cervantino, and Mexico City (October 25-29, 2022), before a five-concert tour in Texas (October 30-November 5, 2022).
Also on the Fall 2022 touring schedule are two performances in Minneapolis (September 23-24, 2022) with the Minnesota Orchestra of Swing Symphony (2010), Marsalis’ epic musical meditation on American ideals, originally commissioned by the Berlin Philharmonic, the London Symphony Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
From November 27-December 10, 2022, the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, under the music direction of Victor Goines, tours its annual Big Band Holidays program with special guests Dianne Reeves and Samara Joy.
From January 24-February 10, 2023, the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis tours the United States with the transformative Iraqi oud virtuoso Naseer Shamma, following their American premiere performances at New York’s Rose Theater. The venues include a residency with Symphony Center Presents in Chicago (January 26-27, 2023) and concerts in Omaha, Nebraska; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; and Madison, Wisconsin.
The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis completes the 2022-2023 season with a month-long European tour in June, including performances of The Jungle (composed in 2016), Marsalis’ grand evocation of New York City, with the Luxembourg Philharmonie (June 6-9, 2023) and with Orchestre de Paris (June 10-14, 2023) in Paris. From Paris, JLCO will crisscross the continent, with concerts every night through July 9, 2023.
Featuring today’s rising jazz stars under the music direction of trumpeter Riley Mulherkar and curated by Jazz at Lincoln Center, JALC Presents “Songs We Love” Tour through IMG, tours 45 cities in early 2023.
Dizzy’s Club
Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Dizzy’s Club is open to full capacity. The world-renowned club, one of the three main performance venues situated in Frederick P. Rose Hall, produces world-class jazz performances nightly, often reflecting and augmenting the programming in Rose Theater and The Appel Room.
Throughout the opening months of the 2022-23 season, performances include Wycliffe Gordon’s annual Thanksgiving run; a return engagement by the crackling Ulysses Owens Big Band; the Sean Jones Quartet; Marilyn Maye; Omar Sosa and the Americanos Quartet; Catherine Russell; Sullivan Fortner; Rufus Reid Quintet; Matthew Shipp; Renee Rosnes; and Buster Williams.
The cabaret-oriented Songbook Sundays series continues in September and November. Dizzy’s iconic Tuesday-Saturday evening Late Night Series, featuring some of the most talented emerging artists in jazz, relaunches at the end of September.
