World Premiere: December 9, 2021
Last HSO Performance: HSO Premiere
Instrumentation:2 flutes with 2nd doubling piccolo, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons with 2nd doubling contrabassoon, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 2 trombones, timpani, percussion, strings, solo tuba
Duration: 25 minutes

Wynton Marsalis

Wynton Marsalis, the second of six sons born to Ellis Marsalis, one of New Orleans’ foremost jazz pianists, received his first trumpet when he was six, a gift from Al Hirt. Marsalis did not begin formal trumpet study until he was twelve but then he was trained in both classical and jazz styles, and within two years he had performed Haydn’s Trumpet Concerto with the New Orleans Philharmonic. In 1978, he studied at Tanglewood, receiving the Shapiro Award for Outstanding Brass Player; he was seventeen. A scholarship to Juilliard followed. Marsalis gathered a wide range of performing experiences in New York, playing in salsa and top-forty bands, Broadway shows and the Brooklyn Philharmonic. By 1980, he was touring with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, and performing in a quartet with Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and Tony Williams. He made his first recording as a featured performer in 1981, and two years later became the first musician to win Grammy Awards in the same year for recordings of both jazz (Think Of One) and classical music (Haydn, Hummel and Leopold Mozart trumpet concertos). He has since won five more Grammys as well as the Grand Prix du Disque, an Edison Award and the Louis Armstrong Memorial Medal.

In 1987, Marsalis co-founded Jazz at Lincoln Center, which moved into its own home in 2004 at the Frederick P. Rose Hall at Columbus Circle, the world’s first concert hall built specifically for jazz. Marsalis continues as Artistic Director of Jazz at Lincoln Center and Conductor of the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, which he leads in performances in tours around the world. Marsalis has also traveled widely as a teacher and spokesperson for jazz, given master classes, concerts and lectures, written six books on the history and appreciation of jazz, delivered a series of lectures titled Hidden In Plain View: Meanings in American Music at Harvard, and served as A.D. White Professor at Cornell University from 2015 to 2021. 

Marsalis is also highly regarded as a composer for small and large jazz ensembles, ballet, film and concert — Blood on the Fields, his epic “jazz oratorio” based on the theme of slavery and celebrating the importance of freedom in America, won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize in Music, the first jazz composition to be so honored. His many other distinctions include the National Medal of Arts, honorary degrees from Columbia, Yale, Brown, Princeton and more than 35 other leading academic institutions, appointment as an International Messenger of Peace in 2001 by the United Nations, Frederick Douglass Medallion for Distinguished Leadership from the New York Urban League, the rank of Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the French Ministry of Culture, and the National Humanities Medal, presented in 2015 by President Barack Obama.

Marsalis composed his Concerto for Tubist and Orchestra in 2021for Carol Jantsch, Principal Tuba of the Philadelphia Orchestra, who premiered the work with conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin on December 9, 2021; the Concerto was immediately adopted into the instrument’s limited solo repertory and is being performed widely across America and overseas. 

Any preconceived notions of the technical and expressive limitations of the orchestra’s largest wind instrument are dispelled by the Concerto’s opening movement — Up! — which begins with energetic music showing the tuba’s range and agility that alternates with quieter passages featuring its singing qualities and warm tone color. “Singing” is the apt word here since the tubist is also required to execute “multiphonics,” playing one note on the instrument at the same time as humming another, reminiscent of the traditional Tuvan throat singers of Mongolia. Boogaloo Americana takes its title and attitude from a funky dance style that originated in New York City in the 1960s, which fused such Latin American idioms as mambo with African-American rhythm and blues. Contrast in the movement is provided by swing passages with an improvisatory feel. The Lament, rooted in gospel, begins with a sorrowful tuba solo before evolving into the shuffling tread of a New Orleans jazz funeral procession. The virtuosity, harmonic sophistication and driving bebop rhythms of In Bird’s Basement pay homage to the influential saxophonist and composer Charlie “Bird” Parker.