The first performance of “All Rise,” Wynton Marsalis‘s epic and extraordinary jazz symphony, didn’t quite go as planned.
“It sounded so bad that first night,” Marsalis sighs, recalling the December 1999 premiere at Lincoln Center. “It was like I was in the middle of a bunch of noise. I felt like I had inflicted a crime on about two hundred people in public.”
Luckily, things got better.
“We were scheduled to play it the next October in Czechoslovakia,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and legendary jazz trumpeter says. “I was trying to get out of that performance. But in the first rehearsal, it was like another piece of music. It sounded like music all of a sudden. Then we played. The people went crazy. They loved it. Ever since, it’s always gotten a tremendous response.”
Marsalis is bringing “All Rise” to Strathmore for two performances next weekend, a highlight of the venue’s season-long series, “Shades of Blues.” “I put a lot into the piece,” he says. “It took me about six months of writing around the clock. The last month my ears were so hot, they were actually hurting. I’ve never written music where I actually had my inner ear hurt because I was hearing so much music.”
The 12-movement piece, fusing blues, jazz, spiritual, and classical music and incorporating a choir of 150 gospel singers, was originally commissioned by the New York Philharmonic and its then-conductor Kurt Masur. “He wanted me to write a piece that celebrated bringing jazz and classical music and black and white people together in America,” says Marsalis. “But I started to think much broader than just people in America. What does it take to integrate with other people? That’s the subject of ‘All Rise.’ What does it take for us to come together, and what do we do when we come together?
“It’s very relevant to this moment,” he adds. “Times have been troubling for a long time. The 1960s were troubling. The 1970s were troubling. The movement away from integration that took place in the late ’70s was troubling. The reasserting of Confederate principles that took place in the 1980s by Ronald Reagan were troubling. The financial crisis that took place in the early ’90s was troubling. A lot of what’s happened in the last years have been troubling — mass incarcerations, privatization of jails, redistricting. We could go on and on and on.
“These days, it’s like we’re swinging back in the other direction. Yes, it’s troubling that we made the decisions we made, but we had the opportunity to vote, we showed up at the polls, and that’s what we decided. Those of us who don’t like the direction we’re going in, we have to protest illegal actions. Fight. Exercise our rights for citizens to create the country we want to create. It will not be easy. To think that centuries of tribalism and injustice just go away — they don’t.
“Kurt Masur told me when I was writing ‘All Rise’ — and I keep this quote on my phone — ‘The line between civilization and barbarism is much thinner than you think. That’s why with everything that you do, you have to decry barbarism and the reduction of people.'”
“All Rise” will be performed on Friday, Feb. 24 at 8 p.m. and Sunday, Feb. 26, at 4 p.m. in the Music Center at Strathmore, 5301 Tuckerman Lane, North Bethesda, Md. Tickets are $65 to $175. Call 301-581-5100 or visit strathmore.org/blues.
U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has reposted a CNN clip featuring Doug Wilson, leader of the Christian evangelical movement he follows, in which the pastor calls for making gay sex illegal.
“In the late ’70s and early ’80s, sodomy was a felony in all 50 states. That America of that day was not a totalitarian hellhole,” Wilson says in the seven-minute segment, reports the Daily Beast.
Wilson goes on to say he wishes the United States would revive anti-sodomy laws, which criminalized same-sex relations -- and, in some states, even certain non-vaginal sex acts between consenting heterosexual partners.
Andry José Hernández Romero, deported in Trump’s immigration crackdown, was freed from El Salvador’s CECOT prison in a prisoner swap but still faces danger.
Gay asylum seeker Andry José Hernández Romero, a makeup artist and costume designer deported to El Salvador’s notorious Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT) maximum-security prison, was released on July 18 as part of a prisoner swap, NBC News reported.
The swap was brokered by Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, a close ally of U.S. President Donald Trump, who agreed to free more than 200 Venezuelans from CECOT in exchange for Venezuela releasing 10 American political prisoners.
Most released detainees had been deported from the U.S. after Trump invoked the rarely used Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to justify removing hundreds of undocumented immigrants, alleging ties to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, which constituted an "invading force" whose members were committing serious crimes.
The U.S. Air Force has issued new guidance, in two memos signed by interim assistant secretary for manpower and reserve affairs Brian Scarlett, detailing how transgender Airmen and Guardians will be involuntarily separated -- and denying them any chance to contest the decision.
Citing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's memo announcing compliance with President Donald Trump's executive order seeking to ban transgender service members, an Aug. 12 memo states that any Airman or Guardian with a diagnosis, history, or symptoms consistent with gender dysphoria will be denied a waiver and involuntarily separated.
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