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Wynton Marsalis Sets March Release


01/28/2009
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(PR) On March 24, Pulitzer Prize winning composer, trumpeter and bandleader Wynton Marsalis will release his fifth Blue Note recording, He and She. It's an ambitious effort, combining spoken word and music, and Marsalis has given his quintet some formidable charts. The album is tempered with flashes of humor and plenty of swing. There's ease and elegance and more than a little wisdom in these grooves.

He and She is about that eternally compelling and most elemental of subjects, the relationship between a man and a woman. Marsalis hasn't merely crafted a love story, but a life story - a bittersweet rumination about the evanescence of life as well as the elusiveness of romance. Time is very much at the heart of He and She: the swift passage of time over the course of one's life, the mood-altering shifts of time in the duration of a song.

He and She began with words, not music, though it was music that brought forth the words. Marsalis had been listening to Max Roach's Jazz in � Time, along with pieces by Duke Ellington, like "Lady Mac" from Such Sweet Thunder, work that explored waltz tempo in a jazz context. Roach's classic album features "Valse Hot," which, explains Marsalis is "a Sonny Rollins piece, a jazz waltz that I started to play when I was in high school." That tune set off a spark: "I began to contemplate the shuffle rhythm, that the shuffle rhythm is the combination of a waltz feeling and a march feeling, and I thought it would be good for me to do an album of waltzes. I had written a couple before -- one was for a ballet by Twyla Tharp, inspired by the Matisse painting, The Dance. I was thinking about waltzes and how in Vienna today younger people still dance the waltz, a waltz season is still a part of their social calendar. From there, I began to consider the ritual of courtship. The waltz is a courtship dance and at one time it was considered to be risqu�. Now, of course, it's genteel. Then I started to think about men and women, our relationships."



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