Wynton Marsalis’s Homecoming Farewell

“Come Home.” That’s the official title for Jazz at Lincoln Center’s 2026-2027 season which will be the final one for founding Artistic Director Wynton Marsalis. JALC launched the season this past weekend with a concert titled “Marsalis and the Masters.” Coming home is one thing, but the opening salvo of their 39th season was a notable example of what JALC does best: Combining the new with the old, the fresh with the familiar. The program consisted of ten works, composed over a 50-plus year period, from Jelly Roll Morton’s 1923 “The Pearls” to Chick Corea’s 1978 “Humpty Dumpty,” all as arranged by Mr. Marsalis. Of the ten, the most vivid illustration of what a major jazz orchestrator can do was “Ugly Beauty,” a relatively lesser-known work by Thelonious Monk. Monk, unlike Duke Ellington, wrote nearly all of his most celebrated compositions in the earlier part of his career, before people outside of the inner circle of the jazz world had actually heard of him. As his biographer, Robin D. G. Kelley, has explained, when Monk got to be famous and was on the road constantly, he was uncomfortable writing away from home, as opposed to Ellington, who seems to have been composing continually no matter where he was or whether or not he even had access to a keyboard. There are only a few important Monk compositions from the mid-1960s onwards. The story goes that Monk played this tune for his quartet at a record date in 1967, and the drummer, Ben Riley, suggested that it might work better in 3/4 time — and thus “Ugly Beauty” became Monk’s only waltz.“Ugly Beauty” stands out from the rest of Monk’s canon, both in terms of its time signature and the time that it was written. Mr. Marsalis ingeniously retooled it with the brass laying out and all the melodic responsibilities going to the orchestra’s five reeds and three rhythm-section players, pianist Dan Nimmer, bassist Carlos Henriquez, and drummer Obed Calvaire. The opening chorus by the combined altos (Sherman Irby and Veronica Leahy, the latter a new face in the band), tenors (Chris Lewis and Abdias Armenteros), and baritone sax (Paul Nedzella) at first suggested Duke Ellington’s famous waltz “Creamy Brown,” which the orchestra played in July as part of “Black, Brown, and Beige.”Marsalis and the Masters at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center on September 18, 2026. Gilberto Tadday/Jazz at Lincoln CenterIn most big band writing, one horn is accompanied by another section, often a trumpet backed by saxes, for instance. Here it seemed like a deliberately Duke-ish move to have one sax, Mr. Irby’s alto, backed by the other four reeds. It also evoked reed-only ensembles led by Benny Carter and Stan Kenton.I can imagine that there are purists out there, even more hardcore than I, who would object to taking a Monk tune and making it less Monklike. But that’s kind of the point. That’s what interpretation is. At “Marsalis and the Masters,” the leader and the orchestra began with ten tunes from the jazz repertoire, and re-orchestrated them in wholly original ways. By contrast, “The Pearls” stayed completely idiomatically true to its source material, and was played in a vigorous New Orleans-style two-beat, with trombonist Vincent Gardner switching to tuba to emphasize the two-beat pulse. There also was an authentically Crescent City-style trumpet solo by Marcus Printup.Mr. Marsalis’s treatment of these pieces is in the same vein as albums by arrangers like Gil Evans, Bob Brookmeyer, and Michel Legrand, who all made classic albums in which they rewrote canonical jazz works to suit their own styles. The show was perfectly balanced, with just enough variety and just enough consistency in spanning the entire history of the music from the beginnings to latter-day masters. It was a cohesive program that illustrated the constant creativity of the great jazz composers from Morton to Corea, whose “Humpty Dumpty,” comes from his 1978 album “Mad Hatter,” a suite of original jazz works inspired by Lewis Carroll. Marsalis and the Masters at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center on September 18, 2026. Gilberto Tadday/Jazz at Lincoln CenterWhere most works on the program, especially the boppish Corea and Powell pieces, are uptempo and energetic, there also were two more tranquil, meditative tone poems by notable post-modern saxophonist-composers, Ornette Coleman’s “Peace” and Wayne Shorter’s “Infant Eyes.” The former was mostly ensemble, with short solos, mostly for brief contrast. The show opened with Jackie McLean’s “Appointment in Ghana,” which was framed by African-style percussive effects, which was followed by “Lemurianos” by the Brazilian composer Moacir Santos, which conversely, didn’t include any overtly South American elements. Roughly half the show consisted of works by notable pianist-bandleaders: Dave Brubeck’s “Bluette,” from the 1961 “Time Further Out,” is a a major-key, downtempo piece that combines the waltz with the blues, wherein Mr. Lewis and Mr. Armenteros switched to soprano saxes and Ms. Leahy played flute. The closer was Bud Powell’s striking “Un Poco Loco,” which sounds equal parts Afro-Latin and Middle Eastern, and builds to a climactic drum solo but not before an exciting trumpet battle between Mr. Printup and Kenny Rampton, both growling away with plunger mutes.“Come Home” may be an ironic title for the season, since it’s essentially about someone leaving home, but Mr. Marsalis, who turns 65 next month (I beat him by a few weeks), isn’t going off without first reminding all of us why he has been so valuable to the organization — and the whole of jazz.

Wynton Marsalis’s Homecoming Farewell

Wynton Marsalis’s Homecoming Farewell

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