The musicians of the Kansas City Symphony will be presenting a concert on Wednesday, May 14 featuring two pieces by famous jazz trumpeter and composer Wynton Marsalis. A Fiddler’s Tale includes a tango and a “devil’s dance” and finishes with “The Blues on Top,” while At the Octaroon Balls sports movement titles like “Creole Contradanzas,” “Blue Lights on the Bayou” and “Rampart Street Row House Rag.”
Wynton Marsalis is one of the greatest jazz trumpet players in recent decades. His skill has extended to playing and recording classical trumpet concertos, winning praise from critics and listeners. As director of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, he has played a major role in preserving the legacy of composers and arrangers of the big band era. Igor Stravinsky’s L’histoire du soldat or A Soldier’s Story, a morality play for narrator, dancers and orchestra, is one of the most famous works by one of the 20th century’s greatest composers. Trumpeter, bandleader and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Wynton Marsalis brought a new perspective to the conversation with his adaptation entitled A Fiddler’s Tale.
The second piece, Marsalis’s first string quartet At the Octoroon Balls, is Infused with the vibrant spirit of his birthplace, New Orleans. At the Octoroon Balls explores the fusion of identities that define the city’s essence. The historic balls of the 19th century, though now largely believed to be apocryphal, were said to have provided a backdrop where young women of mixed African and European heritage mingled with affluent gentlemen, orchestrated by their matchmaking mothers.
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