Marsalis in motion
Using rhythm and music and motion, Wynton Marsalis took a rapt audience through the evolution of the American dance form at a packed Sanders Theatre Thursday night. For four and a half hours, the jazz legend recaptured the seamless mix of prose and performance that punctuated his April talk on the history of jazz and the blues. Thursday’s lecture, “The Double Crossing of a Pair of Heels: The Dynamics of Social Dance and American Popular Musics,” was the second in the two-year series, “Hidden in Plain View: Meanings in American Music.” Community, courtship, social boundaries and barriers, race relations and segregation, and social change and strife were all part of the discussion, choreographed on stage through a fusion of music, beats, and history. Marsalis and his team of performers — Karen Amatrading, Lou Brockman, Heather Gehring, Jared Grimes, Christopher Lockhart, Nelida Tirado, Eddie Torres Jr., and Sheron Wray — danced their...