The jazz orchestra, brick by brick
Jazz legend Wynton Marsalis and his virtuoso Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra treated a Sanders Theatre audience to a three-hour master class Thursday evening that re-created a pivotal quarter century of jazz innovation against the backdrop of American history. His combination lecture and performance, “Setting the Communal Table: The Evolution of the Jazz Orchestra,” centered on jazz’s exploding popularity from the 1920s to the early ’40s. It was the penultimate in a six lecture-performance series by Marsalis sponsored by the Office of the President and the Office of the Provost, with the goal of fostering “a conversation about the arts on campus,” according to Harvard President Drew Faust, who attended the event. A nine-time Grammy Award-winner and the first jazz musician to win a Pulitzer Prize for music, the New Orleans-born trumpeter and composer showed his skills as a teacher, not just of the music but of its social and historical underpinnings....