Wynton Marsalis Quintet
The Palace Theater
Stamford, CT
April 30, 2016

There are expectations baked into a live performance from the caliber of a Wynton Marsalis. An artist who has won a Pulitzer Prize for Music, nine GRAMMY awards, serves as the Director of Jazz studies at Juilliard and is actively involved in a number of humanitarian activities, Marsalis is as much a brand name as any musician in modern history. And so, maintaining spontaneity in the face of broad public anticipation, becomes all the more challenging. Suggested as having a somewhat predisposed criteria for defining jazz, the body of Marsalis' work would effectively argue in the other direction. Traditional New Orleans style, swing, blues, gospel, post-bop and jazz oratorio all have a place in the Marsalis canon along with baroque and other classical recordings. While not all-inclusive of a more broadly defined scope of jazz (i.e., avant-garde, free jazz, fusion), it is nevertheless, a fairly open and extensive resume and much of it on display at Stamford's Palace Theater.

The quintet performance was sponsored by the Stamford Symphony though the resident orchestra did not participate in this show. Marsalis, who had lost his voice prior to the show, turned over the calling of the set list to his band mates. This gave them the opportunity to inject a bit of good natured ribbing of their leader during the course of the seventy-five minute concert. The Stamford Palace Theater—home base for the city's symphony—is one of the more stately settings in which to see a jazz concert. The sixteen-hundred seat theater was originally designed as a vaudeville house, which opened in 1927. Designed by the Scotsman, Thomas W. Lamb, a preeminent theater architect, it had been restored and re-opened in 1983 with improvements ongoing over the past years.

The Marsalis Quintet, as one would expect, consists of the some of the finest musicians and composers, in modern jazz. Saxophonist