By Joyce Corrigan
Too darn hot! Caramoor celebrated its 10th anniversary collaboration with Jazz at Lincoln Center on June 22 with JALC managing and artistic director, Wynton Marsalis, conducting a program celebrating Duke Ellington’s 125th birthday. Band leader, musical ambassador, trumpeter extraordinaire and longtime Caramoor friend, Marsalis is the only musician to have won a Grammy Award in both jazz and classical categories in the same year. Ellington was one of the most prolific composers of his era (2,000-plus pieces) and was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for music in 1999.
As early as the 1930s, Ellington quietly devoted his services to the NAACP and its racial equality activities. He died in 1974.
“I’ve always regarded the Duke Ellington Orchestra as one of the great achievements in the history of art,” remarked Marsalis. “He hired the best musicians playing this enormous body of original music, who stayed on the road, separated from their friends and lovers through wars, Prohibition, the Depression and the Civil Rights Movement. But a love for the music and the people they played for kept them out there, year after year.”
“As we broaden the scope of the Caramoor audience,” Lewis said, “our goal is for listeners to be transformed not only by what they hear but who they see on stage.”
So, picture “Sir Duke,” as serenaded by Stevie Wonder, and famously dubbed “Harlem’s Aristocrat of Jazz,” in his scene-stealing top hat and tux looking down on Caramoor’s Venetian Theater from that jumping jazz joint in the sky, toasting the health, success and enduring influence of jazz; that infectious, all-American musical genre that bubbled up in New Orleans in the late 19th century. A fiery gumbo of African American, European, Latin and Caribbean musical influences, from the get-go, jazz was far more than just a new multicultural music genre. “Jazz is a good barometer of freedom,” Ellington once said. “In its beginnings, the United States spawned certain ideals of freedom and independence through which, eventually, jazz evolved. The music is so free that people say it’s the only unhampered, unhindered expression of complete freedom yet produced in this country.”
Taking liberties is what jazz does — improvising, merging, and mixing it up with every kind of music. Last month, jazz pianist and multi-Grammy winner, Jon Batiste, a Caramoor headliner in 2015, opened for the Rolling Stones at MetLife Stadium. That the irresistible Batiste is on every Best Dressed list (recently at the Grammy Awards and the Met Gala), well, Duke would get it. “I never had much interest in the piano,” the dapper Duke confessed, “until I realized that every time I played, a girl would appear on the piano bench to my left and another to my right.”
On the occasion of Duke’s 100th birthday, Marsalis wrote a tribute in The New York Times about how the “uplift of the human spirit and … having a good time” were Duke’s main concerns. “[Ellington] appropriated the moans, hollers, laughs and cries of the blues despite having been raised in a high-minded, churchgoing family.” Call it the contradictory human instinct. “Some people may sit in the first pew of church and be the most demonstrative voices in the ‘Amen chorus,” wrote Marsalis, “but (also) love the most secular and low-down music.”
Kathy Schuman, who directs Caramoor’s far-reaching programming, acknowledges that while the performing arts center regularly hosts top performers from the fields of classical, Latin, American roots and other genres, this year’s annual gala has been a particularly big deal.
“The 10-year collaboration with JALC has enabled us not only to have access to jazz legends but to rising talents,” she said. “We love when we host someone who’s just appearing on people’s radar and then they go on to be global superstars.”
While it’s the 10th anniversary of the JALC partnership, Caramoor audiences have been swinging to jazz for 30 years. In 1988, the debut program kicked off with performances by Ray Brown, and later hosted the bands of Count Basie and Ellington.
In 1945, Caramoor owners Walter and Lucie Rosen bequeathed their 25,000-square-foot 1920s Mediterranean-style summer home to the public as a venue for classical music; since then it’s become the “summer home” of generations of musicians .
“No matter what stage they’re in their careers, musicians love the place,” commented Schuman. “They can’t get over the outdoor Venetian Theater, the Spanish Courtyard, the Music Room with its Renaissance and Gothic art and the sprawling performance lawns. The young artists all bring their peers, and it’s just an exhilarating time.”
Caramoor CEO and President Edward J. Lewis III, now in his third year at the helm, couldn’t have been more excited to kick off the season with a celebration of the two jazz giants. Trained as a classical violinist, Lewis has also had the “enormous pleasure and fun” of playing with jazz stars including Christian McBride, Kenny G and brothers Wynton and Branford Marsalis. “The beauty of jazz is that it’s a distinctly American form, blending sounds and rhythms from ancestral Africa with Western,” he said, adding, “It’s art music that dips into the realm of the popular.”
Caramoor’s highly-anticipated Jazz Festival (another Jazz at Lincoln Center collaboration) takes place July 27, starting at 12:30 p.m. Featuring headliner Matthew Whitaker, it will be filled with performers exploring many facets of the genre.
Lewis embraces his role as musical ambassador, a part also played by both Ellington and Marsalis. He was thrilled to announce that Sphinx Virtuosi, a Detroit-based, self-conducted string orchestra of Black and Latino players playing music by composers of color, are making their Caramoor debut July 7.
“As we broaden the scope of the Caramoor audience,” Lewis said, “our goal is for listeners to be transformed not only by what they hear but who they see on stage.”
This summer season is, in fact, a cauldron of every musical style. Scheduled programs include the classical strings of Abeo Quartet on June 27, American Roots Music Festival on June 29, Pops, Patriots, & Fireworks on July 4, Kiki Valera y su Son Cubano on July 6, and Broadway diva Sutton Foster on July 13 . In August, Caramoor welcomes back dance with the cheeky Mark Morris Dance Group whose unorthodox contemporary choreography and dancers famous for being all shapes and sizes, is often set to iconic classical and baroque music.
You couldn’t find a better way to kick off the summer season than with a tribute to Duke Ellington by Wynton Marsalis. They truly are two kindred spirits. According to Marsalis, Duke had learned an important lesson from the blues: “That the greatest joy is earned in the hardest times,” he wrote. His mantra was “integrate, integrate, integrate,” Marsalis explained. “He blended diverse cultural and musical ideas because he understood not only what the country was, but also what it could become.”
Caramoor is located at 149 Girdle Ridge Road, Katonah. For tickets and more information, visit caramoor.org.