Marsalis mass is praised in world premiere
(April 2008)
Wynton Marsalis, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1997 for his oratorio, Blood on the Fields, and whose monumental work for orchestral and choral forces, All Rise, received its world premiere with the New York Philharmonic in 1999, has impressed again with his newly premiered mass, Abyssinian 200: A Celebration. This nineteen movement work for big band and chorus can be programmed in its entirety or in selections.The New York Times praised the mass as an “elaborate concert piece that traverses jazz history, from spirituals to hard-bop” and reported:
“Mr. Marsalis, who knows harmony and rhythm the way a grandmaster knows chess, savors all the historical allusions and virtuosic convolutions that his orchestra can execute. He also understands the participatory side of gospel: the call-and-response and the potential singalongs that give churchgoers melodies carrying messages to remember.
“Many parts of “Abyssinian 200” resemble Mr. Marsalis’s secular compositions. It uses modernist variants of New Orleans dirges and struts, the modal excursions of hard-bop and the Ellington big-band legacies of brassy, section-against-section byplay and sumptuously harmonized ballads.
The “Call to Worship” sets out a tremolo drone chord on piano, bursts of tambourine, close-harmony horns and high-note trumpet improvisations that hint at both Miles Davis’s “Sketches of Spain” and Islamic calls to prayer. The Recessional, “The Glory Train,” revisits a big-band subgenre, the train song, with an accelerating click-clack beat and saxophones wailing like train whistles. The closing “Amen” isn’t a hand-clapping gospel finale, but a tolling, modal, Afro-jazz waltz, mournful and resolute.
“Other parts give the choir joyful, straightforward gospel melodies with a tambourine-shaking beat. As in gospel services, sterling soloists emerge briefly from the choir, like Nicole Phifer, who sang the Pastoral Prayer — a minor-key tune that would have been at home in an old New Orleans cabaret — with gutsy conviction. Mr. Marsalis added musicianly twists to the clear-cut melodies: sometimes with bluesy horns answering the singers, sometimes with layers of convoluted counterpoint from the full band.”
> Further information on Work: Abyssinian 200: A Celebration
Photo: Clay McBride
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