Folk, Blues, and Spirituals New York Performances

At Jazz at Lincoln Center, the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, led by Wynton Marsalis, turns to folk, blues, and spirituals as source material rather than nostalgia. The program traces how vernacular songs, church music, and work melodies feed big-band language, translating call-and-response and blues inflection into arranged ensemble form. In New York, where jazz has long been both an archive and a living practice, this repertoire reads as cultural history in motion. One clear point emerges: the tradition survives because it keeps being rewritten.