Portraits of Bards, Titans, and Legends New York Performances

Now at Jazz at Lincoln Center, *Portraits of Bards, Titans, and Legends* places the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra under the artistic direction of Wynton Marsalis, working in the big-band lineage the institution was built to preserve. The program frames jazz history as biography, using large-ensemble color to study influential figures and the ideas they carried. In New York, where repertory jazz has been actively canonized on major stages, the concert reads as both performance and archival practice. One clear throughline is Marsalis’s insistence that tradition is something you interrogate, not simply repeat.