Performance

Music of W. C. Handy

0 upcoming performances in New York

“Music of W. C. Handy” traces the blues at the moment it moved from local tradition into written form and mass circulation, shaped by Handy’s early-20th-century publishing and bandleading. At Jazz at Lincoln Center, the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis frames that legacy as repertory, with featured voices including Sherman Irby and Kenny Washington. In New York, Handy’s songs entered the city’s theaters, ballrooms, and record shops as the blues became part of urban popular culture. Heard now in a concert hall, the material shows how structure can carry vernacular feeling without sanding it down.