Wynton Marsalis official web site

The famous series entitled “Marsalis on Music”, in which Wynton explains the fundamentals of music to middle school audiences, is now available as four-DVD boxed set. Buy it directly on Amazon.com.
The companion book + CD is also available on Amazon.
Check the video section for a complete list of Wynton’s DVDs available.

The DVD version of Congo Square will be available on March 4, 2008. You can pre-order it directly on Amazon.com. The performance was filmed last summer at Montreal Jazz Festival.
More info, liner notes and audio preview of the CD version can be found on the related Congo Square page.

A few months ago a new DVD has been released. It’s about a 1992 performance of In This House, On This Morning, by the Wynton Marsalis Septet.

Buy it or get more info on: Amazon.com

This month saw the release of the Jazz Icons series by San Diego’s Reelin’ In The Years.
Available on nine DVDs that will be released in a boxed set, the series features previously unreleased European performances by such legends as Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk.

Wynton wrote the foreword for the Louis Armstrong DVD

Out this month is a DVD version of a 1982 concert of Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers in performance at the Baird Auditorium at the Smithsonian Institution. The hourlong concert features a young Wynton Marsalis on trumpet, his brother Branford on baritone saxophone, Bill Pierce on tenor sax, Donald Brown on piano and Charles Fambrough on bass as they swing through “Little Man,” “My Ship,” “New York,” “Webb City” and a closing medley. A brief interview with Blakey is included.

Buy the DVD on Amazon.com

Unforgivable Blackness, the Ken Burns’ documentary about iconic black heavyweight champion Jack Johnson is now available on DVD.
Combining photographs and film footage with music provided by Wynton Marsalis, Burns’ portrait of Johnson clicks on at least three levels: as a biography, as a piece of sports history, and, most important, as a lesson on race relations in the early 20th century.

Drawing on blues, jazz and ragtime, Wynton collects and re-creates the musical styles that Johnson heard - and sometimes played - and uses them to portray the exhilarating rise and predictable fall of America’s first black heavyweight champion.

Buy the DVD from Amazon.com

The Marsalis Family recorded together for the first time ever, at University of New Orleans on August 2001. Featuring Ellis on piano, and his sons Branford (saxophones), Delfeayo (trombone), Jason (drums) and Wynton (trumpet). Plus bassist Roland Guerin, and a special guest appearance by Harry Connick Jr.
The DVD of that concert is now available in stores.

Buy it from Amazon.com

Inspired by a New Orleans concert in August 2001 celebrating patriarch Ellis Marsalis’ retirement from teaching at the University of New Orleans, a tour , a PBS special, a recording and a DVD (buy it on Amazon.com) are now in the works. The Marsalis family tour (check dates), kicks off on February 23.
It features Ellis Marsalis on piano, with sons Branford on saxophones, Wynton on trumpet, Delfeayo on trombone and Jason on drums, and the only non-family member, Reginald Veal on bass.
West Coast fans will have to be content with reproduced performances by this celebrated band of brothers and their father. The first entry is a CD chronicling the 2001 concert, titled “The Marsalis Family: A Jazz Celebration”, scheduled for release on Branford’s new independent record label, Marsalis Music, on Feb. 4. Harry Connick Jr., a longtime Marsalis associate, makes a guest appearance.

It was, says Delfeayo, a performance that “reflected our family collectively and individually.” Branford agrees, adding that “everybody came to play the music as well as they possibly could play it.”

A PBS presentation of the same concert, premiering on Feb. 20, visually illuminates those thoughts. And, finally, there will be a DVD (buy it on Amazon.com) version of the same performance, scheduled for spring, which will undoubtedly include all sorts of additional bits and pieces of outtakes, interviews, etc…, not on the CD or the special.