Led by Wynton Marsalis, the fifteen-strong Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra (JLCO) is made up of some of today’s finest instrumental soloists and big-band musicians. This impressively versatile orchestra has a vast repertoire, which includes original compositions by its members, pieces commissioned by the Jazz at Lincoln Center, rare masterpieces of jazz history and evergreens by such greats as Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Fletcher Henderson, Thelonious Monk, Mary Lou Williams, Dizzy Gillespie, Benny Goodman and Charles Mingus.
‘This was the world’s finest music from cats with the finest jazz chops – anywhere,’ wrote a reviewer of one of the JLCO’s recent concerts. The jazz trumpeter, composer and bandleader Wynton Marsalis is a guru to some, who has long held that ‘all jazz is modern. We attempt to embrace both the legacy and the future of jazz so the history of jazz is present in what is currently being played.’
Balázs Szalóky, the featured guest of the concert, studied in New York. By his own account, he decided to form his own band in 2018 after he heard the JLCO at a concert in Vienna.