Customer Reviews

All Rise

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Wynton and the whole Marsalis family are a gift to the world of music. Striving to educate every step of the way, All Rise is a new voice in the 21st Century. Combining styles from Swing to Classical Settings to Gospel chants to lush horn harmonies, the calibre of contempory classical music just leaped up a couple notches.

While listening to music, I use as a gauge what kind of mood would I have to be in to listen to this: to crave hearing it. Lots of contemporary music does reflect our times: disconnected; disconcerting; disharmonious. But why would we ever want to re-inforce these feelings? If music soothes the savage beast, save me from modern music. Until now.

500 years from now, when teachers are teaching about music from the turn of the century, Wynton Marsalis will be heeded as a giant in many categories: Jazz, Classical, Composition.

All Rise has made me stand up and want for more.

wynton marsalis represents a nexus or, as some would say, signifies a nexus in jazz. when he came on the scene, the recording scene, as a leader in the 70s, jazz had gone in a lot of directions, rock fusion, a soft keening lullaby jazz, jazzy rhythm and blues, and a jazz form more classical than jazz.

marsalis stuck to a traditional jazz idiom, strongly influenced by louis armstrong, while `eschewing` (a word i really dislike using) avant garde jazz, which didn't make him very popular with a lot of folk who believed he was stagnating jazz.

and then there was his classical training, which did not intrude, though many suspected that it did.

all rise is what marsalis does best, it is marsalis at his best, a sophisicated jazz symphony utilizing a symphonic orchestra to augment jazz. usually when composers write a jazz symphony, jazz gets short shrift, and the listener has to pick out of the composition pieces of jazz. not in the case of all rise. this is probably the first real jazz symphony ever written.

anyone serious about jazz, whether they like the musical personality of wynton marsalis or not, should own a copy of all rise.

Granted, it's not for everyone. But if you have a sophisticated ear, and you like to try new music, "All Rise" needs to be in your CD collection. There's a little bit of "Grovers Corners" here; the pieces are at once nostalgic and avant-garde at the same time.

What happens when you take great modern classical music, great modern jazz music, a jazz orchestra, a classical orchestra, THREE choirs, put it in a blender, and put it on CD.

Well, when Wynton Marsalis is involved, you get either one of the coolest pieces of "serious" music of the end of the 20th century, or one of the coolest pieces of "serious" music of the beginning of the 21st.

Either way, you who are more adventurous... Check it out!

This is fresh and new and combines many different elements