Branford Marsalis Quartet Contrarianism suits the saxophonist Branford Marsalis, though probably not as much as he likes to think. The title of his new album, ''Four ------ Playin' Tunes,'' hurls a rejoinder to the rarefactions he sees elsewhere in jazz. He's overstating the point, but maybe that's the motivation he needed. Anyway, the album is a...
Taken at face value, the program that the New York Philharmonic presented on Wednesday evening in Avery Fisher Hall was a curious clutch of disparate works. Still, there was symmetry to the arrangement: two saxophone showcases played with an estimable soloist, Branford Marsalis, both also heard during a Philharmonic concert in Central Park last...
The trumpeter Terence Blanchard and the saxophonist Branford Marsalis, in back-to-back sets at Rose Theater on Friday, played what sounded like new music. In truth some of it was old. (And some of it was really old.) But the flexible musical rhetoric of the sets felt like the right move for the main theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center, where jazz is...