‘Trumpeters? We think we’re the kings of the orchestra’: Wynton Marsalis prepares to blow the Edinburgh festival away
Wynton Marsalis, the veteran American trumpeter and composer, is bringing his 1999 symphony All Rise to open this year's Edinburgh International Festival, with a performance uniting his Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and massed choirs at Usher Hall. The piece, a large-scale fusion of jazz, orchestral and choral forces, was originally conceived as a musical statement of racial integration, and its revival now carries added resonance at a moment when shared cultural and civic ideals feel increasingly contested.
All Rise spans 12 movements and was written for a 15-piece jazz band, a 50-piece orchestra and a 100-piece choir, drawing on marches, blues and dance rhythms to evoke American pluralism; the Edinburgh performance will bring together more than 200 performers in total. Marsalis, now notably more self-effacing than in his earlier, combative public persona, credits collaborators including orchestrator James Oliverio, bassoonist Milan Turković and above all the late conductor Kurt Masur, who commissioned the work for the New York Philharmonic in 1999 as a response to a divided city, drawing on his own experience of Nazi Germany as a warning about complacency.
- Marsalis's symphony All Rise opens Edinburgh International Festival this year
- Work unites his jazz orchestra, the RSNO and choirs, 200+ performers
- Piece, from 1999, was conceived to promote integration and unity
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Wynton Marsalis is a well-known American jazz trumpeter, bandleader and composer, and one of the most influential figures in American jazz over the past four decades. He wrote All Rise in 1999, a large-scale piece bringing together a jazz band, a full orchestra and a choir, at the request of the conductor Kurt Masur for the New York Philharmonic. Masur, who had lived through Nazi Germany, intended the work partly as a message about unity in a divided city.
The Edinburgh International Festival is one of the world's best-known arts festivals, held every summer in the Scottish capital and drawing performers and audiences from around the globe. This year it opens with a performance of All Rise, bringing together Marsalis's own Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and choirs, with more than 200 performers taking part at Usher Hall, one of Edinburgh's main concert venues.
All Rise is built around themes of bringing different people and traditions together, blending musical styles such as jazz, blues and orchestral composition. Its staging now, at a time when questions about shared values and cultural identity are widely debated, has added a layer of interest to its revival, though the piece itself was written over two decades ago.