# ‘Trumpeters? We think we’re the kings of the orchestra’: Wynton Marsalis prepares to blow the Edinburgh festival away

- URL: https://talkfuse.com/story/trumpeters-we-think-were-the-kings-of-the-orchestra-wynton-marsalis-prepares-to-blow-the-edinburgh-festival-away/
- Published: 2026-08-03T04:00:39+00:00
- Updated: 2026-08-03T04:12:16+00:00
- Original publisher: The Guardian (publisher lean: Left)
- Original article: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2026/aug/03/trumpeters-wynton-marsalis-edinburgh-festival-all-rise
- Topics: Americas, Culture, Entertainment, Music, Space, Technology, World

## Key points

- 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

## Summary

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.

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Summarised by TalkFuse (https://talkfuse.com/). Quote the original publisher for the reporting and link this page for the summary and discussion.