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Classically Black
Black classical musicians have been composing substantial music for centuries. This February, we shined the spotlight on a score… one every weekday… of great composers with roots in Africa.We met Le Mozart Noir… the man who not only was a world-famous swordsman, but an acknowledged master of the violin bow and the composing quill, playing duets with Queen Marie Antoinette. We visited a city of Creole musical dynasties, when New Orleans was home to the finest orchestras in the new world. We rediscovered a woman tirelessly composing in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood, many of whose works were likewise rediscovered: in a dilapidated downstate summer house, leading to a worldwide wave of interest in her music. And we heard a sinfonietta by a 2oth century New York composer… who himself was named after an Afro-English composer whose interest in American music made him a 19th century fan favorite in the U.S.Looking for the music? TSPR Music Director Ken Zahnle shares all the compositions he featured on Ovation on a Spotify playlist.

Wynton Marsalis

Tri States Public Radio | By Ken Zahnle
Published February 24, 2023 at 6:00 AM CST
Wynton Marsalis
Wikimedia

Wynton Marsalis is the most famed member of a New Orleans musical dynasty. Born in 1961 to prominent jazz pianist and teacher Ellis Marsalis, he was named for another jazz great, pianist Wynton Kelly, and he got his first trumpet at age 6 from another famed trumpeter, Al Hirt.

He studied classical music at school, and jazz at home. At 14 he performed the Haydn trumpet concerto with the New Orleans Philharmonic, and Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 two years later. The year after that he was admitted to the Tanglewood Music Center.

After attending Juilliard, where he is now director of Juilliard Jazz, Marsalis secured a unique contract with the Columbia record label: an equal number of jazz and classical albums. That paid off in 1983, when he became the only musician to win Grammy Awards in jazz and classical the same year, repeating the feat the next year as well.

Marsalis is founding Artistic Director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, a constituent at that venue alongside the New York Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera.

Accolades continued to followed Marsalis as he turned more attention to composing. He has written concertos in collaboration with the Philadelphia Orchestra, created an updated sequel to Igor Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale, and became the first jazz musician to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music for his oratorio Blood on the Fields.

Marsalis has been awarded the National Medal of Arts, the National Humanities Medal, the New York Urban League’s Frederick Douglass Medallion for distinguished leadership, and has been named a United Nations Messenger of Peace.

Wynton Marsalis… Classically Black.
Ken Zahnle
Ken oversees all music programming for Tri States Public Radio, hosting the morning classical music program Ovation, the Saturday nigh jazz survey After Hours, and engineering recorded performances for TSPR. Ken is a native of Highland Park, IL, with degrees in music and broadcasting from Western Illinois University. Teenage years listening to Chicago's old-school fine arts and classical radio stations, coupled with a few months spinning discs on a college residence hall radio station, led him onto the primrose career path of radio. Ken has deep roots at TSPR, starting as a student staff announcer and host, before becoming news director for a group of local radio stations, then Program Director for Tri States Audio Information Services. When he's not deep within our studios and music library, he continues his over quarter-century of assisting Macomb High School's Marching Band.
See stories by Ken Zahnle