Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis: Afro!
'Jazz shows us how to find a groove with other people, how to hold on to it, and how to develop it.' — Wynton Marsalis
What a way to open the Fine Arts Center's fiftieth anniversary season!
You absolutely must be with us as we host the first performance in a two-evening world premiere event for the Jazz at Lincoln's Center orchestra's brand new program, Afro!
In October 1975, the Fine Arts Center’s inaugural concert featured the Boston Symphony Orchestra, one of the nation’s foremost European classical music ensembles.
Now we have the distinct honor of starting our second half century with a performance by the most celebrated and prestigious ensemble in Black classical music.
And as we look back on fifty years of harnessing the power of the arts to unite people, call us to community, and elevate our minds and our spirits — and look forward to carrying on that tradition for another fifty years — we find the embodiment of our faith in the arts in Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra leader Wynton Marsalis. "We will elevate you," Marsalis says about jazz musicians in this BBC interview from March 2025. "Let me share my space with you. Let me be quiet and let you talk. Let me leave space for your soul."
Marsalis's brand new piece, Afro!, explores the deep roots of jazz in African Music. In this performance — and the one that follows at Lincoln Center itself a day later — the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra will be joined by the extraordinary vocalist Shenel Johns and Ghanaian American djembe virtuoso Weedie Braimah. In tracing the history of America's greatest artform, this stunningly accomplished group of musicians will remind us of why jazz has been a significant part of the Fine Arts Center's programming for the entirety of our fifty years.
Join us for this most joyous occasion as we honor the past, illuminate the present, and envision a bright future. Let the music we'll experience together remind us that even under the most difficult of circumstances, the arts hold the power to bring us together, to uplift, to heal, and to give us the strength to hope.