ABOUT THE ALBUM

Blue Engine Records is proud to announce the release of We the People, the latest album from the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis. Recorded live in 2019, this suite of music emerged from an historic collaboration between Jazz at Lincoln Center and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art that united two great American institutions in service of using our shared cultural heritage to lead the way toward a better future.

The project began when the JLCO’s masterful composers were asked to select a single work of art from Crystal Bridges’ incomparable collection as inspiration for a new original work. The resulting songs, stitched together into a suite, present a stunning big band portrait of our nation’s history, scoring works from acclaimed artists such as Romare Bearden, Thomas Cole, Stuart Davis, and Grace Hartigan. Both stirring and elegiac, We the People celebrates America’s unparalleled cultural contributions to the world; and by bringing together Jazz at Lincoln Center and Crystal Bridges, the record shows how the arts can connect disparate communities and unite us all.

We The People was made possible by the Alice L. Walton Foundation.

LINER NOTES

Jazz music is America’s past and its potential, summed up and sanctified and accessible to anybody who learns to listen, feel, and understand it. The music can connect us both to our earlier selves and to our better selves-to-come. It can remind us of where we fit on the timeline of human achievement, an ultimate value of art.

It is us—all of us—at our best, collaborating for a greater good while reveling in individual freedom. Nothing is more quintessentially American than that.

There has never been a recording quite like this one, a creative collaboration between an art museum and a jazz orchestra. The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas is dedicated to celebrating the American Spirit. The virtuosos who make up the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis embody that spirit, night after night, across the country and around the world.

To create this recording, members of the orchestra were asked to choose a work of art from the museum’s collection that especially resonated with them—works by artists as different from one another as Stuart Davis and Thomas Cole, Adolph Gottlieb and Romare Bearden—and then write and arrange music for the orchestra that it inspired.

Never in the history of the music has there been a band that included as many gifted arrangers. The result—filled with echoes of church music and the blues, Afro-Latin rhythms, 4/4 swing, and much, much more—is as rich and varied, soulful and surprising as the country it reflects, a brilliant reminder, just when one is badly needed, of how much America’s music has to tell us about ourselves if we take the time to listen.

—Geoffrey C. Ward