Experiencing America, With Foot and Instrument

Excerpt from NYTimes -- The climax of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s 50th-anniversary season, which has emphasized live music, has arrived in the middle of its run, with two programs whose first two-thirds are each to music by Duke Ellington. To play these, Wynton Marsalis (on trumpet) and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra (conducted by Eric Reed, some 19 musicians in all) occupy the back of City Center’s stage. It’s a thrill to hear the big-band sound projecting through the theater. At some moments the brass section comes in like a massive wall of sound; at others its long chords hang in the air like clouds. Dan Nimmer (on piano) and Carlos Henriquez (on bass) are marvelous sources of rhythm. Ellington called his work “American music” rather than jazz, and throughout these two programs you hear how he took the American jazz roots of his style and pushed them into aspects of classicism, European modernism and more. This American-based diversity is one reason that Ellington was so often the composer to whose scores Ailey chose to choreograph. Both of these current Ailey-Ellington programs show the range of styles that Ailey could use. The hip-tilting jazz dance that is the main idiom of “Night  Creature” (1974) is far from the controlled, modern-dance adagio of “Reflections in D” (1962), even though some of the same steps occur in both. In “Night Creature” you feel Ailey’s dancers surfing the wave of the music; in “Reflections” you feel the male soloist rigorously, soberly countering it. Those two begin Program A. Program B starts with “The River” (1970). Ailey and Ellington shaped this together; it originally had its premiere with American Ballet Theater (the Ailey company dances it without point work), and it is a spectrum of styles, speeds and tempers. The middle part of each program is the same: two sections from the choreographer Talley Beatty’s “Road of the Phoebe Snow” (1959), whose music is by Ellington and Billy Strayhorn; a duet from “Caravan” (choreographed in 1976 by Louis Falco to music based on Ellington themes by Michael Kamen); and single excerpts from three of Ailey’s compositions to Ellington music: “The Mooche” (1975), “Pas de Duke” (1976) and “Three Black Kings” (also 1976, to music of that title composed by Ellington and his son, Mercer). Continue Reading