An Oratorio of History With History of Its Own

By BEN RATLIFF, Published: February 24, 2013

By the time of Wynton Marsalis’s 1994 oratorio, “Blood on the Fields,”written for three singers and a 15-piece band, his scale for musical structure and organizational planning was big and getting bigger.

He was 32 then. Jazz at Lincoln Center hadn’t yet become a constituent part of the larger Lincoln Center organization, and the idea of a dedicated theater for jazz hadn’t even been proposed. But he had already written extended works and had developed a framework for identifying and explaining jazz’s standards of excellence, and for linking the music to the history of black Americans and the notion of cultural survival. Never before had such power resided within one jazz musician, and those who doubted him wanted to be impressed on every possible level — especially after “Blood” won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for music.

In its latest rerun on Friday at Rose Theater — I saw the second night of a three-night stand — the band, conducted by Mr. Marsalis, put on a powerful and slightly streamlined version of a piece that once felt challengingly long and heavy. The singers tell a story of two slaves transported to America, Jesse (Kenny Washington) and Leona (Paula West), a man and a woman, a prince and a commoner. Jesse tries to escape, but is caught and brought back; with the help of a sage named Juba (Gregory Porter), he adjusts his view of the world, learns how to love both Leona and his new land properly, and by the end the couple prepare to seek freedom together.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/25/arts/music/blood-on-the-fields-from-jazz-at-lincoln-center.html?_r=0