Wynton Marsalis Crafts an Ambitious, Emotional Work with ‘Blues Symphony’

By Greg Cahill | From the May/June 2025 issue of Strings

This ambitious, high-definition stereo recording traverses time and space. Grammy-winning jazz trumpeter and Pulitzer Prize–winning composer Wynton Marsalis has crafted a sprawling, seven-movement orchestral work that takes the listener from Revolutionary War–era New York to the traffic-congested streets of modern Harlem. His Blues Symphony—a blend of blues, gospel, jazz, and symphonic music—is a historical, social, and cultural powerhouse. It evokes the work of such third-stream jazz composers as George Gershwin and Leonard Bernstein, as well as the innovative Harlem ragtime pianist James P. Johnson. The resulting music, brought to life by the rock-solid Detroit Symphony Orchestra, has all the verve of the teeming American urban landscape and the generations of diverse inhabitants that have served as its inspiration. 

Listening to the second movement, “Swimming in Sorrow,” you are struck by the rich musical palette the Black community brought to 18th-, 19th-, and 20th-century American culture, including Afro-American parlor music, gospel and church music, New Orleans funeral marches, and the swing-violin stylings of Claude Williams. The movement concludes with a repeated blues cry, played on the English horn, that evokes Dvořák’s Ninth Symphony, “From the New World.” 

The immigrant population’s cultural contribution to America is heard in the sixth movement, “Danzon y Mambo, Choro y Samba,” which begins with a New Orleans/Cuban concert feel and includes a male-female dialogue between violin and cello. Overall, Blues Symphony is an emotional tribute to the Black community’s considerable contributions to American music: “Life hands you hard times,” Marsalis writes. “When you cry, holler, and shout to release those hard times; when you tease, cajole, and play to diminish them; and when you dance and find a common community through groove, better times will be found. The more profound the pain, the deeper the groove.”

Blues Symphony is available on CD and streaming formats, and Detroit’s Third Man Records (operated by White Stripes guitarist and Detroit-area native Jack White) has pressed a limited vinyl edition that features cover art by Detroit artist Judy Bowman, commissioned by the DSO. It is available online exclusively to supporters of the orchestra’s new Gold Record Collective, which will raise funds to support future recording projects by the DSO.