The Spark with Tift Merritt: Wynton Marsalis and Carlos Henriquez

Registration for this event closes at 12 PM EDT on November 19, 2020.

Join us for the third episode of The Spark with Tift Merritt, featuring Wynton Marsalis and Carlos Henriquez. In this livestreamed series, Grammy-nominated singer/songwriter and UNC alumna Tift Merritt returns to Carolina Performing Arts to take us behind the scenes in artist-to-artist video interviews that delve deep into the creative process.

On November 19, Tift will sit down with Wynton Marsalis, internationally acclaimed musician, composer, and managing and artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, and Carlos Henriquez, bassist for the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra (JLCO) and lecturer at the Northwestern University School of Music.

Marsalis and the JLCO are no strangers to Chapel Hill. In the 06/07 season—CPA’s second season ever—they began a long tradition of performing on our stage. In this interview, Merritt will take us “backstage” with Marsalis and Henriquez for a candid conversation about their work, their lives, and turning points in their work as artists, with Jazz at Lincoln Center and beyond.

Marsalis’s transformational work at Jazz at Lincoln Center began in 1987, when he co-founded a jazz program at Lincoln Center, which grew into  the acclaimed institution that today serves as an international destination for jazz and education. Henriquez’s history with JLCO is nearly as long: during his time as a student in the LaGuardia High School of Music & Arts and Performing Arts’ Concert Jazz Ensemble, they won first place in the 1996 Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Essentially Ellington High School Jazz Band Competition and Festival. Just two years later, Henriquez joined the Wynton Marsalis Septet and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra.