“You really just want to be entertained,” says Mr. Game, the sly hustler-narrator portrayed by acclaimed actor Wendell Pierce (The Wire, Treme, Jack Ryan), who presides over Wynton Marsalis’s 2019 masterpiece The Ever Fonky Lowdown.

Combining droll commentary with soulful, big band-backed vocals, the Lowdown brilliantly reveals Marsalis’s incisive, panoramic view of modern society with its irresistible cocktail of deception, racism, greed, and gullibility that corrupts the promise of democracy in America and around the world. It covers terrain from football to politics, from power to poverty, from love and romance to betrayal and corruption.

Scored for jazz orchestra, narrator, three dancers, three vocalists, and guitar, The Ever Fonky Lowdown is a horn-fueled survey of the political malaise and cultural decay now plaguing America with an exhortation to rise above the structures that have been holding us back for centuries.