In October 2022, UMS hosted an intensive weeklong residency with Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra that included two concerts, a School Day Performance, multiple residency activities on and off campus, and a halftime performance at the Michigan football game. While a February residency precludes an appearance on the 50-yard line, we’re thrilled that Wynton and his Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra will return for another distinctive UMS residency this year.

Marsalis’s Symphony No. 4, “The Jungle,” was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic and premiered in December 2016; it has only been performed three times in the US since it was written. The six-movement symphony for jazz band and orchestra takes the dense mosaic of New York City as its inspiration. Marsalis’s masterwork highlights the paradoxes that define New York City, where wealth and poverty, grit and romance, and unlimited growth and stagnation all coexist. But it’s also a meditation on what being human means today — a wide-scale attempt to understand the maelstrom of modern life and remind us all what brings us together.