The Pulitzer Prize Jazz Winners

Three jazz musicians have won the Pulitzer Prize: Ornette Coleman, Wynton Marsalis, and Henry Threadgill. Coleman and Threadgill were noted for creating new compositional styles, Coleman’s "harmolodics" and Threadgill’s non-diatonic tonal structures (more fun than it sounds). Marsalis's work is a three-hour jazz opera tracing the roots of slavery through American history. Three extended performances this evening: Ornette Coleman’s “Sound Grammar,” Wynton Marsalis’s “Blood on the Fields,” and Henry Threadgill’s “In for a Penny, In for a Pound.”