On March 24, Pulitzer Prize-winning composer, trumpeter and bandleader Wynton Marsalis will release his fifth Blue Note recording, 'He and She' – an ambitious new album of 22 tracks that combines spoken word and music.

The album is tempered with flashes of humor and plenty of swing centered around the compelling and most elemental of subjects, the relationship between a man and a woman.

Before heading into the studio, the Wynton Marsalis Quintet traveled to the Iron Horse in North Hampton, MA to perform the new material in front of a live audience. The quintet subsequently cut the tracks live over a two-day period. The minimally edited result became He and She.

Marsalis ended his last Blue Note studio album, From the Plantation to the Penitentiary, with a stunning spoken word piece, though on He and She, Marsalis’s voice is more prominent throughout, prefacing just about every track with his poetic words.

The new album draws its greatest power from telling a familiar story in such a compelling and richly entertaining manner, a unique variation on a theme that everyone, in some way, knows. One detects the sound of all our love stories in here.

“Since I was a boy, I liked talking. It’s easy to talk, but it’s hard to play. I never found talking that difficult.” – Wynton Marsalis

If you would like to win your own copy, and you think you know all there is to know about the man himself, then just answer this easy question: In 1983, Wynton won two (2) Grammy Awards, becoming the first recording artist ever to accomplish that feat. But what were the names of those two (2) Grammy Awards?!

Send me your answers and if you're correct you'll be in the running to win one of these new CDs. Just send us an e:mail here before May 1st with your answer and the subject title CONTEST: WYNTON MARSALIS CDs to:

exclusivemagazine@flash.net

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