The most revealing thing about a jazz musician’s craft is how they treat a melody they didn’t write. World on a String: Swinging Songs of Broadway turns that observation into a full evening, bringing Jazz at Lincoln Center’s vocalists Kate Kortum and David Marino to swing-reimagined material from Hamilton, Wicked, South Pacific, and West Side Story. The fifth production in JALC’s Presents touring series comes to Universal Preservation Hall in Saratoga Springs on Saturday, April 17 at 7:30 p.m.
About the Show
Kortum carries considerable jazz credentials into this program. A Juilliard graduate and winner of the 2025 Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition, she studied at the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music before completing a master’s at Juilliard. Her sound moves through bebop, blues, and the Great American Songbook with what critics have called “an old soul but a young heart.” Her 2023 debut, Good Woman, reframes standards through a distinctly female perspective and has accumulated more than 3.5 million streams; her 2025 follow-up, Wild Woman, pushes into territory the traditional songbook rarely assigned to women: obsession, pride, emotions deliberately suppressed. She has performed at Newport Jazz Festival, Birdland, Blue Note, and with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra alongside Wynton Marsalis.
Marino, a Montreal vocalist and former finalist on Canada’s The Voice, brings a different path. Trained at The Neighborhood Playhouse and active across North America and Europe, he has made a regular home at Birdland in New York alongside musical director Billy Stritch. His debut EP, The Debut Sessions, extended his solo platform beyond the club circuit.
The production comes at a particular point in Jazz at Lincoln Center’s history. The organization has brought jazz to more than 446 cities in over 40 countries over more than three decades under Wynton Marsalis’s direction, and jazz.org identifies the 2026–27 season as Marsalis’s final year leading the organization. World on a String is the JALC Presents series — not the flagship orchestra on the road, but a production that connects regional venues with artists the organization has specifically championed.
Venue & Logistics
Universal Preservation Hall, a High Victorian Gothic building constructed in 1871 at 25 Washington Street in downtown Saratoga Springs, reopened in February 2020. The Great Hall’s acoustic character is warm and responsive, well-suited to jazz vocal performance, and a program that asks two singers to make Broadway standards swing depends on exactly the kind of room that rewards nuance over projection.
Tickets
No ticket price was available from sources at the time of publication. Buy tickets