Trumpeter and Composer Wynton Marsalis
Trumpeter and composer Wynton Marsalis spent his formative early years around seasoned Black artists who taught him about American culture from their perspectives. It started with his father, Ellis Marsalis, the late jazz pianist and educator, who introduced him to music by way of his funk band, pushed him to perfect his practice, and showed him how to confront reality while he was growing up in New Orleans, during the 1960s civil rights movement. After moving to New York, in 1979, on a scholarship to Juilliard, Marsalis met other artists—including drummer Art Blakey, novelist Ralph Ellison, choreographer Alvin Ailey, and poet Stanley Crouch—who recommended books and works of art for him to engage with, and quizzed him to ensure that he understood them. Looking back on it now, Marsalis says, “they were out on a ledge, dealing with stuff”—deep racial inequalities and discrimination—and generously showing him the context of the history he was stepping into. As a result, Marsalis became all the more serious and intentional about his craft. For him, music is a way of talking, specifically about the beauty and ugliness of the world, without using spoken language.
Marsalis, now 60 and the managing and artistic director of New York’s Jazz at Lincoln Center (JALC), has never seemed to run out of steam. He began his classical training on the trumpet at age 12, and joined Blakely’s Jazz Messengers band in 1980. He signed his first recording contract, with Columbia Records, at 22, and went on to release more than 100 jazz and classical recordings, win nine Grammy Awards, and author six books. In 1987, Marsalis co-founded a jazz program at Lincoln Center, which, following the initiative’s success, made it a formal part of the performing arts complex in 1996, giving the musical genre equal stature alongside the New York Philharmonic, the Metropolitan Opera, and the New York City Ballet. The following year, his album Blood on the Fields, an oratorio about slavery, won a Pulitzer Prize. A passionate teacher and advocate for music education, Marsalis holds more than 40 honorary degrees.
Not even the pandemic could stop him from using music as a vessel for knowledge and expression. As New York went into lockdown last March, Marsalis accelerated JALC’s digital programming: He launched a weekly YouTube conversation series, Skain’s Domain, hosted a virtual edition of JALC’s high school jazz band competition, and composed and recorded, with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, a single called “Quarantine Blues.” In August 2020, he released The Ever Fonky Lowdown, a horn-powered survey of the forces that divide people and a vision of how we might rise above them. Marsalis is currently touring his annual “Big Band Holidays” show with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra and, in March 2022, back at JALC, he will present “Journey Through Jazz: Fundamentals,” a new concert series that details the evolution of jazz and the blues. Through it all, Marsalis has remained passionate about the power of his work. “Music is important,” he says, “because music, and all art, is reenactment. The reenactments exist to let you understand the meaning of things across time.”
On this episode, Marsalis speaks with Andrew about jazz as a metaphor for democracy, communicating through instruments, and how understanding music lends itself to understanding life.
