Wynton Marsalis is a world-renowned trumpeter, bandleader, composer, and a leading advocate of American culture. He presently serves as Managing and Artistic Director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, the Director of Jazz Studies at The Juilliard School, and President of the Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation. Born in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1961, he is the son of renowned jazz pianist and music educator Ellis Marsalis, Jr. Wynton started practicing trumpet at age 6 and grew up playing in an unusually diverse mix of musical ensembles— including everything from New Orleans traditional marching bands to funk bands, concert bands, symphonic orchestras, and small jazz ensembles. Just one year after moving to New York City to attend The Juilliard School at age 17, Marsalis joined the legendary Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers.
In 1981, Marsalis formed a quintet and began touring all over the country and the world. To date, he has performed over 5,200 concerts in 845 distinct cities and 64 countries across the globe. Over the past four and a half decades, Marsalis has rekindled and animated widespread international interest in jazz through performances, educational activities, books, curricula, and relentless advocacy on public platforms. Today, Marsalis continues the renaissance that he sparked in the early 1980s, attracting new generations of young talent to jazz and illuminating the mythic meanings of jazz fundamentals.
Marsalis has been called the “Pied Piper” of jazz and the “Doctor of Swing.” Since his recording debut in 1982, he has released over 110 jazz and classical recordings and won many awards, from a home cooked meal to honors that require a tuxedo. He regularly performs in the most prestigious concert halls and, from time to time, till all hours of the morning in the most inconspicuous of local clubs. From the very beginning of his career, education has been vital to his mission. He has taught and mentored countless musicians who have gone on to play, teach and advocate in their own brilliant ways.
Marsalis performs and composes across the entire spectrum of jazz and has written jazz-influenced chamber music and symphonic works for revered classical ensembles across the US and abroad. He is inspired to experiment in an ever-widening palette of forms and concepts that constitute some of the most advanced thinking in modern jazz and in American music on the broad scale. His body of original work includes (but is not limited to) over 600songs and movements, 11 dance scores, 13 suites, four symphonies, two chamber pieces, two string quartets, a jazz oratorio, a fanfare, and concertos for violin, tuba, trumpet and most recently, for orchestra.
Marsalis has received such accolades as The French Grand Prix du Disque, The NEA Jazz Master Award, the Marian Anderson Award, and The Ken Burns American Heritage Prize. He was appointed Messenger of Peace by United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan (2001),awarded The National Medal of Arts (2005), and The National Medal of Humanities (2016). Britain’s Royal Academy of Music has granted Marsalis Honorary Membership; in the fall of 2009, he received France’s highest distinction, the Chevalier of the Legion of Honor; on his 62nd birthday in October 2023, he was awarded the Praemium Imperiale for Music by the Japan Art Association—Japan’s highest honor for the arts. He has received honorary doctorates from 41 of America’s top academic institutions including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Tulane University in his hometown of New Orleans.
Marsalis is the music’s chief advocate, philosopher, and performer, who is called upon at ceremonial occasions to place events in their proper historical context. To that end, he is a principal speaker in several vital documentaries on jazz and American culture and has authored many relevant essays on jazz-related topics.
Between 2011 and 2014, he delivered six groundbreaking and definitive lectures entitled Hidden in Plain View: Meanings in American Music at Harvard University. In 2023, he delivered the highly esteemed Nexus Lecture in Rotterdam, Netherlands. Marsalis is the author of nine books, including two children’s books.
Wynton Marsalis’ core beliefs are based on jazz fundamentals: freedom and individual creativity (improvisation), collective action and good manners(swing), as well as acceptance, gratitude and resilience (the blues). Marsalis believes music has the power to elevate our quality of life and lead us to both higher and lower levels of consciousness; that music can elevate the quality of human engagement for individuals, social networks and cultural institutions throughout the world.