Collection: Wynton Marsalis

Wynton Marsalis received his first trumpet at six, a gift from New Orleans trumpeter Al Hirt, his father’s employer and friend. By fourteen he was performing the Haydn Trumpet Concerto with the New Orleans Symphony. By seventeen he had won the Outstanding Brass Soloist award at Tanglewood. He arrived at Juilliard in 1979 intending to pursue a classical career, changed his mind, joined Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers in 1980, toured Japan with Herbie Hancock in 1981, and in 1982 became the first musician signed by a major label for both jazz and classical work simultaneously when Columbia took him on in both capacities. He was twenty. His second album “Think of One” (Columbia, 1983), named after the Thelonious Monk composition, introduced the Wynton Marsalis Quintet: Branford Marsalis on saxophone, Kenny Kirkland on piano, Charles Fambrough on bass and Jeff “Tain” Watts on drums, a group that applied post-bop rigor to the jazz tradition with a directness and technical command that nobody had attempted publicly at that scale in over a decade. He won Grammy Awards in both jazz and classical categories in 1983, the first musician to do so in the same year. He co-founded the Classical Jazz program at Lincoln Center in 1987, which became Jazz at Lincoln Center, and he has been its artistic director ever since. “Blood on the Fields” (Columbia, 1997), a three-hour oratorio on slavery, won the Pulitzer Prize: the first time the prize had been awarded for jazz, or for any non-classical music. Eight Grammy Awards in total. His centrality to American jazz institutions for three decades has made him a celebrated and contested figure simultaneously, which is true of most people who hold that much influence over a living art form.