Trumpet | b. 1961

Wynton Learson Marsalis was born on October 18, 1961 in New Orleans, Louisiana, the second of six sons of jazz pianist and educator Ellis Marsalis Jr. He was named after pianist Wynton Kelly. Al Hirt, a New Orleans trumpeter and his father’s employer, gave him his first trumpet at six. He was performing the Haydn Trumpet Concerto with the New Orleans Symphony at fourteen, won the Harry Shapiro Award as outstanding brass soloist at Tanglewood at seventeen, enrolled at Juilliard in 1979 intending a classical career, and changed his mind. He joined Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers in 1980, toured Japan with Herbie Hancock in 1981, and in 1982 became the first musician signed by Columbia Records as both a jazz and classical artist simultaneously. His debut as a jazz leader appeared the same year. “Think of One” (1983), with Branford Marsalis on saxophone, Kenny Kirkland on piano, Charles Fambrough on bass and Jeff “Tain” Watts on drums, introduced the quintet and won a Grammy alongside a simultaneous Grammy for his classical album “Haydn, Hummel: Trumpet Concertos,” making him the first musician to win in both categories in the same year. He co-founded the Classical Jazz program at Lincoln Center in 1987, eventually becoming Jazz at Lincoln Center, and has served as its artistic director since. “Blood on the Fields” (Columbia, 1997), a twenty-seven-part oratorio on slavery, won the Pulitzer Prize, the first time the prize was awarded for jazz or for any non-classical music. Marsalis has won nine Grammys in total.