Wynton Marsalis
The boy from a New Orleans church band gave half his lifetime to raising jazz into a classic of the concert hall.
At a glance 🔭💭
Some coordinates adapted from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) · Pleiades (CC BY 3.0)
Companions along the way ⏳🌊
- FamilyEllis Marsalis Jr.
A pianist and educator who grounded the Marsalis sons in the fundamentals of jazz, and who passed away in 2020.
- FamilyBranford Marsalis
A year older and the saxophonist of the early quintet, Branford shared a stage on which the brothers drove each other on.
- MentorDanny Barker
Placed the young Wynton in a church brass band, and later joined “The Majesty of the Blues” on banjo.
- MentorArt Blakey
In the Jazz Messengers he showed the teenager hard bop and the path of a bandleader.
- SupportHerbie Hancock
He took him on the VSOP tour and produced part of his debut album.
- InfluenceAlbert Murray
His view of the blues as the core of American culture became the foundation of Jazz at Lincoln Center.
I. A house of six brothers · 1961–1977 (age 0–16)
(Birth) He was born in October 1961 in New Orleans, Louisiana. His father, Ellis Marsalis Jr., was a pianist and music teacher, and his mother, Dolores Ferdinand Marsalis, ran the household and raised six sons. The name Wynton came from a pianist his father admired, Wynton Kelly, the player who had worked in Miles Davis's band. (Brothers) Branford, a year older, took up the saxophone, younger brother Delfeayo the trombone and the youngest, Jason, the drums, each becoming a musician, while Ellis III is known to have worked as a poet·photographer. Their father is known to have insisted on modern jazz over popular music. The sons grew up watching a musician's life up close from an early age. (Trumpet) Around the age of six, he received his first trumpet from Al Hirt, a trumpeter his father worked with. As a child he also played in the Fairview Baptist Church children's brass band led by the banjoist Danny Barker, but by his own recollection he was not a diligent student then. (Turning point) He recalled that it was around twelve that he began to throw himself seriously into practice. At the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts (NOCCA) he studied classical music and jazz side by side, and at fourteen he performed Haydn's Trumpet Concerto with the New Orleans Philharmonic. In the same years he formed a funk band with friends and earned pocket money playing neighborhood parties. These years, in which he absorbed at once the rigor of classical music, which will not stray by a single note from the page, and the street musician's feel for reading a dancer's body, became the root of a career that would later branch in two directions.
II. A school on the road · 1978–1982 (age 17–21)
(Tanglewood) In the summer of 1979, at seventeen, he entered the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood in Massachusetts and learned orchestral playing. He is said to have been the youngest wind player ever accepted into the program. That fall he moved to New York and enrolled at the Juilliard School. (Messengers) In 1980 he joined drummer Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers. Blakey was a bandleader renowned for putting young players onstage and raising them there, and in that band Wynton learned the language of hard bop and how to drive a band before an audience night after night. Rather than finish Juilliard, he chose the school of the tour bus. (VSOP) In 1981 he toured in the VSOP quartet with Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter on bass and Tony Williams on drums. In effect, a trumpeter not yet twenty was playing at the very heart of the rhythm section of Miles Davis's quintet of the 1960s. He remembered the experience as a time when he learned, in his body, how masters listen to one another. (Columbia) Around the same time he signed with Columbia Records, and from then on released jazz and classical albums side by side on the label. His 1982 debut was partly produced by Hancock, with his brother Branford on saxophone. The label presented him, dressed in a suit and playing acoustic jazz, as the face of a new generation, the so-called Young Lions. At a time when electric instruments and rock rhythms ruled the jazz mainstream, the path the twenty-year-old chose was, if anything, to relearn the old language head-on.
The debut of a twenty-year-old schooled at the side of Blakey and Hancock. His brother Branford and Hancock's quartet each appear on separate tracks, showing that he set out between two generations.
- The tracks with Hancock·Ron Carter·Tony Williams were recorded during the VSOP tour. Listen for the tension as a young trumpet cuts in while the three masters' rhythm section pushes and pulls the tempo.
- In Ron Carter's “RJ,” Tony Williams's cymbals seem to split the beat without pause, pushing the soloist forward.
- “Hesitation” is a piece in which, without piano, trumpet and tenor saxophone trade phrases over the chord progression of Gershwin's “I Got Rhythm” (rhythm changes). Follow the conversation as the brothers take up each other's sentences.
- The tone is bright and the high notes precise, and the phrasing seems to reflect the influence of Freddie Hubbard and the Miles Davis of the 1960s.
His classical debut, in which at twenty-two he recorded again the Haydn he had performed with orchestra at fourteen; the following year it won him a Grammy alongside his jazz album. Raymond Leppard conducted the National Philharmonic Orchestra.
- Haydn's concerto was written in 1796 for a new trumpet fitted with keys that change its pitch. Listen for the passages where it trades with the orchestra melodies that, thanks to those keys, could move by semitones even in the low register.
- In the slow second movement, what matters is the breath that carries the line as if singing, in a straight, unwavering tone that spares the tremor (vibrato) of jazz.
- The fast third movement is in a form where the same theme keeps returning (rondo), and the cleanness of cutting notes off quickly with the tongue (tonguing) stands out.
- Heard alongside the jazz album recorded the same year, it lets you compare how differently a single player handles tone and articulation from one genre to the next.
III. Grammys in two fields · 1983–1989 (age 22–28)
(Grammys) At the 1984 Grammy Awards he won in the jazz category for “Think of One” and in the classical category for his recording of the trumpet concertos of Haydn·Hummel·Leopold Mozart. He was the first performer to win in both fields in the same year, and the following year he did it again. He was twenty-two. (Quintet) His quintet centered on his brother Branford, Kenny Kirkland on piano and Jeff Tain Watts on drums, with Charles Fambrough and Charnett Moffett among those who held the bass chair. The music of this period, when the brothers pushed each other on a single stage, carried on the tension of Miles's 1960s quintet while experimenting with complex rhythms that split and layered the beat so the tempo seemed to shift. (Parting) In 1985 Branford and Kirkland left the quintet to join the band of the rock singer Sting. “Black Codes,” released that year, became this lineup's final peak. Wynton built a new group with pianist Marcus Roberts, bassist Robert Hurst and the remaining Watts, and later colleagues such as Wessell Anderson and Todd Williams on saxophone, Reginald Veal on bass and Herlin Riley on drums became the face of the band. (Roots) Around this time he grew close to the critic Stanley Crouch and the writer Albert Murray. Murray read the blues as a Black American form that celebrates life while enduring hardship, and Wynton, taking that idea to heart, went back to Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and the traditions of his hometown, New Orleans. The “Standard Time” series, fresh interpretations of standards, began in 1987, and on 1989's “The Majesty of the Blues” he brought in his childhood teacher Danny Barker on banjo to take up the New Orleans funeral march.
The last studio album by the quintet with his brother Branford and Kenny Kirkland. The title comes from the Southern laws that bound the rights of freed Black people after the Civil War.
- On the title track a rhythmic device that splits the beat so the tempo seems suddenly to change (metric modulation) recurs again and again. Jeff Tain Watts's drums shake that framework as they drive the band.
- Kirkland's piano builds tension with an accompaniment that converses behind the soloist by jabbing in short chords (comping). Many have said it recalls Hancock's approach in the 1960s.
- In the passages where Branford's saxophone and Wynton's trumpet play the theme together and then part ways, the breathing peculiar to a band of brothers comes through.
- “Blues,” at the end of the album, is a duo for trumpet and Charnett Moffett's bass alone, laying the 12-bar blues bare to its leanest skeleton.
An album that brings together the ideas of Albert Murray and Stanley Crouch and a return to his hometown, New Orleans. His childhood teacher Danny Barker joined him on banjo.
- On the title track he uses a plunger mute, a rubber cup opened and closed over the bell, to draw a crying sound like a human voice. It is a sound handed down from the trumpeters of the Ellington orchestra.
- The long suite “The New Orleans Function” follows a New Orleans funeral procession. The crucial moment is when the slow dirge on the way to the cemetery turns into a joyous march on the way back.
- In one passage a minister reads a sermon written by Crouch, so you can hear how the speech and music of the Black church interlock.
- Herlin Riley's drums roll the beat over the drum patterns of New Orleans street parades (second line), laying old movement beneath modern harmony.
IV. Jazz at Lincoln Center · 1987–1997 (age 26–36)
(Lincoln Center) In 1987, New York's Lincoln Center launched a summer jazz concert series and brought him on as its artistic director. The series later became a formal department, Jazz at Lincoln Center, and in 1996 it rose to become an independent constituent alongside the New York Philharmonic·the Metropolitan Opera. Under his leadership, the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra revived the scores of Ellington and Count Basie, Thelonious Monk and Jelly Roll Morton with all the care a symphony orchestra lavishes on its classical repertoire. (Education) Around 1995 he started “Essentially Ellington,” sending Ellington's original scores to high school big bands and holding a competition, and that same year, on the PBS series “Marsalis on Music,” he unpacked the architecture of music for children. Visiting schools to hold workshops in every city on tour became a long-standing habit. In effect, the ways of his father, a teacher, were being repeated in the son on a larger scale. (Composition) His stature as a composer grew as well. After “Citi Movement,” written for a work by the choreographer Garth Fagan, and “In This House, On This Morning,” which borrowed the order of a Black church service, he premiered in 1994 the oratorio “Blood on the Fields,” the story of two Africans dragged into slavery. In 1997 it became the first jazz work to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Music. (Thought) In his 1994 book “Sweet Swing Blues on the Road,” he chronicled life on tour, riding the bus with the band from city to city. From around this time he began to describe jazz as a miniature of American democracy, a conversation in which everyone speaks freely yet which moves forward only if they listen to one another, and this belief became the thread running through all his later work and teaching.
A three-hour oratorio tracing the journey to freedom of Jesse and Leona, a man and a woman dragged into slavery, and the first jazz work ever to win the Pulitzer Prize. It was recorded in 1995 and released in 1997.
- Cassandra Wilson sings Leona, Miles Griffith sings Jesse, and Jon Hendricks sings the sage. Each of the three voices tells of a different character's age and circumstance.
- Field work songs and shouted calls and answers (call-and-response) are folded into the big-band arrangements, and you can hear the sounds of the slavery era being carried over into the language of jazz.
- Like Ellington's, the horn section of the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra layers the distinct timbre of each instrument to create color. Listen for the moments when low horns settle beneath a heavy scene.
- This is theater music in which the lyrics drive the story, so if you follow how rhythm and tempo shift with each change of scene, the plot comes through by ear.
V. Rose Hall and the waters of home · 1998–2012 (age 37–51)
(Loss) In 1998, Kenny Kirkland, the pianist of his early quintet, died at forty-three. It was the death of a comrade with whom he and his brother had spent their youth. (Prolific) Over the single year of 1999 he released one album after another, among them “Standard Time” Vol. 4, devoted to Monk's tunes, the Jelly Roll Morton collection “Mr. Jelly Lord,” and a seven-disc set recorded live at the Village Vanguard, and that December he premiered the large-scale work “All Rise” with the New York Philharmonic. His long relationship with Columbia came to an end around this time, and in the 2000s he recorded for Blue Note. (Documentary) In 2001 he served as an adviser on Ken Burns's documentary “Jazz,” appearing often on screen to explain what Louis Armstrong had meant to jazz. Many viewers first encountered the history of jazz through his commentary. (Rose Hall) In October 2004, Frederick P. Rose Hall, a venue built for jazz, opened inside the Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle in Manhattan. The club within was named for Dizzy Gillespie. He is known to have led the fundraising for its construction as well. (Katrina) When Hurricane Katrina struck his hometown of New Orleans in August 2005, he staged the benefit concert “Higher Ground” at Rose Hall that September to raise relief funds. That same year he received the National Medal of Arts. In 2007, on “From the Plantation to the Penitentiary,” he confronted race in American society head-on with a small ensemble and a singer. (Symphonic) In 2008 he released “Two Men with the Blues,” a live blues album with the country singer Willie Nelson, and premiered the “Abyssinian Mass” for Harlem's Abyssinian Baptist Church. In 2010, with the Berlin Philharmonic under Simon Rattle, he unveiled the “Swing Symphony,” which wove the history of jazz into a single work.
A recording, released on Blue Engine, of the symphony he premiered in 2010 with the Berlin Philharmonic under Simon Rattle and performed again in 2018 with the St. Louis Symphony under David Robertson. It brings the history of jazz he has explored at Lincoln Center all his life onto a single stage with an orchestra.
- With each new movement, the eras of jazz pass in sequence, from ragtime and New Orleans jazz to swing, bebop and beyond. Try to pin down which movement calls up which era.
- At the moments when the symphony orchestra and the jazz orchestra take turns in front and then overlap, a difference in rhythmic feel emerges between the players who keep strictly to the score and the swing players who lay back on the beat.
- Where the jazz players' improvised solos cut into the symphony's composed flow, you can hear how the two traditions fashion their seams.
VI. His father's classroom · 2013–2026 (age 52–65)
(Return) In 2014 he became director of jazz studies at the Juilliard School. He had come back to teach at the very school he had left at eighteen, postponing graduation to board a tour bus. In 2015 Jazz at Lincoln Center founded its own label, Blue Engine Records, to issue the orchestra's recordings and unreleased live performances itself, and the following year he received the National Humanities Medal. In effect, it opened a path for the institution to keep its own record without relying on the judgment of record companies. (Concerto) In 2015 he premiered in London a violin concerto written for the Scottish violinist Nicola Benedetti, and its recording won the Grammy for best classical instrumental solo in 2020. In 2021 he premiered a tuba concerto with the Philadelphia Orchestra, carrying on as a composer the classical path he had begun with Haydn at fourteen. (Farewell) His mother, Dolores, died in 2017, and in April 2020 his father, Ellis, died at eighty-five of complications from COVID-19. Ellis had spent his whole life raising students in the classrooms of New Orleans. In that year, as the pandemic shut the concert halls, Wynton recorded “The Democracy! Suite” with a Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra septet, releasing it the following January, and moved Jazz at Lincoln Center's concerts and workshops online. It was music that asked how to be together in a time apart. (Present) Into the mid-2020s he has continued to lead the orchestra as artistic director while composing and teaching. He writes children's picture books, listens to high school bands play, and at night still takes the stage with his trumpet. His has been a life spent widening the classroom where his father taught to the size of a whole city.
A suite recorded with a septet in the year he lost his father and the concert halls went dark. His long-held view of jazz as the conversation of democracy is distilled here into a small ensemble.
- Four horns, trumpet·trombone·alto·tenor, stack harmonies far more lightly than a big band would. Listen to how the arrangements are built to draw a big band's colors from a small group.
- Each piece has its own character, blues, swing, Latin rhythms and more, which brings out the particular charm of the suite as a form.
- The piano·bass·drums rhythm section supports the beat without fuss, adjusting its density with each change of soloist to pass along the turns of the conversation.
Lesser-known stories
His name comes from Wynton Kelly, the pianist on “Freddie Freeloader” from Miles Davis's “Kind of Blue.” That a trumpeter known as a guardian of tradition should have inherited at birth the name of a pianist at the very heart of 1960s modern jazz is a small piece of evidence of what his father, Ellis, was listening to. Al Hirt, who handed him his first trumpet, was a New Orleans trumpeter known in those days for popular hits, and Ellis made a living playing piano in his band. The history of a single instrument holds a family's circumstances, in which modern jazz alone could not pay the bills. His catalog also includes chamber music written without a jazz band: the string quartet “At the Octoroon Balls,” commissioned in 1995 by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and “A Fiddler's Tale,” written in response to Stravinsky's “The Soldier's Tale.” Overshadowed by his fame as a trumpeter and as the head of an institution, they are rarely mentioned. Marciac, a small village in southwestern France, has welcomed him to its summer jazz festival for many years, and a bronze statue in his honor stands in the village. It is one of the places outside America with which he has kept up the longest relationship. In 2012 he published “Squeak, Rumble, Whomp! Whomp! Whomp!,” a picture book that renders the sounds of instruments as onomatopoeia, and he has continued to write books for children.
Notes on terms 📚🔎
Hard bop
(Literally) Hard means firm·rough, and bop is taken from bebop, of the 1940s. The name carries the sense of bebop hammered into something thicker and more forceful. (In jazz) A jazz style of the 1950s and 60s led by players such as Art Blakey and Horace Silver. Built on bebop's fast, complex harmonies, it added the earthy feel of church music and the blues, making the music easier for listeners to feel in their bodies. In soccer terms, it resembles a style of play that adds physical tussle and grit to dazzling individual skill.
Swing
(Literally) The English word swing means to sway back and forth, like a swing. (In jazz) Rather than dividing the beat into equal lengths, the player makes the first part slightly longer and the second slightly shorter, dragging the back of the beat just a little; the word names this push-and-pull rhythmic feel. It is also the name of a genre, the big-band music of the 1930s. When you jump rope, landing on a steady beat while your body sways of its own accord, that sway is swing. (Elsewhere) In baseball or golf, the motion of swinging a bat or club is called a swing.
12-bar blues
(Literally) Blues comes from blue, the English word for the color, which in English also means melancholy. The name itself carries the idea of music that sings of sorrow and care. (In jazz) Music that grew out of the songs of Black Southerners; in jazz it refers to a fixed chord progression that makes one lap every 12 bars. It falls into three lines of 4 bars each, and often the first line makes a statement, the second repeats it, and the third answers. Just as you would run laps around a track, players circle these 12 bars many times (choruses), improvising as they go.
Rhythm changes
(Literally) The chord progression (the changes) of Gershwin's song “I Got Rhythm.” (In jazz) Tunes and performances that borrow the song's sequence of harmonies wholesale and lay a new melody on top. The form is 32-bar AABA: an 8-bar melody A sung twice, a different melody B once, then A once more. Just as runners on the same track follow the same course but each with a different stride, the skeleton stays the same while the melody and improvisation on top differ from player to player.
Plunger mute
(Literally) A plunger is the rubber suction cup used to unclog a toilet. The name comes from players actually holding that rubber cup to their instruments; a mute is a device that softens or alters the sound. (In jazz) A technique of covering and uncovering the bell of a trumpet or trombone with the rubber cup to make the sound go wah-wah, like a human voice speaking or crying. The horn players of Duke Ellington's orchestra were especially fond of it. The principle is the same as the game of covering and uncovering your mouth with your palm to make a wah-wah sound.
Big band
(In jazz) A jazz orchestra of about 15 players: a horn section with several each of trumpets·trombones·saxophones, plus piano·bass·drums. Written arrangements are at its core, and soloists step out here and there to improvise. It resembles a school choir singing harmony by section until one student steps forward for a solo.
Suite
(Literally) Moeumgok ('collected pieces') means a piece made by gathering several pieces. The Western name, suite, comes from a French word meaning 'what follows' or 'a set,' and is a different word from sweet, meaning sugary. (In jazz) A work that strings together several pieces of differing character under one theme. Duke Ellington was fond of the form, and Marsalis has written several. Like a collection of short stories, it can be heard one piece at a time, but listened to from start to finish it becomes a larger story. (Elsewhere) A hotel suite is a set of connected rooms let together as one.
Concerto
(Literally) Hyeopjugok (協奏曲) means a piece (曲) played (奏) together (協). The Latin root of its Western name, concerto, is concertare, which also means 'to contend,' so the nature of this music, in which soloist and orchestra trade phrases as if in contest, is already present in the name. (In jazz) Originally a classical form: a piece in which a single soloist stands before an orchestra and the two play off each other. Marsalis not only performed classical works such as Haydn's Trumpet Concerto but also wrote a violin concerto and a tuba concerto himself. It is like a class presentation, in which one student comes to the front to present while classmates chime in and ask questions, carrying it forward together.