Wynton Marsalis on Jazz as a Tool for Understanding Life

Trumpeter and composer Wynton Marsalis, the managing and artistic director of New York’s Jazz at Lincoln Center (JALC), is a man bursting with endless energy. Throughout his four-decade career, he has never seemed to run out of steam. He signed his first recording contract at 22, and has gone on to release more than 100 jazz and classical recordings, win nine Grammy Awards, author six books, and earn more than 40 honorary degrees. 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 institution in 1996. The following year, his album Blood on the Fields, an oratorio about slavery, won a Pulitzer Prize. 

Not even the pandemic could stop Marsalis from using music as a vessel for knowledge and expression. As New York went into lockdown last March, he accelerated JALC’s digital programming with initiatives including a weekly YouTube conversation series and a virtual edition of JALC’s high school jazz band competition. 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. 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.

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