Earlier this fall I had a chance to meet one of my absolute idols from decades ago.
Back in junior high and high school I played trumpet, and in the summer before my junior year, a trumpet player released an album of three classical era trumpet concertos: one by Haydn: one by Hummel and one by Leopold Mozart. The playing on each was smoother and crisper and lighter than any player I’d ever heard—than any of us in the band had ever heard. The runs and the jumps and the high notes all sounded effortless. This is how we all wanted to play. I got a tape of the album and wore it out.
The player was 21-year-old Wynton Marsalis. He was born in New Orleans, the son of a jazz pianist, and started playing trumpet seriously at age 12. Two years later, he was playing the Haydn concerto with the New Orleans Philharmonic. That Haydn/Hummel/Mozart came out in June of 1983. He received a Grammy for it in 1984.
What was just as amazing, was that Marsalis also won a Grammy for best jazz album that same year. He’s the only musician who’s ever done that. While he kept playing classical pieces and performing with orchestras, he began to release more jazz albums, and explore deeper into what’s usually referred to as the classic style of jazz.
A few years later he began a jazz summer concert series at the famed Lincoln Center in New York City, the home of the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic. It was such a success it turned into a permanent performing arts organization called “Jazz at Lincoln Center.” Marsalis was named its artistic director in 1991. Now the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra plays regular gigs in New York and tours all over the country.
From this position, Marsalis has become the country’s leading evangelist for the country’s one truly indigenous art form. He’s appeared on television ranging from Sesame Street to Ken Burns’ multi-part films about American history.
A few years ago, a writer for the Harvard Crimson said that though his multiple roles as “an author, public speaker, public television personality and director of the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra,” Wynton Marsalis “has become a musical diplomat, a 21st-century Leonard Bernstein, lecturing and performing on six continents.”
If you were among those who heard him play when he was here in November, count yourself as fortunate. If you haven’t heard him play, be sure to catch the orchestra on tour after the beginning of the year.