Wynton Learson Marsalis was born on October 18, 1961. He is an American trumpeter, composer, and music teacher. He is the artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center. He works to promote classical and jazz music, especially for young people. Marsalis has won nine Grammy Awards. His 1997 musical work, Blood on the Fields, was the first jazz piece to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music. Marsalis is the only musician to have won a Grammy Award in both jazz and classical categories in the same year.

Early years and education

Branford Marsalis was born on October 18, 1961, in New Orleans, Louisiana, United States. He grew up in the nearby town of Kenner. He is the second of six sons born to Dolores Ferdinand Marsalis and Ellis Marsalis Jr., a pianist and music teacher. He was named after jazz pianist Wynton Kelly. His older brother is Branford Marsalis, and his younger brothers are Jason Marsalis and Delfeayo Marsalis. All three are jazz musicians. While sitting with trumpeters Al Hirt, Miles Davis, and Clark Terry, his father joked that he might as well give Wynton a trumpet. Hirt offered to give him one, so at age six, Marsalis received his first trumpet.

Although he had a trumpet at six, he did not practice much until he was 12. He attended Benjamin Franklin High School and the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. He studied classical music in school and jazz at home with his father. He also played in funk bands and a marching band led by Danny Barker. Marsalis performed publicly on trumpet as the only Black musician in the New Orleans Civic Orchestra. At 14, he won a music contest and performed Joseph Haydn’s trumpet concerto with the New Orleans Philharmonic. Two years later, he performed Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 in F Major by Bach. At 17, he was one of the youngest musicians admitted to Tanglewood Music Center. Marsalis applied to only two music colleges, the Juilliard School and Northwestern University. He was accepted by both and chose to attend Juilliard.

Career

In 1979, he moved to New York City to study music at the Juilliard School, aiming to earn a degree in trumpet performance. He left in 1981 without completing the degree. He originally planned to work in classical music. In 1980, he traveled to Europe with the Art Blakey band and joined The Jazz Messengers, staying with Blakey until 1982. Later, he decided to focus on jazz instead. He said that years of playing with Blakey helped him make this choice. He recorded his first album with Blakey and, one year later, toured with Herbie Hancock. After signing a contract with Columbia Records, he released his first solo album. In 1982, he formed a group with his brother Branford Marsalis, Kenny Kirkland, Charnett Moffett, and Jeff "Tain" Watts. Three years later, Branford and Kenny Kirkland left to work with Sting, so Marsalis created a new group with Marcus Roberts on piano, Robert Hurst on double bass, and Watts on drums. Over time, the band added more members, including Wessell Anderson, Wycliffe Gordon, Eric Reed, Herlin Riley, Reginald Veal, and Todd Williams.

When asked about artists who influenced his playing style, Marsalis named Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Harry Sweets Edison, Clark Terry, Dizzy Gillespie, Jelly Roll Morton, Charlie Parker, Wayne Shorter, Thelonious Monk, Cootie Williams, Ray Nance, Maurice André, and Adolph Hofner. Other influences include Clifford Brown, Freddie Hubbard, and Adolph Herseth.

Marsalis has become known as a teacher and musical ambassador, described by one writer as a "21st-century Leonard Bernstein."

Jazz at Lincoln Center

In 1987, Marsalis helped create the Classical Jazz summer concert series at Lincoln Center in New York City. The popularity of the series caused Jazz at Lincoln Center to become a department within Lincoln Center. Later, in 1996, it became an independent organization, joining groups like the New York Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera. Marsalis became the artistic director of the center and the musical director of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. The orchestra performs at its main venue, Rose Hall, tours, visits schools, appears on radio and television, and records music through its label, Blue Engine Records.

In 2011, Marsalis and rock guitarist Eric Clapton performed together in a Jazz at Lincoln Center concert. This performance was recorded and released as the album Play the Blues: Live from Jazz at Lincoln Center.

In January 2026, Marsalis announced he would leave his position as artistic director in July 2027 and would remain as an advisor until June 2028. In an interview, Marsalis said, "It's the perfect time to identify the next generation of leadership… We want to make sure that we do what we can to nurture what we've already built with the understanding that this is an art form and it will continue to grow and the organization will continue to flourish." However, he will continue to perform with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra on occasion.

Other work

In 1995, he hosted the educational program Marsalis on Music on public television. Also in 1995, National Public Radio broadcast his series Making the Music. Both programs received the George Foster Peabody Award, which is the highest honor given in journalism.

In 2005, Marsalis performed at Apple's "It's Showtime" Special Event on October 12. During this event, Apple introduced the new iMac with Front Row and the iPod with Video. In 2006, Marsalis appeared in an iPod television advertisement featuring his song "Sparks."

In December 2011, Marsalis was named cultural correspondent for CBS This Morning. He is a member of the CuriosityStream Advisory Board. He also serves as director of the Juilliard Jazz Studies program. In 2015, Cornell University named him A.D. White Professor-at-Large.

Marsalis helped write, arrange, and perform music for the 2019 film Bolden, which was produced by Daniel Pritzker.

In addition to his work with Jazz at Lincoln Center, Marsalis has collaborated with the Philadelphia Orchestra as a composer for modern classical music. The orchestra first performed a Violin Concerto he composed in 2015 and a Tuba Concerto he wrote in 2021.

In December 2023, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra announced that it would extend Jader Bignamini's contract as its music director through the 2030–2031 season. At the same time, the orchestra announced a plan to record Marsalis's Blues Symphony with Bignamini. The album was released in March 2025.

Debate on jazz

Marsalis is known for playing straight-ahead jazz, which uses traditional instruments. This style avoids the electronic music that became popular in the 1970s and 1980s. In The Jazz Book, the authors note that Marsalis believes the basics of jazz include blues, standards, a swing beat, tonality, harmony, craftsmanship, and mastery of the tradition from New Orleans jazz up to Ornette Coleman. Tara Hall wrote that Marsalis’s view of jazz history (not considering experimental music after 1965 or 1970s fusion as important) is influenced by the unusual ideas of Stanley Crouch. In The New York Times in 1997, pianist Keith Jarrett said Marsalis "copies other people’s styles too well… His music sounds like a high school trumpet player to me."

Bassist Stanley Clarke said, "All the people who criticize—like Wynton Marsalis and others—I would hate to be around to hear those guys playing on top of a groove!" Clarke also said, "These things I’ve said about Wynton are my criticism of him, but the good things I have to say about him are more important. He has brought respectability back to jazz."

When Marsalis met Miles Davis, one of his idols, Davis said: "So here's the police…" Marsalis compared Davis’s use of rock and pop music (especially in his 1970 album Bitches Brew) to "a general who has betrayed his country." Marsalis has called rap "pop music driven by emotions" and said that hip hop "encourages harmful actions at home and influences the world’s view of African Americans in a negative way."

Marsalis responded to criticism by saying: "You can’t enter a battle and expect not to get hurt." He has said that losing the freedom to criticize is "accepting rule by the crowd, it is a step back toward slavery."

Personal life

Marsalis is the son of the late jazz musician Ellis Marsalis Jr., a pianist. He is the grandson of Ellis Marsalis Sr. and the brother of Branford, a saxophonist; Delfeayo, a trombonist and producer; and Jason, a drummer. Marsalis has five children: three sons and two daughters. One of his sons is Jasper Armstrong Marsalis, a music producer known professionally as Slauson Malone 1. One of his daughters is Oni Marsalis, who has performed with her father as a singer. In July 2025, an article in The Daily Telegraph confirmed that Scottish violinist Nicola Benedetti, whom Marsalis met when he was 42 and she was 17, is married to him. She is the mother of his youngest child, a daughter named Elise Marsalis. Marsalis was raised Catholic.

Awards and honors

In 1983, when he was 22 years old, he became the only musician to win Grammy Awards in both jazz and classical music in the same year. The next year, he won again in both categories.

After his first album was released in 1982, Marsalis won awards in DownBeat magazine for Musician of the Year, Best Trumpeter, and Album of the Year. In 2017, he was one of the youngest people ever inducted into the DownBeat Hall of Fame.

In 1997, he became the first jazz musician to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music for his oratorio Blood on the Fields. In a message to him, Zarin Mehta wrote, "I was not surprised at your winning the Pulitzer Prize for Blood on the Fields. It is a broad, beautifully painted canvas that impresses and inspires. It speaks to us all…I'm sure that, somewhere in the firmament, Buddy Bolden, Louis Armstrong and legions of others are smiling down on you."

Wynton Marsalis has won the National Medal of Arts, the National Humanities Medal, and been named an NEA Jazz Master. In 2001, he was also named a UN Messenger of Peace.

Approximately seven million copies of his recordings have been sold worldwide. He has toured in 30 countries and on every continent except Antarctica.

He was given the Louis Armstrong Memorial Medal and the Algur H. Meadows Award for Excellence in the Arts. He was inducted into the American Academy of Achievement and was dubbed an Honorary Dreamer by the I Have a Dream Foundation. The New York Urban League awarded Marsalis the Frederick Douglass Medallion for distinguished leadership. The American Arts Council presented him with the Arts Education Award.

He won the Dutch Edison Award and the French Grand Prix du Disque. The Mayor of Vitoria, Spain, gave him the city's gold medal, its most coveted distinction. In 1996, Britain's senior conservatoire, the Royal Academy of Music, made him an honorary member, the academy's highest decoration for a non-British citizen. The city of Marciac, France, erected a bronze statue in his honor for the key role he played in the story of the festival. The French Ministry of Culture gave him the rank of Knight in the Order of Arts and Literature. In 2008, he received France's highest distinction, the insignia Chevalier of the Legion of Honour. In 2023, he won the Praemium Imperiale.

He has received honorary degrees from the Frost School of Music at the University of Miami (1994), University of Scranton (1996), Kenyon College (2019), New York University, Columbia, Connecticut College, Harvard, Howard, Northwestern, Princeton, Vermont, the State University of New York, and the University of Michigan (2023).

Best Jazz Instrumental Solo
– Think of One (1983)
– Hot House Flowers (1984)
– Black Codes (From the Underground) (1985)

Best Jazz Instrumental Album, Individual or Group
– Black Codes (From the Underground) (1985)
– J Mood (1986)
– Marsalis Standard Time, Vol. I (1987)

Best Instrumental Soloist(s) Performance (with orchestra)
– Raymond Leppard (conductor), Wynton Marsalis and the National Philharmonic Orchestra for Haydn, Hummel, L. Mozart: Trumpet Concertos (1983)
– Raymond Leppard (conductor), Wynton Marsalis and the English Chamber Orchestra for Wynton Marsalis, Edita Gruberova: Handel, Purcell, Torelli, Fasch, Molter (1984)

Best Spoken Word Album for Children
– Listen to the Storytellers (2000)

Published works

• Sweet Swing Blues on the Road with Frank Stewart (1994)
• Marsalis on Music (1995)
• Jazz in the Bittersweet Blues of Life with Carl Vigeland (2002)
• To a Young Jazz Musician: Letters from the Road with Selwyn Seyfu Hinds (2004)
• Jazz ABZ: An A to Z Collection of Jazz Portraits with Paul Rogers (2007)
• Moving to Higher Ground: How Jazz Can Change Your Life with Geoffrey Ward (2008)
• Squeak, Rumble, Whomp! Whomp! Whomp!: A Sonic Adventure with Paul Rogers (2012)