Chapter 2: From New Orleans to New York

While riding the streetcar Uptown one day, a stranger saw Wynton eyeing his Maurice André record—a classical album. It wasn’t something the young Marsalis had much familiarity with, though it intrigued him. Noticing Wynton’s inquisitiveness, the stranger picked up his trumpet case and sat down next to Wynton. He handed the record over to him. ‘Try it, I think you’ll enjoy it,’ the fellow student said. Wynton immediately took it home and put it on the record player. Upon listening to it, he discovered that the music was that of the Haydn trumpet concerto.

He was enthralled with the sounds that emanated from that vinyl: the complicated, yet seamless rhythms of André’s trumpet as it culminated with a diverse group of instruments to form each song. Wynton made up his mind that he wanted to know how such music came to be… and he wanted to know how to play it. He decided that he needed to become a classical musician—not an easy feat for a Black youth living in the segregated South.

Wynton’s time at Juilliard was brief, however. While the school offered an immense trove of knowledge and instructional tools to students, its curricula did not include jazz-- the path that Wynton’s musical career was naturally taking. Though Marsalis maintained a strong interest in classical, jazz was calling him. He rapidly accumulated jazz gigs around Manhattan, and his reputation as a young jazz prodigy grew to proceed him. Wynton, Branford, and the group of musicians they played with at the time were colloquially referred to as "The Young Lions of Jazz."

Along with his brother Branford, Wynton caught the attention of Art Blakey. In 1980, Blakey offered Marsalis a spot on the road with his touring band, the Jazz Messengers. While it meant leaving school, he knew the chance to play in Blakey's band was a once-in-a-lifetime chance he could not pass up. With Ellis’s blessing, Wynton accepted the offer and started touring all across the United States. Later in his career, Wynton would return to Juilliard to become the founder and Director of the Jazz Studies program.

“In fact, when I want to show young musicians the results of disrespect for tradition, I put on my old records with Art Blakey and hang my head in shame as I listen to the confidence I had in disrespecting the bandstand of that great man. Every time I see Art Blakey now, I apologize, then thank him for tolerating such an aberration and continuing to remind me that I was not playing much of anything other than the horn itself – and very little of that, come to think of it. I was just playing scales in whatever key the tune was in. But that was enough to be considered musical in my era.” –Wynton Marsalis, Down Beat Magazine interview with Stanley Crouch (1987)

Wynton’s time with Art Blakey catapulted him into the center of the jazz scene and allowed him to gain a crash course in the art of bandleading. By 1981, Marsalis had curated his own jazz band and lined up tours to introduce it to the world. For the next 15 years, he would perform 120 shows annually all over the globe. Wynton also prioritized offering music workshops to students while he visited country after country. Since the beginning, Wynton has valued accessibility to music and maintains the belief that anyone who is interested in ‘the music’ should be able to experience it.