Marsalis, Branford
Marsalis Wynton, *18th October 1961 New Orleans, American trumpeter, jazz composer, brother of saxophonist Branford Marsalis. In 1973 he studied trumpet at the New Orleans Centre for Creative Arts. He soon began playing in local jazz bands, including D. Barker’s. At the age of 14, he performed J. Haydn’s Trumpet Concerto in E-flat major with the New Orleans Philharmonic Orchestra. He continued his education taking summer courses at the Berkshire Music Centre in Tanglewood and, from 1979, at the Juilliard School of Music in New York. From 1980 to 1982, he was a member of A. Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. In 1982, he formed his own band (B. Marsalis, K. Kirkland, C. Moffet, J. “Tain” Watts), with which he toured and recorded his debut album Wynton Marsalis (former musicians of the M. Davis Quintet also took part in the session: H. Hancock, R. Carter and T. Williams); the album proved to be both an artistic and commercial success. In 1983, accompanied by the National Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by R. Leppard, Marsalis recorded concertos for trumpet and orchestra by J.N. Hummel, Haydn, and L. Mozart (in 1984, these recordings and the album Think of One earned him a Grammy Award in the classical and jazz category). In 1983, he performed again in Europe at the Jazz Jamboree. In 1984, he recorded an album featuring works by Baroque composers (including Purcell, Handel and G. Torelli). In 1987, he began work on a series of albums entitled Standard Time. In 1991, the ballet Citi Movement, featuring music by Marsalis, premiered in New York. In 1992, he became the artistic director of the Lincoln Centre in New York and took charge of its jazz orchestra, with which he toured extensively. In 1994, he composed an oratorio for orchestra and soloists, Blood on the Fields, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize in 1997 as the first musician in the history of the award to do so. In 1994, he performed with his septet in several cities in Poland; in 1998, he played at the National Philharmonic in Warsaw together with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra.
Marsalis’ style stems from the great jazz trumpet tradition – from F. Navarro and C. Brown, to the early M. Davis, L. Morgan and F. Hubbard. He plays with a confident, firmly grounded tone, perfect intonation, a wide range of expressive means, and a brilliant technique that allows him to execute the most complex passages in both jazz and classical works. As a performer and composer, he shows a strong tendency to rework and combine historical jazz styles such as New Orleans music, swing, bebop, cool and blues. His works for larger ensembles (Blood on the Fields, Vitoria Suite, A Fiddler’s Tale, At The Octoroon Balls – String Quartet No. 1, All Rice), drawing inspiration from the entire jazz tradition (including D. Ellington, C. Mingus) and the music of G. Gershwin and I. Stravinsky, are considered technically excellent but not very original and rather eclectic in character. Today, Marsali is perceived in two different lights. On the one hand, he is recognised as an outstanding artist, an unrivalled improviser and promoter of classical jazz; on the other, as a conservative who indirectly advocates a stylistic regression to the 1950s and early 1960s, i.e. acoustic, communicative music in traditional forms. He also discredited Miles Davis’s achievements in fusion, accusing him of departing from jazz ideals and pandering to cheap tastes, which caused a split in the jazz community around the world. Today, Marsalis’ musical projects are received with reserve, and his aesthetic views have no influence on the state of world jazz.