In our continuing series on recipients of the Algur H. Meadows Award for Excellence in the Arts at SMU, we feel the need to laissez les bons temps rouler into Mardi Gras and post about one of New Orleans’ most famous musicians, Wynton Marsalis. Marsalis was the recipient of the Meadows Award in 1997, and he remains a leading figure in contemporary jazz music, using his roles as trumpeter, composer, and educator to promote the power of music and the arts to build communities of shared experiences.
Marsalis, the son of jazz pianist Ellis Marsalis, grew up in New Orleans, where he was surrounded by its rich jazz traditions. He mingled with and learned from jazz stalwarts who often visited his father’s house. While in the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, he studied classical music, winning awards that led to solo performances with the New Orleans Philharmonic and eventual admission to the Julliard School in New York City. After touring Europe with Art Blakey and The Jazz Messengers, Marsalis left Julliard in 1981 without completing his degree. Instead, he signed a recording contract with Columbia while continuing to perform and tour in jazz ensembles.
By the age of 22, Marsalis had developed a discography in both jazz and classical music recordings, becoming the first musician to receive Grammy Awards in both classical and jazz music in the same year. While he still recorded classical works for CBS Masterworks between from 1982 into the 1990s, his tireless work in jazz propelled him to be a leader in promoting the uniquely American genre in the late 20th century. Beginning with the Classical Jazz at Lincoln Center series, Marsalis went on to become the artistic director for Jazz at Lincoln Center, which became a constituent organization of Lincoln Center in 1995, matching the stature of the Metropolitan Opera, New York City Ballet, and the New York Philharmonic.
More than a performance venue, Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra allowed Marsalis to develop an educational environment; programs like Jazz for Young People and the Essentially Ellington competition brought jazz education into schools and communities in the United States. Marsalis believed that music is a powerful tool for personal growth, self-discipline, and cultural understanding, a belief which inspired his advocacy of arts education. Indeed, jazz music in particular, with its reliance on individual expression and instrumental timbre, is the ideal genre by which seemingly divergent musical ideas and cultural histories join together to form a shared understanding within the total musical expression.
Wynton Marsalis was on SMU’s campus for three days in late October 1997. During his residency, he participated in orchestral rehearsals, lectures, master classes with students and visited local Dallas area high schools. The Algur H. Meadows Award for Excellence in the Arts ceremony held on October 31 was recorded and is included below. The entire video is worth a viewing as it includes segments on Marsalis’ compositions, thoughts about teaching and his musical performances in the Bob Hope Theatre.
This post was written by Pam Pagels, Arts & Humanities Research Librarian. Pam uses her knowledge of the arts and other fields to help students and other researchers navigate scholarship and other information. Her post is the third in a four-part series called Celebrating Black History in the Arts. You may find additional resources on Wynton Marsalis, shown below, in the Hamon Arts Library.
- Marsalis, W., Hendricks, J., Wilson, C., Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra., & Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. “Blood on the fields.” New York: Columbia, 1997. A jazz oratorio about the history of slavery and its aftermath in the United States through the story of two enslaved persons. The work was the winner of the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Music, marking the first time that the Pulitzer was given for a jazz music composition.
- Marsalis, Wynton, Raymond Leppard, Henry Purcell, Johann Friedrich Fasch, Giuseppe Torelli, Johann Melchior Molter, Joseph Haydn, Johann Nepomuk Hummel, instrumentalist English Chamber Orchestra, and instrumentalist National Philharmonic Orchestra. “Trumpet concertos.” New York: Sony Classical, 1994. Grammy Award winning recording of works by Joseph Haydn, Leopold Mozart and Johann Hummel, reissued under the Sony Classical label.
- Marsalis, W. “Black codes (from the underground).” New York: Columbia, 1985. Winner of two Grammy Awards in 1986. Selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Recording Registry in 2023.
- “Jazz Musician Wynton Marsalis, in The David Rubenstein Show: Peer to Peer Conversations.” Academic Video Online. New York, NY: Bloomberg L. P. Jan 1, 2020. Wynton Marsalis, Jazz at Lincoln Center managing and artistic director, talks about growing up with racism, who influenced him and how he kept performing during the pandemic.
- Photo Credits: Wynton Marsalis playing with Jazz at the Lincoln Center Orchestra (Aalborg, Denmark 2020) photo by Hreinn Gudlaugsson, licensed under the Creative CommonsAttribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. Willie Nelson, Wynton Marsalis and Norah Jones in Concert promoting the album “Two Men With the Blues” by Anthony Quntano, CC Attribution 2.0 Generic.
