Wynton Marsalis

Wynton Marsalis is an internationally acclaimed musician, composer and bandleader, an educator and a leading advocate of American culture. He has created and performed an expansive range of music from quartets to big bands, chamber music ensembles to symphony orchestras and tap dance to ballet, expanding the vocabulary for jazz and classical music with a vital body of work that places him among the world’s finest musicians and composers.

Wynton has produced over 100 records which have sold over seven million copies worldwide including three Gold Records. His recordings consistently incorporate a heavy emphasis on the blues, an inclusive approach to all forms of jazz from New Orleans to modern jazz, persistent use of swing as the primary rhythm, an embrace of the American popular song, individual and collective improvisation, and a panoramic vision of compositional styles from dittys to dynamic call and response patterns (both within the rhythm section and between the rhythm section and horn players).

Wynton joined the roster of Blue Note Records in 2004 and released his label debut The Magic Hour that year, following it with Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson (2004), Live at the House of Tribes (2005), From the Plantation to the Penitentiary (2007), and He and She (2009), as well as two collaborative albums with Willie Nelson: Two Men With The Blues (2008) and Here We Go Again: Celebrating the Genius of Ray Charles (2011).