Wynton Marsalis

Wynton Marsalis (born 1961 in New Orleans) is one of the towering figures of American music: a virtuoso trumpeter equally celebrated in jazz and classical music, a composer, bandleader and educator. He made history in 1983–84 as the only artist ever to win Grammy Awards in both classical and jazz categories in the same year, and in 1997 became the first jazz musician to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music, for his oratorio Blood on the Fields. As artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center he has been a tireless champion of jazz as ‘America’s classical music,’ and as a composer he increasingly bridges the two worlds, writing symphonies, concertos and large-scale works that fuse jazz idioms with the European classical tradition.