Experience Planner

Opening Week Four, with a morning lecture on how the arts can unite us during moments of change, is Wynton Marsalis, the world-renowned trumpeter, bandleader, composer and a leading advocate of American culture. He will close the week with a rousing performance by the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra and appear mid-week to premier his newest orchestral composition, Liberty Symphony, performed by the JLCO in collaboration with Chautauqua’s Music School Festival Orchestra.

Marsalis presently serves as managing and artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, the director of jazz studies at The Juilliard School, and president of the Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation.

He has been called the “Pied Piper” of jazz and the “Doctor of Swing.” Since his recording debut in 1982, he has released 136 jazz, classical and alternative recordings and won numerous awards. He regularly performs in the most prestigious concert halls and has been known to play until all hours of the morning in the most inconspicuous local clubs. From the very beginning of his career, education has been vital to his mission. He has taught and mentored a voluminous number of musicians who have gone on to play, teach and advocate in their own brilliant ways. Through these relationships Marsalis has ensured that the legacy of jazz music will continue to propagate for generations to come.

Over the past four and half decades, Marsalis has rekindled and animated widespread international interest in jazz through performances, educational activities, books, curricula and relentless advocacy on public platforms. Today, Marsalis continues the renaissance that he sparked in the early 1980s, attracting new generations of young talent to jazz and illuminating the mythic meanings of jazz fundamentals.

Marsalis performs and composes across the entire spectrum of jazz and has written jazz-influenced chamber music and symphonic works for revered classical ensembles across the US and abroad. He is inspired to experiment in an ever-widening palette of forms and concepts that constitute some of the most advanced thinking in modern jazz and in American music on the broad scale.

Marsalis’ core beliefs are based on jazz fundamentals: freedom and individual creativity (improvisation), collective action and good manners (swing), as well as acceptance, gratitude and resilience (the blues). Marsalis believes that music has the power to elevate our quality of life and lead us to both higher and lower levels of consciousness. He maintains that music can elevate the quality of human engagement for individuals, social networks and cultural institutions throughout the world.