Wynton Marsalis: From the Plantation to the Penitentiary

Status of copy at Case Memorial Library
Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns wrote in Jazz: "No musician in jazz history has ever risen so far so fast as Wynton Marsalis, winner of Grammys in jazz and classical music at twenty-two, cofounder of Jazz at Lincoln Center at twenty-six and its creative director at thirty-one, winner at thirty-five of the first Pulitzer Prize ever awarded to a jazz composer, for his oratorio Blood on the Fields. Because his climb seemed so meteoric, because he was born in New Orleans and was the son of one jazz musician and the brother of three more, and because for many people he would become the symbol of the rebirth of mainstream jazz, his success seems to have been almost preordained. But the world into which he was born in 1961 had had little use for the music his father played. … When, during the early seventies, Wynton and his older brother Branford were in high school and performing with a funk band called the Creators, they sometimes played to crowds of better than two thousand and brought home a hundred dollars a night; their father's audiences were rarely larger than one-tenth that size. …" (p. 459).