Wynton Marsalis (*1961) is a prominent musical figure: first and foremost, he is a top trumpeter and outstanding performer of jazz and classical music, as well as a composer, arranger, and popularizer of music. He was born into a musical family in New Orleans, the cradle of jazz. Three of his brothers are jazz musicians. Marsalis began playing the trumpet at the age of six and at 14 appeared with the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra as a soloist in Haydn’s Trumpet Concerto in E flat major. He subsequently studied music at the prestigious Juilliard School in New York. As a jazz musician, he has collaborated artistically with some of the biggest stars in the field, while also establishing himself as a respected performer of classical music. He has won a total of nine Grammy Awards and received the Pulitzer Prize in 1997 for his oratorio Blood on the Fields. He is also a recipient of the French Gran Prix du Disque, the French Order of the Legion of Honor, and an honorary member of the Royal Academy of Music in London.
As a solo trumpeter, Marsalis performed intensively for ten years, playing up to 130 concerts a year. He then slowed down his grueling pace and devoted himself more to recording jazz and classical music, arranging music, and hosting music education television programs. In 1987, Marsalis helped start the “Classical Jazz at Lincoln Center” concert series, which led to the establishment of Jazz at Lincoln Center as an independent department of Lincoln Center. Marsalis was appointed the managing and artistic director of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra (JLCO), which now performs at Rose Hall. In January 2026, Marsalis, soon to be 65 years old, announced he would step down from his role as artistic director and continue to serve only as an advisor.
Marsalis has created 641 original compositions across genres, which stand on their own as groundbreaking feats in the world of music and many are genre-bending. His classical oeuvre includes eight ballet and dance scores, four symphonies (Blues Symphony, Swing Symphony), two string quartets, a bassoon quartet, a mass (The Abyssian Mass), 13 suites, a jazz oratorio, and concertos for violin, tuba, trumpet, and cello.
Violin Concerto in D major, composed in 2015 for virtuoso Nicola Benedetti, was co-commissioned by the London Symphony Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, and the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra. This 45-minute piece takes inspiration from the life of Nicola Benedetti, a traveling performer and educator. Scored for symphony orchestra, with tremendous respect for the demands of that instrument, it is nonetheless written from the perspective of a jazz musician and New Orleans bluesman. The motto of the entire work is the belief that all human beings are connected in the essential fundamentals of life: birth, death, love, pain, and hope. The composer wrote, “Nicky asked me to ‘invite a diverse world of people into the experience of this piece.’ Because finding and nurturing common musical ground between differing arts and musical styles has been a lifetime fascination of mine, I was already trying to welcome them. It may seem simple enough, but bringing different perspectives together is never easy. Form, improvisation, harmony, and methods of thematic development are very different. Because modern living is an integrated experience, it is never difficult to discover organic connections. Turning those insights into something meaningful and playable, however, is another story. It has to be lived and digested. That’s why I looked for real-life examples in the history of jazz-symphonic collaborations and to the environment and experience that connect Nicky and me. I considered aspects of her Scottish ancestry, the great Afro-American abolitionist Frederick Douglass’s love of legendary Scottish poet Robert Burns, my love and inextinguishable respect for Scottish baritone saxophonist Joe Temperley, and the luminous but obscure achievements of Afro-American keyed bugler Francis Johnson, father of the American cornet tradition and one of the first published American composers who was also a fine fiddler. These sources led me to reconnect with the Anglo-Celtic roots of Afro-American music.”
The concerto is in four movements. As Marsalis wrote in his notes, its first movement, Rhapsody, “is a complex dream that becomes a nightmare, progresses into peacefulness and dissolves into ancestral memory.” It is highly expressive music which at the end resounds with echoes of a march, perhaps for Marsalis a childhood memory of a funeral procession in New Orleans. The second movement, Rondo Burlesque, draws on the wilder side of New Orleans, as Marsalis put it, “jazz, calliope, circus clown, African gumbo, Mardi Gras party.” The music here is raw and raucous and unlike anything one has ever heard in a violin concerto. The third movement, Blues, is the very incarnation of sadness beyond words. Finally comes a barnyard throw-down entitled Hootenanny (American folk music party best known from Western films), “fiddling from rural America transformed into art music of the highest and most joyous order.”
Marsalis has created a major work in his violin concerto woven from elements of American jazz and folk music, reaching deep into the roots of American music. At the same time, it draws from a wide range of Western violin styles and fiddle music from the Baroque to the present day. It also reflects Celtic, Anglo-American, and African-American dance traditions, making sophisticated use of the magic of violin virtuosity. The world premiere of the composition was given on 6 November 2015 by Nicola Benedetti at the Barbican Centre in London with the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by James Gaffigan. Since then, she has performed the concerto multiple times with the Philadelphia Orchestra under the baton of Cristian Măcelaru.
