Portraits in Global musicianship: Winton Marsalis and Yo-yo ma

Wynton Marsalis (African American, b.1961) has in many respects come to exemplify the consolidation of America’s transcultural musical identity, serving as a first-rate classical and jazz trumpeter, Pulitzer-prize winning composer, educator, author, critic, commentator and global ambassador. In this, Marsalis’s profile is entirely commensurate with that of another global musician, Yo-Yo Ma (Chinese American, b.1955). Both Ma and Marsalis were awarded the United States National Medal of Arts early in the twenty-first century at relatively young ages, signaling the extent to which America’s elite understood their influence. Neither of these men is a pop superstar, yet they project the broader musical spirit of the New World across the globe in other ways.

Ma especially has been an active and articulate proponent of understanding music and music history globally, both through his Silkroad project—reviving and resynthesizing transcultural traditional Old World Afro-Eurasian musics and new musics that they have inspired—and through his work as a musical ambassador in World Economic Forum meetings in Davos, Switzerland (for which he serves as a Trustee) and with the United States State department, in countries such as Lithuania, Korea, Lebanon, Azerbaijan and China. Born in Paris to Chinese parents but raised in New York, Ma regularly performs and records everything from Western European standard repertoire (a genre in which he has achieved the highest honors) and newly-composed works, to Brazilian and U.S. Appalachian music, in addition to the Silkroad project (the subject of the 2015 documentary The Music of Strangers).

Marsalis, born and raised in greater New Orleans and a fierce proponent of traditional jazz styles as opposed to fusion and beyond, has, like Ma, been a classical superstar from at least the age of 14 (when he played Haydn’s Trumpet Concerto with the New Orleans Philharmonic), but also a prominent jazz figure from nearly the same age: while studying at the Julliard School, he began playing with top jazz figures in New York, and, at the age of 20, signed an unprecedented recording contract in both the classical and jazz areas with the CBS label (Gioia 2011:349)—and subsequently won several Grammy Awards in both categories during the 1980s. In 1997 Marsalis broke another barrier by winning the Pulitzer Prize for his composition Blood on the Fields, which integrates a range of traditional African-American styles. As director of the jazz programs at Lincoln Center and the Julliard School, he is New York’s leading jazz educator and advocate.