“My thing is, once you start to put a backbeat on your music or something that has a machine in it, you have popularity, but you lose the flexibility. And you lose a richness.”

American trumpeter and composer

Wynton Marsalis is an American trumpeter, composer, music instructor, and the artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center. Born in 1961, he is known for work that spans both jazz and classical music, as well as for promoting those traditions, especially among younger audiences. He has won nine Grammy Awards, and his 1997 oratorio Blood on the Fields was the first jazz composition to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Music. He is also the only musician to have won Grammy Awards in both jazz and classical categories in the same year.