National Jazz Act

Wynton Marsalis

Maximum exposure

It was pianist/vocalist Diana Krall who racked up the sales figures in jazz last year, and trumpeter/composer Dave Douglas whose creative strides took him from the New York underground to the mainstream with a major-label debut. But Wynton, as always, was omnipresent. His "Swinging into the 21st" series comprised seven CDs (and a bonus eighth for those who collected all seven) in forms as various as big-band jazz, a string quartet, ballet music, movie music, interpretations of Monk and Jelly Roll Morton, and a jazz rewriting of Stravinsky's L'histoire du soldat. He followed that with the seven-CD set Live at the Village Vanguard, a document of the remarkable Wynton Marsalis Septet's appearances at the legendary New York club from 1990 through 1994. And there was the continued touring with the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra. As artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, Marsalis is easily the most powerful figure in jazz -- perhaps the most powerful ever. Yes, it wouldn't hurt to spread some of that power (and money) around a bit. That said, Marsalis is a major jazz composer. Throughout the "Swinging into the 21st" series you can hear him developing multi-thematic material over long arcs of music -- imaginatively exploiting rhythm, dynamics, color, orchestration, architecture. Rather than creating new forms or a new language, he's consolidated the old and made a case for it in a major American cultural institution that he created. And, of course, he's a rather impressive trumpet player. As Marsalis's record in our poll demonstrates (he won in '94, '97, '98, and '99), for a lot of folks he -- like Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, and Miles Davis before him -- is jazz, for better and worse.

-- Jon Garelick