📍Kenner, LA, USA
1961 – 1979“Wynton Marsalis was born in New Orleans in October 1961, the second of six sons of the pianist and teacher Ellis Marsalis Jr. and Dolores Ferdinand Marsalis, and grew up in Kenner, a suburb on the western edge of the city near the airport, which was then quiet, semi-rural and far removed from the cultural life of New Orleans. Music filled the house, and his brothers Branford, Delfeayo and Jason also became musicians. When Wynton was six, his father was sitting at a table with the trumpeters Al Hirt, Miles Davis and Clark Terry, and joked that he might as well get Wynton a trumpet too; Hirt, his father's employer, offered his own. Wynton played in the Fairview Baptist Church band under Danny Barker, but he did not practise seriously until he was twelve, when he heard recordings of Clifford Brown and decided to master the instrument. Then he practised for hours a day, studying classical trumpet at school and jazz at home with his father. He went to Benjamin Franklin High School and the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, played in funk bands, and at fourteen played Haydn's trumpet concerto with the New Orleans Philharmonic. At seventeen he went to the Tanglewood summer school, then to the Juilliard School in New York, and joined Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers. In 1983 he became the first musician to win Grammy Awards for both jazz and classical recordings in the same year, and in 1997 he won the Pulitzer Prize for music. He co-founded and leads Jazz at Lincoln Center, and remains devoted to New Orleans.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today