The internationally acclaimed jazz musician Wynton Marsalis was the guest of Jewell’s Harriman Arts Program and Perspectives on the Common Good lecture series at a free Gano Chapel lecture in October on the William Jewell College campus. The Wynton Marsalis Quintet also performed at the Folly Theater as part of the Harriman Arts Program’s 2003-04 season.

A fixture on the American cultural scene, Wynton Marsalis has brought jazz back to center stage in the United States through his relentless work ethic and drive. He is also a distinguished classical performer whose many recordings have been an important aspect of his career. In 1997 he became the first jazz musician to win the Pulitzer Prize in music for his epic oratorio on the subject of slavery, “Blood on the Fields.”

In his Jewell remarks, Marsalis gave a jazz musician’s take on how music impacts the people whose lives it touches.

“From my perspective as someone who has spent the last 25 years as an educator, musician and performer—what Duke Ellington called a ‘pedestrian minstrel,’—I’ve come to discover that the common good is not something common,” Marsalis told the overflow crowd of Jewell students and community members. “The average person is not looking for anything common. Wherever you go in the world, people are looking for joy and affirmation. They are looking for the mythic.”

The winner of nine Grammy Awards for his jazz and classical recordings, Marsalis has also been creatively involved in musical education. His four-part Peabody Award-winning TV series, Marsalis on Music, introduced young viewers to the adventure of making music. The New Orleans native began studying trumpet seriously at age twelve. During high school he performed in local marching bands, jazz bands, funk bands and classical orchestras, and at age 18 he moved to New York to attend the Juilliard School of Music. In the summer of 1980 he became a member of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers and that same year signed with Columbia Records. Marsalis serves as artistic director for the internationally recognized Jazz at Lincoln Center program, which he co-founded in 1987. In 1996 Time magazine named him among America’s 25 most influential people. Marsalis was also featured prominently in Ken Burns’ acclaimed 2000 PBS documentary series Jazz.

Marsalis expressed his concerns that young people exposed to a barrage of popular culture images have drifted from concerns of the soul to more earthly distractions. “I am afraid that we have lost contact with the spiritual,” Marsalis told the crowd. “Right now, we seem not so much to believe in God as we do in special effects.”

Music can provide a link to our inner selves, Marsalis said: “We learn to speak our language through music. We express our most primal concerns through music.” Marsalis was critical of recording industry executives, whom he believes exploit young people’s sexuality for financial gain. He was particularly critical of the gangster rap culture, which he said celebrates “hedonistic idiocy. These are people who speak as though illiteracy is an achievement.” The musician urged young people to look to their elders for guidance, and to reject the notion of a generation gap. He paid tribute to his own mentors, who inspired him to embrace his own creative impulses.

“The call of the common good is like a whisper,” Marsalis concluded. “At first it has no pitch. But it becomes a note that ultimately will ring out against the silence and the darkness.” Jewell’s nationally recognized Harriman Arts Program brings acclaimed performers from the worlds of music, dance and theatre to Kansas City’s Folly Theater and Music Hall, and in addition often provides an opportunity for area students and community members to view artists in an informal setting of lectures and master classes. The Harriman program partnered for the Marsalis presentation with Jewell’s “Perspectives on the Common Good” lecture series, which focuses on themes of selfhood and responsibility, challenging listeners to explore the complexities of values in a pluralistic world.