Successful jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis (born 1961) is America's top modern purist of the genre. Influenced by the jazz artists from the early 1900s through the 1960s and annoyed with the music labeled "jazz" in the 1970s, Marsalis took on the mission of not only creating "true" jazz, but teaching its definition as well.

A successful jazz and classical musician and composer, Marsalis had won more than eight Grammy awards and released over 30 albums in both genres by the late 1990s. In 1997, he received the first Pulitzer Prize ever awarded for nonclassical music. He also co-founded and directed the ground-breaking jazz program at New York's Lincoln Center, and became an influential jazz educator for America's youth.

Marsalis was born into a family of musicians on October 18, 1961, in New Orleans. His father, Ellis Marsalis, played piano and worked as a jazz improvisation instructor at the New Orleans Center for the...