Text taken directly from the Sony Classical CD "Wynton Marsalis, The London Concert" Refers to recent (1994, kinda recent) performences of The Haydn, Hummel, and L. Mozart trumpet concertos.

MS=Interviewer= Mark Swed, WM=Wynton Marsalis
My reflections are in Brakets {bla bla bla}

MS: Musicians, over time, evolve, change, grow. When you recorded the Haydn, Hummel and Leopold Mozart a dozen years ago at the young age of 20, you recived glorious reviews and the Grammy Award for Best Classical Soloist with Orchestra, followed the next year for a concerto recording including Fasch (and in both years you won a grammy for Jazz, an unprecedented combination of recognition both as a Classical and Jazz master.) Now you are one of America's most celibrated musicians, and a dominat presence in jazz- as a trumpeter, band leader, composer, artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, taste maker, and educator. You also are now an experienced classical musician. How has your approach to thease works changed over the years?

WM: When I first recorded thease concertos, I had performed the Haydn maybe 3 or 4 times, and the Hummel once, in High School. {he must have gone to a damn cool HS, all the band directors I'm familiar with are soooooo anti-trumpet it makes me puke}I hadn't really considered playing classical music because at the time, I had just started my own band to play jazz music. Recording thease concertos seemed like a novelty. This time I approached thease works with the experience of having performed with different orchestras, and, though I hadn't played thease concertos for 4 years, I've had the opprotunity to study them, to reflect on them, and to have taught thease pieces many times to students all over the world.

MS: Still, given that your life is, and always has been, lived mainly in jazz, do you consider thease concertos, in any way, a oart if your heritage growing up in a jazz family in New Orleans? Can you speak about what the works mean to you personally as a performer?

WM: The Haydin is definitely part of my heritage as a trumpet player. It is a part of the heritage of all trumpeters. It's the first piece in which the trumpet plays lurical passages in the middle register. It introduced new aspects to the trumpet's personality which still resonate.

As a student, at the age of 12 or 13, I first heard recordings of it. So part of my schooling included the Haydn Trumpet Concerto. {I wonder if he could play the triple Eb in the first movement at the tender age of 12... I didn't know what the hell a trumpet was when I was 12....} The Leopold Mozart I first remember from about the same time. I heard Maurice Andre play it. And the Hummel, too.

So, I don't care if Haydn was from Austria and I'm from New Orleans. That doesn't mean that things that happened in Austria in 1796 are not brought to bear on my experience as an American in this time.

MS: But what about the style in which you play concertos from the late 18th century and early 19 centurys? That's a big issue thease days when period instruments and period practices are so prevalent. Do such considerations seem somehow forign to you as a jazz musician from New Orleans?

WM: Music was played in a certain way, but we don't know what it was. And there's no way for us to know. It's my personal belif that musicians of Haydn's time played with a feeling and style which is gone from the world. It would be an act of mysticism to figure out how they sounded. In the same way, I feel that the music of Haydin's time had a quality and a sound to it that is like the early New Orleans music. I don't mean the style. But the early New Orleans music has the sound of people working something out, and I don't think people today can get that sound. But we can translate that feeling using today's musical language.

I try to interpret whatever music I play from a contemporary vantage point, and I try to play it in a clear fasion. I don't try to improvise some modern conception of what style used to be.