Citizen Wynton

Jazz great Marsalis views his hurricane-relief efforts and other charity work as ‘just part of being alive’

Despite helping to award more than $3-million to victims of Hurricane Katrina, Wynton Marsalis, the New Orleans native

and jazz great, says he wants to change how Americans think, not to act like a well-heeled donor.

“Social awareness is more important than money,” he says on a Sunday afternoon at his office in midtown Manhattan. “I don’t feel like I’m a philanthropist. I’m just a citizen.”

A citizen, perhaps, but one whose fame gives him a tall soapbox from which to voice his ideas about how to fix the problems in his hometown.

Mr. Marsalis, dressed down in jeans and a brown button-up shirt, is taking a break after rehearsing with John Mayer, Tracy Chapman, and other musical stars for a forthcoming concert. He dribbles a basketball against the floor to relax.

As Mr. Marsalis talks about Katrina and his efforts to help his birthplace recover, he has the demeanor of a laid-back jazzman, but speaks with the passion of a social activist.

While many politicians and residents of the Gulf Coast have attacked public officials for the government’s failure to adequately help poor New Orleans citizens, especially black people, the 44-year-old trumpet player says the problem — and the solution — is the American people.

“Everybody wants to point out a person or two to blame for it, but you can’t. It’s us,” he says, rolling the basketball in his hands.

“We also are to blame for letting our system get control of us.”

Motivating Young People

Such talk, he says with a smile, has earned him a “bad reputation.” But the disaster has opened a window of opportunity, he says, to get more Americans, especially young people, involved in politics, charity work, and other efforts to change the Gulf Coast and the rest of the nation.

During a January speech at Tulane University, in New Orleans, he made an impassioned plea to the college students to take charge of rebuilding the city.

“I urge you not to let this moment pass without sending a clear message to your peers and elders around the world: ‘New Orleans will be rebuilt, and it will be rebuilt with an intensity, with an intelligence, with an impatience, and with a freshness that only serious-minded young people can bring,’” he said.

Mr. Marsalis himself has worked tirelessly to contribute to the reconstruction. He serves on two government advisory boards, did a week’s worth of free concerts and jazz classes in New Orleans, and created a hurricane fund with Jazz at Lincoln Center, the nonprofit music-education organization where he is artistic director.

His Higher Ground Hurricane Relief Fund, administered by the Baton Rouge Area Foundation, garnered more than $3-million from a benefit show that featured Mr. Marsalis and other famous performers, such as the singers Norah Jones and James Taylor.

In February, the fund awarded 21 grants to arts and cultural institutions in the Crescent City, as well as checks of up to $15,000 to 193 people, many of them jazz artists, who were displaced by Katrina.

Mr. Marsalis, who was on the committee that helped pick the Higher Ground grant recipients, calls the effort a limited success. “The problem is so massive it’s hard to be happy with anything, but, yeah, our organization stepped up,” he says. “A lot of people are saying, ‘Thank you.’”

Providing Salaries

The New Orleans Musicians’ Clinic, a Higher Ground beneficiary, praises Mr. Marsalis for providing money to pay for its employees’ salaries, a move other donors have been reluctant to do.

“This money from Wynton allowed us to continue the work of this nurse practitioner so she didn’t leave New Orleans,” says Bethany E. Bultman, program director and co-founder of the charity clinic, which provides health services to professional musicians. The clinic received more than $85,000 from Higher Ground.

Ironically, the hurricane-relief project hampered Jazz at Lincoln Center’s fund raising, because many of the center’s usual donors gave to the disaster fund last year.

“Our philanthropic efforts in that end hurt us in a way with our own fund-raising efforts,” Mr. Marsalis says, “but we thought [helping New Orleans] was important.”

Philanthropic Role Models

Mr. Marsalis says his sense of community concern was instilled in him by a variety of people — from his father, the pianist Ellis Marsalis, to the jazz fans who give freshly baked pies to his band during cross-country tours.

One of those role models was the late Irene Diamond, a philanthropist who received accolades for being an early supporter of AIDS research. Ms. Diamond, who died in 2003, also gave to Jazz at Lincoln Center and occasionally served as sounding board for Mr. Marsalis’s unfinished compositions.

“Man, she’d critique pieces,” he says. “She’d know more than the jazz critics.”

Ms. Diamond, whose late husband earned their fortune as a New York real-estate developer, also told Mr. Marsalis inspiring, if racy, stories from her colorful past, which included a career as a story editor at the Warner Bros. film studio.

During that period, she found and helped rewrite the script that eventually turned into the movie Casablanca.

“She’d talk about all kinds of stuff,” Mr. Marsalis says, “the civil-rights movement, George Gershwin hitting on her, movies in the ‘30s, artistic imperatives.”

While Ms. Diamond and others helped develop Mr. Marsalis’s charitable drive, he dislikes the idea that he is obligated to “give back” because of his success.

“I don’t do it so much as a part of giving back — it’s just a part of my life,” he says about his work to help New Orleans. “You believe in things and you support things. That’s just part of being alive.”

Taking his basketball and putting it aside, he adds: “There’s a gospel song by Mahalia Jackson, ‘I’m Going to Live the Life I Sing About in My Song.’ I just try to embody that and do it.”