“I am Wynton Marsalis. I am a musician from New Orleans. My father is a musician and I have three brothers who are also musicians,” the iconic American trumpeter, bandleader, music teacher and scion of one of the most famous musical families in America introduced himself thus during a conversation with the BDLife in Nairobi early this week.
Marsalis and his ensemble, Jazz at Lincoln Centre Orchestra, performed two shows in the city as part of the Bob Collymore International Jazz Festival Series. Nairobi was the second stop on their first-ever African tour, having performed at the Joy of Jazz Festival in Johannesburg last weekend.
Earlier, the Pied Piper of Jazz, as he is popularly known, wasted no time in pulling out his trumpet, just as he arrived at a media briefing, and jumped into a jam session with musicians from Nairobi’s Ghetto Classics.
“It is like when we were young, music is a certain type of language and pedagogy that goes with it,” he reflected, on his connection with the musicians from city’s Korogocho slums.
“I expect young people to be able to play. I expect them to have the spirit. Africa is known for creativity, soul and feeling, so I am proud of my young people. Great trumpet players.”
African rhythms and traditions are a major inspiration for the big band jazz compositions by Marsalis. He cites the lessons of his partnership with Ghanaian master drummer Yacub Addy on the 2006 project Congo Square, named after a historic park in New Orleans where enslaved blacks gathered to sing and dance.
“When I was with Yacub, he described the process of making a drum, how a tree had to be consecrated a certain way and it had to be a certain shape, specific proportions and dimensions,” explained Marsalis. “When these types of things are just reduced to signals without the human involvement…it is the interaction of the human with the scientific that creates the wave.”
Weedie Braimah, the renowned Ghanaian-American djembe player, who is a special guest on the tour, agreed with Marsalis, warning that Africans should steadfastly hold on to their indigenous rhythms and instruments.
Djembe player Weedie Braimah, trumpeter and band leader Wynton Marsalis, and drummer Herlin Riley during a press conference ahead of the inaugural Bob Collymore Jazz Lounge at Tamarind Tree Hotel, Nairobi, on September 30, 2025.
Photo credit: Wilfred Nyangaresi | Nation Media Group
“There are certain traditions that we must maintain because even the aesthetic of seeing an instrument has power in it,” he declared. “If there is one thing, I get scared of, it’s the tradition and maintaining it. That is why I always give a shout out to sister (Kenyan percussionist) Kasiva Mutua because she is utilising the djembe but also playing instruments that are indigenous to Kenya.”
Marsalis who turns 64 on October 18, said working with the djembefola (a master player of the djembe) who is 20 years his junior is evidence of the shared musical dialogue within jazz.
Wynton Marsalis chats with BDLife ahead of Jazz Festival
“I am honoured to share this space with Weedie who is so knowledgeable about music, just as I was honoured to learn from Yacub. He is very scathing when asked about attempts to make jazz accessible to a wider audience through fusion with commercially-leaning genres.
“If I take the trajectory of sinking lower and lower into trash and pop music and profanity and vulgarity and stupidity and abuse of the word jazz by any kind of music, somebody hold a horn and they say its jazz, I could be very negative. But I don’t do that because the future is unknown. All we can do is try to work creating the future we envision.”
“I don’t envision the end of the world by bombs and commercialism, even though that is the popular vision that everything will be ruled by whatever is the cheapest form that can be sold for the most, the degrading of culture, is not something I believe in. I don’t believe that all of this humanity was to end like that.”
The tour of four African cities (after Nairobi, the group heads to Lagos, Nigeria and then Accra, Ghana) is part of the Mother Africa season at the Jazz at Lincoln Centre, with more than 80 shows through June 2026 curated to celebrate the deep connections between jazz and the African diaspora.
The centrepiece of the performance is latest work by Marsalis, Afro, which he described as an extension of Congo Square where he had to learn different African rhythms and their significance to traditions like libation to the ancestors, celebration of life and death, transition to adulthood and preparation for war. Afro, he explained, deals with the same themes.
“Just because we are in a technological age does not mean that the things we create can challenge the traditional nature of things.”
The political turbulence in the US and around the world has not escaped the attention of Marsalis, who is known to hold strong views on social justice.
“My dad used to say don’t imitate your enemy, if he is segregating you; you don’t segregate. You have to have trust. We embody trust and that is why we keep our music on a certain level and we don’t care what people say about it. We do it our way.”
