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But the young man still had a lot to learn. Stanley Crouch, a New York City- based writer and jazz critic, befriended Marsalis shortly after he joined Blakey's group, and was astounded at how little he knew about jazz history. "He didn't know anything about Ornette Coleman, Duke Ellington or Thelonious Monk," says Crouch, 44. "His dad had tried to make him listen to Louis Armstrong, but he had this naive idea that Louis was an Uncle Tom."
Crouch set to work on Marsalis' jazz education, lending him records, taking him to clubs and engaging him in all-night gab sessions. He also introduced the young trumpeter to writer Albert Murray, whose 1976 book, Stomping the Blues, was a seminal work on African-American music. Murray, now 74, took Marsalis to museums and bookstores and got him reading "everything from Malraux and Thomas Mann to the Odyssey and the Iliad." In particular, he filled him in on the life and works of Duke Ellington, whom Murray considers the "quintessential American composer."
^ Columbia's George Butler first heard Marsalis with the Blakey band while scouting New York City jazz clubs for young talent. "Here was an 18-year-old playing with the maturity and facility of men twice his age," he says. "He was the ideal person to appeal to a young marketplace and revive the larger audiences that had been into acoustic jazz in the '50s." Butler promptly signed the new artist and devised an unheard-of marketing strategy: simultaneous record releases in both the jazz and classical idioms. Marsalis' first Columbia jazz album won a 1983 Grammy nomination. The following year he hit pay dirt: double Grammys, one each in the jazz and classical genres. "From that point on," says Butler, "his career just blossomed."
Butler also claims some credit for the clean-cut image that set the trumpeter apart from scruffy rockers and fusionists. Back in his Jazz Messengers days, Marsalis would go onstage in tennis shoes and overalls. "But once we started to talk about appearance," says Butler, "Wynton began to epitomize what jazz musicians ought to look like." Indeed, sartorial elegance has become de rigueur among the new generation of jazzmen.
Columbia made sure that its star stayed visible. The company assigned him to high-powered publicist Marilyn Laverty, who represented rock star Bruce Springsteen, and she soon generated reams of press clips. Wynton is the first to admit that Columbia's salesmanship had a lot to do with his popular success, but claims not to take it seriously. "It has nothing to do with artistic merit or substance," he says. Adds brother Delfeayo, who has produced more than a dozen albums for Columbia and other labels: "Sure, Wynton has the hype. He created the hype: he was cute and articulate, and he could play his ass off. But people shouldn't confuse the hype with the music."