Teaching Jazz, Creating Community
Wynton Marsalis is best known as an award-winning jazz musician. But for students in the thousands of schools he’s visited, he’s a role model telling them to “take your freedom and put it into the service of somebody else’s.” Young people like Roberto Perez in Washington D.C. have learned from Wynton how jazz can be a metaphor for creating democracy. “What a kid learns from jazz is how to express his individuality without stepping on somebody else’s,” says Wynton. ·”Being a good neighbor, that’s what jazz is all about.”