Best National Jazz Act

Wynton Marsalis

Lightning rod You love him, you hate him, you can't live without him. Wynton Marsalis (who won the BMP category last year and in '94) is the most controversial living artist in a genre rife with polemical disputes. Depending on whom you talk to, he's either the savior of jazz or its ruin; either a political and artistic conservative who (to paraphrase one musician I know) is making the music go backwards for the first time in its history or a bold visionary who has brought jazz onto the center stage of the country's cultural life. A Pulitzer Prize in 1997 -- the first ever for a jazz composer -- didn't hurt. His development of Jazz at Lincoln Center has made the music a full partner in that institution's life. His tours with the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, as well as his educational efforts in schools, on radio and TV, and at Tanglewood, have spread the language of jazz. This year, he and the LCJO brought the music of Sidney Bechet to Symphony Hall in a BankBoston Celebrity Series concert, and his Pulitzer Prize-winning Blood on the Fields came out on CD. Wynton isn't playing the only jazz around (even if he sometimes talks that way), but when he and one of his bands are cooking, the arguments disappear.

Others may push the edges of jazz, but Wynton holds a pretty broad center.

-- Jon Garelick