Jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis: The arts are key to student success

Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, led by trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, center, with clarinet player Victor Goines, left, and trombone player Ron Westray, right. Marsalis said students should study the arts. (Aristide Economopoulos / THE STAR-LEDGER)

At a time of year that invites both retrospection and prediction, jazzman Wynton Marsalis and Harvard president Drew Faust offer a thoughtful argument for the critical importance of arts education.

In an USA Today essay, trumpeter and composer Marsalis notes that today's emphasis on job preparation is misguided because "many of today's students will hold jobs that have not yet been invented, deploying skills not yet defined."

Instead, Marsalis and Faust suggest students study the arts, which promote risk and collaboration.

"Music stresses individual practice and technical excellence, but it also necessitates listening to and working with others in fulfillment of the requirements of ensemble performance," wrote Faust and Marsalis, who teamed up for a six-part lecture-concert series that spotlighted the importance of arts education.

"In jazz, collective improvisation offers musicians the freedom to reinvent, adapt and change. But that freedom is tempered by a shared overall objective: swing. The art of swing is the art of balance, of constant assertion and compromise.

"Learning to play or paint, dance, sing or act, means constantly being refashioned, constantly demanding risk. "If you don't make mistakes," Coleman Hawkins once said, "you aren't really trying."

Read the whole essay here.