September 19, 2002 Contact: Paula Mlyn

Artistic Director of Jazz at Lincoln Center,
Pulitzer Prize-winning composer, and trumpeter Wynton Marsalis

Director of Chamber Music at The Juilliard School
And flutist Brli Nugent

The Juilliard School announces the appointment of Wynton Marsalis and Brli Nugent to its Jazz faculty. Mr. Marsalis, world-renown jazz and classical trumpeter, is the artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center and a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer; Ms. Nugent, a flutist, is the current director of chamber music at The Juilliard School. They both are alumni of Juilliard. Mr. Marsalis and Ms. Nugent join the jazz studio faculty.

In 2001 Juilliard began a diploma program in jazz for the first time with the creation of the Juilliard Institute for Jazz Studies, a collaboration with Jazz at Lincoln Center. The Juilliard School inaugurates its bachelor of music degree in jazz studies beginning in the fall of 2003. The first undergraduate jazz musicians who will begin study at Juilliard in the fall of 2003 must audition during March 2003.

Wynton Marsalis is the artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center (J@LC). Born in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1961, Mr. Marsalis began his classical training on trumpet at age twelve and soon began playing with local bands in diverse genres. He entered The Juilliard School at age seventeen and joined Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. Mr. Marsalis made his recording debut as a leader in 1982, and during two decades has recorded more than 30 jazz and classical recordings, which have won him nine Grammy Awards. In 1983, he became the first and only artist to win both classical and jazz Grammys in the same year and repeated this feat in 1984. Mr. Marsalis’s rich body of compositions includes Sweet Release, Jazz: Six Syncopated Movements, Jump Start, Citi Movement/Griot New York, At the Octoroon Balls, and In This House, On This Morning, and Big Train. In 1997, Mr. Marsalis became the first jazz artist to be awarded the prestigious Pulitzer Prize in music, for his oratorio Blood on the Fields, which was commissioned by J@LC. In 1999, he released eight new recordings in his unprecedented Swinging into the 21st series, and premiered several new compositions, including the ballet Them Twos, for a June 1999 collaboration with the New York City Ballet. That same year he premiered the monumental work All Rise, commissioned and performed by the New York Philharmonic along with the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra (LCJO) and the Morgan State University Choir in December 1999. All Rise will be released on CD September 24, 2002 by Sony Classical. Recorded on September 14 and 15, 2001 in Los Angeles, the All Rise CD features the LCJO along with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Morgan State University Choir, the Paul Smith Singers and the Northridge Singers. Mr. Marsalis also is an internationally respected teacher and spokesman for music education, and has received honorary doctorates from dozens of universities and colleges throughout the U.S. He conducts educational programs for students of all ages and hosts the popular Jazz for Young People^SM concerts produced by J@LC. Mr. Marsalis has been featured in the video series Marsalis on Music and the radio series Making the Music. He also has written two books: Sweet Swing Blues on the Road in collaboration with photographer Frank Stewart, and recently released Jazz in the Bittersweet Blues of Life with Carl Vigeland. On March 20, 2001 Mr. Marsalis was named a United Nations Messenger of Peace by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. He is helping to lead the effort to construct J@LC’s new home - Frederick P. Rose Hall - the first education, performance, and broadcast facility devoted to jazz, slated to open in fall 2004.

Flutist Brli Nugent, director of chamber music at The Juilliard School, received her bachelor and master of music degrees from The Juilliard School, as a student of Julius Baker. She also studied chamber music with Ronald Roseman, solfège with Madame Renée Longy, and theory with David Diamond and Vincent Persichetti. She began flute studies as a child with Jean Whiton, a protégée of Juilliard’s Georges Barrère, and later studied with Harold Bennett and the legendary Marcel Moyse. She has pursued doctoral studies at SUNY Stony Brook with Samuel Baron. Ms. Nugent was principal flute of the Concordia Orchestra, conducted by Marin Alsop, a unique chamber orchestra combining classical and jazz repertoire during its eighteen-year existence from 1984 - 2002, and she participated in a 1999 concert featuring players from orchestras of fifty nations honoring the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Avery Fisher Hall. As a founding member of the Aspen Wind Quintet, winners of the 1984 Naumburg Chamber Music Award, she has performed more than 1000 concerts with the quintet throughout the U.S., Europe, the former Soviet Union, and North Africa. The Quintet’s commissions include works by Frank Zappa, Paquito D’Rivera, Christopher Brubeck, Robert Ward, Allen Shawn, George Tsontakis, David Sampson, and David Rimelis. She has presented seminars and master classes all over the world, including at Juilliard, Hartt, Princeton, Stanford, the Chautauqua Institution, Beijing’s Central Conservatory, Guangzhou’s Xinghai Conservatory, the Shenzhen Conservatory, National Conservatory of Algiers, Vilnius (Lithuania) Conservatory, and the Aarhus (Denmark) Conservatory, among others. An honorary faculty member at China’s Guangxi Arts College, she has taught at the Bennington Chamber Music Conference and served as a member of the national conference planning committee and panelist for Chamber Music America. An alumna of the Aspen Music School and Festival, she has been a member of the artist-faculty there since 1984.