Wynton Marsalis

‘He May Be the Greatest Virtuoso That Jazz Has Ever Produced’

In August 1958, Esquire invited 58 jazz musicians to meet on a stoop in Harlem for a photo shoot. The resulting picture, now known as Harlem 1958, became legendary for collecting some of the genre’s greatest talents, stretching from the swing era (Count Basie, Gene Krupa) to the peaks of bebop (Charles Mingus, Dizzy Gillespie). The assembled musicians may not have realized that rock and roll was on the verge of taking over pop music, thus sweeping jazz to the margins—but the fact that it was...