“What happened to Wynton Marsalis? That may be like asking What happened to jazz? For twenty years the fates of Marsalis and jazz music have appeared inextricably intertwined.” But at the age of 40 Marsalis finds himself without a recording contract, and many in jazz feel that “by leading jazz into the realm of unbending classicism, by applying the Great Man template to establish an iconography and by sanctifying a canon of their own choosing Marsalis and his adherents are said to have codified the music in a stifling orthodoxy and inhibited the revolutionary impulses that have always advanced jazz.”