At some indeterminate point in the last decade, Wynton Marsalis became the official spokesman for serious jazz. It’s an unlikely position for a man who had previously split the jazz world down the middle with his lofty pronouncements about the form, and his dismissal of many modern performers and their influences. But today, “with Jazz at Lincoln Center as the most powerful nonprofit jazz institution in the world, with a responsibility to its donors for the $128 million it took to build the halls, his declarations, and his answers to criticism, have become temperate and more like coalition-building.”