He gave this year’s Nancy Hanks speech. “Marsalis’s eloquence and easy humor made his tears at the finale all the greater a surprise. He bowed and cried, and bowed and cried, which made the crowd cheer even more. Though he couldn’t articulate what brought on this emotion, he told me it came from feeling ‘overwhelmed’–from putting into words the full weight of the tragic, glorious history bound up in our arts, and vice versa: ‘That’s our life, that’s the life I live, so it started to hit me’.”