Backtalk with Wynton Marsalis.

Today, the piano inside the studio at Jazz at Lincoln Center is tucked away against the wall, replaced with a tall basketball rim. In the center of a small crew playing a friendly lunch-hour game is Wynton Marsalis: trumpeter, classical musician, and co-founder and artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center since 1987.

Jazz at Lincoln Center has a new home inside the Time Warner Center overlooking Central Park in New York City. From his impressive window to the world, Marsalis, 43, has stepped up his mission to broadcast jazz to a new generation of music listeners. This winner of nine Grammy awards, a Pulitzer, and a Peabody sat down with BLACK ENTERPRISE to discuss bringing the country's oldest music back to the forefront of American culture.

What is your mission for Jazz at Lincoln Center? The objective is the integration of the arts and trying to invite more and more people into the feeling. The whole thought around the facility is to create a great artistic environment in a small place and to project it out to a larger place. All we do is designed to enrich the artistic substance of the music to forward the democratic spirit of it.

As an institution, what is the future of jazz? Jazz is not so much an institution. But for Jazz at Lincoln Center, the future is however we take it and whatever we do with it. We have clear objectives and goals, so the execution of our ideology is doing pretty good so far.

Can a jazz artist be politically active? I think all artists are politically active on some level, if they are true to their art, because art is a perspective. It's your perspective. But I don't think artists are politicians. I think art is above politics. But I feel that an artist's political view isn't necessarily sophisticated. Their understanding of the human condition might be deeper. You can have a deep understanding of the human condition and have strange politics. Politics is an enactment of how you think you can achieve these things. But politics doesn't help you too much in art. Either you can write or hear or play, or you can't.

Do you perceive a mixture of culture between jazz, hip-hop, and r&b? Well, jazz and r&b musicians many times come from the same place, usually the church. There's some connection between the early r&b musicians; they all used to be jazz musicians. The hip-hop musicians are not a part of that so much. They deal with tracks, and they come from a different generation. We come from the same way of speaking and the same kind of call and response, but the level of sophistication in hip-hop is much lower. From a musical standpoint, many of them are not musicians.

Has hip-hop or the mixing of hip-hop in American culture influenced your style of playing? No. It's made me more resolute to become better. Most of hip-hop is just mind-boggling to me. If you would have told me in 1975 when I was 14 that there would be a form of music where black people called each other nigger and called women bitches and all of that would be normal, you might have got your ass whipped. I've been saying since the beginning, I'm not for that. And I am still not for that. I'm embarrassed by it.

Is jazz a lost art form in terms of its influence on today's musician? No, a lot of musicians want to play. They don't become popular, but jazz is not lost. There are jazz schools all over the world. The music is very difficult to learn. It's gaining influence on musicians because they want to be great. But you can't confuse art with entertainment. An entertainer is not an artist. Art has a different objective than entertaining. Not better or worse--I'm not judging it--it's just very different. I'm an artist. I'm not an entertainer. An entertainer has to have a different set of skills. An entertainer does different things; they study different things.

Your brother is a musician too. How competitive are you? We're not really competitive. I never really competed with any of my brothers. I was very serious when I was young. My only thing was that I would practice four or five hours a day. I was never thinking about what somebody else was doing. I was just trying to be as good as the people I listened to on records. I listened to Miles Davis and Clark Terry and said, "Man, how can I play like them?"

You're the face of jazz nowadays. Is it hard to live up to that expectation? I don't really like that so much. It's too narrow. No person should be the face of a whole art form. There are a lot of people in the art and a lot of people who contributed, and the kind of cult and the personality that's in our culture right now is the antithesis of what jazz is all about. There are many faces of jazz. It doesn't need one vision.