He's been called the Pied Piper of Jazz and Doctor of Swing.

But renowned trumpeter and composer Winton Marsalis has now launched a new project,

a kind of call and response for these times.

Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown met Marsalis at the Jazz at Lincoln Center

for our series Art in Action, exploring the intersection of art and democracy, part of our canvas coverage.

The music is vibrant and alive. But says Winton Marsalis, our democracy is threatened, with warning signs everywhere.

I'm seeing what we all are seeing. We're lost.

We're blindly flailing about the world.

And while many responses are possible, his as always, is jazz.

An art form of individual statements or improvisation and collective swinging together. Music, he believes, to heal divisions.

Our music takes us away from that into the feeling of community, which is shared responsibility, shared rights, and the creation of space for others to be creative and to be a part of the process.

And it's just an assertion of who we are and a reassertion of the importance of freedom and of civic engagement by artists.

Marcellus has been a leading cultural figure for decades,

founder of jazz at Lincoln Center in New York in 1987.

It's artistic director ever since.

He was born into a musical New Orleans family, from early on playing with older brother Brantford,

learning from their father, Ellis, a pianist and educator who died in 2020.

I want as much as possible to try to communicate to y'all.

A key mission, preserving and passing on that tradition.

As we saw in 2011 as he led a festival for high school musicians around the country, called

Essentially Ellington, that continues to this day.

Carceles was born and raised in the cauldron of the 1960s, and he says now sees a nation in peril once again.

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