“Was there a point when you realized that Jazz at Lincoln Center – this organization you planted the seeds of almost 20 years ago – was going to become the central institution, the house organization as it were, for the entire world of jazz?” I asked. If there was only one way to leave the normally verbose Mr. Marsalis tongue-tied, I, inadvertently, had found it.

“No, not really,” he said, and then there is an awkward silence. He did, however, ultimately answer the question this way: “We are going to break down the barriers of one-ness,” he said. “We will embrace all the styles of jazz, New Orleans, bebop, swing. We will have modern musicians and traditional musicians. We will play the music of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington as well as Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane. We will play in nightclubs and concert halls, we will embrace jazz in theatrical settings and film scores. We will collaborate with artists in other disciplines, such as painting and sculpture, as well as with jazz musicians from all over the world, as well with other kinds of musicians. We will embrace all the traditions of jazz, from playing for dancers in a ballroom to playing for formal dancers in a choreographed setting.”

If that isn’t trying to address the entire scope of the jazz experience, what is?

Mr. Marsalis and I were born one month apart, and he has been the most prominent figure in the music for roughly as long as I’ve been writing about it. I have no idea if he’s been reading me as long as I’ve been listening to – and writing about – him. I went to school with his brother Ellis Marsalis Jr. (One of two non-playing Marsalis brothers), but Wynton and I had met face to face only once, very briefly, at the Rutgers Institute of Jazz Studies Christmas Party in 2001. But when I ran into him recently at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola, the jazz club within Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Rose Hall facility, he caught me off-guard by greeting me with a big warm bear hug.

As Mr. Marsalis is quick to point out, the idea of a musical family is hardly unique in New Orleans – there were the Humphrey Brothers, the Nevilles, the Lasties, and many others. Ellis Marsalis Sr. was one of the city’s great modern jazz pianists and pedagogues. The four playing brothers are Branford (saxophone, born 1960),Wynton (trumpet, 1961), Delfayo (trombone and producer, 1965), and Jason (drums, 1976). When asked “When you first joined Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers (in 1980), did you think that was as far as you could possibly go as a jazz trumpeter?” Mr. Marsalis answered, “I wasn’t even thinking about that. I was just thinking ‘Damn! I hope I can learn how to play this instrument!'”

He recapped by describing the amorphous jazz scene of the 1970s, when the music had been relegated to the margins of popular culture. He says, “Even with my father, it was hard to figure out what jazz was in the 1970s,” He had been given his first trumpet at the age of 12 by Ellis Sr.’s occasional employer, Dixieland superstar Al Hirt. For most of their teenage years, the two elder Marsalis brothers availed themselves of the diverse New Orleans music scene, playing bebop when they could but also traditional jazz and funk.

Mr. Marsalis came to New York in 1979, like Miles Davis 30 years earlier, to study at Juilliard. He found himself sharing a room with the experienced drummer Akira Tana, who was 10 years his senior and then working with a non-New Orleans musical family, the Heath Brothers. “We would go out and jam all over New York, and when we got home by 1 a.m. we would always watch the reruns of ‘The Twilight Zone’ on Channel 11.” Mr. Tana was the one who inspired Mr. Marsalis to set his sites on the Jazz Messengers. “He kept telling me ‘Art is the one guy who really likes to work with young musicians.’ He was as much a teacher as a bandleader and drummer! Fortunately [one-time Messenger pianist] James Williams had heard me play in New Orleans and he got Art to listen to me.”

Jazz musicians and fans born a decade after Mr. Marsalis probably can’t imagine the impact the young trumpeter had when he burst through in the early 1980s.After leaving Blakey, Mr. Marsalis became the first acoustic jazz headliner the music had known in almost 20 years; it was especially notable when a major label (Columbia) signed him to record both jazz and classical music.

“I was always curious about what was on the other side of the fence,” he said.

To some he was controversial, in that re-establishing the bop mainstream, he had a tendency to dismiss both the more commercial fusion (and later smooth jazz) players as well as the considerably less user-friendly avant-garde players. He was labeled both a jazz neoclassicist and a neo-conservative, but no matter who was doing the labeling, everyone agreed that he was a hell of a trumpet player.

“I tried to always keep going as a musician,” he said. “When I was younger, I never thought that there was anything to the blues. I didn’t see any need to put time into learning how to play them. Then I met [legendary swing trumpeter Harry] ‘Sweets’ Edison, who showed me there were intricacies and subtleties to the blues beyond anything I had imagined.” These days Mr. Marsalis can afford to be more charitable. He says he would welcome “instrumental pop” groups to use Rose Hall. “I don’t consider them jazz, but that doesn’t mean that they’re not valid.”

Yet it was Mr. Marsalis’s skill with Mozart and other classical trumpet concertos that earned him the respect of the academy. It was only logical that he would consolidate that respect in a way that would be vastly beneficial for all of jazz by founding what would eventually become Jazz at Lincoln Center in 1986. As late as the 1980s, jazz fans could never have imagined that we ever would be taken seriously enough to be granted a full-blown constituency at Lincoln Center – afforded just as much respect as opera and chamber music. As of last October – as every New Yorker, at least, hopefully knows – jazz has its first concert hall, the acoustically splendid Frederick P. Rose Hall at Columbus Circle.

Twenty years ago, Mr. Marsalis was the dominant icon of the young jazz musician. It would have been impossible to envision a time when he would be an established veteran in his field. Now, it’s equally difficult to mentally fast-forward to 20 or 30 years from now, when Mr. Marsalis will be an old-timer.