‘Trumpeters? We think we’re the kings of the orchestra’: Wynton Marsalis prepares to blow the Edinburgh festival away

It has 12 movements, 200 musicians and aims to unite America. The great US trumpeter and composer talks about his All Rise symphony, his jazz great mentors – and learning humility from his wife At Heinz Hall in Pittsburgh, Wynton Marsalis is hard to spot. When he first played this venue, in 1984, he was the prodigious 22-year-old soloist out front, blowing Haydn’s trumpet concerto under the baton of Lorin Maazel. Tonight he is embedded in the machinery: half-hidden behind ranks of strings and woodwind, a black-suited figure in the heart of his own symphony. It’s a strange way for a composer to behave – especially one whose public persona has long been associated with certainty, polemic and the upright authority of a man who can make any argument sound like a moral law. Yet Marsalis seems almost pleased by his disappearance. “It’s my piece,” he says, as we talk in his hotel room the next morning, “but it’s not my show.” The piece is All Rise, Marsalis’s first symphony, written in 1999 – a mammoth hybrid for a 15-piece jazz band, a 50-piece orchestra and a 100-piece choir, premiered at the turn of the millennium by the New York Philharmonic with Kurt Masur. Ac