Composer, musician and New Orleans native Wynton Marsalis will receive a National Humanities Medal during a ceremony at the White House on Thursday, September 22.The trumpet virtuoso, who hails from New Orleans’ first family of jazz, will be honored alongside authors, a poet, a physician, a historian, a chef and a higher education program,

Marsalis, son of famed jazz musician and educator Ellis Marsalis Jr., was born in New Orleans in 1961. He graduated from Benjamin Franklin High School and the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts before moving to New York City to attend Juilliard in 1979. Since then, he has won nine Grammy Awards and risen to the top of the global jazz scene. These days, he serves as Artistic Director for Jazz at Lincoln Center, Musical Director for the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra and director of Juilliard’s Jazz Studies program.

National Humanities Medals are awarded each year by the National Endowment for the Humanities, a federal agency that supports research and learning in history, literature, philosophy, and other areas of the humanities. There have been 175 honorees since the medals were first given out in 1996.

Marsalis is not the only New Orleans music icon who will be honored by a federal agency this month. As previously reported, the National Endowment for the Arts will award Big Chief Monk Boudreaux with a National Heritage Fellowship at the Library of Congress on Wednesday, September 28.