Performer
Four decades on the world's great stages — on clarinet and saxophone, as soloist and bandleader. A charter member of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra and a longtime member of the Wynton Marsalis Septet, Victor Goines has carried the music from New Orleans bandrooms to concert halls across the globe.
A life on the bandstand.
Across a lengthy tenure with both the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra and the Wynton Marsalis Septet, Goines has performed on the world's major stages and contributed to the recordings that became the modern canon — among them Wynton Marsalis's Pulitzer Prize–winning Blood on the Fields and Ted Nash's Grammy-winning Presidential Suite.
Equally fluent on clarinet and saxophone, he moves between the two not as a doubler but as an artist for whom both are mother tongues — the clarinet carrying the architecture of his phrasing, the saxophone its weight.
“A clarinetist of rare beauty — a saxophonist of true authority. There are few in this music who hold both at this height.”
— on Goines's voice across two instrumentsOver four decades he has shared bandstands and studios with Eric Clapton, Dianne Reeves, Ellis and Branford Marsalis, Marcus Roberts, Wycliffe Gordon, and Ruth Brown — sideman and leader, equally at home in a festival headline or an intimate room.