Victor Goines (CFA’27) performs with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra at Central Park in New York City in 2022. Photo by Nancy Kaszerman/ZUMA Press Wire/Alamy

Music

Giant Steps for a Longtime Jazzman

Musician and composer Victor Goines, who has collaborated with Wynton Marsalis and other greats, becomes a student again

You could easily refer to Victor Goines by any of his pursuits. He’s a jazz saxophonist and clarinetist. A composer. A blazing solo performer and a collaborator with the likes of Wynton Marsalis (Hon.’92), Diana Ross, and Ken Burns. An educator on the music faculty at Loyola University, the University of New Orleans, Northwestern, and the prestigious Juilliard School, where he helmed the jazz studies program. And now a student: Goines is pursuing a Doctor of Musical Arts in music education at the BU’s College of Fine Arts. 

But the man is loath to be defined by any one thing.

“I’m trying to be a specialist at everything,” says Goines (CFA’27). “I’m trying to resurrect the term ‘Renaissance man’—someone who knows a lot about a lot.”

Goines led the nonprofit music center Jazz St. Louis from 2022 until February 2026. Before that, he toured extensively with Jazz at Lincoln Center (JALC), playing for 30 years under Marsalis, the orchestra’s founder and managing and artistic director. 

He describes Marsalis, whom he met in kindergarten in New Orleans, as an innovator: “He is a man who has been able to figure out how the universe comes together.”

Since stepping down from Jazz St. Louis, Goines has recommitted to life as a full-time jazz musician and composer. It’s a career that has taken him all over the world, from Cuba to New Zealand, France to South Africa, Australia to Spain. Throughout the decades, he has notched expertise in traditional New Orleans music, big band, bebop, and Latin jazz styles, as well as classical, soul, and rock and roll. 

What remains constant in an ever-evolving menu of specialties, he says, is the bond shared by the international jazz community.

“We have a standing rule that you should never play on the bandstand with anyone that you don’t know, so when I walk on a bandstand and sit in with musicians I don’t know, the first thing I do is introduce myself,” he says. “The music has allowed us to come together and be part of the same community for generations and generations. I still know people I have met in 1993, who live in Europe, and I talk with them regularly. I have former students in Japan who call me every time someone [we both know] comes to play at the club.”

His career has also introduced him to a wealth of collaborators—in a wealth of musical genres. In addition to his longstanding relationship with Marsalis and JALC, he’s performed with musicians like Ross, Bob Dylan, Ray Charles, Dizzy Gillespie, Eric Clapton, and B.B. King. Goines has performed on scores for Ken Burns’ documentary series Jazz with Marsalis and mentored Jon Batiste, the Grammy-winning former bandleader for The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, when he was teaching at Juilliard. It was Batiste who may have taught Goines the most important lesson of all: Every student needs room to improvise, experiment, and grow.

“Most people would think that when they come to Juilliard, they would leave playing only a certain type of ‘straight-ahead’ jazz, but Jon Batiste was very eclectic in his music,” he says. “When I look at him, he becomes a very good example of what I learned as a teacher: People have to be themselves. Thelonious Monk said, ‘A genius is the one who is most like himself.’”

Researching Inequalities in Music

At CFA, Goines appreciates the online program’s emphasis on equal exchange between teacher and student, bolstered by a reading of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. He had already been thinking about power imbalances and overlooked perspectives in music, especially in the wake of criticism and protests against JALC in 2016.

“The orchestra had been all-male since its origin,” says Goines. “We did have women coming in along the way to sub, but it was a predominantly male orchestra. It’s not that Jazz at Lincoln Center was not sensitive to it; they just didn’t have any guidelines in place to be able to address [the issue].”

The uproar settled following systemic changes at JALC—such as blind auditions, expanded outreach, and transparent hiring practices. And the experience gave Goines a vision for his doctoral thesis: to highlight the inequalities faced by women musicians. At CFA, he’s embarked on a long-term research project where he’s compiled interviews with women in the orchestra pit, the bandstand, and the music classroom.

“It has been revelatory,” he says of his work so far. “Orchestras are evolving and changing, but they’re not all the way there.”

In his interviews, Goines found that female musicians often face pressure at an early age to play more “feminine” instruments—flute and violin, as opposed to drums or trombone. Bandleaders often won’t hire a woman because they, in turn, may solely be looking for drummers and trombonists. Classical music is similarly seen as more feminine, and jazz more masculine. These rigid gender associations are very real, he says, and often hiding in plain sight.

“Things are starting to change, but it is far from what many would call equitable, whether it be in classical music, in jazz, in rock, or in education,” says Goines. “Female [music] teachers tend to teach middle school, but high school band directors tend to be men. It’s right in front of our face, but we haven’t really recognized it.”

It may be nearly 40 years since Goines was a student—he has a Bachelor of Music Education from Loyola University and a Master of Music from Virginia Commonwealth University—but he’s happy to be among his fellow learners again. 

“I’ve occupied some of the key positions in the country,” he says, “but it didn’t mean that I couldn’t learn more.”