Illustration by Maki Yamaguchi

The Renaissance Man

After decades as a touring jazz musician, community leader, and world-class educator, Victor Goines is back in school

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

The closest Goines might get to a permanent label is the one he now wears: student. Education is of tantamount importance in his life, and it speaks to a major tenet of his: that a person never stops learning.

“It’s better to have a worldview than a view of the world,”he says. “Everything I do is a compilation of everything I’ve experienced, and every person I’ve met has educated me.”

It has been nearly 40 years since Goines received his master’s degree in 1988. Since then, he’s been on the music faculty at Loyola University and the University of New Orleans. He helmed the jazz studies program at Northwestern University and the Juilliard School. But he got the bug again, and decided to enroll in CFA’s online graduate program in music education.

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

Giant Steps

Victor Goines (’27) (right) performs with longtime collaborator Wynton Marsalis (Hon.’92) at Lincoln Center in 2018. Slaven Vlasic/Getty Images

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.”

While touring solo and with Marsalis, it’s necessary to balance a strenuous show schedule with his studies. “[I’m] touring all over the world and teaching full time, so being able to make class at a specific time every week does not meet my needs,” he says. “I had to demonstrate to my teachers that I could attend the lectures online and continue to study.”

Goines appreciates the CFA 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 project: to highlight the inequalities faced by women musicians. While at CFA, he compiled interviews with women discussing their experiences in the orchestra pit, the bandstand, the concert hall, 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, but 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.”

A Love Supreme

Since stepping down from Jazz St. Louis, Goines has re-committed 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 since 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.”

Goines’ career has also introduced him to a wealth of collaborators—in a wealth of musical genres. In addition to his long-standing relationship with Marsalis and JALC, he’s performed with Diana Ross, Bob Dylan, Ray Charles, Dizzy Gillespie, and B.B. King,  among other giants. He has performed on scores for Ken Burns’ 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 came 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 most like himself.’”