Victor Louis Goines

About

Jazz clarinetist and saxophonist, bandleader and composer and director of jazz studies at Northwestern University. He's been a member of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra and the Wynton Marsalis Septet since 1993.

Before Fame

He was born and raised in New Orleans and started studying the clarinet at eight. He received his bachelor of music education from Loyola University in 1984, and his master of music from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1990.

Trivia

He has toured throughout the world. He appears on Marsalis' Pulitzer Prize-winning recording Blood on the Fields and The Ever Fonky Lowdown. In addition to all the jazz legends he's played with, he's also played with Ray Charles, Bob Dylan, BB King, Diana Ross, and Stevie Wonder. 

Family Life

His father is a retired police officer, and two of his brothers are police officers in New Orleans.

Associated With

Goines has been friends with Wynton Marsalis since he was a kid, and studied with Marsalis' father Ellis Marsalis Jr. And when he heard a recording of John Coltrane playing sax on "Countdown," "that," said Goines in an interview with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, "was a motivation for me."