[msb-alumni] New Orleans jazz patriarch Ellis Marsalis dead at 85 on April 1, 2020
- From: Steve <pipeguy920@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: <msb-alumni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 2 Apr 2020 16:12:23 -0400
BlankNew Orleans jazz patriarch Ellis Marsalis dead at 85.
NEW ORLEANS -- Ellis Marsalis, jazz pianist, teacher and patriarch of a New
Orleans
musical family that includes famed musician sons Wynton and Branford, has died.
He
was 85. New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell announced Marsalis' death in a news
release
Wednesday night. She did not specify a cause of death. He had continued to
perform
regularly in New Orleans until December.
Because Marsalis opted to stay in New Orleans for most of his career, his
reputation
was limited until his sons became famous and brought him the spotlight, along
with
new recording contracts and headliner performances on television and on tour.
Four of his six sons are musicians:
Wynton, the trumpeter, is America's most prominent jazz spokesman as artistic
director of Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York.
Branford, the saxophonist, led The Tonight Show band and toured with Sting.
Delfeayo, trombonist, is a prominent recording producer and performer.
And Jason, the drummer, has made a name for himself with his own band and as an
accompanist.
Ellis III, who decided music was not his gig, is a photographer-poet in
Baltimore.
The Marsalis family band seldom played together when the boys were younger, but
in
2003 toured up East in a spinoff of a family celebration that became a PBS
special
when the elder Marsalis retired from teaching at the University of New Orleans.
Harry
Connick Jr., one of Marsalis' students at the New Orleans Center for the
Creative
Arts, was a guest. He is just one of the many now-famous jazz musicians who
passed
through the Marsalis classrooms; others include trumpeters Nicholas Payton and
Terence Blanchard, saxophonists Donald Harrison and Victor Goines, and bassist
Reginald Veal.
Marsalis was born in New Orleans, son of the operator of a hotel where Marsalis
met
touring black musicians who could not stay at the segregated downtown hotels
where
they performed. He played saxophone in high school but was also playing piano
by the
time he went to Dillard University.
Although New Orleans was steeped in traditional jazz, and rock 'n' roll was the
new
sound in the city's studios in the 1950s, Marsalis preferred bebop and modern
jazz.
His college quartet included drummer Ed Blackwell, clarinetist Alvin Batiste
and
saxophonist Harold Battiste playing modern. Ornette Coleman was in town at the
time,
and in 1956 when Coleman headed to California, Marsalis and the others went
with him,
but after a few months Marsalis came back home. He told the New Orleans
Times-Picayune years later, when he and Coleman were old men, that he never did
figure out "what a pianist could do behind the free form of Coleman's jazz."
Back in New Orleans, Marsalis joined the Marine Corps and was assigned to
accompany
soloists on the service's weekly TV programs on CBS in New York. It was there,
he
said, that he learned to handle all kinds of different music styles.
On returning home, he worked at the Playboy Club and ventured into running his
own
club, which quickly went bust.
In 1967 trumpeter Al Hirt hired him. When not on Bourbon Street, Hirt's band
was
appearing on national TV doing headline shows on The Tonight Show and The Ed
Sullivan
Show, among others.
Marsalis got into education about the same time, teaching improvisation at
Xavier
University in New Orleans, and in the mid-1970s joined the faculty at the New
Orleans
magnet high school where he influenced a new generation of young jazz musicians.
When asked how he could teach something as free-wheeling as jazz improvisation,
Marsalis once said, "We don't teach jazz, we teach students."
In 1986 he moved to Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond as coordinator
of
Jazz Studies, a post he kept until 1989 when the University of New Orleans
lured him
back to set up a program of jazz studies at home.
Marsalis retired from UNO in 2001, but continued to perform, particularly at
Snug
Harbor in New Orleans, a small jazz club that anchored the city's contemporary
jazz
scene -- frequently backing young musicians who had promise.
His melodic style, with running improvisations in the right hand, has been
described
variously as "romantic," "contemporary," or simply "Louisiana jazz."
He is always on acoustic piano, never electric, and even in interpreting the
old
standards there's a clear link to the driving bebop chords and rhythms of his
early
years.
He founded his own record company, ELM (taken from his initials), but his
recording
was limited until his sons became famous. After that he joined them and other
musicians on mainstream labels and headlined his own releases, many full of his
own
compositions. He often played at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival.
For more than three decades he played two 75-minute sets every Friday night at
Snug
Harbor until he decided it had become too exhausting. But even then he still
performed there on occasion as a special guest.
Marsalis' wife, Dolores, died in 2017. He is survived by his sons Branford,
Wynton,
Ellis III, Delfeayo, Mboya and Jason.
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