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Ellis Marsalis Jr., Jazz Pianist and Patriarch of a Musical Family, Dies at 85 Ellis Marsalis Jr., Jazz Pianist and Patriarch, Dies at 85
(about 2 hours later)
This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.
Ellis Marsalis Jr., a pianist and educator who became the guiding force behind a late-20th-century resurgence in jazz and who helped to shape the musical careers of four sons, died on Wednesday at a hospital in New Orleans. He was 85. Ellis Marsalis, a pianist and educator who became the guiding force behind a late-20th-century resurgence in jazz, while putting four musician sons on a path to prominent careers, died on Wednesday. He was 85.
The cause was complications of Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, his son Branford said. The cause was complications of Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, his son Branford said in a statement, which did not specify where he died.
Mr. Marsalis had spent decades as a working musician and educator in his native New Orleans — mentoring his own children as well as many other young musicians — before his sons Wynton and Branford found fame in the early 1980s. Mr. Marsalis spent decades as a working musician and teacher in New Orleans before his eldest sons, Wynton and Branford, who embodied a fresh-faced revival of traditional jazz, gained national fame in the early 1980s.
Mr. Marsalis’s star soon rose as well, and before long he was a household name. In New Orleans, his devotion to bebop and its offshoots branded him as an outsider; it also put him on the progressive end of the stylistic spectrum in a city where most musicians stuck to a more traditional style rooted in the early 20th century. On the national stage, his family’s promotion of straight-ahead jazz turned Mr. Marsalis and his extravagantly talented young sons into the shepherds of a new movement in jazz. Mr. Marsalis’s star rose along with theirs, and he, too, became a household name.
“Ellis Marsalis was a legend,” Mayor LaToya Cantrell of New Orleans wrote on Twitter on Wednesday night. “He was the prototype of what we mean when we talk about New Orleans jazz.”“Ellis Marsalis was a legend,” Mayor LaToya Cantrell of New Orleans wrote on Twitter on Wednesday night. “He was the prototype of what we mean when we talk about New Orleans jazz.”
In 1979, when Mr. Marsalis played regular gigs at the Carnegie Tavern, at West 56th Street and Seventh Avenue in Manhattan, The New York Times noted that he eschewed the traditional New Orleans stylings of many of his peers, and described him instead as “an eclectic performer with a light and graceful touch, but more exploratory turn of mind.” That was not always so. Mr. Marsalis’s devotion to midcentury bebop and its offshoots had long made him something of an outsider in a city with an abiding loyalty to its early-jazz roots. Still, he secured the respect of fellow musicians thanks to his unshakable talents as a pianist and composer, and his supportive but rigorous manner as an educator.
Ellis L. Marsalis was born in New Orleans on Nov. 14, 1934. Once they reached the national stage, the Marsalises’ advocacy of straight-ahead jazz made them renegades of a different sort. Wynton, a trumpeter, boldly espoused his father’s devotion to heroes like Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk, and he issued public broadsides against the slicker jazz-rock fusion that had largely displaced acoustic jazz during the late 1960s and ’70s.
His father, Ellis L. Marsalis Sr., who died in 2004, was involved in the civil rights movement as the owner of the Marsalis Motel in suburban New Orleans; its guests included the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. from New York, the future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and the musician Ray Charles. Photogenic, erudite and fabulously talented, Mr. Marsalis’s children and many other young jazz musicians he had taught — including Terence Blanchard, Donald Harrison Jr., Harry Connick Jr. and Nicholas Payton — became the leaders in a burgeoning traditionalist movement, loosely referred to as the Young Lions.
Though he became a prominent jazz musician in his own right, Mr. Marsalis Jr. was perhaps best known as a mentor to his children, four of whom followed their father into careers in jazz. “My dad was a giant of a musician and teacher, but an even greater father,” Branford Marsalis said in a statement. “He poured everything he had into making us the best of what we could be.”
Wynton Marsalis, a trumpeter and composer, became the managing and artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center and won the Pulitzer Prize in Music in 1997. Branford became a world-renowned saxophonist and bandleader with multiple Grammy Awards; Delfeayo, a trombonist; and Jason, a drummer. In an acknowledgment of the patriarch’s influence as well as his own talents, the National Endowment for the Arts in 2011 named Mr. Marsalis and his musician sons as N.E.A. Jazz Masters. It is considered the highest honor for an American jazz musician, and until then it had been awarded only on an individual basis.
Mr. Marsalis earned his bachelor’s degree in music education from Dillard University in 1955, and played jazz until enlisting in the Marine Corps the following year, according to the National Endowment for the Arts. He became a member of the Corps Four, a Marines jazz quartet that performed on television and radio to increase recruiting efforts, the endowment said. By that point, the Marsalises were widely understood to be jazz’s royal family. Wynton had become the founding artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, the world’s pre-eminent nonprofit organization devoted to jazz, and he won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 1997. Branford was a world-renowned saxophonist and bandleader with three Grammys to his name. Delfeayo, a trombonist, and Jason, a drummer and vibraphonist, were also well established as bandleaders.
In the 1970s, he earned a master’s degree in music education at Loyola University, according to the endowment, and went on to teach at the Virginia Commonwealth University and the University of New Orleans, where he led the jazz department for 12 years. In addition to those sons, Mr. Marsalis is survived by two nonmusician sons, Mboya and Ellis III; a sister, Yvette; and 13 grandchildren. Dolores Marsalis, his wife of 58 years, died in 2017.
In 2008, Mr. Marsalis was inducted into the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame. In 2011, the National Endowment for the Arts gave the family a “jazz masters” award in recognition of its many contributions to American music and culture. In an interview with The New York Times Magazine in 2004, Wynton Marsalis said that his father had always led by example — expecting, rather than demanding, a high level of seriousness from his students.
Mr. Marsalis’s wife, Dolores, died in 2017. He is survived by his sons, Branford, Wynton, Ellis III, Delfeayo, MBoya and Jason; his sister Yvette; and 13 grandchildren. “My father never put pressure on me. He’s too cool for that kind of stuff,” Wynton said. Asked to define his father’s brand of cool, he explained: “The house could fall down and everyone would be running around, and he would still be sitting in his same chair.”
Ellis Louis Marsalis was born on Nov. 14, 1934 in New Orleans. His mother, Florence Robertson, was a homemaker. His father, Ellis Marsalis Sr., who died in 2004, owned the Marsalis Motel in suburban New Orleans, and became involved in the civil rights movement. The establishment’s guests included the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Rep. Adam Clayton Powell Jr. from New York, the future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and Ray Charles.
Mr. Marsalis started out as a saxophonist before switching to the piano in high school. He earned his bachelor’s degree in music education from Dillard University in 1955, and he taught at Xavier University Preparatory School until enlisting in the Marine Corps in the late 1950s. There he became a member of the Corps Four, a quartet of Marines that performed jazz on television and radio to aid in recruitment.
After leaving the Marines he taught briefly in Breaux Bridge, La., then returned to New Orleans with Dolores and their four children to work at his father’s motel, while playing shows at night.
Mr. Marsalis performed and recorded throughout the 1960s and ’70s with a variety of modern and progressive jazz musicians, including the drummer Ed Blackwell and the eminent horn-playing brothers Cannonball and Nat Adderley.
Mr. Marsalis later earned a master’s degree in music education from Loyola University, and went on to lead the jazz studies program at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts for high school students. It was there that he mentored such future stars as Mr. Blanchard and Mr. Connick, as well as his own children.
He later taught at Virginia Commonwealth University and the University of New Orleans, where he served for 12 years as the founding director of its jazz studies department. “We want to make the whole process as scholarly as possible without turning it into something sterile,” he said in an interview with Offbeat magazine in 1989, upon starting his position at the University of New Orleans.
Always hungry for knowledge, Mr. Marsalis saw himself as a perpetual student. At the university, he said, “I’d like to get involved in a course on physics to get a good understanding of the physical aspects of the universe. There are literature courses I’d like to take. I might one day. I don’t buy the idea that colleges are just for young people.”
Reviewing a 1979 performance by Mr. Marsalis at New York’s Carnegie Tavern, just before his family burst onto the national stage, the New York Times critic John S. Wilson introduced Mr. Marsalis to his readers. “Unlike the widely accepted image of jazz musicians from New Orleans, Mr. Marsalis is not a traditionalist,” Mr. Wilson wrote, describing him as “an eclectic performer with a light and graceful touch” and an “exploratory turn of mind.”
Four years later, Mr. Marsalis made another New York appearance, at a next-door locale with a similar name: Carnegie Hall. There he gave a solo concert, oscillating between original compositions and covers of jazz standards.
“Mr. Marsalis’s interpretations were impressive in their economy and steadiness,” the Times critic Stephen Holden wrote. “Sticking mainly to the middle register of the keyboard, the pianist offered richly harmonized arrangements in which fancy keyboard work was kept to a minimum and studious melodic invention, rather than pronounced bass patterns, determined the structures and tempos.”
Before Wynton and then Branford found acclaim, Mr. Marsalis had recorded only sporadically. But once they all became nationally known, that changed. In the 1990s, after the Young Lions boom he had helped unleash led major labels to reinvest in straight-ahead jazz, Mr. Marsalis released a series of albums for Blue Note and then Columbia.
In 2008, Mr. Marsalis was inducted into the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame.
Mr. Marsalis held a weekly gig for decades at Snug Harbor, one of New Orleans’s premier jazz clubs, before giving it up in December.
Julia Carmel contributed reporting.