In memory of Ellis Marsalis Jr.
Jazz pianist Ellis Marsalis Jr., who died Wednesday of complications from COVID-19, was a great musician but an even greater teacher. Through his pupils — especially his famous and highly acclaimed sons — he helped shape the sonic landscape of America.
Marsalis, who was 85, lived and died in New Orleans, the city where jazz was born. His passing is a reminder of the awful toll — not just human, but cultural as well — of this relentless pandemic. We have lost a giant, and sadly he will not be the last.
Marsalis was a pianist who spent much of his career working as a sideman with stars such as saxophonist Cannonball Adderley, and teaching music at Xavier University of New Orleans,
the University of New Orleans and the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. What Ellis Marsalis’ students, especially his son Wynton, gave to jazz was a reemphasis of the rigor and formality of jazz’s golden age.
Beginning in the 1970s, jazz branched into directions that mostly turned out to be dead ends — rock-influenced jazz fusion, which produced more bad music than good; commercial “smooth jazz,” which is numbingly unchallenging.
But jazz also has to swing, or else it’s not jazz at all. Listen to music by Ellis Marsalis, any of his sons or any of his well-known pupils, who include trumpeters Nicholas Payton and Terence Blanchard, singer Harry Connick Jr., saxophonist Donald Harrison and many others. They all have that ineffable but unmistakable quality known as swing.
The combination of rigor and style Marsalis taught shaped first his children, and then the world of music as a whole. Wynton and his brother Branford both played in funk bands when they were kids, but as adult jazz musicians they became neoclassicists. They treat jazz as fully equal, in depth and sophistication, to European classical music or any other musical tradition in the world.
Trumpeter Wynton is one of the greatest musicians of our time, a supreme virtuoso who is as comfortable playing Haydn’s Concerto in D Major with the London Symphony Orchestra as he is leading a septet in one of his own compositions — the beautiful “Sunflowers,” say — or performing with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra he leads.
In 1997, he became the first jazz musician to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Music for an epic orchestral-vocal suite entitled “Blood on the Fields,” which explores the transition from slavery to freedom.
Branford played with legends such as Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie and Art Blakey as well as his own combos. His music can be heard in Spike Lee’s films “Do the Right Thing” and “School Daze”; he has played with rock musicians such as Sting and the Grateful Dead; and for three years he served as music director of NBC’s “Tonight Show” while Jay Leno was host.
Two other Marsalis brothers, trombonist Delfeayo and drummer Jason, are also working jazz musicians. On the few occasions when the whole family played together, Wynton once said in an interview, Ellis was the leader and called the shots.
But those family gigs were few and far between.
“I was never big on family bands,” Ellis Marsalis once said. “Even when I was teaching, people would ask about that, and I would say everybody needs to do their own thing. … If I was in Wynton’s band, the music would be dated, because at that time,
Wynton was still a growing musician, and he needed everyone to be on the same page musically with him.”
Making a living as a jazz musician has never been easy, and Marsalis was able to regularly record his own music as a bandleader only after his sons Wynton and Branford became world-renowned. He recorded albums of his own compositions, tribute albums to Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk, duet albums with Wynton and Branford, a Christmas album and a host of others.
“There was never any one particular way to learn whatever it is that you needed to learn,” Ellis Marsalis once said.
An outstanding teacher finds the right way for the right pupil at the right moment. Someday, when the pandemic ebbs, I hope New Orleans is able to give him the joyous, defiant Second Line funeral he deserves.