Jazz great Ellis Marsalis Jr. will play at Yoshi’s with his son Delfeayo.
Ellis Marsalis Jr.’s sons Branford, Wynton, Delfeayo and Jason are easily the most prolific bunch of brothers in jazz history. They also can trace their family tree to the idiom’s beginnings in New Orleans.
Two of their mother, Dolores’, great-uncles started their careers around the turn of the 20th century, before anyone called the new music “jass” or “jazz.” Wellman Braud, born in 1891, played bass and violin in New Orleans string trios during the century’s first decade before moving north and eventually hooking up with Duke Ellington.
Clarinetist Alphonse Picou, born in 1878, was playing even earlier, at age 16. Dolores has been told that he’d worked with Buddy Bolden, the legendary cornetist who never recorded and died in obscurity in 1931 when he was probably 63.
Mother’s side
“Most people think it comes from my dad’s side, but ironically, Dad has no creative individuals from a musical standpoint on his side of the family,” says Delfeayo, 49. “It’s all on my mother’s side.”
The trombonist speaks by phone from a resort hotel on Mackinac Island, Mich., where he, his pianist father, bassist Delfeayo and Ellis Marsalis. 8 p.m. Wednesday. $33-$39. Yoshi’s, 1330 Fillmore St., S.F. (415) 655-5660. www.yoshis. com. John Clayton and drummer Marvin “Smitty” Smith are performing at a jazz festival. His mom and dad are staying in a room down the hall, along with their autistic son Mboya, the second youngest of the six Marsalis brothers.
Delfeayo and his Trena’s only child, 13-yearold Jazmine, is involved in musical theater back in New Orleans. He says his nonmusician brother Ellis III’s daughter sings and that both saxophonist Branford’s and drummer Jason’s daughters play piano. None performs professionally, however.
“I think the music thing might end with us, actually,” he says of himself, his brothers and his father.
New album
Delfeayo, his dad, Clayton and Smith are touring in support of a new album titled “The Last Southern Gentlemen” on the Troubadour Jass label. They will appear at Yoshi’s in San Francisco on Wednesday.
The CD, produced by Delfeayo with his oldest brother, Branford, serving as executive producer, consists mostly of old standards such as “Autumn Leaves,” “She’s Funny That Way,” “Speak Low,” “Nancy (With the Laughing Face),” “My Romance” and “I Cover the Waterfront.” One notable exception is the “Sesame Street” theme song, which has been around since the popular children’s television show’s inception in 1969 and might as well be considered a standard.
Surprise addition
Recording “Sesame Street” was not part of Delfeayo’s original plan.
“It was actually a misunderstanding,” he explains. “I was playing a warm-up routine, and John Clayton started playing this bass vamp. I said, ‘What are you doing?’ He said, ‘It’s “Sesame Street,” huh?’
“So I figured out the melody. It’s a great song. Before that I never knew it’s a 12-bar blues. I was like, ‘Whoever knew that?’
“Many times it’s easier to just play your own original music because there is less of a standard required,” he adds. “You can play your own music and it is the first time people are hearing it, but when you perform a standard, you’re being compared to Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker, so it has to be serious. The other thing is that my dad excels so much at playing standards. That was the obvious choice when recording with
him.”
Although he recorded in the early 1960s with brothers Cannonball and Nat Adderley, Ellis Marsalis Jr. was unable to find much work playing modern jazz around New Orleans at the onset of his career. The most lucrative forms of music at the time for local pianists were Dixieland jazz and rhythm and blues, but he played neither, other than R&B on one record by singer-guitarist Snooks Eaglin.
Some did well
“I was not in social circles with people who spent time working” on R&B, says Ellis, 79. “There were people that I knew, and some of them did pretty well with it, like Earl King and Huey Smith. I went to high school with Huey Smith.”
Ellis taught marching band and chorus at a school in Breaux Bridge, La., for two years before returning home to help his father run a motel called Marsalis Mansion. Stints at the Playboy Club in New Orleans as leader of a trio that was all-black because of segregation laws were followed by three years with popular white trumpeter Al Hirt’s newly integrated, post-segregation band in the late ’60s.
“What I learned had little or nothing to do with music, but I was able to grasp a level of professionalism which was different from anything I had seen,” he says of working with Hirt, who had a manager and traveled with roadies. “It was also good because I got to go into New York a lot. I had some friends in New York.”
Ellis says that he never encouraged his boys to play music, but when they began showing interest, he found them “good teachers.” His own professional profile rose substantially when the careers of Branford and trumpeter Wynton took off in the early ’80s. Ellis has since recorded 16 albums of his own and appeared on others by all four musician sons.
Many were produced by Delfeayo, whose other production credits include albums by Terence Blanchard, Harry Connick Jr., Nicholas Payton, Mingus Dynasty and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band.
“I was in fifth or sixth grade when Branford showed me how to create a feedback loop with a reel-to-reel recorder,” he recalls. “It was coolest thing. I was kinda hooked.”
High school demos
By the time he was in high school, Delfeayo was producing demo tapes at home for Wynton.
“I did a lot of experimentation,” Delfeayo says, “I went in the bathroom. The bathroom sounded live, but there was too much echo. And sound doesn’t travel outside, so that wasn’t good.
“We went into the kitchen and the kitchen had the best sound, but my mom was cooking, so she was like, ‘Get outta here with that thing, boy!’ ”