BY AAGD STAFF
April 2, 2020
Sad news permeates throughout the jazz world today, as it is reported that Ellis Marsalis Jr., the father of Wynton and Branford Marsalis and a prominent performer and educator, has succumbed to complications of the coronavirus.
Ellis Marsalis spent his life entertaining and educating jazz lovers around the world, working as the guiding force behind a late-20th-century resurgence in jazz while putting four his phenomenal musical sons on a path to successful careers. Ellis Marsalis Jr. died on Wednesday in New Orleans. He was 85.
The cause was complications of Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, his son Branford said in a statement. The disease is killing thousands across America and according to the World Health Organization, it is especially dangerous for senior citizens.
Mr. Marsalis spent decades as a working musician and teacher in New Orleans before his eldest sons, Wynton and Branford, gained national fame in the early 1980s embodying a fresh-faced revival of traditional jazz.
Ellis Marsalis Jr., with his son, trumpeter, Wynton Marsalis.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
“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.”
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.
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 in New York, 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. Mr. Marsalis’s two other musician sons, Delfeayo, a trombonist, and Jason, a drummer and vibraphonist, were well established as bandleaders.
Mr. Marsalis is also 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 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.
