Marsalis’s father was an independent black entrepreneur and his mother a champion of cultural education, but both discouraged their eldest child from becoming a professional musician. As the editors of The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD described it, “One can easily hear where Wynton got his even-handed delineation of melody from, and where Branford’s aristocratic elegance of line is rooted.” Thoroughly schooled in modern jazz, Marsalis developed his own lush, understated style that is both melodic and rhythmically moving. When he began teaching music full-time in 1974, Marsalis continued to perform in New Orleans, soon becoming a featured artist at Snug Harbor, the city’s premier modern jazz club, often in solo performances. This occasion marked the first national exposure for modern jazz from New Orleans. In 1962, he took part in a recording by Nat Adderley and his brother, Julian “Cannonball” Adderley, both nationally prominent figures in the world of modern jazz. Marsalis remained active in the small-but-fervent jazz scene in New Orleans for almost twenty years, performing with his own modern jazz group and as a member of trumpeter Al Hirt’s traditional New Orleans jazz band. With Ed Blackwell on drums and Richard Payne on bass, they called themselves The American Jazz Quintet and, in 1956, produced one of the first New Orleans modern jazz recordings. Through childhood friend Alvin Batiste, Marsalis met a Dillard University senior, Harold Battiste, who was recruiting a modern jazz band. Marsalis was fourteen when he attended a Dizzy Gillespie concert in New Orleans and immediately became “a confirmed bebopper.” Just two years later, at the age of sixteen, he entered New Orleans’s Dillard University as a freshman. He also called for increased attention to jazz’s central function in articulating the underlying virtues of American culture. Whether teaching or performing, he emphasized respect for modern jazz traditions and a heightened awareness of the role of the professional jazz musician.
Marsalis’s method rested on teaching by example. In addition, he helped establish a new perception of jazz and its place in American popular culture, transmitting some of his most deeply held beliefs through his sons (four of whom have become professional jazz musicians) and an initial wave of Marsalis-trained students prominent in jazz during the 1980s and 1990s. He later made a midcareer decision to focus more seriously on music education, eventually becoming an impassioned advocate for the rightful place of jazz education in a formal academic setting.
He was, for example, among only a handful of young musicians in New Orleans during the 1950s who chose to pursue careers in modern jazz at a time when rhythm and blues and traditional jazz dominated the local music scene. However the elder Marsalis had a much greater influence on American jazz history in the last quarter of the twentieth century than it might appear.
Modern jazz pianist and leading jazz educator Ellis Marsalis was probably best known as the father of trumpeter Wynton Marsalis and saxophonist Branford Marsalis, both internationally acclaimed modern jazz artists. Ellis Marsalis Modern jazz pianist and leading jazz educator Ellis Marsalis was the patriarch of the musical New Orleans family that includes his sons trumpeter Wynton Marsalis and saxophonist Branford Marsalis, both internationally acclaimed modern jazz artists.Įllis Marsalis.
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