“Ellis Marsalis, a pianist and educator who was 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 in New Orleans,” write Giovanni Russonello and Michael Levenson in Wednesday’s (3/1) New York Times. “He was 85. The cause was complications of Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus … 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 … Mr. Marsalis’s star rose along with theirs, and he, too, became a household name…. 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 … Wynton [is] the founding artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York … and won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 1997. Branford [is] a world-renowned saxophonist and bandleader with three Grammys … Mr. Marsalis’s two other musician sons, Delfeayo, a trombonist, and Jason, a drummer and vibraphonist, [are] well established as bandleaders. In addition to those sons, Mr. Marsalis is survived by two nonmusician sons,” Mboya and Ellis III. “Dolores Marsalis, his wife of 58 years, died in 2017.”
Change font size
