Marsalis: Father of a Jazz Dynasty

Ellis Marsalis is breeding a generation of jazz talent.

Mellon Jazz time reminds me of my astonishment and elation during the 1987 running of the festival at experiencing Wynton and Branford Marsalis on successive nights at the Academy of Music and Irvine Auditorium. I vowed that some day I'd try to take a good look at their dad, Ellis, who has surely earned the honorific, "First Father of American Jazz."

So imagine my delight last December, when attending the Modern Language Association in New Orleans, to find a feature in the Times-Picayune on Marsalis's "homecoming" concert that night at the Storyville Jazz Hall.

"Homecoming" because the University of New Orleans--activated by Virginia Commonwealth University's making Ellis a visiting professor of jazz--was just announcing a new jazz department for fall 1989, to be chaired by the First Father. Bright Moments, the jazz packaging firm handling the concert, said sure, come along to the sound check at three and we'll get you an interview.

Ellis is a hulking bear of a man, reticent, giving off a quiet, scholarly air emphasized by his black horn rims. Sound checks, by the way, are a marvelous way to psyche out the persona of a jazz performer. The formalities of the actual concert in abeyance, the star relates to his peers on a down-to-earth level that reveals his personality.

The easy give and take was disrupted only once, when Ellis begged the soundman to turn down the volume--"You're making us sound like a rock group." Later, he added disgustedly that sound engineers were "frying their brains" with that high-tech noise, and it was hard to wean them away from their decibels.

For 11 years Ellis had taught music at the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts (NOCCA), and the move to Richmond he found stimulating because he was working in an entirely different curriculum and getting a good line on his home town for the first time.

There is no mystery about why the new academic status is satisfying to him. He's got six children and a wife to deal with, and in his late 50s he was finding the entrepreneurial sides of jazz performance a bit of a drag.

As he told the Times-Picayune: "At a certain time in your life you have to move forward if you have more to do, or face the concept of retirement, whatever that is. I was dealing with all of those things when I was here, and I was feeling rather stymied. I don't think it was because there wasn't anything to do here. I just couldn't see what was here to be done beyond the situation I was in."

The father / prophet was without honor in his own county, and it took the fear of Richmond's larceny to get the city and county of New Orleans off its musicological duff.

Of course I wondered how a man in the same business deals with the possibly eclipsing stardom of his two sons. It's kind of the Oedipal flap turned inside out. The answer is: very, very equably. He glows over them, and he has two more sons coming along--Jason and Delfayo.

Imagine what a faculty he'll have performing when they get up to speed on drums and trombone. But he doesn't play favorites. At the moment, he seemed proudest of Ellis III, who had just graduated from New York University with a double major in history and photography: "He's doing whatever reserve second lieutenants do at Fort Benning."

And it is a measure of the humanist in the man that when he spoke about his son Mboya, he minced no words. "That's autistic, not artistic."

Needless to say, his opinions on the state of jazz possess the same measured gravity. He resents the fact that promotion has more to do with the size of a jazz audience than does the quality of performance. (The Storyville concert that night was SRO, not just because it was New Year's Eve but because the locals missed him.) And he said he hopes that as a jazz educator he can clear up some of the confusion that exists in the bewildering maze of what jazz has been, is, and can become.

Because the audience is personality-oriented, their attention span leaves something to be desired. He recalled a peculiarly egregious instance of inattention at Bradley's in New York when Tommy Flanagan's luminous performance on a "big, beautiful Baldwin" was simply drowned out by foolish jabbering. On the other hand, recently in New Orleans, he remembered, the audience stayed with his group for 35 minutes as they put "Cherokee" through every key imaginable.

You can bet your gene pool that Ellis hopes his curriculum at the University of New Orleans will in the long haul leaven the lumpishness of the underattentive jazz listener.

His getting a professorship in his home town is yet another example of how America is finally--however dilatorily--joining the rest of the civilized world in paying the homage of careful attention to the country's most original contribution to world culture.

And as Mellon 1989 strikes up the pandemonium June 20th at the Academy of Music with Nancy Wilson and Joe Williams, it's right to be grateful for how that once-staid banking institution is making a wise investment in the city's long-term vitality.

I know I was grateful, as I walked up to Canal Street after the New Orleans concert, to the Mellon stimulus of 1987 that made me wonder what kind of dad could engender such wunderkinder. They didn't fall far at all from a mighty oak of a man. Ellis, we can hardly wait to hear Jason and Delfayo.

from Welcomat: After Dark, June 14, 1989