Ellis Marsalis influenced many of today’s artists

Story and Photos By Christine Bordelon, Clarion Herald
Additional Photo | COURTESY  JAY CHRISTMAN, SNUG HARBOR

When local music legend Ellis Marsalis was listening to New Orleans radio in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s, popular music of the day echoed in his soul, especially hearing Artie Shaw play the clarinet.

“I like to say the music I heard, which was mostly on the radio, the music spoke to me,” Marsalis said. “I think it’s that way with everybody. If you are young and exposed to music, if that music speaks to you and you listen, you can develop an interest in it, and you start to study it.”
  At that time, popular singers were covering top Broadway hits, he said, so the idea was far-fetched that he would become the jazz master on the piano and be among the artists with the longest tenure at Snug Harbor on Frenchman Street in New Orleans, as he is today at age 85, and have four of six sons – Wynton, Branford, Delfeayo and Jason – follow him in the music business.

Different than his studies

As a youngster, Marsalis was instructed in the classics, first at Xavier University of Louisiana’s Junior School of Music, playing on the clarinet, until he said a nun removed him from the program, telling his mother she was sending him to Gilbert Academy, which she considered an atheist school, he said.

Marsalis then took private lessons with Geneva Handy Southall, who later received a Ph.D. in piano performance and music literature at the University of Iowa; and Jean Coston Maloney, an Oberlin’s Conservatory of Music graduate. He stopped private instruction once he attended Dillard University in New Orleans, where classical music, not jazz, filled the curriculum. In fact, he mentioned that students were kicked out because Dillard didn’t take kindly to jazz at the time.

Marsalis said he realized while listening to rhythm and blues in high school that there were no clarinet players on records. But, there were saxophonists like Leroy “Batman” Rankins, who played with Roy Brown and the Mighty Mighty Men. Brown’s hit was “Good Rockin’ Tonight.”

“I loved the sound of (the saxophone) and how the tenor sax fit in with what was going on in the rest of the song,” Marsalis said. “So, I asked my folks if I could get a tenor saxophone so I could play with local bands.”

Neither of his parents was musical, but the family had a piano, which his sister played.

Marsalis learned by practicing songs from the radio and eventually playing rhythm and blues in local clubs. Band leaders picked songs that crowds enjoyed dancing to. Being in bands with different musicians strengthened his playing ability, as did practicing.

“You have to practice,” he said. “In some cases, if the music is a little more advanced, then you have to get a teacher and develop a skill on that particular instrument.”

Had to feed six children

Marsalis wasn’t sure he would use his college degree in music education and worked for a short time at his father’s motel in Jefferson Parish.

  “My sisters and I went to college because our parents thought being a good parent meant sending your kids to college,” he said.

Because he wasn’t living in New York or Los Angeles, where musicians were getting paid for jazz gigs, he and his friends initially would just practice together. He freelanced with several bands such as the American Jazz Quintet with Harold Battiste, Ed Blackwell, Alvin Batiste and either Peter Badie or Richard Payne. It was a quartet consisting of piano, bass, drums and tenor saxophone.

“Most of us were interested in developing our jazz skills, which had nothing to do with paying us money,” he said. “Harold and Alvin started teaching school. Peter Badie left town to play in Hampton’s band, and Blackwell went to New York.”
He considers Battiste, with whom he played in local clubs, a mentor.

“We had the band, the American Jazz Quintet,” he said. “You would find out how good you were based on how well you were playing the music that was being played.”

He spent a few years in the U.S. Marine Corps and then got married in 1959 to Delores Ferdinand, for whom he converted to Catholicism (he was formerly Methodist), eventually having six boys he raised Catholic: Branford, Wynton, Ellis, Delfeayo, Miboya and Jason.

“I’m really proud of my wife,” Marsalis said. “She was the linchpin of the whole thing. If it wasn’t for her, you wouldn’t be talking to me right now.”

Ellis Marsalis at home.

Teaching was satisfying

  Marsalis said his first teaching position was as band and choral director at Carver High School in Breaux Bridge.

In 1967, trumpeter Al Hirt’s band leader, clarinetist Joseph “Pee Wee” Spitelera, heard Marsalis play and offered him his first full-time music job – house pianist at Hirt’s French Quarter Club. He was there three years, and also played piano backing Al on several albums, staying in his band until 1970. Hirt gave his son Branford his first trumpet, Marsalis said.

While serving as an adjunct music teacher at Xavier University, the music department chair advised him to earn a master’s degree so he could be hired full-time.

“I enrolled in the summer in the mid-1970s, and not long after I got a call from Alvin Batiste, who was on the faculty at Southern in Baton Rouge and artist-in-residence as a jazz artist in Orleans Parish public schools,” Marsalis said.

Batiste was too busy to take a job at the new arts school NOCCA (New Orleans Center for Creative Arts) and told Marsalis about the position. Marsalis taught at NOCCA for 12 years, teaching three of his four sons. He also taught jazz studies at Virginia Commonwealth University for three years and was the Coca-Cola chair of Jazz Studies at UNO for 12 years. He retired in 2001.

Marsalis is amazed at how “conversive” current young musicians are in jazz. In November, he was in New York at Jazz at Lincoln Center, which his son Wynton directs, and heard students playing compositions by Jelly Roll Morton and other early jazz musicians.

“Man, I’m really glad to hear you young guys,” he told them. “When I was your age, all we wanted to do is play as fast as we could and didn’t care nothing about the old people at all.”
  Marsalis still tickles the ivories occasionally on Fridays at Snug Harbor. His most recent performance was Jan. 3 with a quartet that included his son, Jason, on drums. While he has honorary degrees from Dillard and Julliard and was inducted into the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame, he considers his longtime Snug Harbor engagement his biggest accomplishment.

His curiosity – a bug he said he inherited from his father – takes him on continuous journeys of learning about many things.

“It’s too late for med school,” Marsalis said. “I can’t be no engineer. I’m too old for athletics. So, there’s nothing left but music. So, that’s what I do. It’s what I’ve been doing for the past 60 years or so.”

Christine Bordelon can be reached at [email protected].