'My dad was a giant of a musician and teacher, but an even greater father' - Branford Marsalis, on the death of his father, jazz great Ellis Marsalis Jr.
FILE - This April 28, 2019 file photo shows Ellis Marsalis during the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival in New Orleans. The New Orleans Advocate says the 85-year-old Marsalis has told the Snug Harbor Jazz Bistro that he no longer wanted to play his usual Friday evening set. Instead, he'll make two monthly appearances as a “special guest" with other acts sitting in with him.
In a statement, Mayor LaToya Cantrell said of the man who'd continued to perform regularly in New Orleans until December: “Ellis Marsalis was a legend. He was the prototype of what we mean when we talk about New Orleans jazz. He was a teacher, a father, and an icon — and words aren’t sufficient to describe the art, the joy and the wonder he showed the world."
Harry Connick Jr., one of Marsalis' students at the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts, was a guest. He's one of many now-famous jazz musicians who passed through Marsalis' classrooms. Others include trumpeters Nicholas Payton and Terence Blanchard, saxophonists Donald Harrison and Victor Goines, and bassist Reginald Veal.
Ornette Coleman was in town at the time. In 1956, when Coleman headed to California, Marsalis and the others went along, but after a few months Marsalis returned home. He told the New Orleans Times-Picayune years later, when he and Coleman were old men, that he never figured out what a pianist could do behind the free form of Coleman's jazz.
When asked how he could teach something as free-wheeling as jazz improvisation, Marsalis once said,"We don't teach jazz, we teach students."
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