One of the ironies of pianist Ellis Marsalis’ musical career is that two of his sons—trumpeter Wynton and saxophonist Branford—were world-famous before most music followers had ever heard of their dad. Like Picasso’s father, the original progenitor often fails to receive his “props.”
Born November 14, 1934 in Gert Town, Ellis is perhaps most renowned as a jazz educator. Besides tutoring his sons Wynton, Branford, Delfeayo and Jason, Ellis has instructed such pupils as Terence Blanchard, Donald Harrison, Jr., Harry Connick, Jr., Nicholas Payton, and Kent and Marlon Jordan, the progeny of his fellow educator, Edward “Kidd” Jordan.
Ellis Marsalis began his musical career as a tenor saxophonist, switching to piano while in high school. During the late ’50s, Ellis trod the lonely road of modernist jazz in New Orleans (with drummer Ed Blackwell), recorded with Cannonball and Nat Adderley in the ’60s and between 1967 and 1970, played the piano in trumpeter Al Hirt’s band. Since 1989, Ellis has been the director of the Jazz Studies Program at the University of New Orleans, a position from which he is now retiring.
On August 4, UNO will host “Satchmo to Marsalis: A Tribute to the Fathers of Jazz,” a concert featuring Ellis, Wynton, Branford, Delfeayo and Jason Marsalis, as well as “adopted” son, Harry Connick, Jr.
Ellis Marsalis was interviewed by Fred Kasten, the genial host of “Saturday Night Jazz” on WWNO.
How did this concert with your sons first come about?
The idea of the concert emanated from the office of UNO Chancellor Gregory O’Brien. There’s so few times that any concert with all of us has been on. The Chancellor thought it was a good idea as a way of closing out my academic career as a teacher.
Has the family performed in public together before?
Once, in 1988, we did a benefit concert in New York for three different organizations. In fact, I’m not exactly sure what they were now. It was the only time that all of us have actually been on stage [together].
Was that fun?
Well, it was except we didn’t really get a chance to—oh, how can I put it?—there was in and out of different things and we didn’t get a chance to enjoy each other in a classic sense of playing together with a certain kind of interaction. Jason was real young, He was still playing well but he was still kind of young. This [concert] should be a lot more of a fun-type thing than it was before.
Once the Chancellor mentioned this, did it seem like a good idea to you? Something that you took to right away?
Well, it definitely is a good idea and I think to encase it in the fundraising concept so that the [Jazz Studies] program will receive the kinds of funds that’s necessary to grow. And to know that we were a part of that is very important.
It’s a wonderful opportunity to do a lot of things at once—honor Louis Armstrong, honor your contributions, and your family gets together and gets to play, and make some money, we hope.
Yeah, we really hope that we can have a successful benefit and raise a few bucks to help some students, to get some equipment and the usual kinds of day-to-day operations and situations.
When did the program start here at UNO—was it in 1988?
No, we started in the fall of 1989. I had returned here from Virginia Commonwealth University. Charles Blanc, another faculty member—he and I put the curriculum together on the telephone from Richmond to New Orleans.
How many students enrolled that first semester?
You know, I really can’t remember but I think probably around 15 to 20.
It was just a few courses offered? Not even a major at that time?
It started out as a major. In order to get a major, you have to have your courses outlined and go through the various committees so that they approve it as a degree program. Now since there’s already a music degree there, we just had to put together the amount of hours that it took to complete a liberal arts degree because that’s really the degree that the Jazz Studies student gets, a liberal arts degree.
I know one of your philosophies is that a liberal arts degree is an important thing. A person, whatever your pursuit is, should read widely in the arts, and sciences, too, as far as that goes, don’t you think?
The last that I heard—just from general information—is that about 30 percent of the CEOs of major corporations have liberal arts degrees. The concept of a liberal arts degree can be the best of two worlds, that is to become exposed to other courses which help you to get a broader perspective of the major interests that you have.
As the program developed, did enrollment keep going up each year?
Yeah, we’ve got about 50 students. I think it’s probably leveled off. The problem that we’re having now is we don’t have a lot of space. There is definitely a limit to the growth potential at the current time, just from the standpoint of the physical space. So we’re trying to solve it in a vertical manner. When I say “vertical manner,” what I mean is we’ll start earlier on some days and go later on some days.
Were you able to bring in a faculty pretty quickly as you got the program up and running?
The Chancellor said that he would see to funding for four full-time faculty. It would be a total of five because Dr. Charles Blanc was already on the UNO faculty. So we were able to get Harold Battiste, who was 20 years in Hollywood and musical director for Sonny and Cher—a lot of experiences that is needed to help with students who are neophytes in terms of the business. Eventually, we got Victor Goines, who was with us for a while and eventually decided that he wanted to concentrate more on the professional performing end. And now, he’s accepted a position at the Juilliard School as director of their jazz program. His replacement, Ed Peterson, came from Northwestern University in Chicago and is now our saxophone teacher. New Orleans’ own Steve Masakowski, a wonderful guitarist, holds the guitar chair in the faculty because we usually find that the students we get, from an instrument standpoint, are usually guitar students, drummers and saxophone players. We’ve always had a problem getting trombone players and some trumpet players and also piano players. Bass players are not that prevalent either. Usually, your bands benefit if the university has a football team and usually you can recruit trombone players and trumpet players because there’s a band there that’s needed for halftime football activities. Since we don’t have that, we have to be a lot more creative. Not that I think that we should have it—I’m glad UNO doesn’t have a football team.
It’s interesting how all that stuff works together, when you think what gets musicians to a campus sometimes is the athletic program. In this case, it’s strictly for the music and I take it that the interest has run pretty high among applicants, that you have a lot of people who are interested in the program.
Well, the study of jazz today is a lot different than it was in earlier years. Because the performance of jazz is more systematically inclusive in the society as a whole, you find more and more students are becoming interested in studying as a part of the overall skills that they develop. Because the way that the industries are going now—and when I say “industries,” what I mean is the scores for movies, scores for television, performers to back up different singers, different jazz groups, the overall business aspect of it—the jazz skill has become an extremely important part of the education process. It’s been a part of the mainstream business part for many years but now the education arena has seen the validity of jazz as a discipline, which is necessary to study formally.
That’s got to be gratifying to you and to others who have been involved in jazz education.
Yeah, it’s wonderful to be able to sort of come aboveground, so to speak. There was many years when Al Belletto—he was up at LSU—and different players who did go to the various universities around the country and it was not received very hospitably. Things have changed since that time.
I can remember instances of people being thrown out of school for playing jazz.
Precisely. Exactly.
Those days are maybe gone forever—I hope.
Today, there’s so much competition—just in terms of getting students to agree to get a university education for the purpose of the education itself. When you look at what’s happening in athletics, for example. See, music has a very close affinity to athletics even though a lot of people don’t really think so. We’re both in the entertainment business—it’s just that the athletes make a lot more money than we do. However, they do it for a shorter period of time. When you begin to look at what happens with athletics and universities, you see that students used to go into college and basketball and football were not so much on the professional side, in earlier years. The most professional game was really baseball. As television brought football and basketball more to mainstream [America], then you started finding all of these different rules or “You can’t turn pro until this” or “You can’t do that.” Now, kids coming out of high school are saying, “I don’t think I’ll bother with college—I’m just gonna go to the pros. Cobey Bryant did it!” Whether that’s good or bad is relative. It is a part of the realities of the landscape. A lot of people in music departments have said, “Well, we can’t really continue to freeze out music just because it didn’t come from Europe.” There’s world music, which is all the other kinds of things. The jazz studies programs are more and more inclusive in their history-type courses. At UNO, “Jazz Profiles,” which is a history course, Harold Battiste and Dr. Blanc both teach those courses. And there’s a rise that we know of by way of publishing companies of an interest [in jazz studies] on campuses nationwide. The last publishing company we were talking to told us, “There’s about 400,000 students studying classical music as an elective—about 200,000 studying jazz as an elective.” That’s with a bullet because it’s steadily going up. That’s in the United States.
Those are impressive figures.
Publishing companies’ statistics are reliable because they’re out there to sell books and books are what these institutions are using to determine exactly who gets what information.
If you just look at the convention of IAJE [the International Association of Jazz Educators] and notice the tremendous growth of that convention, which was a very small group not that long ago, and now thousands of people are going to those conventions.
The support is great with IAJE. First of all, it was NAJE, which I think was started by Nat Benton and was located in Manhattan, Kansas. The first time that I went, I went with the Loyola University jazz band—I was in graduate school then. Eventually, they developed chapters in other parts of the world so now it’s IAJE and there’s a lot of sponsorship coming from instrument companies, cymbal makers, what have you. The constituency is primarily university professors and some high school teachers—I don’t know what the ratio is now but it’s probably more and more high school teachers.
As you step away from the daily part of education, will you write about it and think about it?
Well, I think about it all the time. There are some things that I want to do, in particular involving the study of jazz music, which I think has more of a universal appeal than the more narrow scope that we look at jazz because for example, a lot of times when we think of jazz or let’s say when we think of music, period, if you want to study music—regardless of the instrument you happen to have chosen—you can go to music stores and buy a beginner’s book. And as you progress, you get to sort of like an intermediate book. And after you study a little more, you get to an advanced book. There is no such thing as “beginning jazz,” “intermediate jazz,” and “advanced jazz.” The music has not yet been academically codified so that one can come into it as a beginning student. As you probably might’ve noticed, there’s a lot of brass bands in New Orleans and most of these kids learn what they learn by the time they’re in junior high school, you see? Coming out of high school, some of them don’t bother thinking in terms of studying music because what they do is good enough for where they are.
Their skill level matches the market they put themselves in.
That’s right so consequently, that’s fine if that’s all you ever intend to do. But if you intend to really advance—whether advancing means composing music or arranging music and all of the different skills that’s connected to that…there’s some things I’d like to write about which hopefully will be able to help a band director. ’Cause band directors are like Rodney Dangerfield in the business: they get no respect. They tell you about class size—I listen at the politicians that say, “Thirty-five students in a classroom!” Hey man, the band directors in public schools have 110 and that’s as many as they can get for their marching band. So each class that they teach has a sizable number in it that they have to go out and recruit. On top of that, they have to hustle the money to get instruments repaired when they’re broke. Aside from that, they get no assistance. I remember I asked my son Jason one day, I think he was at McMain, which is not a powerful, athletic-type school—they were primarily focusing on college prep. I asked him one day, “How many coaches can you name?” Now Jason doesn’t bother with athletics, he didn’t play anything but just from his classes and the people that he knew, he was able to name five coaches. I said, “How many band instructors?” “One—Francis Gonzales, that’s it!” I don’t know how much good a book would do in this situation ’cause I don’t know how to tell people to get assistance.
Help them manage their time a little better. Has your outlook on jazz studies evolved or changed over the years?
Oh definitely. I’m not as narcissistic as I used to be about being a jazz musician. And also I think what is beginning to happen, bit by bit, there’s an evolution that is taking place in which jazz as we have known it and know it now is going to be a part of the mainstream American music landscape. Invariably, those skills, like the computer, are going to be more and more taken for granted. With some music-type jobs, people are going to be expected to have those kind of skills. Like with the computer, nowadays you are expected to be able to do something—if it’s just word processing. I was in a meeting and one of the attendees was saying that she just got a Palm Pilot and was saying how it is she was kind of embarrassed into getting it. Well, I don’t have a Palm Pilot but I do remember when about the third or fourth person asked me what is your fax number, something says, “Well, man, maybe you should buy a fax machine!” Invariably, the skill level of the musician functioning in the 21st-century is going to include jazz skills in ways that have not previously been expected.
As a professional in jazz for these many years, do you think that the future of jazz is in these jazz studies programs? Are they key to jazz’s survival?
I think that’s a part of the equation. Ultimately, the thing that’s key is going to be the employment opportunities because it doesn’t matter how well you play, whatever you play, unless there’s an opportunity for employment, eventually you’re looking at the law of diminishing returns.
Back to the concert, what kind of formatting have you foreseen?
Well, Harry, Jr., says he’s coming down with some players so he’ll have a unit that he’s going to be functioning with. There’s a possibility also that he and I will do some two-piano pieces. We used to do that when he was at NOCCA. I also did it some years later at Wolftrap with two pianos and we did some things with that. The rest of it is basically rhythm section with different combinations.
Will there be obvious homages to Louis Armstrong?
It’s a possibility. Obviously, there are a lot of things that Wynton knows how to play, relating to Louis Armstrong, including that very, very difficult “West End Blues.” That kills a lot of trumpet players! I don’t how much time we’re going to have, in terms of rehearsal so a lot of what we do will have to be like the curriculum that Charlie Blanc and I did over the telephone.
It’s gotta be fun anticipating having all the guys there.
Yeah, I think we’re going to have some fun—definitely.
Get the family together and play some music.
That’s right.
