Courtesy of Ellis Marsalis







Columbia Records

A FIRESIDE CHAT WITH ELLIS MARSALIS


As the father of four established musicians, Branford, Wynton, Delfeayo, and Jason, Ellis Marsalis must sleep like a baby at night. Such astounding musical wealth from one family is still quite difficult for my pea brain to comprehend, but I am just a simpleton. I spoke will the elder Marsalis from his home in New Orleans about his musical life, his children, and the future as he sees it. It is a candid conversation, unedited and in his own words.


FRED JUNG: Let's start from the beginning.

ELLIS MARSALIS: When I was about eleven, my mother bought me a clarinet. I played the clarinet through most of high school and eventually, I got a tenor saxophone, which was around '48, '49, something like that. I started trying to learn these rhythm and blues solos and was pretty successful at doing that. By the time, just before I got out of high school, we, a group of us formed this band that used to play for school dances and I was playing tenor saxophone. When I got out of high school, I went to a local university as a music major. I was still, to some extent, playing clarinet. However, this university was not a really strong music school. When I say strong, what I mean is there was no orchestra there. So essentially, I wasn't too keen on playing traditional jazz, so the clarinet sort of fell into disfavor. I had studied some piano and more and more people would call me when all the good piano players who were in town were working, they would call me to come and play on different kinds of jobs, mostly like rhythm and blues jobs. Eventually, I started saying, "Hum, there is some work to be had here." And so I started to concentrate a lot more seriously on piano. By the time I got out of college, I was bitten by the jazz bug, which wasn't a good thing for making money. I started working at trying to become a better jazz player and I have been doing that ever since.


FJ: What was your first paying gig?

ELLIS MARSALIS: Oh, yeah (laughing). I can remember, the first paying gig was in high school and it wasn't even supposed to be a paying gig. A group of us in high school, the piano player in the group, his music teacher had a party for her students at the end of the year and asked if he could get a band. So he said, "Yeah, I'll bring my band." So we went to the YWCA in New Orleans and he had told us that we were going to play and that it was not a paying gig. We were just starting out anyways, so we said, "Yeah, OK." So we went and we played and they really liked us, so what they did was they passed a hat and we made a dollar and a half a piece (laughing). That was the first time I remember actually getting paid for a job. Not long after that, we thought about it, "Man these people were willing to pass the hat for us, maybe we can make some money." So we started playing school dances after that. We went to at least five dollars a piece. It went pretty much from there.

FJ: As an educator, a piano player, and a composer, is there one aspect that strikes a chord above another?

ELLIS MARSALIS: It's really hard to say, Fred. I don't foresee the day when I won't be a teacher. I can foresee the day when I may not be employed by an academic institution, but I think that I will always, in some form or fashion, be a teacher. As far as playing is concerned, I enjoy playing, period. I just enjoy playing. I don't work at it now, probably as much as I should. My composition is another thing. I have mixed feelings about that. I write some tunes every now and then, but I don't necessarily consider that composition. I don't know if I will really sustain an interest and go more into composition once I retire from the University (University of New Orleans). I don't know.


FJ: As an educator, you have been a teacher to some of the music's celebrities, Terence Blanchard, Nicholas Payton, and Harry Connick, Jr., is there one student that stands out in your mind?

ELLIS MARSALIS: The one student that comes to mind and I don't know if it would be correct to say that there was some humongous obstacle that he had to overcome, but he did put some concepts of playing the instrument together in the shortest period of time that I've ever known anybody to do and that's Reginald Veal, the bass player. When I met Reginald, Reginald was in junior high and I didn't actually get to interact with him as a teacher until he was I think either a senior or a junior in high school. He was an electric bass player and he used to play with his father's gospel group and they would tour around. When he took the audition at the high school that I was teaching at, and he got in, it was obvious that he was talented, there was no doubt about that, but he didn't have any experience with jazz. So I started working with him when he graduated and eventually over the summer in Baton Rouge, and I was able to convince him to get an acoustic bass and we started working with that. Somewhere around 1984, I got a job at a club here and I needed a bass player because the bass player, who was also another former student, was working and couldn't make it. So I asked Reginald, who was at Southern University at the time, if he could come in on Saturdays and make this job. Well, he hadn't really been playing acoustic bass that much. In fact, I don't even know if he owned one. But he agreed to come in and I said, "Look, we'll play whatever is comfortable to your technical abilities, rather than try to force anything." I hooked him up with the associate principal with the New York Philharmonic for lessons. He was an extremely diligent student. He practiced consistently all the time and in two years, he had put it together. We went on an Asian tour in '86 in June, I think, May or June and when we came back from that tour, I had accepted a job in Virginia, at the Virginia Commonwealth University and Reginald packed his stuff and joined Terence Blanchard's band and that was it. He hasn't looked back since. I had never seen or heard of anybody who had put the concept of that instrument together as rapidly as he did it. That is not an easy instrument to play, not that any of them really are, but to really be a rhythm section player, because that's like the mule team of a band. As a bass player, you have really got to have a lot put together to go after two years and jump on the professional scene with somebody, especially like Terence. He stayed for a long time with Wynton's band.


FJ: As the patriarch to the music's most prominent dynasty, you must beam with pride at the success of your sons, Branford, Wynton, Delfeayo, and Jason.

ELLIS MARSALIS: They were also students at the high school that I taught at, so I was able to see them from both sides as parent and also as teacher and I always felt that what they did, essentially, was what they were formally trained to do. I've seen a lot of students who had tremendous talent, but they didn't work or if they did work, they allowed other things to interfere with what would be needed to elevate themselves on a much higher plain than just a local musician with some talent. So when I think about them, I think about the fact that they're basically doing what they were trained to do. I don't really think that talent is any kind of mystic. It's definitely a gift. Some people say it's a gift from God, depending on what religion you profess. I don't have any reason to doubt that, but when it comes right down to it, I've seen too many kids with too much talent that never went anywhere. So I'm more inclined to think that the thing that they did was ninety percent work. As far as me being proud of them, well, yeah, but I'm just as proud of my sons who don't play music at all.


FJ: Have you been approached by some clever A&R person to do a quintet recording with Wynton, Branford, Delfeayo, and Jason?

ELLIS MARSALIS: We always get stuff like, "When are you all going to do a family album?" We get that so much that I've lost count. I've never wanted that. I'm now looking back in retrospect, that might not have been correct. Maybe it would have been a good idea if we would have had that. I never really wanted that. I never did feel comfortable with the idea of a family band. I always felt that if it was a family band, essentially, it would be my band and that would have a tendency to stifle the growth of the younger people. My youngest son played with me for five years. We quit the trio last October to go do some other things and to me, that's what it's all about. I think the problems come, when families have bands is that the economic substance of family becomes tied to that and when somebody wants to depart to go do their own thing, it causes a lot of problems. I never really had economic notions about a family band.


FJ: Louis Armstrong once pointed out that, "Musicians don't retire, they stop when there's no more music in them." Do you believe that there is a point in a musician's life when there will simply be no more music in them?

ELLIS MARSALIS: Well, most of that, I don't think that has to do with whether there is music left, I think it was Duke that said, "You're just playing the same song all through the years, but he just did it in different ways." I think what happens is that we lose a certain amount of interest, which causes us to de-emphasize what we've become known for doing. In some areas, it has been very difficult to grow beyond a certain level. Among some of the greater composers that came out of Europe, there wasn't but one of them who was kicking butt until he died and that was Beethoven. The rest of them, except the ones who died real young, like Mozart was thirty-six, and you get a jazz musician like Charlie Parker who was thirty-five when he died. I don't doubt that as young as Coltrane was, I don't know that Coltrane had much more that he was going to say in the form that he was functioning in. Yusef Lateef is writing for orchestras now. Wynton is working on a piece for the New York Phil right now. I had told him years ago, I said, "Man, at some point, the only place for you to go is composition." There is not an endless cycle of growth that takes place with any of that. There's people who are writers. How many books do people really have? You look at a William Shakespeare and that's why a lot of people don't believe that it was one person. For the most part, we either lose interest, which in another way, it could be considered as running out because there is definitely a way, in composition it's called repeating yourself or imitating yourself. I think there's a certain way you have to live which would permit someone who grows into old age to continue their growth cycle. I don't think it's impossible because Beethoven lived to be sixty or sixty-five and was growing all the time. That to me is amazing. It really is amazing to listen to that music and hear the growth in the middle to the late string quartets, from the first to the ninth symphony too. Man, none of the rest of them were like that. Haydn wasn't like that. He had a hundred and six, but you can pick three of them and there it is.


FJ: You alluded to Wynton writing for a symphony, he has released an enormous volume of material this year by anyone's standards and in doing so has met with great criticism that he maybe putting too much at one given time, and thus diluting his musical output for the future.

ELLIS MARSALIS: Actually, Fred, I think that is stupid. What does putting these recordings out have to do with his ability? I don't even understand that. When people write things like that, it doesn't sound to me like an intelligent statement, written by anybody who understands any kind of music. When you are in this kind of business, the business part of it, let's put it that way, the only thing that you really have is a way to put out material that has to do with whatever you are about musically, I mean, Jimi Hendrix did that. Jimi Hendrix had so much music they are still putting out stuff that they find. Miles put out a ton of stuff. That's the record company's thing. The record company wants you to put out one record and sell it until they can't sell it no more, which is about a year and then go out and tour and do all this stuff and then come back and do another record the next year. That has nothing to do with anybody's talent or ability. That's somebody else's business approach. I don't know what kind of music writer they are.


FJ: You mentioned Beethoven's body of work. Many Europeans and some artists in the States feel as though jazz, in all its forms, is America's classical music. Is it?

ELLIS MARSALIS: No, I don't like the term. I never did. The mere fact of referring to jazz as anybody's classical music is essentially borrowing a term which describes another culture's excellence and sticking it on this culture's excellence without doing whatever the homework is to develop the vocabulary to adequately describe what actually takes place with an Ellington. You see, Fred, Duke Ellington made a community and he wrote music for that community, that community of musicians. He exploited, and when I say exploited, I'm not talking negative, he explored and exploited the abilities of everybody in that band. They were different people at different times, but that band had a nucleus of people and he wrote for that band. Beethoven wrote for Beethoven and everything that he wrote was the sentences of one man. In fact, he even made a statement when he sent a violin concerto to a guy and the guy said to him, "This is unplayable." And Beethoven said, "I hope you don't think I was considering your meager talents when I wrote this music." He wrote music for a keyboard, which was not even in existence at the time. This is the sentences of one man. He wasn't dependent upon the musicians around him to give him any inspiration that was really needed to be the composer that he was to become. If he would have, that would have been sad because they were so far beneath him, it wasn't even funny. Ellington's whole process, Duke was an artist. He was a visual artist and I think that what he did is similar to what sculpture does. His pieces came out of, he almost sculpted these pieces. They came out of what he heard the musicians play and formulated pieces and developed a whole sonic language out of that. When you really listen to Duke's band over an extended period of time, what Duke did with the riff was something that none of the other musicians did. Charlie Parker did a tremendous amount with the riff and so did Dizzy. They wrote themes off of that, but harmonically, most of them were just standards. Compositionally, the harmony was simple, very basic.


FJ: Let's talk about your latest release, Duke in Blue and Ellington's influence upon you.

ELLIS MARSALIS: Duke Ellington's music really didn't have a big impact on me. I used to go and hear Duke back in the fifties, middle fifties, because Duke used to do these Southern tours and he would come through New Orleans. We used to Booker Washington Auditorium, which was the only place that black people could go anyway to hear musicians that came into town. I didn't really know who Duke Ellington was. I had a cursory awareness of Duke Ellington. I wasn't that much of a musician. I was still learning, but I knew that the band was still swinging. Eventually, I did play some of Duke's pieces, which melodically was very challenging, songs like "Sophisticated Lady," which is very challenging. "Prelude to a Kiss," which was melodically and when I say melodically, I mean singable. We grew up as a whole people hearing music that was singable like "Jingle Bells" or "God Bless America," which were structured in a way that they are singable by just the average person. You don't need to be a vocal specialist to sing them. And Duke's music had that quality in terms of the melody, the way that his melody was constructed. One of the reasons why I think people didn't like Monk was because Monk's musical logic took on different proportions than a lot of other people. Monk was very much influenced by Duke Ellington. My primary influence, instrumentally was Oscar Peterson, musically, it was probably Bird, Charlie Parker. This record was recorded at the University of New Orleans. I was kind of surprised. I don't usually like what I do after I finish it. I listen to it and put it on the side somewhere and don't listen to it. I was a little surprised. It sounded better than I thought it would. By the time I had heard it, I had been away from it for so long, I could bring an objective ear to it. In fact, I just got a shipment from the record company last week. I had to call them up and say, "Man, the record is out. I went to Canada and somebody had it and I haven't gotten one yet." I was pleasantly surprised because usually you hear something and you say, "I wish I could have done this one again."


FJ: Do you see a prosperous future for the music in the next century?

ELLIS MARSALIS: You see, Fred, the thing that kept the music from spreading, essentially, was the racism in America. When I was growing up, the bass player that I am working with right now, he is about a year, maybe two years younger than me, and when we first met, we couldn't even play on the bandstand together. We couldn't even sit down and hold a conversation anywhere. So if there had not been all this racial segregation, who knows where the music would really be now. I don't know. This music is created in a very democratic environment. That is to say, everybody who is a part of a group, is a contributing element to the total success of the end product, unlike a symphony orchestra, where the total success there is a sound. The music has already been written by somebody many years ago and it doesn't matter which orchestra you hear play it, the notes will never change. But the sound will change depending upon the individuals in that particular orchestra. But with a jazz band, you can find fifty different bands playing fifty different ways. I think invariably, I think it just depends on what kind of composers come out of the mix. Jazz musicians are like conversationalists. Once you finish a composition, it's up in the air. I was thinking about this piece, "The Christmas Song." There was an interview with the composer, who passed away not too long ago.


FJ: Mel Torme.

ELLIS MARSALIS: Right, Mel Torme. It was like in the middle of July on a hot day and it took them fifteen minutes. The extent to which the improvisatory element remains will largely depend on this country. There are things about this country that seem to be going away from that, from that improvisatory element. I don't think anybody looks at it like that. During the second World War, one of the things that enabled us to defeat the Germans is they couldn't improvise. A good percentage of the leadership was dead at the officer rank and so when the German senior officers were killed, they surrendered. Them cats were surrendering to news reporters and photographers. They couldn't improvise. They didn't know what to do. Invariably, if people don't have a lot of respect for improvisation, that's another reason why the powers that be were against jazz. They wanted somebody to write it all down and organize it and print it all out. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but when it comes down to it, this country is about improvisation, some positive, some negative. I would imagine, Fred, that if there is ever going to be an American music, jazz would be the cornerstone.


Fred Jung is Editor-In-Chief and can't believe jazz is failing when there are about two billion summer festivals. Comments? Email him.