Thursday, April 2, 2020

John Malveaux: NYTimes.com: Ellis Marsalis Jr., Jazz Pianist and Music Family Patriarch, Dies at 85


E
Credit...Chad Batka for The New York 
Times

John Malveaux brings this article to our attention:
The New York Times
The father of Wynton and Branford Marsalis and a 
prominent performer and educator, he 
succumbed to complications of the coronavirus.

This obituary is part of a series about people who 
have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about 
others here.

Ellis Marsalis, a pianist and educator who became the 
guiding force behind a late-20th-century resurgence 
in jazz while putting four musician sons on a path to 
prominent careers, died on Wednesday in New Orleans. 
He was 85.

The cause was complications of Covid-19, the 
disease caused by the coronavirus, his son Branford said 
in a statement.

Mr. Marsalis spent decades as a working musician and 
teacher in New Orleans before his eldest sons, Wynton 
and Branford, gained national fame in the early 
1980s embodying a fresh-faced revival of traditional 
jazz.

Mr. Marsalis’s star rose along with theirs, and he, 
too, became a household name.

“Ellis Marsalis was a legend,” Mayor LaToya Cantrell 
of New Orleans wrote on Twitter on Wednesday 
night. “He was the prototype of what we mean when 
we talk about New Orleans jazz.”

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