The Marsalis Family and the Treme Music Dynasty
Louisiana
Ellis Marsalis Jr. taught piano in New Orleans for decades. He taught at the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts, where his students included Harry Connick Jr. and Terence Blanchard. He taught at the University of New Orleans. He played in the clubs. And he raised six sons in a house in New Orleans, four of whom, Wynton, Branford, Delfeayo, and Jason, became recognized jazz musicians.
That is the fact-sheet version. The Treme version is more complicated and more interesting.
The Marsalis family is the most famous example of a tradition the Treme neighborhood has sustained for more than a century: the transmission of musical knowledge through families, through Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs, through second-line brass bands that follow the funeral processions of musicians with the same instruments those musicians played. Jazz in New Orleans is not primarily a conservatory tradition. It is a neighborhood tradition, passed through proximity and relationship, from older musicians to younger ones, in a chain that connects the brass bands of the late nineteenth century to the musicians playing on Frenchmen Street tonight.
Ellis Marsalis was a link in that chain, and he was also aware of being a link in that chain. He made educational choices, institutional choices, that were about more than his own sons. When Hurricane Katrina dispersed the New Orleans musical community in two thousand five, Wynton Marsalis became one of the most prominent voices insisting that the city's cultural infrastructure be rebuilt. Not as a museum piece, but as a living system.
Ellis Marsalis died in April of two thousand twenty, at eighty-five, of pneumonia related to the coronavirus. His death was widely noted as the passing of a figure whose contribution to American music could not be measured by recording credits alone. The Preservation Hall Foundation and the Hogan Jazz Archive both hold documentation of the Marsalis family's place in the Treme music lineage, which did not begin with Ellis and has not ended with his sons.
