The pianist, educator, and patriarch of the Marsalis family had be hospitalized for symptoms consistent with the Coronavirus.

"He went out the way he lived: embracing reality.”

On Tuesday, Wynton Marsalis Tweeted that response to the death of his father Ellis Marsalis. He had been hospitalized for COVID-19 symptoms and tested, but the results had not come in as of this writing.

Marsalis occupied a distinctive space in New Orleans’ musical culture as a musician best known for his contributions off the stage. As a father, teacher, mentor and thinker, he helped shape the last 40 years of music in New Orleans. It’s hard to imagine how much music exists because of Marsalis, whether directly or indirectly.

He was an elegant, impeccably tasteful pianist who maintained an active dialogue with the history of jazz, asserting himself with respect for the musicians who went before him, considering their music and the ideas embedded in it. He had clear, definite thoughts about the centrality of melody, harmony and rhythm in jazz, but he intellectually and artistically open enough to admit when he had been wrong. When I interviewed him in 2008, I observed that he had likely heard pianists who considered themselves traditional get it wrong. He answered, “I was one of them,” and remembered the band cracking up when he played a stride solo while playing a traditional jazz gig on Bourbon Street in the 1970s. 

“I started to do some research,” Marsalis said. “I went and really listened to Jelly Roll and Willie ‘the Lion’ Smith. I realized these guys have ideas peculiar to this style of music. If you’re going to play this, you’ve got to be involved with those ideas—the rhythm of the ideas, the melody, and all of that. I started working on that. The next time I played a stride solo, I didn’t get the same response, and I realized I was on the right track.

“Right around the corner from Crazy Shirley’s was Preservation Hall, and Willie Humphrey and Percy and them would come by on the way to work. Some of those old guys came in one night while I was playing one of those solos, and the guy looks and goes, Mmmm hmmm, okay, and I knew just from that gesture that I was on the right track.”

Marsalis was part of many New Orleans music stories including the car trip with Ed Blackwell and Harold Battiste to Los Angeles that resulted in Battiste helping Mac Rebennack launch Dr. John. They met Sam Cooke when he was launching the black-owned SAR Records, and returned to New Orleans to start the similarly black-owned and operated AFO label. On it, Marsalis recorded as the pianist with the Original American Jazz Quintet with Blackwell, Battiste, Alvin Batiste, and William Swanson; and with the Ellis Marsalis Quartet, which included drummer James Black and tenor saxophonist Nat Perrilliat.  Marsalis and those musicians were part of the relatively small community of jazz musicians who embraced be-bop era modern jazz in a city where the money and action was in continuations of New Orleans' birth of jazz roots.

After his death, Mayor Latoya Cantrell Tweeted, “Ellis Marsalis was a legend. He was the prototype of what we mean when we talk about New Orleans jazz. The love and the prayers of all of our people go out to his family, and to all of those whose lives he touched.” That includes a lot of lives, and one heartbreaking coda to Marsalis’ story is that because of social and physical distancing, the kind of public New Orleans funeral celebration that Marsalis deserves won’t be possible. I’m sure his passing will be respectfully remembered, and hopefully a more collective civic recognition can take place this summer. 

Tuesday was a devastating day for the music community as Adam Schlesinger of Fountains of Wayne died from COVID-19 as well. In the last 10 days, we’ve also lost Afro-Jazz icon Manu Dibango, country singer Joe Diffie, trumpeter Wallace Roney, songwriter Alan Merrill (“I Love Rock and Roll”), and New Orleans’ DJ Blaq N Mild, not to be confused with the BlaqNMild who produced bounce tracks for Big Freedia among others. Last weekend, the music world was bracing for John Prine’s death after his wife Tweeted that he was in critical condition, but as of two days ago, he was reported to be in stable condition on a respirator. 

Those deaths remind us that the Coronavirus doesn’t select the weak or the reckless, and although statistics say that older populations are more likely to die from it, Schlesinger was 52 and Blaq N Mild was 44.