The incoming class of Tulane University was once again welcomed with jazz music as Jason Marsalis — son of the late jazz musician Ellis Marsalis — fronted the Jason Marsalis Jazz Concert on Sept. 23 at Dixon Annex Recital Hall.
“This is what I call a freshman welcome concert,” Marsalis said.
For two decades, New Orleans jazz pianist Ellis Marsalis performed at Tulane for the incoming class of first-year students. This was the first concert by a member of the Marsalis family at Tulane since Ellis Marsalis’s passing from COVID-19 in 2020.
“He was all about passing the music onto younger musicians and younger students,” Jason Marsalis said. “There’s a good chance they [first-year students] have never heard it because that’s not a popular culture, so it’s good to play the music for young people. There’s a stereotype that it’s music for old people. It’s not. It’s for anybody.”
At the event, Jason Marsalis and his bandmates performed eight pieces composed by Ellis Marsalis. The songs were played in chronological order, beginning with a piece titled “Swing It” composed in the 1950s and ending with “Three in One” composed in the 1980s under Ellis Marsalis’s own jazz label Elm Records. Some of the songs were composed for students he taught, while one, “Spring, Summer, and Autumn,” was never released.
In the future, Jason Marsalis plans to record his father’s music — much of which is only written — with his bandmates from the concert.
“A lot of these tunes he didn’t play. I’m enjoying them because it’s like what I call new-old music. It’s old because it was written 30, 40, or 50 years ago but it’s new because they haven’t been played till now,” Jason Marsalis said. “When you have melodies that are memorable they can stand the test of time.”
Jason Marsalis was accompanied by Ashlin Parker on the trumpet, Derek Douget on the saxophone, Oscar Rossignoli on the piano and Jason Stewart on the bass, all of whom knew Ellis Marsalis personally.
“He would often reference the phrase, ‘you can bring a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink,’” Stewart said. “When I was very young, I’d be on the bandstand with him and I wouldn’t know what he was going to play. He would just start playing and it was on me to figure it out in the moment on the stage in front of people.”
Following the concert, Jason Marsalis and his bandmates led a question-and-answer session for audience members, highlighting the legacy and impact of Ellis Marsalis as a teacher and institution in New Orleans jazz.
“Out of the hundreds and thousands of piano students he put out there, none of them sound like him. He wasn’t teaching them to sound like him,” Parker said. “ [Ellis Marsalis] said ‘I don’t teach jazz, I teach students.’”
Jason Marsalis looks to continue his father’s legacy of welcoming Tulane first-years with music. “It’s a pleasure to do this again and we want to keep doing this every year.”