Jazz Legend Wynton Marsalis Reflects on His Late Father

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Now we turn to a heartfelt conversation about grief and the healing power of music with our next guest. And he the great jazz musician Wynton Marsalis. He is in conversation with our Walter Isaacson. He opens up about losing his father, the New Orleans jazz patriarch Ellis Marsalis, who died aged 85 earlier this month after contracting coronavirus. Wynton Marsalis reflects on his father’s legacy and on how jazz can help us all right now.

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WALTER ISAACSON: Wynton Marsalis, welcome to the show.

WYNTON MARSALIS, MUSICIAN: Right. It’s great to be here, Walter. Great to see you.

ISAACSON: Hey, man, I’m sorry about your daddy.

MARSALIS: Oh, man, you know, thank you. You’re a New Orleanian, so you would know the position — the position that he occupied and who he was. So we all miss him. But he was very unfussy about stuff in life. And in death, he went out — he went out the way he was, so…

ISAACSON: You said he went out with a cool of a jazz man to me at one point. What do you mean by that?

MARSALIS: I mean, he wasn’t complaining and whining. He accepted it. But he had a lot of underlying conditions, too. My father was taking up to 18 medications a day before this. And I think, you know, he was struggling, but he never complained. So, you could never tell how he was doing. And even in the end, when they were increasing the oxygen, he was having more and more problems breathing, when the nurse would come in and say, are you OK, he would say, yes, I’m fine.

ISAACSON: And he was pretty accepting at the end.

MARSALIS: Very. He was always accepting. Even the end was — he made it to 85, so — but he could come to grips with life. He had a very holistic view. And we were joking just three — two days — two nights before he went into the hospital. I was joking with him about him perhaps having it. And he said, well, man — you know, I said, “I don’t think it’s your time for COVID.” He said, “I don’t determine the time.” So, he started joking, he said: “Anyway, because your loved one that dies doesn’t make it more or less significant than anybody else’s. A lot of people are suffering.” So, that was always his philosophy. And you know, I was laughing. I said, well, my friend — I was talking about a friend of mine. I said, well, my friend, who has both parents passed away, said his parents signed a do not resuscitate. And he said, you know, you always think you will do it, until you get to that moment. So — and this friend of mine is in his late 70s. So, he was talking about his parents, of course, who had passed on. He said, when you get to that moment, you are always thinking, well, maybe I should just resuscitate them, because you don’t want them to go. That wasn’t his vibe. He was like, well, don’t resuscitate me here. Do not resuscitate. Don’t get to that moment with me.

ISAACSON: Tell me about going to clubs with him when you were a little kid and you listened to him play gigs.

MARSALIS: You know, I was always with them. And they were struggling. It wasn’t glamorous places. It was people struggling. They never had a lot of people in the clubs, really. He had a good little period in the early ’70s at this club called Lu & Charlie’s. But in the early years, when I was like 3, 4, and 5, man, they were struggling, country clubs, older people, black and white, black and red tile on the ground, sparkly kind of tile with Sam and Dave on the jukebox, combination restaurant/bar, Old South, segregated.

ISAACSON: At one point, you watched him play a gig with only one or two people in the club.

MARSALIS: Right. That’s right.

ISAACSON: What did you…

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ISAACSON: … from that?

MARSALIS: Oh, man, I saw him play a gig. It was like 2:00 — the gig stopped at 2:30. So, one thing about that way of life is, you are always out late. So, my entire life, I was always out 1:30, 2:00, 12:30. So, this gig ended at 2:30, but he could lock the club up. — it was Lu & Charlie’s — at a later time. And there was one guy in the club was drunk sitting at a table. So, I went to the piano. I told my daddy, man, let’s go. It’s 2:00 in the morning. Nobody in here. Let’s go. And I pointed to the guy who was inebriated. He had had a little too much spiritual involvement. And I said, let’s go, man. He said, man, this gig ends at 2:30. I said, man, nobody’s in here. Look around. I pointed at the club. It was empty. And he looked at me and said, man, go sit your ass down and listen to some music, man, for a change. So, that was the first time I ever — I used the King’s Lake English, because that’s how he talked to me. So, I went and sat down. And that was like the first time of all the gigs I went on that I actually listened to the music, because even though I was always in the clubs, I never was really listening to what they were playing. I was always running around, listening to whatever older people talk. There was always people inebriated. Of the five or six people there, there was always some kind of interesting human thing going on. And then I sat down. I listened to him play. And I was just looking around the club thinking, what makes somebody play this good for nobody at 2:15 in the morning? And, you know, just for that 30 minutes, it is like — it made me understand something about what it means to have integrity. And I kid you not that, when I walk on stages around the world over all these years, many times, I walk out and I think about that night. I think about what I learned that night about just, you know, you do a thing because you do it. And the meaning of it is that it’s being done. And he taught me that, without — he even preached to me. But then I understood. You know?

ISAACSON: What else did he teach you besides music?

MARSALIS: The main thing I learned from my father is, in the 1970s, you know, you being from New Orleans, New Orleans being such a backwards, racist town. And my father was very conscious, like a jazz musician. But like a jazz musician, he also was not segregated. So, we grew up in Kenner, which was really segregated. So, you never saw white and black people together. But, because my father was a jazz musician, you saw him with white musicians. And he would be in a barbershop, black barbershop. Everybody, we got our Afros, black power, everybody talking about white folks, in the way that they would talk about them. And my father would never go along with the status quo conversation. And it used to make me mad. I would be like, why are you embarrassing me up here in the shop, taking this humanistic view, when nobody is about that? And he was nonplused, man. He just never — he didn’t go with the group. His thing was always attack people that’s in front of you. If you are going to say something disparaging, don’t waste it on them. The them is right there in front of you. And it’s not just something, some words. I saw him actually live by that credo to espouse what he believed. Some of what they were saying, he believed. Other parts of it, he didn’t. And when it got to that kind of extreme kind of xenophobic thing that groups of people love to fall into, because it gives them the illusion of power, he never went for that.

ISAACSON: He was a great teacher and, of course, for many years, taught at the University of New Orleans. I remember, about 20 years ago, when he retired as a teacher, you and all your brothers got together at the arena there and did a farewell concert to celebrate his life as a teacher. I think you actually did some Louis Armstrong, “Struttin With Some Barbecue.” Why don’t you tell me a little bit about that, but play a few bars of “Struttin With Some Barbecue”?

MARSALIS: Yes, me, my brothers, I, Harry Connick. Don’t forget, Harry was always in the house. Musicians always would come to my house. My father was always — we’re people — we’re like a family. And there’s musicians all over the country who eventually are like that. He would have the same pride in Harry Connick, in Terence Blanchard, in Donald Harrison. He had the same pride in them, Reginald Veal, as he had in my brothers or in me. It wasn’t a thing of, these are my kids. He wasn’t like the kind of family-type proprietary group person. He was a world kind of — I will play “Struttin With Some Barbecue.” That’s another one of pops’ songs you can easily mess up. That goes…

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MARSALIS: And then pops would go to play all kind of fantastic stuff on that, too.

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ISAACSON: You wrote on your Facebook page something beautiful about your father. It was: “My daddy was a humble man with a lyrical sound that captured the spirit of place, New Orleans, Crescent City, the Big Easy. Like many parents, he sacrificed for us and made so much possible, not only material things, but things of substance and beauty, like the ability to hear complicated music and to read books, to see and contemplate art, to be philosophical, and to be kind, but also understand that a time and place may require a pugilistic-minded expression of ignorance.”

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MARSALIS: Yes. Yes, he had all of that, man, you know? I’m about to get full just thinking about how — just how kind a man he was. My daddy was — he could talk you to death, but he was kind. Like, he was — he used to always tell me, man, leave people alone, man. It is hard enough out here. And, sometimes, he would say, you know, you got to be able to put your foot in some behind. And he wasn’t — I was much more aggressive than him even growing up. But I — mainly, I would make my daddy laugh, because he was really a kind of sweet, very philosophical guy. Probably had a hard time growing up in his neighborhood, whereas, with me, I never had a hard time. It was like, OK, if we’re going do get to that, you’re not going do see me after school. See me now. I’m not going to wait. And then you are seeing me. Yes, he was — he had a lot of depth as a person. He was very kind toward people of all kinds, very advanced in his thinking. He had a very loving spirit. So many things, the first time I ever heard of them was from him, like the South African struggle, the — what musicians were playing in Cuba, the importance of intellectual development, non-racism of any kind. We have a lot to overcome if we want to, but it’s such a weakness that, if we could — if we could address it, we would be so much more progressive a nation. And we could get so much further than we are. Let me just say one thing. And I know I’m going on. If we ever could ever stop confusing business and — with civics. Civics is investment. I want your kids to be educated. I don’t want your old people to die because they can’t afford a $200,000 pill. That is ethics. We don’t — it’s not a business for us to exploit. Business has its own space. But for some reason, we don’t believe in civics. It’s not a civics. Business is not civics. And civics is the investment branch of our way of life. And we have to get business out of civics. We need an educated populace. We need people to not have to die because they don’t have insurance. I mean, it is just common sense. It’s not — it is crazy, man.

ISAACSON: A few days ago, you did a virtual gala for Jazz at Lincoln Center, which you help run.

MARSALIS: Yes.

ISAACSON: And it was amazing. You did Charlie Parker’s “Yardbird Suite” from around the world.

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ISAACSON: Tell me how you pulled that together.

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MARSALIS: Well, I was talking to Victor Goines three weeks ago. And we went to kindergarten together in New Orleans at Martinez. And we still work together and he runs the jazz studies program at Northwestern. And he said, man, we ought to do the type of things that I’m doing with my students, ought to do that as a band. So, we have also an engineer named Todd Whitelock. And we came up with a way to record songs we could play in time. I had a meeting with the band on the phone. And we talked through the arrangement right here. Ryan plays lead right here. Sherman has lead. This is called in response to — and it is easy, because everybody in the band arranges. So, when it’s — the band is so capable, it’s hard to really even explain what it’s like to have a band with 13 arrangers in the band. So, in two days, we did the track. We set the rhythm track in. Then the horns play. Then the drums redid the track, so drums the foundation. Then, after you can hear how we play the arrangement with dynamics, you do it. And when I first heard it, it’s funny, because Todd, the engineer, and I are always arguing for years, 20-year argument about, I hate booths and headphones and isolation for musicians. I always say, give the musicians the authority. And Todd always says, you got to give the engineer more control. I said, we don’t need the engineers. Capture the sound in the room. So this was all on our cell phones. And when we got finished, Camille Thurman did her vocal part, and Veronica Swift did her vocal part. Then I — when he sent it to me, I said, damn, this sounds good, man, on cell phones. He said, you see what happens when you give the engineer control?

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ISAACSON: You’re grieving the loss of your father, as so many people around the country, around the world are grieving loss of their family members. How can music help us, help you, help all of us get through this type of mourning?

MARSALIS: Well, the music is a — it’s like, in New Orleans, we do the music. You — the music is inside. It’s invisible. So it touches all the things, like memory and — in New Orleans, we play a New Orleans funeral. I think, the deeper the music you listen to, the deeper you can get inside of your emotions. So, you want to try to go toward musicians who have a certain depth of playing. That’s why you got your Louis Armstrong and the kind of timeless masters, Beethoven, masters of that tradition, and people who sing, Umm Kulthum, or those kind of singers who could touch people really deep down and could sit inside of an emotion, Mahalia Jackson. And it doesn’t matter the age, even somebody like Patsy Cline, the way Patsy could — you want to be able to sit in your emotion and experience the grief and feel it. And then you want to be able to celebrate and come up out of it and have a good time.

ISAACSON: Has it been hard for you to mourn without having people around?

MARSALIS: No. For me, you know, not — you know, not really. I mean, I loved my daddy so much and it’s so deep inside of me, the love I had for him. And he wasn’t a really emotional man. Like, he wasn’t hugging on you and all of that. He’s very — but I just — I always expressed the love and respect and veneration for him. And I also — I always teased him and played with him, because he wasn’t a big teaser and a joker. So, you know, he would lead me to tease him and play with him. And even in that conversation, the last real lucid conversation I had, I was messing with him about I could play better than him or, you know — so, I want to pick up the phone and mess with him, because, mainly, at this stage, I was mainly picking up the phone, and, man, did you see so and so? You better get on your instrument. You been practicing your piano? I more dealt with him like that. Don’t sound like you have been practicing, because he was kind of shaking. He had Parkinson’s, you know? So, with his hands shaking, it was hard to even get his — to get his food up. So I would — instead of being — I would be like, man, they told me you were shaking so much you couldn’t get your spoon to your mouth. I know I can play piano better than you now. Then I would go play something — something on the piano, try to play something fast and miss all the notes. And he would be like, you out your mind, man. So, it was that — me and him had more that kind of relationship.

ISAACSON: One of the ways we deal with it in New Orleans is to march somebody out, to play them out…

MARSALIS: Yes.

ISAACSON: … the second line. You haven’t been able to do that for Ellis Marsalis.

MARSALIS: Correct.

ISAACSON: I hope, someday, you will be able to do a second line for him, just like you did for your mother, I remember.

MARSALIS: Yes, sir.

ISAACSON: So, maybe we could end with you playing “A Closer Walk With Thee,” which is what you will play for your daddy someday.

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ISAACSON: Thank you very much, Wynton, and stay healthy.

MARSALIS: You’re very welcome. Thank you, man. Great talking to you.