Artist: Ellis Marsalis, Jr.

Ellis Louis Marsalis Jr. was an American jazz pianist and educator.

Active since the late 1940s, Marsalis came to greater attention in the 1980s and 1990s as the patriarch of the musical Marsalis family, when sons Branford and Wynton became popular jazz musicians.

Marsalis played tenor saxophone and piano during high school, and performed locally with a rhythm and blues band that included pianist Roger Dickerson. After high school, Marsalis served a year in the Marine Corps where he performed on piano for the majority of his duty. He subsequently attended Dillard University, where he graduated in 1955 with a degree in music education. He later attended graduate school at Loyola University New Orleans.

In the 1950s and 1960s he worked with Ed Blackwell, Cannonball Adderley, Nat Adderley, and Al Hirt. During the 1970s, he taught at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. His students have included Terence Blanchard, Harry Connick Jr., Donald Harrison, Kent Jordan, Marlon Jordan, and Nicholas Payton.

Marsalis recorded nearly twenty of his own albums and was featured on many discs with such musicians as David "Fathead" Newman, Eddie Harris, Marcus Roberts, and Courtney Pine.

As a teacher, he encouraged his students to learn from history while also making discoveries in music on their own. "We don't teach jazz, we teach students," he once said about his ability to teach jazz improvisation.

As a leading educator at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, the University of New Orleans, and Xavier University of Louisiana, Marsalis influenced the careers of countless musicians, as well as his four musician sons.

Marsalis was inducted into the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame in 2018. The Ellis Marsalis Center for Music at Musicians' Village in New Orleans is named in his honor.