World loses New Orleans musical patriarch Ellis Marsalis Jr. to coronavirus | National Catholic Reporter

World loses New Orleans musical patriarch Ellis Marsalis Jr. to coronavirus | National Catholic Reporter:

by Jason Berry

The news on April 1 that Ellis Marsalis Jr., 85, had died of COVID-19-related pneumonia opened a river of national tributes for New Orleans' premier jazz pianist, professor and the patriarch of a musical family with remarkable aesthetic reach. Government shutdown orders prohibited the pageantry of a jazz funeral, the second line of street dancers parading to brass band melodies. Churches were closed, parading banned. 

Orleans Parish, which includes the city, ranked in the top 10 U.S. counties for per capita deaths from the coronavirus. Along Rampart Street's grassy median opposite St. Jude shrine at Our Lady of Guadalupe church, people with rosary beads stood apart, murmuring prayers to the saint for hopeless cases. 

 Marsalis had begun teaching in the 1960s at Xavier University, the nation's only historically black Roman Catholic college, founded in 1925 by St. Katharine Drexel. Stirred by the city's gloom, Xavier President C. Reynold Verret, a chemist by training, wrote a poem, "Tolling the Bell," published here with permission: 

Last night, Ellis Marsalis went away,Piano keys tug at their locks and rend their robes,And each in their seclusion weeps so silently.No second line,No coming home of acolytes,The many musician daughters and sons,Emissaries of the old man to many places,To share the gift.None may returnTo ring the bell,To celebrate,To mourn.In the emptiness of St. Peter's SquareA lonely Pope stood before GodAnd called me from afar, 9That I too may join with him in prayer, Make my return, give thanksAs thanks we must.In solitude, we remember.In cells of marble ormade of simpler things,We weep.

 Ellis Marsalis carried the spiritual imagination of the city in his music. Pianists, however, have no role in burial parades — the work of marching brass bands. When Dolores, his wife and soulmate of more than 57 years died in 2017, Ellis stood outside Mater Dolorosa Catholic Church as his musician sons — Branford, Wynton, Delfeayo, Jason — raised their horns in tribute to their mother with a large brass band assemblage playing "I'll Fly Away." All six sons had grown up going to the church. As Ellis' life ended, the brothers faced the task of burial under emergency conditions.

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