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Marsalis' roots, like those of jazz, go back to the steamy, sensual city of his birth. Scholars bicker over exactly where and when jazz was born, but there is no doubt that its first identifiable players -- like the legendary trumpeter Buddy Bolden -- appeared in the dance halls, honky-tonks and bordellos of New Orleans around the turn of the century. In the hands of such men as King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton and Sidney Bechet, the story goes, the music thrived until the closing of the red-light district in 1917 sent many of the Crescent City's best players up the Mississippi in search of work. There they gave birth to the brash, vibrant Chicago sound, which helped lay the groundwork for what would eventually become the swing style that reigned during the Big Band era.
The great divide in American jazz took place after World War II, with the emergence of the bebop movement, spearheaded by Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie ("Bird") Parker. By the '60s, bebop had largely given way to experimental avant-garde styles. When fusion took over in the '70s -- although some musicians were still playing earlier styles -- many jazz fans began to bemoan the death of a great American tradition.
Back in New Orleans, however, the purer jazz forms had refused to die. During the '60s, some of Louis Armstrong's aging contemporaries launched a "revival" of the old style, centered mainly around Preservation Hall, a former French Quarter art gallery where the musicians initially played for tips. At about the same time, a group of younger, more modern musicians came of age. Among them was a gifted pianist and teacher named Ellis Marsalis.
In 1974 he helped found a jazz program for the fledgling New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts, a part-time public high school for students pursuing artistic careers. During his 12 years there, the elder Marsalis turned NOCCA into a fertile breeding ground for future jazz stars. Like a Renaissance master turning out a whole school of fine painters, he trained a virtual Who's Who of the younger generation: Harry Connick Jr., Terence Blanchard, Marlon Jordan, trumpeter Nicholas Payton, saxman Donald Harrison and flutist Kent Jordan, to name a few. But the most remarkable crop of Marsalis pupils was his own sons: Branford, Wynton, trombonist Delfeayo, 25, and drummer Jason, 13. (Another son, Ellis III, 26, is a computer consultant in Baltimore; Mboya, 20, is autistic and lives at home with his parents.)
Sitting in an armchair in the green-carpeted living room of his modest wood- frame house, Ellis, 55, sees nothing unusual about the way he brought up his boys. He never urged them to become musicians, he says, but made sure they were exposed to music and got top-level training once they showed an interest. "It wasn't any messianic thing. They had lots of teachers."
The one who really pushed the boys to succeed was their mother Dolores, 53, a handsome, strong-willed woman whose strict Roman Catholic education gave her a sense of order that she tried to impart to her children. "It was very important for me," she says, "that they would have some aesthetic thing that they could express themselves through."