Ellis Marsalis on Wednesday 

at Snug Harbor with Jason on Drums

By Lee Meitzen Grue

Natalie hangs with the young jazzmen,

knows somebody on the door.

We go upstairs, nod our small acquaintance at Ellis

where he sits on a stool, casual in conversation

with students and friends.

At eleven he goes back downstairs

and sits down at the piano.

Talks into a side mike, introducing

Dewey Sampson on bass, and Jason Marsalis on drums.

Jason looks like a kid whose orthodontist

has stretched rubber bands from his back molars

to the heels of his shoes,

and when he starts the drums sound just as tight.

This is the kid who'd been loose last year.

Ellis the big Daddy

is really loose, but only in the fingers

and it is moving to hear Jason,

who should be bowed down by tradition

and the live up to your brothers that everyone expects.

Jason just sits there and works -- works hard.

Works through adolescence

at a trade, a family trade.

He picks up on a saxophonist and a vocalist

from Duluth or Washington or Albuquerque,

they run down from upstairs to take their places on stage

with Ellis, the bassist, and Jason.

At some point a drummer named Cheoff comes on

and Nicholas Payton on trumpet plants himself in the middle

of the stage like a brick house and turns it up,

and the drummer who took over so smoothly in mid set

from Jason is loose

but sharp this Wednesday,

can't help thinking about Wynton, how they used to say

his trumpet had no soul, just technique, and the tone

of Wynton's trumpet now,

how what he gives is sometimes fatherhood or hungry children.

There's promise in the stiff clothes of adolescence,

Ellis holding it all together

in those effortless runs

that never seems memorized

and he plays my favorite song

"Lush Life" and I get back

into the music

and away from thinking about

the high school student

learning his in a bar at midnight.

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"Ellis Marsalis on Wednesday . . . " appeared in the Warren Wilson Review.