NEW ORLEANS - Ellis Marsalis Jr., the jazz pianist, professor and patriarch of a New Orleans musical clan, died late Wednesday, April 1, 2020, from pneumonia brought on by coronavirus, leaving six sons and a deep legacy. He was 85.

“My dad was a giant of a musician and teacher, but an even greater father. He poured everything he had into making us the best of what we could be,” said Branford Marsalis.

Four of the jazz patriarch’s six sons are musicians: Wynton, a Pulitzer- and Grammy- winning trumpeter, is America’s most prominent jazz spokesman as artistic director of jazz at New York’s Lincoln Center. Branford, a saxophonist, has won three Grammys, led “The Tonight Show” band and toured with Sting. Delfeayo, a trombonist, is a prominent recording producer and performer. And Jason, a percussionist, has made a name for himself with his own band and as an accompanist. Ellis III, who decided music wasn’t his gig, is a photographer-poet in Baltimore. Their brother, Mboya, has autism.

Mr. Marsalis’ wife, Dolores, died in 2017.

“Pneumonia was the actual thing that caused his demise. But it was pneumonia brought on by COVID-19,” Ellis Marsalis III told the Associated Press.

He said he drove March 29 from Baltimore to be with his father, who was hospitalized on March 28 in Louisiana, which has been hit hard by the virus’ outbreak. Others in the family spent time with him, too.

“He went out the way he lived: embracing reality,” Wynton tweeted, alongside pictures of his father.

Branford’s statement included a text he said he got from Harvard Law Professor David Wilkins: “We can all marvel at the sheer audacity of a man who believed he could teach his black boys to be excellent in a world that denied that very possibility, and then watch them go on to redefine what excellence means for all time.”

In a statement, New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell said of the man who continued to perform regularly until December, “Ellis Marsalis was a legend. He was the prototype of what we mean when we talk about New Orleans jazz. He was a teacher, a father, and an icon – and words aren’t sufficient to describe the art, the joy and the wonder he showed the world.”

Because Mr. Marsalis opted to stay in New Orleans for most of his career, his reputation was limited until his sons became famous – Wynton has won nine Grammys and been nominated 33 times – and brought him the spotlight, along with new recording contracts and headliner performances on television and on tour.

The Marsalis “family band” seldom played together when the boys were younger but went on tour in 2003 in a spinoff of a family celebration, which became a PBS special when the elder Marsalis retired from teaching at the University of New Orleans.

Harry Connick Jr., one of Mr. Marsalis’ students at the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts, was a guest. He’s one of many now-famous jazz musicians who passed through Mr. Marsalis’ classrooms. Others include trumpeters Nicholas Payton and Terence Blanchard, saxophonists Donald Harrison and Victor Goines and bassist Reginald Veal.

From 1986 to 1989, Mr. Marsalis served as the Commonwealth Professor of Music at Virginia Commonwealth University. He would spend two of those three years as coordinator of jazz studies before returning to New Orleans to become the first Coca-Cola Endowed Chair of Jazz Studies at the University of New Orleans.

“Ellis is part of the very rich history of our department,” said Dr. Terry Austin, interim chair of the VCU Department of Music. “When he came to VCU he joined a very strong jazz program and he provided a unique complement to our instruction. His way of working one-on-one with students was very personal, challenging and caring. The first year he was here, VCU asked him to play at literally every event. That raised our profile within the university.”

Another VCU music professor, Antonio García, grew up in New Orleans and later became a classmate of Wynton and Branford. He nominated Mr. Marsalis for The Midwest Clinic Medal of Honor, which he received in 2009, and an honorary doctorate from VCU, which he received in May 2010, gracing graduates at that ceremony with a brief performance.

Mr. Marsalis was a quiet person, Mr. García said, who exuded great authority, not by yelling, but by calm incisiveness.

“He could speak to the heart of an artistic or personal matter with a directness that was at the same time striking in its revelation and reassuring in the positive potential,” Mr. García said. “And clearly he led by example.”

Mr. Marsalis was born in New Orleans, the son of the operator of a hotel where he met touring black musicians who couldn’t stay at the segregated downtown hotels where they performed. He played saxophone in high school and also played piano by the time he went to Dillard University.

Although New Orleans was steeped in traditional jazz, and rock ‘n’ roll was the new sound in the 1950s, Mr. Marsalis preferred bebop and modern jazz.

Nick Spitzer, host of public radio’s “American Routes” and a Tulane University anthropology professor, described Mr. Marsalis as a “modernist in a town of traditionalists.”

“His great love was jazz a la bebop. He was a lover of Thelonious Monk and the idea that bebop was a music of freedom. But when he had to feed his family, he played R&B and soul and rock ‘n’ roll on Bourbon Street,” Mr. Spitzer said.

The musician’s college quartet included drummer Ed Blackwell, clarinetist Alvin Batiste and saxophonist Harold Battiste. Saxophonist Ornette Coleman was in town at the time. In 1956, when Mr. Coleman headed to California, Mr. Marsalis and the others went along, but after a few months Mr. Marsalis returned home. He told the New Orleans Times-Picayune years later, when he and Mr. Coleman were old men, that he never figured out what a pianist could do behind the free form of Mr. Coleman’s jazz.

Back in New Orleans, Mr. Marsalis joined the Marine Corps and was assigned to accompany soloists on the service’s weekly TV programs on CBS in New York. There, he said, he learned to handle all kinds of music styles.

Returning home, he worked at the Playboy Club and ventured into running his own club, which went bust. In 1967, trumpeter Al Hirt hired him. When not on Bourbon Street, Mr. Hirt’s band appeared on national TV – headline shows on “The Tonight Show” and “The Ed Sullivan Show,” among others.

Mr. Marsalis got into education about the same time, teaching improvisation at Xavier University in New Orleans. In the mid-1970s, he joined the faculty at the New Orleans magnet high school and influenced a new generation of jazz musicians.

When asked how he could teach something as free-wheel- ing as jazz improvisation, Mr. Marsalis once said, “We don’t teach jazz, we teach students.”

Mr. Marsalis retired from the University of New Orleans in 2001 but continued performing. He often played at the New Or- leans Jazz and Heritage Festival.

And for more than three decades, he played two 75-minute sets every Friday night at Snug Harbor, a small club in New Orleans that anchored the city’s contemporary jazz scene, until he decided it was exhausting. Even then, he still performed on occasion as a special guest.

His melodic style, with running improvisations in the right hand, has been described variously as romantic, contem- porary or simply “Louisiana jazz.” He was always on acoustic piano, never electric, and even in interpreting old standards there’s a clear link to the driving bebop chords and rhythms of his early years.

He founded a record company, ELM, but his recording was limited until his sons became famous. After that, he joined them and others on mainstream labels and headlined his own releases, many full of his own compositions.

Ellis III said his father taught him the meaning of integrity before he even knew the word.

He and Delfeayo, neither of them yet 10, had gone to hear their father play at a club. Only one man – sleeping and drunk – was in the audience for the second set. The boys asked why they couldn’t leave.

“He looked at us and said, ‘I can’t leave. I have a gig.’ While he’s playing, he said, ‘A gig is a deal. I’m paid to play this set. I’m going to play this set. It doesn’t matter that nobody’s here.’ ”