Alvin Batiste

Batiste was born in New Orleans on November 7, 1932, and made his reputation as an avant-garde clarinetist. He played in the American Jazz Quintet with Ellis Marsalis, Harold Battiste and Ed Blackwell. In Baton Rouge he taught at his own jazz institute at Southern University, where Branford Marsalis, Henry Butler and Donald Harrison were among his students. He died in his sleep of a heart attack in Baton Rouge on May 6, 2007, aged 74. His last album, a tribute released that year, came from Marsalis Music.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Old State Capitol — steps away
  James Dakin's 1850 Gothic castle on the river bluff, gutted in the Civil War, nearly demolished in 1991 and reopened in 1994 as a free museum of political history.
• Capitol Park Museum — 0.5 mi
  The Louisiana State Museum in Baton Rouge: a shrimp trawler and a Civil War submarine, galleries on the slave market, resistance and Jim Crow, and the music from Armstrong to Chenier.
• Louisiana State Capitol — 0.7 mi
  A 450-foot Art Deco tower Huey Long pushed through in 1930, finished in 14 months, and the hallway where he was shot in 1935; free to enter and ringed by 27 acres of grounds.
• LSU Rural Life Museum — 4.9 mi
  Four slave cabins moved from Welham Plantation and a working-plantation row of more than twenty saved buildings, on land the Burden family held as Windrush plantation since the 1830s.

More markers nearby

• Pioneers of the Bus Boycott — steps away
• Garner v. Louisiana — steps away
• Oliver Pollock — steps away
• The C.O.R.E. March — steps away