Katrina Rocks the Cradle of Jazz

[Christiern]

Beyond New Orleans, Katrina Destroys Music History Too

This loss is a human one first and foremost. But as word spreads that (among others) New Orleans R&B legend Fats Domino remains unaccounted for after the storm, media is more mindful this is cultural devastation too--destruction of primary information about the beginnings of American music, and of a currently thriving community of jazz and rap and everything betwixt.

To better understand the enormity of the situation from that perspective, we spoke with musicologist Ned Sublette. Last year Sublette, musician, label co-founder, and much-applauded author of Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo, spent time in New Orleans as a Rockefeller Humanities Fellow at Tulane University, doing hands-on research for a book about the city and its fundamental relationship to American musical history. Below are some of Sublette's reactions to the loss:

Intro
"The destruction of New Orleans, from a cultural point of view, is too awful to contemplate. And at the same time, everyone had contemplated it. Anyone who came to have dinner last year at my house in New Orleans heard me describe pretty much what happened, in advance. Not because I'm clairvoyant, but because it was well-known what would happen.

"The hurricane was not preventable, but the flooding that occurred was preventable. That levee break was preventable, the destruction of the marshland was preventable. And even if the flooding were not preventable, there was another failure, which was the complete failure of civil defense.

"It's very simple: the plan was--and everybody knew it--the plan was that the poor would be left behind to drown.

"As of Friday, I was 102,000 words into a book [i'm writing] about [New Orleans]. So I have been for months deeply synthesizing this. So for this to hit me now is just like--it's a mindfuck. Simple example: three weeks ago, I had somebody drive me past Fats Domino's house so I could take a picture of it. And that house is under water now. It's like the whole time I was there, I was on input, remembering things that might not be there next year, and I was conscious of that as I was doing it. I would say to people, it's as if we're midway between life and death here."

On the loss of primary historical information:
"Everything from documents to recordings to things that are in private hands [are lost]. Many of the more serious archives are on higher floors--presumably many of them have survived the flood waters. But what condition are they in? How quickly will cultural workers be able to get in and rescue the patrimony which is very important in understanding where American music came from?

"For instance, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall , the historian, went around from parish courthouse to parish courthouse looking at documents that many times were not considered to be of great importance. She managed to compile a database of the identities and nationalities of 100,000 enslaved Louisianans, from primary documents sitting in Louisiana. There are many secrets that those documents might yield up with some hard-working historians to examine them.

Congo Square and its Importance to American Music:
"Congo Square, there were gatherings of black people dancing and playing ancestral drums and singing in ancestral languages probably since the introduction of slaves by the French in 1719. There were gatherings in the French period, there were gatherings in the Spanish period--the gatherings continued up to before the Civil War. In the first half of the century in the United States, the English-speaking slave owners prohibited the playing of drums by blacks, because they could be used to signal rebellion.

But in Congo Square--it was the one place in the United States that black people were allowed to play drums with their hands. It's the one place where an African-derived drumming tradition directly continued. It may be that the Mardi Gras Indians, the groups of black men that dress in fantastical African-style costumes imitative of the motifs of the Plains Indians, it may be that their tambourine tradition derives from this. If so, this is the only direct descendant of the African hand-drumming tradition in African American music. In the years before recordings, this very fertile period between the end of slavery and the beginnings of recordings when we don't quite know what happened and what it sounded like, when there was music going up from Brazil to North America, the step that turned the music into jazz was taken in New Orleans. We know that."

New Orleans's Connection to Rock:
"If you're only looking at it from the rock and roll perspective, New Orleans is a fundamental city in the story. In 1949, Dave Bartholomew, who I hope evacuated in time, led the house band that backed up Fats Domino on his first hit, "The Fat Man", and became the first professional R&B studio band, the forerunner of the kind of thing that they would have in Motown. Singers like Little Richard, Lloyd Price, Ray Charles would come to New Orleans to play with this house band. Many of the first R&B and rock and roll classics were recorded in New Orleans.

Rebuilding New Orleans:
"You cannot abandon New Orleans. You can say that New Orleans has no viability as a business or industrial city. But if our history and culture as a nation mean anything, New Orleans is central to it. And if we can save New Orleans--if we haven't lost it already--it has to be put back and saved right. If we can somehow turn around the hateful direction this country is going in, and really save and fortify New Orleans, and really show the world that we as a nation can save our own cities, that our concept of homeland security means something, then we can be proud of ourselves. Right now we can't.

"We're not only watching history disappear. History is watching us disappear."

[Man with the Golden Arm]

Jazz Musicians Ask if Their Scene Will Survive

 

By BEN RATLIFF

Published: September 8, 2005

New Orleans is a jazz town, but also a funk town, a brass-band town, a hip-hop town and a jam-band town. It has international jazz musicians and hip-hop superstars, but also a true, subsistence-level street culture. Much of its music is tied to geography and neighborhoods, and crowds.

All that was incontrovertibly true until a week ago Monday. Now the future for brass bands and Mardi Gras Indians, to cite two examples, looks particularly bleak if their neighborhoods are destroyed by flooding, and bleaker still with the prospect of no new tourists coming to town soon to infuse their traditions with new money. Although the full extent of damage is still unknown, there is little doubt that it has been severe - to families, to instruments, to historical records, to clubs, to costumes. "Who knows if there exists a Mardi Gras Indian costume anymore in New Orleans?" wondered Don Marshall, director of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival Foundation.

"A lot of the great musicians came right out of the Treme neighborhood and the Lower Ninth Ward," said the trumpeter Kermit Ruffins, temporarily speaking in the past tense, by phone from Houston yesterday. Mr. Ruffins, one of the most popular jazz musicians in New Orleans, made his name there partly through his regular Thursday-night gig over the last 12 years at Vaughan's, a bar in the Bywater neighborhood, where red beans and rice were served at midnight. Now Vaughn's may be destroyed, and so may his new house, which is not too far from the bar.

On Saturday evening Mr. Ruffins flew back to New Orleans from a gig in San Diego, having heard the first of the dire storm warnings. He stopped at a lumberyard to buy wood planks, boarded up 25 windows on his house, then went bar-hopping and joked with his friends that where they were standing might be under water the next day.

The next morning he fled to Baton Rouge with his family, and now he is in Houston, about to settle into apartments, along with more than 30 relatives. He is being offered plenty of work in Houston, and is already thinking ahead to what he calls "the new New Orleans."

"I think the city is going to wind up being a smaller area," he said. "They'll have to build some super levees.

"I think this will never happen again once they get finished," Mr. Ruffins added. "We're going to get those musicians back, the brass bands, the jazz funerals, everything."

Brass bands function through the year - not only through the annual Jazzfest, where many outsiders see them, and jazz funerals, but at the approximately 55 social aid and pleasure clubs, each of which holds a parade once a year. It is an intensely local culture, and has been thriving in recent years. Brass-band music, funky and hard-hitting, can easily be transformed from the neighborhood social to a club gig; brass bands like Rebirth, Dirty Dozen and the Soul Rebels have done well by touring as commercial entities. Members of Stooges Brass Band have ended up in Atlanta, and of Li'l Rascals in Houston; there could be a significant brass-band diaspora before musicians find a way to get home to New Orleans. (Rebirth's Web site, www.rebirthbrassband.com, has been keeping a count of brass-band musicians who have been heard from.)

The Mardi Gras Indian tradition is more fragile. Monk Boudreaux is chief of the Golden Eagles, one of the 40 or so secretive Mardi Gras tribes, who are known not just for their flamboyant feathered costumes but for their competitive parades through neighborhoods at Mardi Gras time. (Mardi Gras Indians are not American Indians but New Orleanians from the city's working-class black neighborhoods.) Mr. Boudreaux, now safe with his daughter in Mesquite, Tex., stayed put through the storm at his house in the Uptown neighborhood; when he left last week, he said, the water was waist-high. He chuckled when asked if the Mardi Gras Indian tradition could survive in exile. "I don't know of any other Mardi Gras outside of New Orleans," he said.

These days a city is often considered a jazz town to the extent that its resident musicians have international careers. The bulk of New Orleans jazz musicians have shown a knack for staying local. (Twenty or so in the last two decades, including several Marsalises, are obvious exceptions.)

But as everyone knows, jazz is crucial to New Orleans, and New Orleans was crucial in combining jazz's constituent parts, its Spanish, French, Caribbean and West African influences. The fact that so many musicians are related to one or another of the city's great music families - Lastie, Brunious, Neville, Jordan, Marsalis - still gives much of the music scene a built-in sense of nobility. "Whereas New York has a jazz industry," said Quint Davis, director of Jazzfest, "New Orleans has a jazz culture." (Speaking of Jazzfest, Mr. Davis was not ready to discuss whether there will be a festival next April. "First I'm dealing with the lives and subsistence of the people who produce it," he said.)

And most jazz in New Orleans has a directness about it. "Everyone isn't searching for the hottest, newest lick," said Maurice Brown, a young trumpeter from Chicago who had been rising through the ranks of the New Orleans jazz scene for the last four years before the storm took his house and car. "People are trying to stay true to the melody."

Gregory Davis, the trumpeter and vocalist for the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, one of the city's most successful groups, said the typical New Orleans musician was vulnerable because of how he lives and works. (Mr. Davis's house is in the Gentilly neighborhood; he spoke last week from his brother's home in Dallas.)

"A lot of these guys who are playing out there in the clubs are not home owners," he said. "They're going to be at the mercy of the owners of those properties. For some of them, playing in the clubs was the only means of earning any money. If those musicians come back and don't have an affordable home, that's a big blow."

Louis Edwards, a New Orleans novelist and an associate producer of the Jazz and Heritage Festival, said, "No other city is so equipped to deal with this." A French Quarter resident, Mr. Edwards was taking refuge last week at his mother's house in Lake Charles, La.

"Think of the jazz funeral," he said. "In New Orleans we respond to the concept of following tragedy with joy. That's a powerful philosophy to have as the underpinning of your culture."

In the meantime, Mr. Boudreaux, chief of the Golden Eagles, has a feeling his own Mardi Gras Indian costume is intact. He was careful to put it in a dry place before he left home. "I just need to get home and get that Indian suit from on top of that closet," he said.