Our Man in New Orleans

Swell.

2008-08-27T12:13:00.001-07:00

Ever get the feeling you've inadvertantly pissed off somebody higher up in the pecking order?

Why I'm here, continued...

2008-08-25T13:16:00.000-07:00

I've had several readers point out that I never did get to the point of my last screed, which is, essentially, why would someone with options choose to live in a place like post-Katrina New Orleans.

The short answer, that this place, even in it's damaged state, is like no other isn't quite enough. Contrarians always argue that every place on earth is unique unto itself, and this is of course true. Evanston Illinois, or Port Coquitlam British Columbia are both unique in their own way. They even have their own distinct cultures. Sterile, barren, mass-produced post-modern cultures, but culture nontheless.

I've spoken at some length previously about the pre-modern agrarian-cycle nature of New Orleans culture. It is also a participatory culture in that being a New Orleanian is something you do as well as an identity you carry. All the cornball, "What is New Orleans" litanies, red-beans and rice on Mondays, Creole Gumbo for lunch at L'il Dizzy's, shrimp po'boy (dressed) at the Parkway, Kermit Ruffins at Vaughn's Lounge on Thursdays, Rebirth at the Maple Leaf on Thursdays, St. Joseph's altars, three pennies at the crossroads for Papa Legba, Indians on Super Sunday...all present and accounted for. Food, music, ritual. Things both the native-born and the newcomer can participate in without hesitation or embarrassment, if one simply comes with a open heart. And while there is sometimes a touristy element to some of these things that tempts cynicism, if you've ever seen, say, a real neighborhood second-line (as opposed to the fake ones at jazzfest, or at rich people's weddings or corporate functions) or seen the Indians come out on Carnival Day, your deepest instincts will tell you you're in the presence of some serious, hardcore shit. The kind that doesn't come around too much anymore in our smart-ass, been-there-done-that 'ironic' world.

So really, bottom line (as the been-there-done-that smartasses like to say) am I coming out ahead by staying here? In the area of straight-up money, no. Even by the luke-warm standard of arts faculty salaries, I could probably do better in Dallas, or Los Angeles, or Chicago. New York City too, but the insane cost of living would more than cancel out any salary bump. And New Orleans, while it has plenty of places to play, is not immune from the kind of cliquey-ness that makes getting a gig a rough slide in other cities, and straight-ahead jazz is as tough a sell here as anywhere. The real action is in more commercial genres; funk, for the college kids, trad jazz for the tourists. And post-Katrina booking policies have gotten tight, with some rooms shutting down and some pushing play-for-the-door policies.

Then there's the crime, the weather, and the ever present possibility of getting flooded out again.

So, am I crazy? Maybe. But I'm inclined to think that my decision to make my life here has less to do with any big-picture laundry list of "quality of life" items than a profound appreciation of the moment, or more properly the continuing string of moments that are the actual stuff of life. Money is a fine thing, and I think we should all have scads of it, but as Redd Fox used to say, you ain't never going to see a Brink's truck following a hearse. And when the sum of any individual life is totalled, it's got squat to do with how many CDs you played on or who you gigged with. What counts is the connection you made with the people in your life.

There comes a time when you reach a certain age...you start thinking about death in a different way. Not the tragically romantic but nevertheless abstract way that young people do, but as a conceivable certainty. You develop a bone-deep understanding of the inevitability of that D.W. Rhodes funeral carriage, the one that, literally or figuratively, waits for us all. No exceptions will be made. No you can't cut some kind of deal. You, yourself, your physical person, will get stuck in a box and buried underground, or roasted in an oven. And who has "the most toys" does not mean shit.

We're all going to be dead someday. New Orleanians understand this better than any other people in America. The time we have on earth should be spent with each other in ways that matter.

Tonight We're Gonna Party Like It's August 29.

2008-08-13T09:34:00.000-07:00

Today's post is by our first ever "guest columnist," my good buddy Lou Maistros, who offers up what I think is en excellent plan to offset the crepescular gloom that sets in every year around this time since "the Thing" happened.

"So it’s August and the big anniversary is coming up. Me and the family usually head to Gulf Shores, Alabama to lie on the beach, count our blessings, and forget. We really don’t need a flashy annual reminder of what turned our lives upside down.

I understand the desire to commemorate what happened, and to pay tribute to the lives that were lost. But that’s really not us, y’know? This is the land of jazz funerals; where the usual drill is to look death in the eye, thumb our collective nose at it, and strike up the band. All this commemoration stuff is a just a flat-out bummer, and it’s out of character.

This year, let’s do what we do. Turn the beat around. Take a sad song and make it better. Transform the blues into a turbo-charged, sugar-frosted luv-mo-sheen. Let’s take the anniversary of the worst thing that’s ever happened to this city and make it a day that promotes change for the better and celebrates the power of redemption over catastrophe. Let’s be a city of wise-aching smart alecks. Yes, this is what we do.

I have a proposal for my fellow New Orleanians.

This year, on August 29, instead of mulling over our misfortunes, let’s take a cue from the president. Let’s follow his lead – with an act of solidarity and tolerance that will push the boundaries of human comprehension.

This August 29, let’s shuffle off the collective gloom by having a citywide party that celebrates the birthday of John McCain.

Huh?

Pop quiz: Where was President Bush when the big storm hit, on August 29, 2005?

He was in Arizona having a piece of birthday cake with his buddy, John McCain.

The president didn’t get caught with his pants down, the storm did not take him by surprise. Everyone saw it coming, knew exactly when it would make landfall. The president’s master plan for zero hour was, apparently: Gotta get me summa that cake!

I’m not sure if I blame the president. Think about it. John McCain, in effect, lured a mentally-disabled manchild to Arizona with the promise of a tasty hunk of birthday cake. How can we expect a feeble-minded person to resist such yummy temptation?

I’m not sure if I blame Senator McCain either. When you reach his age, you really have to celebrate each birthday as if it might be your last – bodies floating down the streets of a major American city be damned!

So this August 29, let’s follow the example of these two great Americans – one who is president, and the other who will be the next president if we’re not careful.

Let them eat cake. And let’s have some, too!

Start making plans. I want to see McCain birthday parties popping up all over the city this August 29. It will be a chance to turn a frown upside-down, and to provide the sort of high-minded, outrageous political mockery that New Orleanians have always been famous for.

Start blogging about your McCain Birthday Bash plans, set up websites, and spread the word!

Come as you were: life preservers and air-mattress-as-flotation-devices are optional but recommended! Don’t forget those pointy little paper birthday hats – and be sure to bring lots and lots of candles!

If our citywide McCain Birthday Bash makes the national news (as it should!), it will be an opportunity for us to remind the rest of the country (in a very important election year!) what Candidate McCain really thinks of American citizens who are staring down the darkest moment of their recorded history: Not much!

He didn’t let us ruin his party, so let’s not let him ruin ours!

If we play our cards right, we can: pass a good time, make a point about the common-decency-deficit in the Republican party, help get Senator Obama elected, let the world know we’ve still got a sense of humor, and wish an old man a happy birthday.

Everybody wins!

That’s right, New Orleanians, this August 29th we can save the human race with a good old-fashioned hunk of birthday cake. It’s not been done before, but there’s a first time for everything…"

Why am I here?

2008-07-23T12:06:00.000-07:00

Everyone in post-Katrina New Orleans asks themselves this question at least once a day. But when I moved here in the late summer of 2003, New Orleans wasn't the poster child for bad disaster management and lightning rod for racial animosity and resentment of the poor that it's become. It was a "colorful" destination city with some serious history, and a music town of some note. Off the beaten path, sure. Invisible to the more New-York-centric jazzerati, absolutely. But to most people interested in music and exotica, an undeniably Cool Place.

My original purpose in coming here was simply to get a masters degree at Tulane. Of course I had other ambitions on the backburner, a new start in a new city, a post secondary teaching gig of some kind, a chance to participate first hand in a vital, active vernacular culture. But I was into seriously minimized expectations at that point in my life, a kind of Mel Brooksian "hope for the best, expect the worst" mindset. I figured the absolute worst-case scenario was I'd go back to Vancouver (with a masters) and the school board would have to pay me an extra $75 a day to be a substitute band teacher. It never even ocurred to me that Tulane would hire me as Visiting Professor of Music, which they did, in June of 2005.

I was up in Vancouver at the time. My father had died a couple of months before, and there was family business to attend to. I also had a gig at the Vancouver Jazz Festival with my Canadian-based quintet. I arrived back in New Orleans in late August, just in time to get my faculty ID picture taken, attend a "new hire" orientation meeting, sign up for the health insurance plan and flee the city hours ahead of the worst engineering failure in the history of the United States.

My wife Darlene was in Canada on business at the time, and I initially drove to Fort Worth, Texas and stayed with our friend Candace for a week. It was there that I learned that the Army Corps of Engineers 'flood protection' system had failed, well below it's own design specifications. The city was flooding, and reports began to emerge of chaos inside the Superdome (the city's shelter of last resort), of multiple rapes and homicides, and of armed bands of looters firing on rescue helicopters. At the time, this sounded like hooey to me, an example of White America's longstanding fever-swamp fears of "armed negroes" storming the barricades, the product of a collective guilty concience. And indeed, the reports subsequently were discredited but not before rescue efforts by the Red Cross and others had been delayed for days because entering the city was "too dangerous."

(For the record, after both the Superdome and Convention Center were clear of evacuees, "officials sent in forensic teams, expecting to find as many as 200 corpses. Only 10 bodies were found at the Superdome. Of these, four were apparently brought in from the street outside, and six were believed to have died within (four of natural causes, one from a drug overdose and one from a fall from a balcony that was an apparent suicide). Of four deaths known to have occurred within the Convention Center, three were from natural causes, and one was an apparent homicide. The bodies of 20 people were found outside the center, but those deaths are not believed to have involved crimes." As for the sniper stories, "there were numerous confirmed incidents of gunfire on the streets of New Orleans after the hurricane, but seperate investigations by the Air Force, Coast Guard, Department of Homeland Security and Louisiana Air National Guard had been unable, as of the first week of October, to confirm a single case of airborne rescue teams taking fire from the ground." Source, Time Magazine, December 2005).

Anecdotally speaking, I know a number of people who were "Domed" and the consensus seems to be that, while the experience was no picnic, folks were surprisingly well behaved considering there was no fresh water, air-conditioning, food or working plumbing, they were being confined ankle deep in human waste by armed guards and were not, as were the recent California wildfire victims, being entertained by stilt-walkers, rock bands, and mimes. If you detect a certain peevishness in the previous comments it's because I, and most other New Orleanians, are good and fed up with the post-Katrina tendency in this country to compare every subsequent "natural disaster," no matter how unrelated in scale and kind, to Katrina, and to cynically use said disasters to score cheap political points.

But I digress. After leaving Fort Worth, I continued on to San Francisco where I met up with Darlene. It was there that we had the inevitable discussion about whether we would, if possible, return to the city. We both immediately agreed that we would return, at the soonest opportunity. I was a very angry man that fall, but Darlene, a much wiser soul than I, counselled that "it's better to go back and try to help than sit in exile and be pissed off."

We returned the first week of December, 2005.

Since then it's been quite a ride all over the emotional map. In those early days, most people in the city felt united by a sense of common purpose. Those who had come back, it was felt, were those who really and truly wanted to be here. Hard-core New Orleanians, and plenty more who couldn't get back yet but would as soon as they possibly could. The more optimistic and trusting among us (I was absolutely not one of them) took the president at his word, and anticipated that the full support and intent of the American people, through the instrument of their federal government, would be brought to bear in the service of restoring the city. After all, it was reasoned, the Army Corps of Engineers own report admits culpability. Those flood walls failed well below design specs. This is not our fault and surely the feds will step up to take responsibility.

Instead we have seen a level of political cynicism for which, to the best of my knowledge, there is no precedent in the history of this country. Blame the Victim has been the name of the game almost since day one. Narratives spun by the administration which were easily disprovable lies (the governor didn't call a state of emergency till three days later, money meant for levee maintainance was spent on casinos, and of course the aforementioned Black Savages Run Amok trope) are still, to this day, repeated without challenge on cable news shows.

That is, when the tragedy is discussed at all. Because here in Attention Deficit Nation, the news cycle has Moved On. The problems of Katrina, like most other problems in America, are complex and deeply rooted. They involve a lot of poor people, who in America are often swept under the carpet, because the problems of the poor tend to be difficult to address or get any traction with. They're a real bummer, a buzz killer. They mess up the ratings and depress people, and when people are depressed they don't feel like shopping and we can't have that. Better to lede with a story on giant stingrays off the coast of England, or some prurient stuff about teen sex. That always perks up the proles.

Meanwhile, in New Orleans, things creep along. The big building boom never materialized. The forest of construction cranes never appeared. The billions of dollars the president promised languish in a bank account somewhere collecting interest for the feds, a victim of the red tape they promised to cut. And it becomes increasingly clear to us that this is it. This is the way it's going to be, for the rest of our lives. Yet we stay, because we can't turn our backs. The place is just too real, too vividly present in both the now and the then. The past really does live here, and walk among us and influence our contemporary affairs. There a ghosts here, and spirits and Lwas and saints.

They say New Orleans is a dying city, but if we are allowed to slip away, through neglect, or outright malice, or whatever...it will be the rest of the country that's dead. Not us.

Profs of Pleasure on "Hot Air."

2008-07-18T09:42:00.000-07:00

After the gig up in Vancouver last June 23rd, guitarist John Dobry and I stayed over a couple of days to do a show on CBC Radio (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) called "Hot Air."

I've done quite a few of these on my own over the years, both as a out-of-town jazz guy coming in to play a festival or club date and as a Vancouver jazz musician when I still lived there. This year marked the first time I was able to bring my band up from New Orleans, and the first time I've shared a radio mic with Dobry.

The show airs tomorrow, July 19th at 5:05 p.m. Pacific time, at 690 on your A.M. dial. If you're not in the broadcast area you can listen online here:

http://www.cbc.ca/hotair/

Jesse Mcbride At The Piano.

2008-06-25T10:26:00.000-07:00

Left to right: Jesse Mcbride, piano, Jim Markway, bass, John Dobry, guitar, John Doheny, tenor saxophone.

Hidden: Kevin O'Day, drums.

My mentor and friend, the late, great tenor saxophonist Fraser MacPherson, once told me, "the audience has no idea what you went through to get there, nor do they care, nor should they care." True, dat.

In my earnest and fumbling efforts to stay within the budget I'd originally submitted to Tulane University's Deep South Humanities Center of the School of Liberal Arts (who were underwriting a portion of the trip) I'd decided to fly us into Seattle, rent a van, and drive to Vancouver. There was always the possibility of picking up a gig in Seattle (which turned out to be a wash) and it would save us almost $300 a man in airfare. Of course by the time we actually booked the tickets the price had doubled, wiping out any potential savings and adding needless complexity and travel time. To top it off, our drummer, Kevin O'Day, had been offered some last minute touring opportunities (the Bonnaroo Festival in Memphis with Anders Osbourn, and some scattered dates with bluesman John Mooney) and would not be travelling with us, instead he'd be flying to Seattle from Vicksburg, Mississippi.

Everybody on the band had gigs the night before (mine was with the Oakside Brass Band at Broussards) so we were all fried at the airport in New Orleans at the 5:30 a.m. boarding call. They routed us through Atlanta (go figure) then a five hour hop back across the country to Seattle, where the Alamo Rental Car computer promptly rejected my credit card. Our pianist, Jesse Mcbride, saved the day with his fat bank balance courtesy of two weeks teaching at Donald Harrison Jr.'s summer jazz camp. Apparently my bank needed at least two business days to process Tulane's expense check onto my card. Funny how they can debit stuff instantaneously, but take their sweet time with the credits.

From there it was onward and upward to Canadian Customs, where, as per usual, we were treated like errant 15 year old boys who'd been summoned to the principal's office, and into Vancouver and our rooms at the Listel on Robson. Total travel time: fifteen hours. I managed to drag myself downstairs to O'Doul's to catch a set of Alita Dupray and to say hello to bassist James Forrest and drummer Joe Poole. I really wanted to make Mike Allen's jam, but there was no way. I shuffled off to bed about eleven.

Up at seven to deal with a seemingly endless stream of minutae and screwups, some my own doing, some not. At one point I had a cel phone in one ear and the hotel land line in the other. Stress city. In another economy move my wife Darlene and I (who was travelling with us) were moving into vocalist Colleen Savage's apartment (she's out of town) and because the place has both a kitchen and a piano, and because in New Orleans beans and rice are a traditional monday/washday dish and music is good any day of the week, I'd planned to invite the guys over for a big feed and jam session before the gig. Jesse was going to cook, as he almost always has people over to his place in New Orleans for monday red beans. But Jesse was getting sick. Bad. Some kind of stomach bug. He spent the afternoon in bed trying to get himself together, and I got to put my head down for a couple of hours to try and forget all this stuff and get my head correct and focus on the music.

We get to the gig, and it's a great space, nice acoustics. Good sound. The sound guy was tenor man Graham Ord, so I knew I was in good hands. We had a good house, I'm told that's somewhat unusual in that venue on a monday. And despite being sick as a dog, Jesse played his ass off. I mean burnin, bro. There were at least three points where he played something and all four of us turned and looked at him and went "Whoah!" Yeah you rite! Everybody played great. Even the three tunes we had literally never played before (we learned them at the sound check) came off without a hitch. As is sometimes the case, the mistakes happened on tunes we've played a lot. A ballad grew a new coda to make up for a missed entrance, for instance, and the form on another tune got re-routed around a drum solo. But those aren't 'mistakes,' really. They're happy accidents that lead to new and interesting things, and a big part of why playing jazz is such an exciting and scary experience.

Life is long and strange. One minute you're in New Orleans, playing "Just a Little While to Stay Here" in a brass band. Then, in what seems like the blink of an eye, you're three thousand miles away in another country playing completely different music. But it's not different, really. It's all of a piece.

Keepin' It Real parade.

2008-06-10T12:11:00.000-07:00

This parade was mounted by a relatively new club, the Keepin It Real social and pleasure club. It ran through our neighborhood a couple of months ago, starting up at Orleans and Moss, running down Orleans Avenue, then taking a left onto North Broad at Orleans.

This guy is outside a great, old-school restaurant called the Crescent City Steak House, at the corner of Broad and St. Philip. Our house is about four blocks up St. Philip behind it.

NOLA Jazzfest 2008 Photos.

2008-06-08T13:13:00.000-07:00

Alan Matheson and I at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, spring 2008, with the Tulane University Jazz Orchestra. The stage manager had asked if we could do an extra ten minutes, so we called a Bb blues (Joe Newman's "Cue-in the Blues") with just the rhythm section.

Vocalist/pianist Rachel Brotman sings Alan's arrangement of Harold Arlen's "Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea."

Alan solos on the arrangement of "Indiana" that he originally wrote for Clark Terry.

Festival Overload.

2008-06-01T07:47:00.000-07:00

New Orleans is probably the last American city that functions on an pre-modern, agrarian 'festival' clock. With an emphasis on 'festive.' 'Festival' here is not necessarily genre specific. Although 'Jazzfest' is ostensibly about jazz, and 'Tomatofest' is centered around tomatoes, there is also music at Tomatofest and remarkable food at Jazzfest. And there's going to be dancing at both.

Many of these festivals are comparitively recent, chamber-of-commerce-generated events. Back in the day, festival season was anchored by the 'season' of Carnival which begins on Twelfth Night and climaxes with Mardi Gras, which usually occurs somewhere mid-february to mid-march. Jazzfest (last weekend in April to first weekend in May) became an extension of the parades and festivities (both religious and secular) of Easter and Holy Week. Thus in a city that is overwhelmingly Latin-Catholic (as opposed to tight-assed European-Catholic) the festive season moved smoothly through Christmas to Epiphany to New Years to Mardi Gras (culminating in Ash Wednesday, the day after Fat Tuesday) to Easter to....Jazzfest. So that while the rest of the country was resolving to lose that 'holiday five' put on over the Christmas break, New Orleans was just tucking into the first of the Carnival Season Kingcakes.

Somewhere along the line, somebody noticed that there were a few pesky gaps in this flow, areas where, sometimes for weeks, there were no distracting blowouts or opportunities for partying and pigging out. French Quarterfest, a free, outdoor music festival in the French Quarter, was added in mid April to break up the gap between Mardi Gras and Jazzfest. Essence Magazine weighed in with Essencefest, a festival of contemorary African-American music during the traditionally slow month of August, and Satchmo Summerfest (along with it's jazz camp for New Orleans public school students) filled the midsummer gap where July turns to August.

This year the new additions are starting to clog up the calender, creating a 'perfect storm' of overlapping or simultaneous festival activity. June 13 to 15, The Louisiana Cajun-Zydeco Festival (sponsored by the Jazz and Heritage Foundation) takes place at two outdoor stages at the Old U.S. Mint at Esplanade and Decature. The lineup includes Wayne Thibodeaux, Keith Frank, The Soileau Zydeco Band, the Figs, Terrence Simien, Beausoleil, the Red Stick Ramblers, Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys and many more. And yes, there will be food.

Concurrently, The Creole Tomato festival alternates chef demonstrations with musical performances in the Farmers Market and Dutch Alley. The Farmers Market Stage presents brass band, jazz and blues with Don Vappie, Jon Cleary, the Storyville Stompers and more, mixed with demos from chefs including Susan Spicer of Bayona, Tenney Flynn of G.W. Finn's, and Frank Brigsten of Brigsten's. The Dutch Alley stage has a Latin theme, with music by Freddy Omar, Ovi G. and the Froggies, AsheSon, and Julio and Caesar, along with demonstrations by chefs focusing on Latin cuisine including Glen Hogh from Vegas Tapas.

And concurrent to that is the Louisiana Seafood Festival inside the Old U.S. Mint. The music schedule has not yet been finalized, but the feature food will be by Antoine's, Deanie's, the Red Fish Grill, the Bourbon House, the Vidalia Grill, the Saltwater Grill and many others. There will be a Young Chef's Pavillion, with students from the John Folse Institute and Delgado Community College's Culinary Arts Program cooking and being mentored live. Fedex will be on site all weekend to ship fresh seafood, fresh Creole Tomatoes, or other fresh produce around the country.

And... Darlene and I are making a particular point this coming wednesday to go down to Lafayette Square (where a series of free concerts happen every wednesday in the spring and early summer) to catch R&B legend Irma Thomas.

You know, if I were a rich man, I'd make a list of all my friends who live in modern North American cities, places where music is a fringe 'cultural event' that happens in isolation from daily life, and I'd fly em all down here for a month around this time of year. I suspect a lot of them would quit their jobs and move here permanently.

The Spanish Tinge Hypothesis.

2008-05-27T11:43:00.000-07:00

What follows is an excerpt from an article of mine originally published in "The Jazz Archivist" VOL. XIX (2005-2006) ISSN 1085-8415

“Now in one of my earliest tunes, New Orleans Blues, you can notice the Spanish tinge. In fact, if you can’t manage to put tinges of Spanish in your tunes, you will never be able to get the right seasoning, I call it, for jazz.”

-Jelly Roll Morton

When Morton spoke these words to Alan Lomax at the Library of Congress in 1938, his career had been relegated to a footnote in jazz history. It would take the rehabilitative efforts of Lomax, Lawrence Gushee, Bill Russell and others to restore him to his rightful place as a seminal figure in the music. Morton had come to the Library of Congress to re-establish a failing career and to assert his primacy as the “inventor” of jazz, so it is tempting to take much of what he said as hyperbole and braggadocio. But investigation of Morton’s bragging always reveals a truth at the center; he may often have been guilty of exaggeration, but not of outright deception. His reference here to the “Spanish Tinge” regards a supposed characteristic of early New Orleans jazz, a Latin or Afro-Caribbean strain. Many of Morton’s piano compositions do contain certain “Spanish” rhythmic features and melodic references. The presence of these musical devices in Morton’s work is easily verified by examination of his written scores. However notation is not particularly adept at conveying certain subtleties and nuances of phrasing. For this we must turn to the “fossil record” of his recordings and that of other early 20th century jazz musicians, which would indeed seem to reveal a “tinge,” or rhythmic lilt, that sets jazz music apart from other music of the day.

If there is, as Jelly Roll says, a “Spanish tinge” in New Orleans jazz, what might it be, precisely, and in what form does it manifest itself? It seems likely that Morton’s use of the term is not particularly specific, but rather refers to any number of musical characteristics, not all of them “Spanish” per se. One must keep in mind that during Morton’s time many musical devises that were considered exotic or out of the ordinary were assigned ethnic or national sources that may have had very inauthentic relationships with their true origins. In the case of the Spanish Tinge, the route taken was not a direct line of musical influence from Spain to New Orleans. Jelly Roll’s Spanish Tinge is more likely Afro-Cuban in origin.

Morton was not alone among early jazzmen in his interest in ‘Spanish’ music. W.C. Handy, in his autobiography “Father of the Blues” (Macmillan Company, New York, 1941, pp. 52-53) writes of purchasing sheet music for the Cuban Hymno Bayames and arranging it for his band while in Cuba in 1900. He writes of the effect of the habanera rhythm on dancers at an engagement in Memphis in 1909:

"During these nights at the Dixie Park I noticed something that struck me as a racial trait, and I immediately tucked it away for future use. It was the odd response of the (black) dancers to Will H. Tyer’s Maori. When we played this number and came to the habanera rhythm…I observed that there was a sudden, proud and graceful reaction to the rhythm. Was it an accident, or could it be traced to a real but hidden cause? I wondered. White dancers, as I had observed them, took the number in stride. I began to suspect that there was something Negroid in that beat, something that quickened the blood of the Dixie Park dancers. Well, there was a way to test it. If my suspicions were grounded, the same reaction should be manifest during the playing of La Paloma. We used that piece, and sure enough, there it was, that same calm yet ecstatic movement. (ibid. pp.97-98)"

Pamela J. Smith has written of the central role played by Cuba in 19th century Caribbean musical culture. In a sense, the acculturative processes that shaped Cuban music in the 19th century can be seen as predecessors to the cultural amalgam that later produced jazz. Mid 19th century Cuban music incorporated elements of Spanish and African folk music. Smith suggests a clear line of development from the habanera rhythm (a variant of which, the tresillo, is clearly present in Morton’s “New Orleans Blues”), which she suggests is “the basis of the danzon, the tango, the rhumba, and the guaracha” (Pamela J. Smith, Caribbean Influences on Early New Orleans Jazz, MA Thesis, Tulane University, 1986, pp. 47-48). These forms became tremendously popular and were heard outside of Cuba in Europe and the Americas from about 1850 on, first when New Orleans composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk assisted Cuban nationalist composer Nicholas Ruiz Escardero in publishing his work in Europe, and later when visiting European composer Sebastian Yradier incorporated the habanera in his compositions “El Arreglito” and the aforementioned “La Paloma.” “La Paloma,” in particular, quickly entered the repertoire of many popular orchestras. “It’s influence transcended the years. It was heard in the 1850s in Havana, the 1860s in Mexico, and still by the turn of the century in New Orleans” (Smith, p.55).

Congratulations if you've gotten this far. The article carries on in similar fashion for another 5,000 words or so, complete with musical examples and bibliography. My point though, and it's not at all something I came up with all by myself, is that there's a certain type of groove (or clave) in back of everything that comes out of New Orleans. This is true whether you're playing funk, zydeco, straight-ahead jazz or even klezmer, it all winds up with a bit of that second-line stutter in it somewhere. Some people call it 'the Big Fo.'" Bob French says it "ain't nothin' but a big fat stinky back-beat." I spend the rest of that article tying it to Afro-Cuban rhythmic organizing principles like the tressillo and the cinquillo. But the more I think about it, the more I'm convinced it is all of these things. And they've all been cooking together for a long, long time.

In a few weeks, I'll be taking my New Orleans band the Professors of Pleasure up to Vancouver, Canada to play the jazz festival there. Vancouver is a place (like Toronto) that gets a lot of mileage out of presenting itself as 'multicultural' and in fact this is a true thing if you just think in terms of the number of different 'cultures' represented there. There's really a lot, although 'multiculturalism' is a pretty recent developement. Fifty years ago the place was basically all WASP, with a small sprinkling of Chinese and Native Indian. In 300 years things will be pretty interesting.

New Orleans is not multicultural. It only has one culture; New Orleans culture. There are certainly different shades of New Orleans culture, Franco-African American, Anglo-African-American, Canary Islanders, Yats, Cajuns, Sicilians, Native American, Creole of Color etc. But they are different only in the sense that light viewed at different angles through a prism is different. And at the end of the day, everyone is on the same wavelength, and that's the South Louisiana wavelength. There are common threads running through the unified field of music, food, dance and architecture that tie everything together culturally in a way that takes hundreds of years to achieve. This, more than just common rhythms, is really what I mean.

Not For Us To Know

2008-05-06T14:28:00.001-07:00

Friday's performance at jazzfest was boffo. My general philosophy on these things is a Mel-Brooksian 'hope for the best, expect the worst' sort of thing and I'm sorry to say that at many festival stages my pessimism is rewarded. At the New Orleans festival though, I've never had a bad experience. Everything came off without a hitch (no small accomplishment at an event that can draw over a quarter-million people per weekend) great on-stage sound, professional, laid back stage crew. We had some serious wind gusts out of the northwest that threatened to blow everything onstage out onto Gentilly Boulevard, but we kept everything battened down with both clothespins and plexiglass (insert joke about 'scores tied, basses loaded' here).

The students played great and, for the most part, conducted themselves like pros. On big band gigs like this everybody's got to carry their own water, I don't have the time or the resources to babysit folks. But even the stage crew was impressed by how the band got there early and got right to it with the sound check.

In fact, things went so smoothly that we wound up starting early (well, on time actually, something that doesn't always happen at these big events) and the stage manager asked, amazingly, if we could do an extra ten minutes. Fortunately Matheson and I had worked up a couple of small combo things with the rhythm section (Joe Newman's "Cue-in the Blues" and Coleman Hawkins' contrafactum on the changes to Just Me, Just You, "Spotlight") so we got to blow a little bit together as well, something we haven't had a chance to do in years. I don't know if it was a new addition this year or if I just never noticed before, but the Gentilly Stage has a Jumbotron screen now. Doubtless when my huge head appeared on it there was a caption underneath that said "ego=actual size."

All in all, a very pleasurable fifty minutes, especially considering how much I normally hate playing outdoors. Special kudos to pianist Rachel Brotman for doing such a great job on the vocal to Alan's arrangement of Harold Arlen's "Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea," trumpeter Joel Greco for his turn on Ray Anthony's Al Hirt feature "The Man With the Horn," and everybody on the band for playing tight like that, in particular new bassist Samantha Silverstein and old hand drummer Geoffrey Burmeister.

Having Alan around facilitated the continuation of discussions we've been having about jazz and jazz musicians for thirty two years. Alan was particularly gratified by the enthusiastic reception that traditional jazz here gets from such a wide demographic. After our set we walked over to the Economy Hall Traditional Jazz tent to see fellow Tulane faculty member John Joyce play drums with his band the Louisiana Repertory Ensemble and Alan commented on how nice it was to see the place packed with hundreds of people, young, old, and in between, dancing and grooving to the music. Alan was also able to renew his aquaintance with trumpeter Willie Singleton, whom he had last seen over 20 years ago with the Mercer Ellington Orchestra, as well as the rest of the cats on John's band.

One of the things we talked about was the much cherished notion (among musicians, anyway) that jazz is somehow the last surviving meritocracy, that politics and luck and self promotion are not necessary to achieve recognition. The cream rises to the top. Just being the best player is enough.

This is clearly far from the case now, when often it is people who best understand the workings of grant-writing and the machinations of jazz festival politics who get the most exposure. Some of these people are also great players. Some are not (and some, as a prominent alto saxophonist once put it to me, could benefit from spending less time writing grants and more time in the practise room). Excellence in and of itself will definitely get you a heavy rep among working jazz musicians (who are in a position to know who's playing and who's not) but that doesn't necessarily translate into a high profile with the listening public.

It's tempting to think that these are developments of a cynical, modern age; that back in some now-vanished golden age of jazz, genius was always acknowleged. Not so. Matheson collects vintage Downbeat magazines, and their front covers feature all kinds of 'next big things' that no one remembers now. And iconic figures that we currently revere as jazz masters are sometimes not featured at all.

This leads me to suspect that it's hubris in the extreme to make generalizations about where jazz is 'going,' who is and is not 'moving the music forward,' and which players are the new 'modern masters.' I'd especially advise skepticism about statements of this kind made by critics. Their past record in this area has been less than stellar.

History will sort itself out in the long run. But in the long run, we'll be gone. Enjoy the music as it happens. It'd be a hell of a thing to find out from beyond the grave that the new 'golden age of jazz' is right now and you, like some critics, missed it.

Alan Matheson Returns.

2008-04-27T09:59:00.000-07:00

Around this time last year, I wrote about my old friend Alan Matheson's visit to New Orleans.
http://vancouverjazz.com/jdoheny/2007/04/alan-matheson-in-new-orleans.html

Alan is a trumpeter-pianist-arranger-composer-bandleader-educator-jazz-historian whom I've know for over 30 years. That's a lot of hyphens in one descriptor but believe me when I tell you that he does each and every one of those things exceedingly well. When I started developing the jazz performance programs at Tulane he was the first guy I thought of. We now have quite a few of his arrangements and compositions in our library, both for big band and various types of small combos.On his visit last year we used him in-concert as featured soloist on four arrangements he'd written for Clarke Terry and the Vancouver Festival Orchestra, which Alan directs. The arrangements were in honor of Louis Armstrong's 100 'birthday' in 2000 (Armstrong was actually born in 1901), and were of tunes closely associated with Armstrong (Intimacy of the Blues, When It's Sleepytime Down South, Indiana, and Is It True What They Say About Dixie). The concert, with Alan playing Clarke's parts, went so well that I got the idea in my head to take the whole thing out to jazzfest in 2008.

Well, that's just what's happening. Alan will be appearing with the Tulane University Jazz Orchestra and myself, May 2nd at the Gentilly Stage at 11:35 a.m. If that's too early (or too pricey) for you, we'll be presenting the same program, absolutely free, this coming Tuesday April 29th at 8:00p.m. in the Dixon Theater on the Tulane Campus. In addition to the four selections mentioned above, we'll also be doing a couple of other Matheson charts ( Swing With Byng, a Matheson original, and Alan's arrangement of Harold Arlen's Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, featuring Rachel Brotman on vocals) and the Al Hirt classic The Man With The Horn, featuring recent Tulane grad Joel Greco on trumpet.

Be there, or be square.

The Ragged Edge of Fatigue.

2008-04-14T13:55:00.000-07:00

Man, I'm beat. To my socks.

I'm trying to figure out a way to give a sense of the musical and cultural life of New Orleans (my small corner of it anyway) without just posting a laundry list of events and gigs, but it's hard. Most of the year (I'm discovering), it's just not possible for me to see and do everything I want to.

So, I did manage to take one of my students to both the Bayou Steppers second-line parade and the scaled-down version of the Bayou St. John Super Sunday Mardi Gras Indian function last Sunday ( I've been encouraging my students to get out into the city and attend these events, but they often cite transportation difficulties, or concerns that they will be conspicuous in their caucasian-ness. Finally I just started saying, "look. I've got room in the car. Meet me in front of the music building and you can come with me"). On a similar note, I was again appearing with pianist Fredrick Sanders at Sweet Lorraine's a week ago friday (and again Saturday at a private party, with new-bassist-in-town Rob Kohler) when Fredrick's ex-piano student, Jon Cohen, dropped in, and was invited to sit in. A great experience for Jon, getting a chance to play with a world class rhythm section (bassist David Pulphus and drummer Julian Garcia). Hell, it was a great experience for me. I often feel like I'm in very fast company in New Orleans, and that I need to play my very best just to keep up.

Pursuant to that, I skipped most of French Quarter Fest this past weekend to spend time in the practise room tightening up the music for tonight's CD release (7:00p.m., Dixon Theater on the Tulane campus) with the Professors of Pleasure. Hard on the heels of that is a gig with John Dobry's band (really the Professors, but with Tulane jazz program grad Will Buckingham on bass, subbing for his teacher, Jim Markway) at the Hi-Ho Lounge on St. Claude avenue thursday April 17th. Then we'll be well stuck into various jazzfest gigs (including one on May 2nd with the Tulane Jazz Orchestra) , term-end concerts (April 29th for the Big Band, April 30th for the combos), and final exams. Then it'll be time to get ready to go on the road this summer with the Professors.

As my father used to say, "no rest for the wicked, and the righteous don't need any."

A Full Calendar.

2008-03-17T10:23:00.000-07:00

Don't ever get the impression when I don't check in here that there's nothing going on in New Orleans. If anything it's just the opposite; when I have free time to write (or 'blog,' as you youngsters call it) I'll often sit down and knock out a long opus, but when things are popping you won't hear from me or if you do, it'll be short and sweet, like the last few posts.

Let's see; yesterday was Super Sunday, the biggest day in the Mardi Gras Indian calender, a massive city-wide meeting of the tribes in Central City. This year things kicked off at the corner of Washington and Lasalle, an intersection with much history and atmosphere. On the downtown lakeside corner is A. L. Davis Playground, formerly known (and still referred to by everyone in this neighborhood) as Shakespeare Park. Now that the FEMA trailers have been moved out, it's holy ground is once again present for use in all things Sacred and Indian. Further down Lasalle is the wreckage of the Dew Drop Inn, once the most happening African American nightspot in the south, host of numerous long running performances by Ray Charles, James Brown, and Jackie Wilson, as well as frequent appearances by Huey Smith, Guitar Slim, Fats Domino, Bobby Marchan (who also hosted the Inn's famous drag shows, as the Lovely Roberta) Eddie Bo...virtually every New Orleans performer of note worked the Dew Drop at one time or another. On the river side of the intersection, on Washington, is St. Joseph's Cemetary, where trumpeter and bandleader Ernest "Doc" Paulin was recently laid to rest in one of the most splendiferous, horse-drawn, dirge-walking old school jazz funerals the city has seen in many moons, and, since Katrina, this town has seen a lot of jazz funerals.

On the uptown lakeside corner stands the C.J. Peete housing project (or what's left of it), formerly known as the Magnolia houses, incubator of famous New Orleans musicians from clarinetist Alvin Batiste all the way to the late Souljah Slim, formerly Magnolia Slim and devoted son to Ms. Linda of the 9 Times Social and Pleasure Club, first thread in a series of oblique, glancing connections between people like Tuba Phil (of Rebirth fame), Shorty Brown Hustle, Fifth Ward Weebie, Lumar Leblanc (of the Hot 8) and Junie B (last seen at the Parkway Tavern). New Orleans is really and truly a small town.

Pre-Katrina, DJs used to host parties with speakers on the downtown side balconies of the Magnolia. People would dance and sweat in the summer heat until the pavement was slick, and the DJ would give marching orders to the young women to "walk it like a model" and "shake it on a stick." Now the houses are boarded up, awaiting demolition, even though they are sturdy and could be easily rehabbed. This in a town with possibly the worst shortage of affordable housing America has seen since the civil war. A situation best described with General Honore's famous line, "y'all are stuck on stupid."

Sunday March 9th was the 4th annual parade of the "Keepin It Real" social and pleasure club, running straight down Orleans Avenue from Moss street, directly through the center of my neighborhood. A fast moving parade. We followed it as far as North Broad and Esplanade, then walked home for dinner.

February 29th was a clinic with Terence Blanchard sideman-tenorist Brice Winston, and the students from the Monk Institute graduate program next door at Loyola. The Monk Institute (mainly through the machinations of education co-ordinator and all-round good egg Jonathan Bloom) has been extremely good to us at Tulane, extending all kinds of invitations and opportunities for my students to participate in once-in-a-lifetime opportunities such as clinics with Ron Carter and Kenny Barron. Brice (who is now relocated post-Katrina in his hometown of Tuscon Arizona) came over and tore it up with the students, who are very, very good musicians. I mean very VERY good. Gordon Au (trumpet), Joseph Johnson (bass) Johnaye Kendrick (voice), Vadim Neselovskyi (piano), Jake Saslow (saxophone), Colin Stranahan (drums) and local boy made good Davy Mooney on guitar are sho' nuff heavy players who can hold their own with anybody out there. Everybody in town needs to tighten up their game while these folks are on the set, and they'll be here for at least another year.

So there it is. Jazz on the street. Jazz in the clubs. Jazz in the Academy. In this corner of the world, it's all of a piece.

A Love Supreme

2008-02-29T14:55:00.000-08:00

I recently saw the DVD of a performance of this work by the Branford Marsalis Quartet. My first thought was "man, these guys got brass balls!" To perform this iconic piece...I mean, the Coltrane recording always seemed like kind of the last word on the subject to me. Even the live version from Japan is a pale reflection compared to the original, which seems carved in stone, like Mount Rushmore.

The brilliance of the Marsalis concert recording is in the way they make it their own. Branford retains the basic four-movement construction of the piece, and some of it's salient features (the bass line in "Acknowledgement, for example) but doesn't duplicate Coltrane's signature melody in that first movement, instead, coming up with one of his own. Simple, uncomplicated, and clear as a country creek.

Coming hard on the heels of my experience of the Branford version was a performance, last thursday, of the same work at the Holy Name of Jesus Church on the Loyola campus. The saxophonist was my opposite number at Loyola, professor Tony Dagradi, along with bassist Roland Guerin, drummer Troy Davis, and former Tulane piano instructor Fredrick Sanders (he recently turned over his chair to Jesse Mcbride). The performance was equally interesting. Troy Davis, for instance, is a very un-Elvin-like drummer (think Shelly Manne with a touch of Philly Joe) yet he managed to make his own unique statement in the drum solo which introduces the "Pursuance" movement. Guerin played mostly arco in the bass solo which introduces "Resolution." Sanders can play very outside, but his excursions are less the quartal harmony of Mcoy Tyner and more the cluster methods derived from the late Alvin Batiste's "Root Progression Method" teachings. Since Fredrick was one of Alvin's many students, this comes as no surprise. Dagradi is, of course, New Orlean's Mr. Mainstream. He plays very chromatically, and his conception is heavily influenced by Coltrane. Yet at the same time it contains all the lessons he learned over many years of playing and recording with esoterics like Professor Longhair and Clarence "Frogman" Henry. A very interesting performance, in an acoustically (and physically) beautiful space.

Brice Winston did a clinic here at Tulane today with the students from the Monk Institute. I'll report on that soon, but right now I've got to go home and take a quick nap before tonight's gig.

Let's Go Get Em.

2008-02-18T15:20:00.001-08:00

Lately I'm noticing more "little chiefs" at Mardi Gras Indian gatherings (these were taken on Carnival Day at about 11:00a.m by my wife Darlene at the corner of 1st and Loyola). Children have always been part of Indian culture, but it seems like I'm seeing a lot more kids at these things post-Katrina. I'm guessing this is a deliberate move on the part of the old timers to get more children and grandchildren involved in the culture. After the Federal Flood, many of us were worried about the continued viability of these things, and while this is still a matter of concern (Backstreet Cultural Museum curator Sylvester Francis, for instance, feels that the real crunch will come in about 10 years time, when the current generation begins finding it more difficult, because of age and infirmity, to participate) I think it's possible we underestimated the tenacity of these traditions. New Orleans has survived a lot of calamity, including devastating fires, previous (though less severe) flooding, and yellow fever epidemics that annihilated much of the population. The Army Corps of Engineers and the Bush Whitehouse are just the next in a long line of bad news.

Anyway, it was a real hoot to hear those kids chanting in response to their elders. The refrain "let's go get em" is a warriors chant, and a call to arms. To my ears it takes on additional meaning of hope for the future, when sung in the high, clear voices of children.

Fat Tuesday

2008-02-05T15:28:00.000-08:00

I'm going to keep this short and sweet, since I'm dead tired, sunburnt, and sitting here in my underwear and a purple and green Applejack 'pimp' hat that I caught at Zulu. Beat to my socks, in other words, so I'll forgo the usual expository stuff about Carnival, it's traditions and roots in various communities within the city, how, much to the disbelief of visitors schooled on "Girls Gone Wild" videos, it is actually a festival largely for the benefit of children. I write stuff like that every year, and you can read it here:
http://vancouverjazz.com/jdoheny/2005_02_01_archive.html
and here:http://vancouverjazz.com/jdoheny/2006_03_01_archive.html
and here:http://vancouverjazz.com/jdoheny/2007_02_01_archive.html

A quick aside: I just this minute looked out my front door and saw a crowd of people dressed like Arthurian royalty walk by. I can hear our neighbor Ms. Vera hollering "Awrite baby! Lookin' good!"

Anyway, Zulu was a kick. We met transplanted California bassist Rob Kohler and his family at Jackson and South Saratoga this morning. His wife Michelle proved to be a coconut catching fool, and his kids just loved the parade.

My wife Darlene, while she can't catch coconuts worth a damn, always finds some Indians, this time at the corner of 1st and Loyola.

The big disappointment of the season was the all-women Muses parade last Thursday. We have a number of friends in Muses and were really looking forward to it. Darlene collects the little shoe bracelet things they throw every year, and last year I was able to snag her the coveted 'shoe' throw (a hand-decorated shoe that is Muses equivalent of the Zulu coconut). I like to think I caught it cause I'm cute, but it was probably just somebody I knew. Hard to tell behind the mask.

Anyway, I had a rehearsal that Thursday night that conflicted with Muses. Then the parade got rained out, and rescheduled for friday at eight-ish. We got there at seven thirty, suffered through interminably boring, honky parades like Krewe De Etat and Morpheus, and finally gave up around nine thirty. It was cold. Our feet hurt. The crowds were getting thick, drunk and stupid. We went home.

Turned out they rolled at ten thirty.

We were so disappointed to miss Muses, it's giant fiber-optic shoe float, and all it's associated walking krewes. I felt like Darren Mcgavin's character in A Christmas Story, after the Bumpus dogs eat their turkey. No shoe float! No Baby Dolls! No Bearded Oysters! No Big Easy Rollergirls! No Camel Toe Steppers! Gone, all gone!

Until next year. There's always next year.

At the Uptown Gallery

2008-01-24T11:46:00.001-08:00

On January 12th I played a nice little gig with newly-arrived-in-town bassist Rob Kohler (a killer player who's on the faculty at the Stanford University jazz camp, among his many other accomplishments). The bass-tenor-sax duo format can be challenging. Each player has to cover so much, you feel like a one-legged man at an ass- kicking contest. But with Rob on board it was deeply satisfying.

But I'm really here to tout my wife Darlene's show opening, which was the event we were playing at (yes, I got the gig by sleeping with the artist).

Darlene has really been coming into her own as an artist in New Orleans. The spiritual and artistic vibe in the city has been a real inspiration to her, sending her work off into all kinds of interesting tangents and processes. She's produced quite a few pieces inspired by the pantheon of Voodoo Lwas, and another series with an egg-in-nest motif. Concurrent to these themes, she's been tinkering around with actual physical eggs, using the methods of her Ukrainian ancestors to create decorated "Pysanki" eggs with voodooistic themes. What I've come to think of as "Ukrainian-Creole" art.

The show at the Uptown Gallery (which is up until February 6th, the day after Mardi Gras) is called "Natural Abstractions; Gifts of Spirits." A number of the prints were created using photographs of the interior of cut logs from trees felled by Katrina in our old 13th ward neighborhood. Darlene uses altered versions of the photographs to etch plates from which the limited edition prints are hand-pulled.

Works by Darlene Bigus Doheny are showing at the Uptown Gallery, 139 Broadway, right where Broadway meets the levee.
http://www.uptowngallerynola.com/
http://www.darlenebigusdoheny.com/

Happy Birthday Dr. King.

2008-01-15T15:10:00.000-08:00

Like many Americans, I was profoundly moved by Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech. I was only 10 years old when I heard it for the first time. My father was involved in the civil rights movement, and he always made it clear that slavery was the original sin of this country, and that racial discrimination was a stain on the national character. Only a fool (or a blind man) would fail to see the enormous strides we've made as a nation in this area since 1963. And only a fool or a blind man (or the many prominent republicans who are won't to opine that racism 'just isn't that big a deal' anymore) could fail to see that race is at the back of practically everything in this country.

As a white man, this is clearly not my area of expertise. Yet I can't help but notice that the apologists for things like racial profiling, and the folks who insist that racism 'isn't that big a deal,' or that, most incredible of all, white men are now subject to discrimination (shut out as they are, poor babies, from the circles of power in business, politics, and the arts) all seem to be white guys.

How do they come by this information? Who tells them that people of color no longer suffer discrimination of any kind in this country?

I'm guessing their yard man.

All sarcasm aside, I can't help but think that there's something unseemly about white people holding forth on this subject. Our complete lack of subjective experience in this area would seem to dictate that we keep our traps shut. Sort of the same thing as men deigning to sit in judgement on women and abortion (my favorite line for that subject is "it all comes down to when in the process you believe life begins, and I believe that it begins when men start minding their own fucking business"). So I'm going to leave you with Dr. King himself opining on the subject, and button my caucasian cakehole.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbUtL_0vAJk

The People Keep A'Comin, And The Train Done Gone.

2007-12-24T09:13:00.000-08:00

I've been spending a lot of time in church the last week or so.

I'm not a particularly religious person, apart from a rather moony obsession with Catholic martyrdom broght on by reading Joan of Arc at age 11. In my twenties I went through some periods of hard core athiesm (easy to do when you're young and are convinced you're not going to die) and some extremely dark solipsism towards the end of my drinking and drugging career in my late thirties. Sobriety brings most people to an appreciation of a greater spiritual connection (the 'higher power' of 'God as we understand him' of Alcoholics Anonymous and other related 12 step programs) and I'm no exception. I'm also a lot more comfortable with "I don't know" as an answer to life's great questions, like "what happens when we die"? (I don't know. But I rest easy in the knowlege that I will find out, and probably sooner than I might like).

I'm not comfortable with church-based dogma, or with the neo-con crowd of pinch-faced, 'socially conservative' jesus jumpers. But I think it's important to make distinctions in this area, and not buy into the current 'family values' trope, the one that says God is a Republican. I'm old enough to remember when certain churches (most prominently the Southern Christian Leadership Conference) were incubators for civil rights protest, the anti-war movement, and miriad forms of civil disobedience in the service of liberal social agendas.

Of course, with some exceptions, these were African American churches. Ebenezer Baptist, African Methodist Episcopalian, and all the small, storefront outfits, short on money but long on names (the Two-Seeds-In-The-Spirit-Holy-Ghost-Bring-It-Round-Congregationalists etc.), that still, in many New Orleans neighborhoods (alond with Social and Pleasure Clubs), perform the kinds of community-unifying, socially-nurturing, care-for-the-sick-and-bury-the-dead-mind-the-kids-while-mom-works-the-graveyard-shift-at-the-parkinglot functions that George W. Bush style 'compassionate conservatism' does not.

I feel at home in most black churches. Because I have such a deep love for gospel music, I've spent a lot of time in them, going back to the mid seventies, and in all that time I can honestly say that not once has anyone, ever, attempted the kind of glazed-eyed, Moonie-style conversion job that various honky-church minions will try to lay on you for just walking through an airport. At Abbysinian Baptist in Harlem in the late 70s (before it became so infested with tourists that people had to be requested to not just rudely stomp out of the church right after the choir finished (but before the sermon) as if it were an ABBA concert) the most people ever said to me was to warmly thank me for attending, even though in those days I was likely to be poisonously hung-over on a Sunday morning, and thus in obvious need of spiritual enlightenment. But no one ever pushed the party line on me and in retrospect I can't help but think that my being allowed an unfettered, unmolested appreciation of the powerful message of hope and light in that music lead me, at least partially, to the great gift of sobriety I now live my life within. Even at the real serious stomp-and-shout-and speak-in-tongues storefront spiritual churches, no one ever pushed me to participate. The line I heard over and over was "everyone comes in their own way." And while it's true that some of the larger, mainstream black churches are socially conservative in their stands on things like gay marriage, the attitude on the street and in the 'hood is much more likely to be live and let live. People who've been at the business end of serious discrimination are much less likely to be interested in dishing it out themselves.

I'm lucky I'm married to someone who digs this stuff as much as I do, and thus has no objection to schlepping around town from one questionable neighborhood to another to sit on hard pews through long sermons, and to stomp and clap with the congregations. We never miss Rev. Louise Dejean (pictured above) and this year caught her with the Mahalia Jackson Choir, which is composed of students from various highschools throughout the city, including some familiar faces from right here in our neighborhood. I have a student who plays in the worship band at a Central City church. And this year we finally made the trek over to the North Shore to catch my good friend and colleague, pianist (and organist) Fredrick Sanders leading a worship band heavily stacked with 'A' list jazz players, including ex Betty Carter drummer Troy Davis and bassist Roland Guerin.

Nothing beats a little 'churching up' around this time of year, especially if one is lucky enough to live, as we do, in the midst of a rich, vernacular American culture like this one. I'll leave you with this quote from jJames Baldwin's "The Fire Next Time," which says it all better that I ever could:

"THERE is no music like that music, no drama like the drama of the saints rejoicing, the sinners moaning, the tambourines racing, and all those voices coming together and crying holy unto the Lord. I have never seen anything to equal the fire and excitement that sometimes, without warning, fill a church, causing the church, as Leadbelly and so many others have testified, to "rock." Nothing that has happened to me since equals the power and the glory that I sometimes felt when . . . the church and I were one. Their pain and their joy were mine, and mine were theirs . . . and their cries of "Amen!" and "Hallelujah!" and "Yes, Lord!," "Praise His name!," "Preach it, brother!" sustained and whipped on my solos until we all became equal, wringing wet singing and dancing, in anguish and rejoicing, at the foot of the altar.
There was a zest and a joy and a capacity for facing and surviving disaster that are very moving and very rare. Perhaps we were, all of us—pimps, whores, racketeers, church members, and children—bound together by the nature of our oppression. If so, within these limits we sometimes achieved with each other a freedom that was close to love. I remember, anyway, church suppers and outings, and, later, after I left the church, rent and waistline parties where rage and sorrow sat in the darkness and did not stir, and we ate and drank and talked and laughed and danced and forgot all about "the man."
This is the freedom that one hears in some gospel songs, for example, and in jazz. In all jazz, and especially in the blues, there is something tart and ironic, authoritative and double edged. White Americans do not understand the depths out of which such an ironic tenacity comes but they suspect that the force is sensual. To be sensual, I think; is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of living to the breaking of bread."

New CD

2007-12-03T13:14:00.000-08:00

Finally, after much delay, the new CD is out. As anyone who's ever recorded a jazz album can attest, putting it in the can is the easy part. Releasing 'em is hard.

This one was recorded in a single day (february 26th, 2007) at Piety Street Studios here in New Orleans, down in the upper 9th ward. It's a beautiful studio, housed in what was once a post office, then the offices of the Louisiana Association of Retarded Citizens. Honest. Studio owner/head-engineer Mark Bingham says they still get mail addressed to that entity.

Mark, by the way, is quite possibly the best engineer I've ever worked with. He got his start in the late 60's, as an assistant engineer at Columbia's old studios on East 34th Street, which were housed in an old church. Miles recorded 'Kind of Blue' in that room. Mark is conversant with all the latest Pro-Tools techie gadgetry, but also brings with him that deep, old-school understanding of acoustics and mic placement that is a rapidly dying art. When we were mixing the record, I had a list of about four glitches that I figured he'd fix digitally on the computer. Three of them he repaired simply by manipulating EQ in some totally incomprehensible (to me anyway) bit of ju-ju that made it sound exactly like we'd nailed it in the studio. The fourth clam (bassist Jim Markway's hand slipped during a bass solo, giving him an E natural when he'd been going for an Eb) he grudgingly booted up the Pro-Tools. "This is cheating," he said. "But I guess your chances of getting everybody back in here for a re-take in the next two hours are pretty slim, huh?"

So, for better or for worse, here it is. Live off the floor (except for one Eb).

Track previews are available on Myspace:

http://myspace.com/johndohenyandtheprofessorsofpleasure

Additional promotional bumph available on my web-site:

http://www.johndoheny.com/JDstore.htm

Online ordering at the Louisiana Music Factory, 210 Decatur St. New Orleans LA

http://www.louisianamusicfactory.com/showoneprod.asp?ProductID=5713

9 Times Parade

2007-11-23T10:48:00.001-08:00

While the Times-Picayune was busy covering the Oak Street Po Boy Festival up in the Isle of Denial (the TP, as we affectionately call it, likes to cuddle up to it's advertisers, and the business owners up in the Carrollton-Universities area are biggies)) my student Laura Christensen (who took these pictures) and I attended a much different kind of celebration down in the Ninth Ward.

The genesis of the Nine Times Social Aid and Pleasure Club has been well documented in the Neighborhood Story Project's first post-Katrina publication "Coming Out The Door For The Ninth Ward." The work the folks at the Project are doing is highly commendable, and I stand in awe of their achievement. At the same time, one wonders what kind of a society we have created that would make this necessary. I've read (and thoroughly enjoyed) every one of the Project's books. They resonated with me because I recognize the people in them. Some of the authors live (or lived, pre-Katrina) just a few hundred yards from me. But I don't think a similar reader-dynamic is at work in the inclusion of the books in several high-school and university English curricullums. I suspect they are included to give white, middle class students a view of a culture and people completely alien to them. Most suburban white kids experience of African-American culture is limited to the porno-violence of music videos. They tend to either idealize black people or fear them as 'other.' Whenever I encounter this attitude, I'm always saddened. What a terrible, restrictive way to live.

Many Americans live this way, and most aren't even aware of it. They simply automatically avoid certain neighborhoods, and operate out of an instinctive, irrational fear of black people. They will also strenuously deny that this is so, and insist that they are 'not racist.' These are often the same people who instigate (or at least are passively involved in) all sorts of questionable policies, behaviours, and attitudes about race, insisting that these things are 'not racist.' How could they be, when they themselves are 'not racists'? Consequently all of their attitudes and actions must be beyond reproach. It's a worldview that makes excellent cover for the most horrid behaviour.

But back to the parade. I'll let the Nine Times people speak for themselves, as they do in the NSP books:

"A blessing from somewhere is always good."To be thankful for your blessing you have to speak what it is. We thank God for raising us in the Ninth Ward's Desire Housing Project. We couldn't ask for anything different. Many places don't get a chance to be mentioned, so when the opportunity came for us to write about the village, we took it to let the world know the blessing that came from Desire, the third biggest housing project in the United States.Images of drug dealers and violence are regularly put on projects all over the world. Until you actually go there and see, you will never know the love, the family, and the potential that exists in there-not only in sports, but educationally and culturally as well. We have a chance to say some things about the ones who otherwise may never have been recognized-the old timers that paved the way without knowing it.

Bringing some pride back to the community is a job for someone, and you never know who it is or what it is. It doesn't have to be a super speaker on black history all the time. We established Nine Time Social and Pleasure Club in 1998 as a second line club with togetherness, familyhood, and fun. One thing about the tradition is, everyone wants to parade where God raised them up-whether it's uptown, downtown, Carrollton, Algiers, or New Orleans East. The Ninth Ward is where we're from and that's where our smoke is coming from.

The first year we paraded, spirits awoke and we had some fun in that mighty Desire. You can imagine how much it hurt us as former tenants, and now club members of Nine Times, when the project was torn down with no future plans on what would be done with the village.

After Katrina, Nine Times Social and Pleasure Club members were displaced everywhere. Like so many others, we were doing the best to communicate. Once the majority of our members were back in town, we began to rebuild our club and plan for another parade. We also came together to write this book. While we've planned and participated in a lot of events together, we'd never done anything like this before. It wasn't always easy-sometimes it seemed like it would never end-but the process strengthened us to share some of our most important memories. We wrote about how we made it through our childhood in Desire and grew up to be independent. We looked back at our early experiences with second lining and traced the different paths that led us to join together as Nine Times

--Raphael Anthony Peter Parker, Jr.

Troy Materre

Gerald Platenburg

Corey Woods

Michael Simmons

Jean Nelson

Charlena Matthews

The parade was a magnificent experience, made all the more profound by the still-extant devastation of the surrounding neighborhood. The president has continually broken the promises he made in Jackson Square in September 2005. He is not a man of his word. But for the past two years, Raphael, Troy, Gerald, Corey, Michael, Jean, Charlena and the other members of 9 Times have made good on theirs, providing a shining focal point for the community and an inspiring example for us all. My hat is off to you. You are a collective example of the very best aspects of the humanity we all share.

Please check out the Neighborhood Story Project website. You'll be glad you did.

http://www.neighborhoodstoryproject.org/index.html

In the 'Hood.

2007-11-10T10:45:00.000-08:00

Katrina has taught me a great deal about the illusory nature of modern life. You think you're safe and secure, cruising through life, snug in your house or walking in the business district of a large, modern city with highrise office buildings and streetcars and electricity and WiFi access. But in reality you are skating on the thinnest of ice, and when you break through you fall and fall. We in New Orleans now join that special fraternity of humans who have seen the veil pierced; by earthquake or tsunami, war or famine. We can never look at that cityscape again without seeing it reduced to a scene from Goya or Bosch; fire and flood, the apocalypso with a boogie beat.

We also understand that the illusion is necessary. You need it. You need to be able to feel 'safe as houses,' even if it's just whistling past the graveyard. And I don't employ that cliche lightly, because at the bottom of all fear lies the fear of death. That's why New Orleanians dance at funerals. We know that horse-drawn carriage from D.W. Rhodes is waiting, literally or figuratively, for all of us someday. So as long as we're here, let's shake a tail feather.

This is the duality of conciousness that allows me to enjoy a day like today. On one level I know, for instance, that young Anthony Placide was shot dead just four blocks from here last spring. I heard the shot that killed him. I also know that around the same time a fine young woman (I'm ashamed to say I've forgotten her name, but I recall many people speaking well of her) was minding her own business sitting on a bar stool at Pal's lounge, just a block from where I'm sitting, at the corner of St. Philip and North Rendon (so close I can walk out on my porch and read the sign out front) when some alien being in human form slit her throat from ear to ear for no reason at all.

But today is...a beautiful day. It's sunny, in the mid seventies (low twenties for you Celsius worshippers) and the air smells of sweet olive and confederate jasmine. A little earlier, as I was sitting out on the porch talking with neighbors, we thought we heard music from a parade; the thud of a drum, the spangle of a trumpet. I even walked down to the corner to see if I could figure out which direction it was coming from, but no soap. While I was down there I said hello to the lady who lives in the house on the downtown, riverside corner of Hagan and Dumaine. It's an unremarkable looking house made remarkable by the odd, sculture-like ironwork constructions that adorn it's doors and windows. On the Dumain street side there's one that looks like a giant eye.

Two weeks ago, this same woman stopped Darlene and I to tell us that her mother had passed. Her mother was a tiny, bird-like African-American lady who always told us to "have a blessed day" when we walked by. We expressed our condolences, and the woman said, "my moms always commented on how good you two looked together." On my way back to the house, the bells at Our Lady of Holy Rosary on Esplanade Avenue began to peal.

I'm sure some of you are thinking I'm nuts, or deluded, or avoiding the tough realities of urban life. Maybe you're thinking I'm a fool for living in a place like this and that I should move somewhere 'safer.' But you know what? There ain't no such place. You can move to Kansas and live in a subterranian bunker, or even someplace with universal health care and politicians who don't try to steal the fillings out of your teeth, and you could still slip getting out of the tub and crack your skull. And even if you somehow avoid that, eventually, you're gonna die motherfucker, and that's a natural fact.

Me, I'm taking my wife to see Taj Mahal at Tipitina's tonight, and we're gonna cut some steps.