New Orleans' place in the future of jazz uncertain

[Lois Gilbert]

NEW ORLEANS - At the Palm Court Jazz Cafe, it sounds as if people ought to be dancing. Glasses should be clinking against plates of jambalaya. Laughter should be bouncing off the white floor and pouring out into the French Quarter.

Instead, the quartet on stage is playing for half its normal wage to a polite crowd of about 20 perched mostly at the bar. The music stays the same, but the sounds and sights of a Crescent City jazz show have changed since hurricanes rocked the city.

It's a regular sight at local jazz clubs since hurricanes rocked the city, tossing jazz musicians around the country. They're in Houston; Austin, Texas; Atlanta; Memphis, Tenn; Portland, Ore.; and New York. They're playing for jazz-starved crowds and making good money. And while the city slowly rebuilds, it isn't clear who'll come back to rebuild the cradle of jazz.

"The ones who can find a way back, will," said Palm Court owner Nina Buck, who reopened the club within weeks of Hurricane Katrina. "Some might not, and we're going to miss them."

New Orleans isn't just the historic home of jazz; until last August, it determined the future of jazz. Young musicians came here to get their start and learn from old masters. Its schools, such as the University of New Orleans and the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, taught them skills. Its clubs taught them how to perform. Its streets were friendly to musicians trying to make a buck.

"This was the greatest place in the world to play music," said Jim Markway, a bass player whose home near the 17th Street Canal was destroyed. "I lost everything - my community, my instruments. My neighborhood looks like Hiroshima. How do you reconstitute that? A culture?"

Club owners and musicians say the first step is to find moderately priced housing for musicians. The Jazz Foundation of America, a New York-based nonprofit that works to find housing, employment and health care for jazz and blues musicians, has taken hundreds of calls from displaced New Orleanians. The rental market is tight, and services are limited, so most are seeking homes elsewhere, said Eleanor King, the foundation's office manager.

"The opportunity before Katrina was to come here and learn from the old guys first hand," said Jay Christman, the manager at Snug Harbor, a world-renowned club outside the French Quarter. "If those guys don't come back, can't afford it, there won't be a reason to be here."

Many clubs, including major tourist draws such as Preservation Hall and Tipitina's, are still closed or open only some nights. At Snug Harbor, musicians are playing four nights a week for 10 to 70 people.

"New Orleans will always be sentimental stomping grounds," said George Brumat, the club's owner. "I expect all this to work itself out, but this could be serious."

With clubs in other cities paying top-dollar for authentic New Orleans jazz musicians, there's less reason to come back. Some musicians - notably, Cyril Neville, the drummer from the famed The Neville Brothers and Uptown Allstars - have already said they won't return.

"I've kind of made up my mind that I'll buy a house in Houston and keep a house in New Orleans. I'll probably go back and forth the rest of my life," said trumpet player Kermit Ruffins, who's renting in Houston. "You've got to support your family, and I'm getting so many gigs here, it's ridiculous."

So New Orleans waits - for housing to become available, for musicians to return, for clubs to reopen, for tourists to visit, for jazz schools to open, for mentoring to resume, for music to fill the streets again.

WWOZ-90.7 FM, the local public jazz station, is waiting to get back on the air full time. Station manager David Freedman said the future of jazz in New Orleans will work itself out "just like the levees worked out."

"People are saying the musicians can't just leave New Orleans?" he said. "Like hell they can't."

He wants promises that local character and neighborhoods will be preserved. He wants mobilization from arts organizations to draw back musicians and their students. He wants jazz back before it settles into pockets around the country.

"We need a common place and critical mass," Freedman said. "We're going to lose some, but our job is to minimize the loss, before they lay roots wherever they are."

Wherever the musicians have gone may change the sound of jazz. Whatever the dominant sounds and techniques are in Texas, Oregon or Georgia, you can expect to hear that in the music, local jazz watchers say.

"When you get bands playing club gigs, concert halls, they lose that primitive vitality after a while," Freedman said. "They've gotten slick, but lost their touch of growing up in New Orleans."

Still, some musicians say New Orleans has survived wind and flood, and jazz will survive, too. In the 1920s, Chicago was the hot spot for jazz, but the legacy remains in New Orleans. Even now, they say, New York makes jazz stars; New Orleans makes history by sending people to New York.

At least audiences around the country might grow interested in New Orleans culture and music, said Leroy Jones, a trumpet player who's working the New Orleans circuit with his girlfriend, trombone player Katja Toivola.

"The future of jazz is still here," said Jones, who performs often at Palm Court in the French Quarter. "It's different from every place else. After people like us get it re-established, everyone else will come back."

So, Jones and his quartet climb back on stage at the Palm Court - one of the few open clubs - and take requests for dollar tips. Just before the set ends, he steps up to sing on a local favorite, "Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans?," and hears small but vibrant applause.

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http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansas...n/13144604.htm

[shrugs]

I like how they don't mention the future until the end of the article. Doom and Gloom in the media is getting boring. I challenge journalists to accentuate the positives from time to time. "Glasses clinking against plates of jambalaya"? Who writes this garbage? I have never been to Palm Court. Must be a tourist trap because who else would eat jamabalya in a restaurant?What the fuck do these Kansas City assholes know anyway?
Bob French was on OZ just yesterday telling all the muscians to come back. He promised help to any musician that needed a place to stay.
Organist Robert Walter played at the Maple Leaf last night. I think Tim Green, Jim Singleton and maybe Johnny Vidacovich were on the gig. If that's true, then at least we have the best bassist and drummer this city has to offer. Possibly the only two that can play great jazz.
And Donald Harrison pledged to come back in that video that was posted at Speak Out last month.

Kermit Ruffins is good entertainment. But a jazz musician? If you like silly shit all the time maybe. He and the other entertainers will be back come Mardi Gras when the $$$ is flowing.

[Lois Gilbert]

Hip-hop and all that jazz
By Ludovic Hunter-Tilney
Published: November 14 2005 15:32 | Last updated: November 14 2005 15:32

If Nik Cohn is correct, then New Orleans’ recovery from the devastation of Hurricane Katrina will not be heralded by the sound of Dixieland jazz blaring once more from tourist-crammed bars on Bourbon Street, but instead by the resumption of a living musical tradition: cars rocking to a bass-heavy thud, rappers drawling rhymes, women at summer block parties, “twitching so fast”, as Cohn puts it in his new book Triksta, “they seem plugged into a socket, a blur of flying booty”.

Triksta documents the true music of New Orleans, the one that visitors to the city rarely encounter: hip-hop. It is also an absorbing memoir about Cohn’s improbable attempts to transform himself into a rap impresario.

White, 60 next year, with an avuncular mien, a Northern Irish upbringing and a taste for fedoras: it is hard to picture him hanging out with gangsta rappers in the US’s most dangerous city (its murder rate last year was eight times higher than New York’s). “Other men of my age chase after young girls or try to squeeze into very regrettable leather trousers. I chase after beats,” he explains, smiling.

Cohn fell in love with New Orleans as a child, after reading a book about the jazz musician Jelly Roll Morton, which also sparked a lifelong infatuation with black American culture. The city of his fantasies did not disappoint. “The first time I went there, in 1972,” he remembers, “there was this extraordinary, sensuous, relaxed atmosphere. There’s a song about going to the place where the weather suits your clothes. Well, the weather in New Orleans suited my clothes.”

In 1972 he was 26 and a celebrated music journalist and novelist, author of one of the best books about rock and roll, Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom. Since then he has grown disenchanted with rock, but New Orleans still has its claws in him. “The fact that it is below sea-level affects the air, the light, everything about it. You feel as though you’re floating in a tank,” he says.

Unlike New York (where Cohn lives), Los Angeles or Atlanta, New Orleans is not famous for hip-hop. Before Katrina, however, it had a thriving local scene, centred around a rap subgenre called “bounce”, which, Cohn explains, has a “thin, whippy beat” and a background in traditional Louisianan music such as brass bands and Mardi Gras call-and-response routines. “There’s bounce, which is sex songs, and then gangsta bounce, which is sex with violence mixed in,” he explains cheerfully.

In the 1970s, the cultural climate was very different. “Back then New Orleans was incredibly musical, but without boundaries,” he says. There were great pianists such as Professor Longhair and James Booker (“a one-eyed, gay, alcoholic junkie whose range went from jazz classics to really deep funk via Ray Charles and old Spanish songs”) alongside R&B and soul veterans such as Clarence “Frogman” Henry and Irma Thomas. “If you went down Bourbon Street you could hear these kinds of people, and the crowd would be mixed.”

But the city’s determination to transform itself into a sanitised tourist town in the 1980s led to segregation. “Happy hordes of white tourists would go to Jazzfest and listen to older Louisianan music and think: ‘This is wonderful, New Orleans is so musical’. But the ordinary black person wouldn’t go to Jazzfest, in fact despised it. So you got ghetto music, which never really existed in New Orleans before.”

At the same time poverty and drugs turned it into a more violent, fissured place. “The idea of the housing projects as armed camps, where people have tribal loyalty to their project or ward, became dominant in the 1990s,” Cohn says. So how did he manage to enter this world, with his incongruously white skin, advanced years and British accent?

“It’s not like I arrived and they said: ‘Hey, Mr Impresario, come on in.’ They looked at me and the best I got was: ‘Harmless lunatic, not worth shooting’.” Over five years he ransacked his address book for music industry contacts and brokered a few deals, developed a degree of credibility and became “Triksta”, New Orleans’ most anomalous rap producer. Wisely, however, the transformation did not extend to his grooming. “I was totally un-bling,” he says firmly. “And in terms of vocabulary, I never pretended to be anything other than what I am.”

Evidently a sufferer of nostalgie de la boue, he is drawn to street subcultures such as bounce by their wildness and energy. This affinity with outsiders and rebels dates back to his Northern Irish childhood in another segregated city, Derry. “When I was a small boy you were told not to go to the Catholic side of town but if you did, what you saw was a rawness and human warmth that you didn’t get on the Presbyterian side,” he says.

Cohn’s tendency to romanticise is balanced by insight and self-awareness. Hip-hop, with its braggadocio and self-mythology yet simultaneous commitment to gritty authenticity, “keeping it real”, is the perfect match for him. “If you don’t fake it, you can’t sell and the only way to fake it is to say: ‘I’m real’,” he says of the double-bind many rappers find themselves in.

There is an irony here: in 1976 Cohn wrote an article about working-class disco-goers in New York that inspired the film Saturday Night Fever. He later admitted that it was not reportage, but a mix of fact and fiction. Now he looks back at that type of fast-and-loose music journalism with horror. “I’ve become rather born-again about that, rather pompous. In a book like this, if one word was embellished the whole thing would collapse.”

Perhaps there is something of his younger self in his warm description of the rappers he worked with. “What I found very helpful about them was that most of them are nerds by the standards of the people they’re around,” he says. “They’re not drug dealers. They write poetry. They’re extremely sensitive and are usually much smarter than their rock and roll equivalents. There’s none of that slack-jawed thing I find when I talk to young rock bands.”

Katrina has scattered them across the south in a refugee diaspora. “Politically there are a lot of people in New Orleans who regard this as excellent news,” Cohn says. “It has cleared out the criminals and the uncontrollable elements.”

“The idea now is, they can tidy up the music and just play dead music – get rid of this awkwardly alive, amazingly vital culture,” he warns. “But life is never that neat. My guys and their families and hundreds of thousands like them are powerless, except in this weird New Orleans way of being dead but not lying down. The rats are creeping back even though the ship is sunk.”

‘Triksta’ is published by Harvill Secker on November 17

http://news.ft.com/cms/s/29bb090a-55...00e25118c.html

[shrugs]

Please stop posting this crap. We have enough embarrasing info coming from people living here. We don't need anymore from these fucking idiots.

This is priceless:
But the city’s determination to transform itself into a sanitised tourist town in the 1980s led to segregation. “Happy hordes of white tourists would go to Jazzfest and listen to older Louisianan music and think: ‘This is wonderful, New Orleans is so musical’. But the ordinary black person wouldn’t go to Jazzfest, in fact despised it. So you got ghetto music, which never really existed in New Orleans before.”

and this:
At the same time poverty and drugs turned it into a more violent, fissured place. “The idea of the housing projects as armed camps, where people have tribal loyalty to their project or ward, became dominant in the 1990s,” Cohn says.

the 80's saw poverty and drugs for the first time????
and the bit about the projects..............

And bounce is old. I read a piece about it in a journal back in the 90's that stated it's heydey was the early 80's.