Dillard Interviews

The last week of July and first week of August were busy times for the Dillard University interview series mentioned previously in Independent Ear profiles of Harold Battiste, and Dr. Michael White.  Last week I had the great pleasure of interviewing some Crescent City legends: Bennie Jones and the inimitable dapper dan and man-about-town Uncle Lionel, the drumming duo and founding fathers of the Treme Brass Band; New Orleans leading jazz singer Germaine Bazzle; a session with New Orleans oldest living active jazz musician, 97-year old trumpeter Lionel Furbos, who continues to lead the band at the Palm Court, and concluding with a New Orleans modernist, trumpeter Clyde Kerr, frequent bandmate of the city’s free jazz icon saxophonist Edward "Kidd" Jordan.  More from those interviews later…

Satchmo Summerfest

Last week — and every week for that matter when you’re talking about the man I often refer to on-air at WWOZ as the Heavyweight Champion of New Orleans music — was surely Louis Armstrong week in the Crescent City.  As detailed below it was the culminating week of the annual Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong Summer Jazz Camp for youth which was capped off by some reportedly stellar performances from the youngsters at UNO on Pops August 1 birthday. 

As part of the weekend’s 8th annual  Satchmo Summerfest in the French Quarter there was a visual arts exhibition and good friend Rick Holton, who has painted some amazing jazz master collages, was in town to represent his wonderful piece on Pops.  Satchmo Summerfest kicked off in grand style with a keynote address at the Old U.S. Mint from the great record man George Avakian, who produced some important Armstrong discs, including the champ’s separate treatments of W.C. Handy and Fats Waller’s music.  Friday’s action began with a grand Satchmo Birthday Party at Louis Armstrong Park (home of historic Congo Square) with cake (where you gonna go in New Orleans without refreshments?), and music provided by Kermit Ruffins and Japanese Satchmo fanatic Yoshio Toyama.  Later Friday evening was the annual Satchmo Club Strut in the Marigny on poppin’ Frenchman Street, with live jazz in every club as well as on certain balconies (Geraldine Wycoff reports that the New Orleans Saxophone Quartet was a particular highlight).  As I remarked on WWOZ the preceding Wednesday drivetime show when Jason Patterson, ace impressario of key Satchmo Club Strut participant Snug Harbor (see below), was on for an interview — other burghs call such activities Pub Crawls; but in NOLA it was surely a "Club Strut" ("we don’t have pubs here," Jason said).

I had to head off to the Litchfield Jazz Festival in Litchfield, Connecticut for a NEA site visit so I missed the Club Strut and Saturday festival hits, but got back on Sunday in plenty of time for some good festival-closing sounds on the Traditional Jazz Stage, the Brass Band Stage, the Contemporary Jazz Stage, and the Children’s Stage.  The entire Satchmo Summerfest is free and some of NOLA’s finest representing the various stage genres, graced the grounds of the Louisiana State Museum.  New Orleans audiences ain’t shy about getting up to shake ’em down at these events, and strolling around the grounds I experienced the Algiers Brass Band, Treme Brass Band, trumpeter James Andrews & The Crescent City Allstars, and the irrepressible Kermit Ruffins & The Barbecue Swingers encouraging just that.  Over on the Traditional Jazz Stage, whose proceedings were broadcast live over WWOZ (www.wwoz.org), trumpeter Randy Sandke and a crew of New Orleans finest including pianist Steve Pistorius, drummer Shannon Powell, and the ubiquitous bassist Roland Guerin encouraged some fox trotters and free formers, as did stage closer Dr. Michael White (see our previous blog entry on him), with Guerin, Pistorius, and Powell reprising their roles and Detroit Brooks on banjo.  Brooks and Guerin proved once again the exceptional versatility of so many New Orleans musicians (see Snug Harbor below), both in entirely different contexts from other recent sightings, but no less effective.  Musically there was much ado about Pops on every stage; by evening’s end I’d heard "What a Wonderful World" on every stage!  And while that might sound a bit redundant, not to mention maudlin as that song can be, each time the tune was delivered with carloads of heart & soul, befitting the memory of Pops.  Both Sandke and White were quite generous in their Armstrong tributes.

Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong Summer Jazz Camp

Without question one of the summertime jewels of New Orleans is the annual Louis Armstrong Summer Jazz Camp.  This year approximately 100 aspiring musicians (age 10-18) bristling with youthful enthusiasm participated in this two-week intensive at Medard Nelson Charter School on St. Bernard Avenue.  They come mainly from New Orleans-area public schools, but through a cooperative agreement with Columbia College in Chicago several Chicago-area youngsters are attending this session, including one young clarinetist I met who was fortunate enough to stay at flutist Kent Jordan and his wife Christine’s lovely West Bank home. 

The Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong Summer Jazz Camp is a project of the New Orleans Arts and Council Host Committee, whose good work was represented at their press conference by member Mark Samuels, familiar from his other hat as CEO of Basin Street Records.  The heart & soul of this wonderful undertaking however is the executive director Jackie Harris and her spiritual godmother, or "sister" as she referred to herself in her warm remarks, the indomitable Phoebe Jacobs keeper of the Louis Armstrong flame through her Louis Armstrong Foundation.

Today’s press event was primarily in recognition of the kick-off of a week with this year’s Artist-in-Residence, the versatile keyboard wizard-producer George Duke.  The camp’s faculty is an exceptional assemblage of some of New Orleans finest, including the taskmaster with a heart of gold and a saxophone of pure steel, artistic director Edward "Kidd" Jordan, who was recently honored by this year’s Vision Festival in New York for his steadfast journey on the cutting edge of the music.  Other camp faculty included Kent Jordan, Maynard Chattters (trombone), Jonathan Bloom (percussion), Clyde Kerr (trumpet), Roger Dickerson (piano), Nicholas Payton (trumpet), Herman Jackson  (drums), Germaine Bazzle (voice), and an impressive crew of other teachers.  By way of introduction, the Jordans and Chatters are part of one of New Orleans’ most distinguished musical clans, as detailed in an earlier Independent Ear entry detailing violinist Rachel Jordan’s superb concert earlier this summer, a clan that also includes the late clarinet master Alvin Batiste.  

In addition to instrumental and vocal music the camp also boasts a dance program inspired by this year’s other artist-in-residence legendary Savoy Ballroom Lindy Hopper Norma Miller, who delighted those of us old enough to recall her references to working with Pops, and hopefully inspired the youngsters with her spinning of history.

Further information:

Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong Summer Jazz Camp

124 Roselyn Park Place

New Orleans, LA 70131

504/392-2002  or  212/987-0782

jazzcamp@louisarmstrongjazzcamp.com

Snug Harbor Joys

There simply is no better place for jazz in NOLA than Snug Harber, one of the jewels of the entertainment strip on Frenchman Street in the Marigny, the bustling neighborhood just below the French Quarter.  Much like Blues Alley in DC, Snug Harbor enjoys the tourist trade phenomenon.  At one point during last Saturday’s superb performance a woman two tables up leaned over and asked who that marvelous alto saxophonist was on stage who was delighting her so much.  Well, on this particular evening that saxophonist was Wessell "Warmdaddy" Anderson.  Though a native of Brooklyn, Wes Anderson is something of a homeboy, having prepped under Alvin Batiste at Southern University in Baton, Rouge.  The big man was clearly right at home, deep in the swinging shed with guitarist Detroit Brooks, who quite successfully and soulfully recalled vintage Wes Montgomery through the filter of George Benson but decidedly in his own sweet way; drummer Herman Jackson, pianist Larry Sieberth, and one of the most versatile, hardest working bassists on the scene today, Roland Guerin — who we’d just seen two weeks prior on bass guitar bottoming out a New Orleans R&B review at Harrah’s, the first weekend in May as the busiest bass player in town at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival where he played no fewer than six varied gigs throughout the second weekend, and a week prior to that as bassist with the Marcus Roberts Trio. 

Soulful and swinging straight out of the gate, Warmdaddy wasted no time diving headlong into "Billie’s Bounce."  From there it was on to Stanley Turrentine’s familiar "Sugar" and beyond.  There was no pretense, no grasping for some elusive newness, no sense of trying to confuse his audience, just pure, heartfelt jazz in its highest form, all served up with Anderson’s optimistic bounce.  In that respect, and also with the purity of his tone and adroit facility, not to mention his physical form, Wes Anderson has always reminded me of Cannonball Adderley, but his is very personal sound and approach.

Celebrating A Living Legend

It’s always a wonderful thing when deserving folks are celebrated while they can still smell the figurative roses.  Such was the case on Sunday, June 22 when a spirited crowd gathered at the Christian Unity Baptist Church to celebrate the legacy of saxophonist-composer-arranger and record man Dr. Harold Battiste (see our earlier Independent Ear profile for details of his rich life).  Dr. Battiste, who was bestowed an honorary doctorate degree by his alma mater Dillard University, was honored by several presentations, including music from the Treme Brass Band, Ellis Marsalis, vocalist Philip Manuel,  vocalist Germaine Bazzle, and a tribute from poet Kalamu ya Salaam.  Marsalis, Manuel, Bazzle, and Salaam have all recorded for Harold Battiste’s AFO (All For One) New Orleans modern jazz record label.  The program opened, appropos for a New Orleans tribute, with selections from the crack Edna Karr High School Band.  (Where else but New Orleans would a high school marching band have to excuse itself early from a Sunday program because they "had another gig"!)  There was also a rousing African drum and dance processional and heartfelt remarks from many, including Pastor Dwight Webster.  It was a beautiful afternoon, including the reception repast that followed — which we, despite alternate dinner plans, were implored to take part of in typical New Orleans parlance, by a kind sister who virtually blocked the door to prevent us from leaving without filling our plates.  As a good friend once remarked, you can’t go anywhere in New Orleans without there being food… good food… and lots of it!

A profile in today’s Times Picayune weekly Lagniappe arts & entertainment section identifies the erudite clarinetist Dr. Michael White as Renaissance Man.  That’s a dead-on descriptor and comes on the heels of a very revealing interview sit-down I had with the man just yesterday.  The setting was the spacious trad jazz club The Palm Court on Decatur Street in the French Quarter, and the occasion was another in a series of New Orleans artist interviews I’m conducting that are being video taped for Dillard University’s infant Institute of Jazz Studies.

In the Lagniappe White is pictured head skyward in full-throated laughter, lovingly grasping his clarinet.  On the National Endowment for the Arts web site (www.arts.endow.gov) announcing his selection as a 2008 National Heritage Fellow, big smile in place, again he’s cradling that clarinet as if to pronounce ‘this is really what its all about…’ 

So it was no surprise that before sitting down for our interview, fresh from a gym session but neatly clad in a handsome brown business suit and crisp striped sport shirt, he carefully assembled his instrument and grasped it throughout our session.  The impulse was irrisistable: would he be so kind as to provide our interview with a musical invocation?  So Dr. White proceeded to blow not just any few bars, but a clarinet adaptation of Louis Armstrong’s monumental cadenza intro to "West End Blues"!

At 53 years old Dr. Michael White is a bit of an anomaly — at least outside the singular confines of the Crescent City he is — a middle-aged African American who is fully-committed to performing traditional New Orleans jazz.  Although he is not single-minded in his scholarly pursuits of all forms of jazz and various musics of the world — including confessed listens to the work of NOLA rapper ‘Lil Wayne – it seems that all music that comes into his consciousness is at some point filtered into his various original composition-based meditations on the traditional New Orleans jazz form.

As I queried how it is that an African American musician of his age group was so immersed in traditional New Orleans jazz and not hotly pursuing the next evolution of modern jazz or settled down into some modern jazz comfort zone, I could see a big smile playing across Dr. White’s expressive face; he’d been asked this many times before.  Traditional New Orleans jazz — most definitely separate from that homogenized, lilly-white form known as "dixieland" — has for Michael White "a function that defies limitations and embodies the black New Orleans experience."  Quite simply at bottom it is the social aspects of the music that most appeal to him.  He detailed how people in New Orleans have a unique cultural upbringing, immersed in African ways of celebrating and protesting… all of which is embodied in traditional New Orleans jazz, which for Michael epitomizes democratic traditions and freedom of expression.

Although he achieved his PhD in Spanish language studies and taught Spanish for years at Xavier University (he currently occupies an endowed chair in African American Music at Xavier), music is Dr. White’s DNA.  He came up through New Orleans customary music ranks.  As a high schooler he was a member of the notable St. Augustine School Marching Band.  He prepped in NOLA’s rich brass band tradition, including coming under the wings of two of the city’s music patriarchs, the late trumpeter-bandleader Doc Paulin (see our earlier NOLA Diary entry on his traditional New Orleans funeral), and guitarist-banjoist Danny Barker’s noted Fairview Baptist Church Brass Band for youth. 

Today New Orleans is blessed with a wealth of modern-day brass bands, more brass bands than ever before which White applauds.  However he did say that most of today’s younger brass band musicians, who are as likley to be as conversant in George Clinton and Mary J Blige as they are in "Just a Closer Walk With Thee", don’t play marches or play collectively in the traditional manner he was taught.  Not a bad thing, just a reality of life in 2008.

As he mused on bits of traditional New Orleans jazz history —  relating such anecdotes as the fact that the unassuming black man one might have encountered and patently overlooked cutting hedges on Prytania Street at the turn of the 20th century was Louis Armstrong’s mentor Joe "King" Oliver, a house-wrecking trumpeter of few peers — one couldn’t help but consider the terrible loss that Katrina and the resulting failure of the federal levees wrought on this erudite, gracious and unassuming man.  A resident of the flood-ravaged middle class black neighborhood known as Gentilly, White lost priceless instruments and artifacts in his one-story house, including one of Sidney Bechet’s mouthpieces, irreplaceable historic sheet music, and thousands of video and audio recordings.  He’s in recovery, is building back his collection in a new abode after evacuating first to Houston then sheltering for months in a FEMA trailer, and sharing a wealth of new compositions in the tradition he loves on his brilliant new disc Blue Crescent on Basin Street Records (www.basinstreetrecords.com). 

Carefully balancing tradition and innovation is the watchword for Dr. Michael White.  He filters a vast musicological knowledge that ranges out to John Coltrane and Albery Ayler through a prism that is squarely in a very spiritualized context of New Orleans traditional jazz, exclaiming quite simply that "the music I play comes from the black experience" of New Orleans.  "There’s nowhere like New Orleans — a spirit center, a place where the flame and spirit of Africa has existed and transformed itself in many ways and that has contributed to the uniqueness of New Orleans." 

With his clarinet was so conveniently perched, we were treated to an interview benediction — a completely improvised impression of how his day had gone so far: full of telephone calls, a trip to the gym, high heat and humidity outside, and a hurried arrival at our interview — sweat beading on his forehead.  The resulting improvisation did indeed encompass it all.  Catch up to Dr. Michael White’s bio on the Basin Street site or at www.nea.gov/honors/heritage/fellows.  As with our earlier Harold Battiste interview for the Dillard archives (see a previous installment of our NOLA Diary), I’m hopeful of including installments of the full text of our interview with Dr. White on The Independent Ear.

In addition to his own growing discography, for those wishing to delve more deeply into New Orleans traditional jazz Dr. Michael White recommends the following listening investigations:

            – (trumpeter) King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band recordings

            – (bandleader) Clarence Williams Blue Five recordings

            – (clarinetist) Johnny Dodds recordings 

               (particularly his Black Bottom Stompers) 

            – (clarinetist) Jimmy Noone recordings

            – the revivalist 1940s and 1950s recordings of

             (trumpeter) Bunk Johnsonand one of Dr. White’s primary     

             idols (clarinetist) George Lewis

            – And for a strong dose of traditional New Orleans brass band

            music he recommends anything by the Eureka Brass Band

In New Orleans, the great majority of live music performance is either club or festival-based.  There’s very little in-between particularly when it comes to actual concert presentations.  In DC one is accustomed to the equation being either concert or club, with not early as much festival action; the major exception being the ongoing development of the Duke Ellington Jazz Festival (www.dejazzfest.org).  Landing here in NOLA last Fall we were told by many and it became quickly apparent that the local club and bar scene was bread & butter for music performances of a sometimes staggering variety.  And it also became clear that rarely was that a matter of joints that one might characterize as actual listening rooms, or places where the music performance was the primary action.  Outside of the French Quarter and it’s adjacent cousin The Marigny and vibrant Frenchman Street (home to NOLA’s most consistent modern jazz venue, Snug Harbor, and such other big-fun rooms as Ray’s Boom Boom Room), the town boasts all manner of music rooms that in some other parlance might simply be labeled "neighborhood joints".

A nice taste of this New Orleans vibe last was served up last Tuesday.  Crossing Claiborne Avenue on St. Bernard we turned right onto A.P. Tureaud St. and smack dab in the midst of an otherwise residential boulevard (with a green grass dividing strip which in other locales might be a mere median strip but which in NOLA parlance is dubbed a neutral ground) sat a corner joint called Bullets Sports Bar.  Though there were ample pick-ups and SUVs parked on the neutral ground, we were a bit parking shy, having been stung by a few $20 parking tickets (as they say in DC, the most (only?) efficient department of city government is parking enforcement, I’m here to report likewise about New Orleans), so we chose a side street and parked across from the all-too-typical storm-wrecked structure pile (mind you we’re approaching the 3 year anniversary of Katrina).

It was time for Game 6 of the NBA Finals and I’d been assured that Bullets was a sports bar suitable for getting my NBA on.  Indeed the walls and over the bar were festooned with no less than 3 big screens showing the game, but that need was quickly allayed by other attractions.  The bar and tables alongside one wall and to the back of the bar area were jammed with folks from this and some other neighborhoods; translation: these were just plain folks, black & white, out for a good time and a few brews; check your pretense at the door.  Oh, and did I mention the barbecue smoker at the side of the building where one could grab some sizzle-to-go?  As a friend once remarked, you don’t go anywhere in the Crescent City of an arts & culture, entertainment, reception, meeting, informal gathering, etc. nature and there be no food.

The game was purely secondary, occasional eye candy to the funk that Kermit Ruffins & the Barbecue Swingers were laying down at the front of the joint; no stage, just a simple amplification hook-up and they were on!  Kermit Ruffins is a true heir to the New Orleans trumpet tradition, more from the good-time and entertainment side of that equation than the high-artistic pursuit side.  He blows a roof-rocking horn and sings in a wry, raspy manner also befitting his place in that lineage.  Buoyed by his discographical efforts on NOLA’s most viable imprint, Basin Street Records (www.basinstreetrecords.com), Ruffins has also become a New Orleans musical ambassador of sorts and a bit of a celebrity around town.  Name me another jazz-based musician who gets recognized on the Jumbotron to significant applause at his or her local NBA games.

A modern-day NOLA brass band musician, Kermit evolved from the Rebirth Brass Band as one of those "colorful" character players steeped in marching band music, traditional New Orleans songs, all things Pops, and a hustler’s mentality that finds him working somewhere in town several days a week.  He’s as conversant with "The Big Butter and Egg Man", "Struttin’ With Some Barbecue" and "Besame Mucho" as he is with James Brown, George Clinton and "Hide The Reefer".  Beers festooning every table, sometimes in prodigious numbers — Bullets offers them by the bucketful if you’re really in the mood for some brews — this was a good-times scene in every sense.

Ruffins and his skilled, streamlined quartet blew a set that journeyed from a raucous "Little Liza Jane" to one of Rebirth’s signatures "I Feel Like Funkin’ It Up", to permutations of Ray Charles and Sly Stone, to full-out funk.  So when you come to NOLA look for Kermit Ruffins, and look beyond the WWOZ Live Wire reports on who’s playing in town because chances are neighborhood joints like Bullets Sports Bar won’t be reporting, but you can bet they’ll be jammed with good-timers and unpretentious surroundings.