The last time I was in New Orleans, I watched a funeral parade march by. About 30 musicians, serious of purpose but hardly solemn, walked down the street playing a joyous old tune to honor the newly dead, a “second line" of stragglers and celebrants trailing behind.
I never thought it might be an early wake for the aging grande dame of a city herself. With New Orleans in chaos in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, we've belatedly come to realize what a dear and valued friend we may lose.
New Orleans, it seems, is everyone's favorite getaway town - for Mardi Gras and the Jazz and Heritage Festival, for the restaurants and taverns. But what gives New Orleans its enduring spirit, its distinctive attitude and bounce, is music. Not for nothing is it called the birthplace of jazz. For a full century, the whole country has danced to the Crescent City's beat, whether we realize it or not.
It's where, between 1900 and 1920, Buddy Bolden, Jelly Roll Morton, Joe “King" Oliver, Sidney Bechet and the incomparable Louis Armstrong gave definition to the music we call jazz. Other styles and musicians have raised their voices in New Orleans since then, from Professor Longhair and Dr. John to Irma Thomas, Mahalia Jackson and the Neville brothers. The city's very character remains inextricably linked to its jazz heritage.
“It's a core element of the city's identity," said novelist and critic Tom Piazza, a resident since 1994. “It's a part of everything in New Orleans. It's not just entertainment - it's part of the way people conceive of life."
Yet for most Americans today, jazz may be little more than a quaint music of the past, something that was cool back in Grandpa's day. Since at least the 1940s, when new forms of jazz and popular music began to emerge, people have asked whether jazz was on its deathbed.
The question of how jazz can survive in the city of its birth seems almost fatuous when some of its practitioners are facing life-or-death struggles.
“When we left New Orleans, we had no idea that it could possibly be forever," Robin Burgess, the wife and manager of trumpeter Terence Blanchard, wrote in an e-mail. “We believe that Terence's mother lost her home, one of his bandmembers lost his, and ours suffered damage to the roof and upstairs studio."
“For those of us who saw unspeakable things," pianist David Torkanowsky wrote in another e-mail, “it's a bit premature to reflect on the possible degradation of jazz landmarks in the face of literal human decay in the streets."
Continue...
I never thought it might be an early wake for the aging grande dame of a city herself. With New Orleans in chaos in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, we've belatedly come to realize what a dear and valued friend we may lose.
New Orleans, it seems, is everyone's favorite getaway town - for Mardi Gras and the Jazz and Heritage Festival, for the restaurants and taverns. But what gives New Orleans its enduring spirit, its distinctive attitude and bounce, is music. Not for nothing is it called the birthplace of jazz. For a full century, the whole country has danced to the Crescent City's beat, whether we realize it or not.
It's where, between 1900 and 1920, Buddy Bolden, Jelly Roll Morton, Joe “King" Oliver, Sidney Bechet and the incomparable Louis Armstrong gave definition to the music we call jazz. Other styles and musicians have raised their voices in New Orleans since then, from Professor Longhair and Dr. John to Irma Thomas, Mahalia Jackson and the Neville brothers. The city's very character remains inextricably linked to its jazz heritage.
“It's a core element of the city's identity," said novelist and critic Tom Piazza, a resident since 1994. “It's a part of everything in New Orleans. It's not just entertainment - it's part of the way people conceive of life."
Yet for most Americans today, jazz may be little more than a quaint music of the past, something that was cool back in Grandpa's day. Since at least the 1940s, when new forms of jazz and popular music began to emerge, people have asked whether jazz was on its deathbed.
The question of how jazz can survive in the city of its birth seems almost fatuous when some of its practitioners are facing life-or-death struggles.
“When we left New Orleans, we had no idea that it could possibly be forever," Robin Burgess, the wife and manager of trumpeter Terence Blanchard, wrote in an e-mail. “We believe that Terence's mother lost her home, one of his bandmembers lost his, and ours suffered damage to the roof and upstairs studio."
“For those of us who saw unspeakable things," pianist David Torkanowsky wrote in another e-mail, “it's a bit premature to reflect on the possible degradation of jazz landmarks in the face of literal human decay in the streets."
Continue...
For more information contact All About Jazz.
