New Orleans

1991, age 19.  "West End Blues," by Louis Armstrong. 

I'm writing this entry from the greatest musical city on earth: New Orleans, Louisiana. I've visited a lot of places that can justly claim to be musical meccas - Austin, Chicago, New York, Nashville, Memphis - but New Orleans has them all beat. She has the most unique musical history of any city on earth and has nurtured multiple styles. Of course, everyone associates NOLA with jazz, which is true enough. The style's earliest progenitors came exclusively from the Big Easy, so much so that jazz (or 'jass') was regarded as almost a folk style. Names like Buddy Bolden, Jelly Roll Morton, Kid Ory, Sidney Bechet, and King Oliver are still revered here. And then there's Louis Armstrong. Pops is still regarded as more of a demi-god in the city than an historical figure, a musical Hercules and Prometheus rolled into one. Even the first white people to steal the style and record it as their own came from New Orleans. The Original Dixieland Jazz Band recorded a somewhat cornier version of the music and carried it north and east to usher in the Jazz Age.

Jazz looms so large in the city's history that outsiders sometimes forget that the city could boast enormous musical importance even without it:

• The first opera house in the Western hemisphere was located in the French colony. Native composer Louis Gottschalk was one of the first classical musicians to use "world music" influences in his writing, incorporating the Caribbean rhythms he heard brought through the city's port.
• Congo Square, now located in Louis Armstrong park, is the spiritual home of West African drumming in the United States, the only place in the American South where slaves could play the music of their ancestors.
• Brass bands proliferated in the years following the Civil War, spurred on by Patrick Gilmore's "Peace Jubilee" staged here in 1865. Bands can be found at funerals, in clubs, and marching in the ubiquitous parades.
• Ragtime, an essential ingredient in jazz, was enormously popular at the turn of the 20th century, and much of what we know about how that style was improvised comes from recordings of New Orleans' musicians.
• The city's churches have always rung with powerful singing, and the Queen of Gospel, Mahalia Jackson, was born in the Carrollton neighborhood.
• Just downriver from the Mississippi Delta, blues has always thrived in New Orleans. From early pioneers like Lonnie Johnson to Snooks Eaglin to Little Freddie King, the city is on par with Memphis, Clarksdale, and Chicago.
• The Crescent City was the home to some of the most influential pioneers in rhythm and blues and later rock and roll: Professor Longhair, Fats Domino, and Huey "Piano" Smith. And although Little Richard hailed from Georgia, his playing bears the city's influence, most of it recorded here in Cosimo Matassa's studio with band members from New Orleans.
• From such a stanky atmosphere, it is no surprise that New Orleans can claim so many funk pioneers, like Dr. John and the Meters, along with legendary producer, Allen Toussaint. The word "funk" may even originate in New Orleans. The sole remaining evidence of legendary ragtime/jazz cornetist Buddy Bolden is a song called "Funky Butt Blues," dating from the turn of the last century.
• Rappers like Lil Wayne and Juvenile call New Orleans home and there is even a unique style of local hip-hop called bounce.
• Although Cajun and Zydeco both hail from the countryside around the city, it's easy enough to find live musicians playing both any night of the week.

Throw in healthy (though smaller) doses of country and bluegrass, and one need not travel outside the city to see the full range of American musical expression.

I remember learning about New Orleans from a college music history professor. He told us about Congo Square and "Creoles of Color." We learned how the geography of the city, along with its unique political history, helped fashion the musical landscape. I discovered why the Supreme Court case of Plessy v. Ferguson may have directly influenced the birth of jazz. I especially remember listening to Jelly Roll Morton talking about "ragging the rhythm" of Sousa marches, and hearing Louis Armstrong's "West End Blues" for the first time. Armstrong knew the West End well. Canal Street separated the English-speaking black neighborhoods of the West End from the French-speaking Creole neighborhoods of the French Quarter. The opening cadenza of "West End Blues" has 200 years of history in it. It's brilliant and vibrant and 90 years after it was recorded, it still sounds fresh.

As much as I travel, I had never been to New Orleans until just a few years ago. My wife and I decided that we would make our first trip over Thanksgiving 2005. Then Katrina hit and our plans were canceled.

In spring of 2008 I decided to do a school concert themed around the music of New Orleans. We included as many styles as we could to give a cross-section of the city's musical heritage: African drumming, gospel, blues, opera, Cajun, rock and roll, funk, etc. My friend Steve even arranged Professor Longhair's "Mardi Gras in New Orleans" for my band and choir. It was pretty solid. To this day, I think it's my favorite concert I've done with students.

I decided that if I were going to teach about the music of New Orleans, I needed to experience it myself, and so we planned a trip down during spring break.

The place exceeded my wildest expectations.

There is music everywhere. Where I am staying right now, on Frenchmen Street, it is impossible to not hear live music in the evening. That's not hyperbole. This one tiny lane has over a dozen live music venues in a two-block radius, some of them with multiple stages. And that's not counting the "biker bard" who sings Sam Cooke songs, or the ragged white kids playing old-time music or gypsy jazz on the sidewalk.

The city acknowledges and celebrates its musical heritage. The airport is Louis Armstrong International. There are dozens of festivals - Jazz Fest, French Quarter Festival, Voodoo Festival, etc. - all with live music around the clock. And although the city is passionate about the home team, one senses that the Saints are named after the song, rather than their birth on All Saints' Day, as the official story goes.

That first trip led to some pretty wonderful personal discoveries. I heard the Rebirth Brass Band and the Soul Rebels, and learned that the New Orleans tradition was really alive, still incorporating new influences like hip-hop and reggae. This wasn't Wynton Marsalis. This was music that people wanted to dance to. I heard Walter "Wolfman" Washington and Washboard Chaz and swing bands where all the members were tattooed Gen Y-ers.

I also made my first visit to the Louisiana Music Factory, one of the few remaining great independent record stores. There I was introduced to Galactic and Dumpstafunk and the Zion Harmonizers. And then I found out about WWOZ, 90.7, a local radio station where DJs still spin records they want to hear instead of those that marketing reports tell them to.

I was hooked. That one trip in April of 2008 led to another in July. Then another and another and another. I'd have to get out some old calendars to figure it out, but this trip is our 8th or 9th in those few years.

To me, New Orleans represents everything that is great about America. It's a city with a dirty, complex history, where slave-traders and voodoo queens and cross-dressers and pimps and musicians all rubbed elbows. It's a place where people can reinvent themselves, where at least once a year, at Carnival, you get to dress any way you like and "do watcha wanna." It's a place where the grandson of a slave can leave reform school with a cornet and become the most famous American icon of the 20th century.

With all of this incredible music history, the school system obviously places a high value on music education, right? And of course this history is taught by music teachers to every student in the state. Well, not exactly.

In both my regular day job and as president of our state's music educators association, I get the chance to meet arts educators and leaders from around the country. Every time I meet a music teacher from Louisiana, I get excited. I tell them about my love for the music of New Orleans and who I saw on my last trip and how I can't wait to get back there. And almost every time I have had this conversation, I get a blank stare. They seem essentially unaware of the culture I am describing. They've heard of Louis Armstrong and Wynton Marsalis and Harry Connick, Jr. But they don't know the Rebirth Brass Band or the Soul Rebels. They don't know Glen David Andrews or Corey Henry or Trombone Shorty. They don't know Irma Thomas or Lloyd Price or Lee Dorsey. And they don't listen to bounce.

What's going on here?

What they talk about, what they do know, is all the same school music that everyone else is wallowing in. They are familiar with the new publication from Paul Lavender or Jay Bocook. They can tell you what they thought of the new Kirby Shaw or Roger Emerson arrangements. They can discuss what David Holsinger selections were most popular at festival this year.

If you don't know those names, there is a simple reason: you aren't a music teacher. These are the "superstars" of school music, but they are virtually unknown outside of that world. Yet Louisiana students probably learn more music of a staff arranger for Hal Leonard than the music in their own back yard.

At a meeting in Atlanta a couple of years ago, I was talking to a music educator from Baton Rouge and told him that I had opened a concert with a quasi-jazz funeral, my kids improvising with "Just a Closer Walk" and "Saints." They learned it by listening to recordings of groups like the Magnificent Seventh's Brass Band and played it by ear. He told me his band had played the Jared Spears arrangement, "At a Dixieland Jazz Funeral." Dr. Spears lives in Arkansas. He complained that his students wanted to play hip-hop and sound like Grambling State, rather than the drum corps he obviously loved.

This is not quite a case of a prophet having no honor in his own country. New Orleans musicians are widely revered. Just not by music educators. And not in school.

School music programs vary widely across the state, but the public schools in New Orleans, many would agree, are among the worst in the nation. Newspaper articles often report the renaissance of school music programs, but the truth is that most are surviving largely through charitable work done by foundations like Tipitina's and Mr. Holland's Opus. One charity, MusicianCorps, places music teachers in New Orleans schools at no cost to the school system. At the Monday show at d.b.a. this week, Glen David Andrews announced his goal of providing 500 musical instruments this year to New Orleans youth through his foundation, Trumpets Not Guns. While these are certainly laudable efforts, one wonders why the school system doesn't hire music teachers and purchase instruments for its students. Catholic schools in the city fare somewhat better, and many families who love music send their children to these. The famous "Marching 100" at St. Augustine still parades at Mardi Gras, though even they are down to about 90.

In case you haven't picked up on it, the elephant in the band room is race. The poorest (read: "blackest") schools in urban (read: "black") neighborhoods have almost no support for their music programs, in spite of the fact that music is historically one of the city's most important industries. And many music educators place a higher value on traditional (read: "white") musical styles than popular (read: "black") styles.

In this way, New Orleans simply reflects our culture at large. Our music history in this country is largely the product of our attitudes about race. Styles that are most associated with the African-American community (and these are almost all of them in their earliest phases) are initially viewed by the dominant white culture as vulgar, barbaric, and even non-musical. This was true of minstrelsy, blues, jazz, R&B, and rock & roll. It's still true of hip-hop. Elaborate explanations are offered about the supposed quality of the music and its effect on "youth" (read: "white kids"). I have an aunt who used to refer to rock as "jungle music," revealing more latent racism than she probably intended. The truth is that if "jungle" refers to "Africa" (as it did in Duke Ellington's music), then all American music is "jungle music" to some extent. The musical materials of West Africa run deep in our culture.

Over time, those attitudes toward a musical style soften and become part of the mainstream culture. A genre is legitimized in our culture when it is accepted by white people. There are white brass bands in New Orleans, but they are playing music that sounds 100 years old.

For better or worse, music educators largely reflect these dominant cultural attitudes. Most music teachers are not overtly racist, but they do not generally question the assumptions they have inherited. My friend in Louisiana complained about the "poor tone quality" of marching bands like Southern University. The truth is, white music teachers were making the same complaints about jazz musicians in the 1920s. I heard a prominent national music educator tell a crowd that he had taught his own children to dislike the sound of the drum machine. While most musicians probably prefer a live drummer, the prominent sound of the "808" in rap is probably what he had in mind. And it is common to hear vocal teachers decry the "incorrect" and "damaging" technique of blues, gospel and soul singers, in spite of the lengthy career of Aretha Franklin and others. (Before anyone begins using Adele as an example, I would like to point out that she is a smoker, which is far more likely to damage the vocal apparatus than singing. I have heard so many claims on this particular issue that just sound like nonsense to me. While I certainly believe that the voice can be damaged, very few vocal injuries are permanent and most come from simple overuse - a danger any professional singer faces, regardless of the style.)

I believe it's time for music educators to move forward on this issue. School should be a place where all styles of music are studied, especially those that are prominent in the culture at large. While it is certainly laudable to extend our students' musical experiences, I would question whether over-exposure to a small handful of composers who solely serve an educational market accomplishes that. While the conversation is often framed in terms of "Mozart versus Jay-Z," the truth is that most school music teachers are pitting James Swearingen against Jay-Z. I'd pick Hova in that fight.

In the end, it's just a question of how relevant we are as a profession. Professor Peter Davis, the music teacher at the New Orleans Home for Colored Waifs, can be celebrated mainly for allowing young Louis Armstrong to discover his own creative potential. That should be the goal of any educator.

New Music

2011, Age 39. "Between Two Lungs," by Florence + The Machine, from Lungs.

For a couple of years I got to teach a class on the history of American popular music to high school students. It was a lot of fun because I was able to design a curriculum (while still addressing standards, lest you education folk be concerned) around something I am passionate about. I also had that wonderful experience as a teacher of feeling as if I were learning almost as much as my students. I certainly wasn't ignorant of the topic when I began, but my understanding is much deeper now.

There were several "big ideas" in the course, threads that ran through virtually every topic. One was that American music is unique because it is largely the product of two very strongly musical cultures - from West Africa and the British Isles - intersecting on unequal terms and in sometimes violent ways. The blues becomes the archetype for this convergence, and the basis for everything that follows. Another big idea relates to the way new musical ideas become a part of the culture. The script goes something like this:

A younger generation of musicians grows up in the musical tradition of their predecessors, learning the basic materials of the genre. Then something in the culture at large - technology, market forces, political realities - intersects the lives of these young artists, and the music is transformed. The new style is not entirely original, but it is perceived as such. The older generation rejects the new music, believes it to be inferior or perhaps even threatening to conventional values. Over time, the new style is accepted and the younger generation grows up. A new generation begins to learn the music of the generation that preceded it and the whole process starts all over.

Now this is true to a degree of virtually all art at all times all over the world, but it seems to be more true of American music, beginning perhaps in the 20th century. John Philip Sousa said that the new jazz music "makes you want to bite your grandmother." Cab Calloway pejoratively referred to bebop as "Chinese music." Sinatra said that Elvis' music "fosters almost totally negative and destructive reactions in young people." Nina Simone thought that rap wasn't even music. And so on. These reactions have become so predictable, in fact, that when you look at the history of popular music as a whole, it begins to get a little dull.

It is not lost on me that this second big idea is closely related to the first one. Speaking in generalizations, you can almost divide American music into music black folks listen to, and music black folks used to listen to. As the dominant white music establishment begins to accept styles that have their roots (for the most part) in African-American culture, that culture moves on to something else. A topic for another day, perhaps.

Music education tends to mirror these historical trends and behaviors. Time was, you couldn't even study jazz at colleges in the United States. Now we have entire schools dedicated to jazz and rock music. To a point. Those styles that are in the ascendancy of youth culture are largely ignored. As Lady Gaga asked rhetorically, when questioned about dropping out of school, "What could they have taught me about 'Disco Stick' in college?"

If you speak to music teachers, you will notice that their attitudes tend to reflect these generational biases. Many seem to believe that the last truly legitimate musical expression happened in their youth, usually when they were in high school or college. Some continue following the new releases of the idols of their adolescence, but it is rare to meet a music teacher who is actively listening to the music his students favor. A few even express bewilderment that 14-year-olds don't share their tastes. I remember one middle-aged music teacher bemoaning the fact that none of her high school students had heard of Kansas. (I should point out that this was in the pre-Guitar Hero era.) I'm not sure why Kansas should represent the acme of musical expression in this teacher's mind, but whatever.

For me, this gets to the heart of why there is so much passionless music teaching going on in our schools. I would guess that many have forgotten what it is like to really love music. Do you remember what it was like, that first time, or maybe the first dozen times, when it felt like a song you were listening to, or singing, or playing was the best thing you could ever feel? For those of us who chose this as a career, this was followed by several years of music school, then a few more years of the daily grind, trying to get 12-year-olds to remember the fingering for A-natural concert. If we aren't careful, we forget why we decided to do this in the first place. The truth is, it's rare to find music teachers who are still players. To many of them, the sheer joy of music-making and music-listening is something that belongs to their youth.

This certainly isn't true of everyone. The best music teachers I know still play music regularly and when you see them, they ask, "Have you heard . . . ?" I love talking to these people. My friend Rachel is one of the best music teachers I know. She also lives in the small town of New Haven, West Virginia, so she's the de facto maestra of Mason County. She directs the church musical. She accompanies singers on piano. She plays bluegrass bass. She occasionally sits in with a local jazz group on trombone. Et cetera. She also loves listening to music. She's the one who hipped me to Florence + The Machine. We were working together on a project and she kept saying, "You gotta check out this song."

I like this whole album. Florence Welch is one of those big-voiced rock anthem singers like Bono or Steve Perry, which is not to say she can't use her voice in other ways (check out the smarmy "Girl with One Eye"). Yet she seems most at home at forte or louder, belting it out like she's alone in her car going fast down an open highway. In fact, most of these songs make me want to get in my car and drive - anywhere - but fast, and singing at the top of my lungs.

"Between Two Lungs" is the perfect song for doing this. The instruments are boomy and full of echo, Florence is belting in full chest voice at the upper end of her alto range. It might be a love song, I'm not sure, but it's the song I'm falling in love with at the moment. Whatever it's about, it's bursting Flo's lungs to sing about it:

Gone are all the days of begging, the days of theft,

No more gasping for a breath.
The air filled me head to toe
And I can see the ground far below.
I have this breath and I hold it tight
And I keep it in my chest with all my might.
I pray to God this breath will last
As it pushes past my lips as I . . . dance!
This record probably won't change my life. It doesn't matter. Being able to wake up every day and hear something new makes getting out of bed worthwhile.

I've written several times about the transcendent power that music has, that it can transport you to another time or place, or make you feel like a different person. New music is almost a fountain of youth. This is so true, in fact, that when the apostle John wants to describe heaven, he says that it is a place where new songs are sung, a place where tears will be wiped away forever, where there is no more dying. I don't know what I think about that anymore, but I do know that when I feel like wiping my tears away and living forever, I can think of nothing better to do than ask someone, "Have you heard anything good lately?"