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.
