Our Man in New Orleans

Super Bowl Night at the Maison Bourbon...

2012-02-06T10:07:00.000-08:00

...made for a surprisingly quiet start to the evening. Since I was tragically born without a sports lobe and am indifferent to things like football games, I'm constantly getting caught off guard by major sporting events and their traffic-related problems.(I've got a gig this Friday out in Kenner, and am going to have to take care to avoid a parade that's rolling out there that night). In this case though, since the Saints weren't involved, game night seemed to translate into everyone staying home and watching it on TV. When I got to the gig Bourbon Street was mighty empty, and so was the club.

I've made reference in previous posts to Jamil Sharif's top drawer musicianship, he's simply a first rate trumpet player who's comfortable in any style. He's also very consistant in terms of the quality of his performances; audiences who come to see him at the Maison Bourbon are pretty much guaranteed a program of well-played traditional jazz and swing that never drops below a certain standard. Last night though, was one of his fire-eating nights, a display of agile musicianship and a beautiful, burnished tone on the trumpet. I think this was due, at least in part, to the fact that the club was nearly empty for the first set and he decided to call some tunes that were a bit off the beaten path.

First tune was Duke Ellington's "In A Mellow Tone." Most of the guys on Jamil's band would really rather be playing modern jazz, and the opportunity to stretch out a little bit on something besides "Hold That Tiger" or "Fidgety Feet" seemed to wake everyone up and inspired some wonderful solos all around, particularly from pianist Joe Shay, a monster player who usually gets to the gig early and warms up his fingers with a few of Bach's two part inventions. Jamil got into his Clifford Brown bag and stayed there pretty much all night. When we finished, I turned to him and said, "man, you sound beautiful." He smiled and said "thank you brother." I said, "and I really mean that, cause, you know, you already paid me" (at the beginning of the evening he'd handed me an envelope containing a check and 2011's 1099 form) He laughed.

He called all kinds of offbeat stuff you don't normally hear on Bourbon Street. Neil Hefti's "Cute." Jobim's "Wave." Clifford Brown's "Joy Spring." A customer requested "Caravan" and we played that. The joint filled up in the second set (the game had ended) and we went back to a more trad jazz vibe, but the fresh and creative groove remained. I'm not suggesting the gig is stale other times, because the music is always well played, but there is an aspect of this job that can feel like punching a clock. It is, after all, a "show" put on for an audience composed mostly of tourists, and Jamil is not at all above deploying show-biz gimmicks; cycle breathing and other kinds of trumpet gymnastics, high-note acrobatics, triple-tonguing, interpolating numerous national anthems ("Oh Canada" usually gets a big cheer) into performances of "the Saints." But this was a night when the collective musicianship in the band combined with a feeling that we all really wanted to play resulted in performances with a freshness to them that maybe might not be as fully present on other nights. Surprisingly, the audience responded to this, even on the 'modern' tunes.

Of course it's hard to sustain this sort of thing over five hours, and not everything was totally in the pocket. I blanked on the bridge to "There Is No Greater Love" and the piano player had to bail me out (embarrassing). And Jamil caught me off-base again with another trad jazz tune I 'sort of' know but had never played, a breakneck-tempo run through of "That's A Plenty.' But all in all, it was a great night.

Working.

2011-12-05T10:18:00.000-08:00

When I decided to go back to school and get some degrees almost exactly 20 years ago, I did it in part because I was feeling burnt out being a professional musician. The constant travel, the reversed hours of work and sleep, and the economic uncertainty were really grinding me down. I didn't know exactly where a university education would take me, but I was in the mood for radical change and was just starting to dip a toe into teaching and discovering, to my surprise, that I really liked it. I had it in the back of my mind that I'd like to teach at the post-secondary level, although I had no idea how one might go about that. I kind of blundered into the job at Tulane, and in retrospect I can see that I was very naive about the realities of that environment.

For the time being, I'm back to working full time as a mercinary, in-it-for-the-dough jobbing musician, something I haven't really done in maybe 15 years. There's been a lot of changes in "the business" since then, almost none of them for the better; the money has gotten smaller (the money has been getting smaller for 40 years) and recordings are no longer a viable source of income, beyond tip money. The up side though, is that New Orleans, unlike other cities I've lived in, is a "music town," and there are a lot of gigs, even if they don't pay all that well. And in working consistantly as a sideman for the first time in 15 years, I'm getting the benefits of being forced to learn a lot of new music quickly.

When I first started playing jazz seriously (about 1992) leaders weren't exactly breaking down the door to hire me, so I decided I'd have to create my own playing opportunities. To that end I formed my own bands, hustled my own gigs as a leader, and wrote a fair bit of original music. I recorded some CDs as a leader, and played some festivals and got my name out there and some other good stuff, but in the process I deprived myself of the benefits of placing myself in the service of musical choices other than my own. I also took myself out of the 'side-player" pool of musicians people think of when they're putting together a project. In other words, I was thought of as a leader, a guy who gives you a gig, not one you give one to.

People who see you playing original modern jazz on big festival stages have a tendency to think that's what life is for you all year round, but the fact is that the working musician must be a part of the vast, churning mass of variegated musical work of all kinds to survive. Being "on the scene" is key, so that you are top of mind when various leaders are looking to fill out ensembles for convention work, private parties, wine tastings, political ballyhoos, art gallery openings, picnics, second-lines etc. I've made it a point to try to spend at least three nights a week sitting in on other people's gigs, and asking other horn players who have gigs to consider adding me to their sub list. My good buddy (and ace drummer) Geoff Clapp has been very helpful in pointing me to opportinities in this regard, including a gig he's been working two nights a week at the Maison Bourbon with trumpeter Jamil Sharif.

The Maison Bourbon is one of the last places (Fritzel's a couple of blocks down is another) on Bourbon Street to still feature traditional jazz, seven nights a week. They offer two bands per night (one that plays from 3:30p.m. to 8:15p.m., and a second that plays from 8:30 to to 1:15a.m.) for a total of 14 possible gigs, so understandably it's advantageous for me to be on the sub list there. I played my first (and several subsequent) gigs there with Jamil. Jamil is a very, very good trumpet player (in addition to playing and recording as a leader, he turns up as a sideman on albums by Dr. John, Chuck Carbo, and others) who can play in pretty much any style. Technically a very disciplined player, aggressive style, very out front, and like his predecessor at the Maison, the late Wallace Davenport, he's decided at some point that the way to work consistantly in New Orleans is to specialize in traditional jazz for the tourist trade. In fact, many of his band are players he inherited from Davenport.

The first thing I noticed on the gig was that "stomping off" a tune is not just a nod to tradition; on Bourbon Street it's a necessity, because the loud racket from other clubs makes hearing a spoken count difficult, and in any case if you're a trumpet player you need the horn up to play a pickup into bar one of most trad jazz tunes. If I remember correctly the first tune Jamil called was "Undecided," which I may or may not have played on some job years ago. But it set the pattern for the night, which was one of rubbing my nose in the fact that trad jazz repertoire is not my strong suit, I'd say out of every five tunes, two were ones I knew, two were ones I'd heard somewhere and could fake, and one was something I'd never heard before and had to scramble to pick up on the fly. On these gigs, "sorry I don't know that one" is not an option, and often not even a key is mentioned. It's just "stomp...stomp...stomp.stomp,stomp,stomp" and bang, you're in.

There were a few bright spots and comfort zones for me, like Chris Kenner's "Sick and Tired,' an old R&B chestnut I'd played a million times back in the day, and standards like "Satin Doll" and "In A Mellow Tone." There were also uptempo fingerbenders I'd never attempted before, like "Fidgety Feet," that were a real strain, and I was glad Jamil seemed inclined to be patient with me. I'm making it a point, when tunes like that get called, to write them down and then learn them the next day using youtube or some other online resource, so I won't get caught offbase as often.

I'd given my card to the 'afternoon' band leader, a trumpet player named Dwayne Burns, and he wound up calling me a few days ago. Dwayne's gig seemed less intense and aggressive than Jamil's (in the afternoon things are slower at the club) and he called a lot more stuff within my comfort zone, blues shuffles and standards like "The Way You Look Tonight." Dwayne's singing bears a strong resemblance to Fats Waller's, so we did "Honeysuckle Rose" and "Ain't Misbehavin," and other tunes I know very well. In this sense the gig was easier on the nerves; I felt more relaxed and had more fun, but I also maybe didn't get pushed and learn as much as with Jamil.

In a way, this particular club reminds me of the first gigs I played in strip clubs. They're labor intensive (five 45 minute sets) and in the service of commerce more than art. But I'm learning a lot, getting my name and face out there, and making a little money, so it's all good.

Doheny Interviews Doheny, Part 3.

2011-09-24T15:33:00.000-07:00

We'd been talking before about technique, and you'd managed to get yourself all balled up in what seemed to me to be some contradictory statements. Would you care to untangle them?

I thought I was being pretty straightforward actually, but I'll try a different approach. If we use an analogy like, say, language, then obviously if you're trying to get a complex and nuanced point across, it's best if you have the widest vocabulary possible. On the other hand, if you have nothing to say, all the ten dollar words in the world won't make it sound like anything more than what it is...empty bullshit.

Okay, but what about so-called "primitive" folk artists, like blues singers. Are you saying these musicians, who obviously aren't technicians, are not expressive?

But are these people really "primitive? Just because Robert Johnson didn't play like Julian Bream doesn't mean he wasn't a virtuouso. And even guys who are seemingly just banging on the guitar and hollering are often using a very large vocabulary of expressive techniques, they're just not "classical" techniques. Check out, say, Son House doing "John the Revelator." All he's doing is kind of chanting the lyrics and clapping his hands, but holy cow is that shit intense! You try doing that sometime. The way that he places the words, punches some of them and pulls back others, where he places them in the time stream. And the intent behind it, he really wants to get that message across, and he's got total mastery of the musical materials he needs to do it. I was on a gig once about ten years ago where this guy, he was a radio announcer, decided he was going to do Tom Waits's "Step Right Up," which is a kind of beatnik-hipster monologue done with bass, drums and tenor sax. This guy figured, hey, I make my living talking on the radio, all Waits is doing is talking over some music, I can do that. The bass player on the gig, my good buddy Jasper Clarke who passed away last year, tried to warn him, "hey man. This shit is harder than it looks." But the guy went ahead anyway, figuring he'd just toss it off, and it was one of the more embarrassing moments I've endured onstage, I mean the guy was just twisting slowly in the wind. Just awful.

Another example. Some friends of mine once accompanied a female "rock" singer who decided she wanted to do Billie Holiday's version of "What A Little Moonlight Can Do." This was a person with, technically, a much better set of pipes than Billie, who had about a three note range. This singer was a real belter, but she had no concept of phrasing, no idea of swing, beyond hearing Billie do it and thinking "hey, that's cool." But you have to learn how to do these things, it takes time and study, even though it sounds easy. But it's not easy. If it was, everyone would do it.

It's disrespectful to approach music, any music, with that kind of casual attitude. That's why I'm so indifferent to the charms of stuff like the early Rolling Stones and Beatles versions of classic blues and R&B stuff. I mean why on earth would I want to listen to the Rolling Stones fuck up "Time is On My Side" when I can listen to Irma Thomas's original? I don't understand how they could even put that crap out, you know? I mean, the guitars aren't even in tune. They obviously just kind of clanked around with it for awhile, thought, "okay, good enough," and put it in their repertoir. Then figured it was cool because if you stand back fifty feet and squint, it sort of sounds okay. That's an insult to all the people who sweat bullets to get their point across, like Irma and Son House.

Okay, this is starting to make a little more sense. You seem to be saying that a musician needs the tools to get his message across. But what is this "message?"

Again, you're going to hate me when I say this, but I don't think these things are necessarily something that can be expressed in words. And I'm talking about "songs" that have lyrics as well. Because when you write down a lot of supposedly "poetic" song lyrics, they actually look pretty dumb on the page. Especially if you stack em up next to real poetry, like Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gently Into That Good Night," or Henry Reed's "Naming of Parts." But Billie Holiday singing "Strange Fruit," which actually started it's life as a pretty mediocre poem...that's heavy, heavy stuff.

The problem is, we're talking about intangibles here, and also (and here I'm going to say something else that's going to piss you off) we're talking about things that become clearer over time, as you get some age under your belt. Or maybe it's just me, I dunno. But it's like, yeah, I "dug" B.B. King and John Coltrane and Son House and Robert Johnson when I was 16, but I was only "digging" down into the first couple of layers of what those people do. As I got into my 30s and 40s, their work began to have more resonance for me. And just lately man, I've been revisiting some cats I haven't listened to in a while, and wow! It's like the veil has fallen from in front of my eyes, you know? I've been digging on some Ike Quebec recently, a CD I've had for maybe 15 years, but hadn't listened to for quite awhile, and it was like...WHAM! The stuff is just so deep, man, so soulful. It sets me back on my pins.

This has been very interesting, but we probably need to wrap it up, since we both have actual lives to attend to. Any closing thoughts about your own development as a musician?

Wow, you sure know how to snap a shiv, don't you *laughs* And stick it in. I have to be careful how I answer this, because if I confess how badly I think I suck, nobody'll pay to come hear me.

Seriously, everyone has inner doubts, absolutely everyone. The heaviest players you can name have their bad days, and no way do I put myself on that level. I've always told my students that I speak to them as a fellow sufferer, not as some all-seeing Jedi Master of Jazz who's got it all figured out. No matter how good you think you are, there's always someone better to put you in your place.

One of the great things about New Orleans is the opportunity to be humiliated, on a regular basis, by players who will just mercilessly kick your ass on the bandstand. And it's not always the "big dogs" doing it either; I mean, there's no shame, to me, in being cut by Branford Marsalis or Tim Warfield, I can live with that no problem. But when it's some student less than half your age whacking you all over the stand all night long, that's a humbling experience.

For example last night, I went to sit in on Jesse Mcbride's "Next Generation" gig out at the Steak Knife in Lakeview. Jesse's rhythm section is as good as it gets, Max Moran on bass and Joe Dyson Jr. on drums. These are cats who are starting to get international reputations through touring with guys like Donald Harrison, but a few years ago they were just little weed-hopper students of Jesse's. And now here they are at this nothing gig in a steakhouse, playing with Jesse's new crop of weed-hoppers.

On trumpet is a young guy named John Michael Bradford, who I think is about 16 and just started at NOCCA. Jasmine Butler sat in on drums for a bit, as did Steve Lands on trumpet, who plays in Delfeayo Marsalis's big band.

It's a strange vibe for me, because I feel I am Jesse's student too, even though he's almost 30 years younger than me. But his pedagogical approach is so hip, you feel like you just have to leave all vanity and ego behind and just...address the music. And Jesse's tunes that he plays on that gig always have a purpose, either as some iconic but little known (outside of New Orleans) composition by James Black or Harold Battiste or Ellis Marsalis that he wants to pass on, or as examples of various technical things that all jazz improvisers need to master. Often they include both these aspects.

I'm generally a pretty gregarious guy, I love to socialize`and cut up and such, but lately when I go on Jesse's gig to sit in, I try not to do that much. I feel like I need to shut up and get serious about Jesse's music, because there's so much to learn there, and I see the people who've put themselves in the service of his concepts have become such fine musicians, and I'd like a little of that for myself.

I wasn't feeling so good when I got there last night, and I didn't think I was playing well. I was screwing stuff up in weird ways, like tunes I thought I'd at least got a handle on, like James Black's "Dee Wee" and Ellis Marsalis's "Swingin At The Haven," I was kacking stuff, fluffing lines. Jesse is playing "Dee Wee," which is a super-hard, mixed meter thing, a little faster than I'm used to, so I was a bit forgiving of myself for messing that up. But he played "Swingin" at a slower tempo than usual, and I screwed that up too. It's like you get this comfort-zone kind of rut on some tunes, and if you get pushed out of that, it's harder to deal. At least it is for me.

But I was watching John Michael on trumpet, here's this kid, he's just got so much heart, you know? Even when he's messing up, he just keeps pushing, and he searches and finds his way, and by the end of the solo, he's got something he can sit back down with and feel good, you know?

So I kind of took that to heart and figured there's something for me to learn. And the last few tunes of the evening, which were mostly funk or blues things, I felt like I played some decent stuff. Mostly, I'm trying to listen and learn. From everybody. And practise. There's never enough time to practise.

Doheny Interviews Doheny, Part Two.

2011-09-08T20:03:00.000-07:00

We were speaking of the viability of teaching jazz performance in an institutional or university setting.

Yes we were, and I'd like to resume by saying that at this point I'm much too close to the process to gauge the degree of success, or lack of it, that we've had at Tulane. But I do feel I can address some of the problems we encountered, and the advantages we've had.

Please do.

Well, in the beginning we had two very strong elements working in our favor. The first was a combination of support from the chair of the music department (Barbara Jazwinski in the first years, and Michael Howard more recently) coupled with a kind of benign neglect. And by this I mean that since the bulk of the performance program in the music department at Tulane was, when I arrived there in 2003, almost entirely classically oriented, there wasn't really anyone around when we started who knew enough about teaching jazz performance to place any restrictions on us. In the days after Katrina, when the program really started moving ahead, Barbara gave me pretty much carte blanche. I didn't have much of a budget, but she more or less let me develop programs and curriculum how I liked, hire who I liked.I brought in people like Fredrick Sanders, who taught jazz piano for a while, who were really marvelous musicians and educators, and who had solid connections in the community of professional jazz musicians, both locally and nationally. When Fred left, he recommended Jesse Mcbride, and by total coincidence I had a gig with Jesse right after that and afterwards we talked for an hour about jazz education and what we thought it should be, and I could tell right away that we were on the same page. Jesse has proved to be a huge asset to the program.

The other advantage is the city of New Orleans itself. I can't imagine what it must be like to try to teach jazz performance in some little college town in Kansas or something like that, it must feel very abstract. In New Orleans, by contrast, the history of the music is right at your doorstep, as are many, many musicians who are part of that lineage. I remember as a grad student here, having to write a paper on Jelly Roll Morton, and at one point I got up from the computer and went and took a walk past Jelly Roll's house. You can't do that in Keokuk Iowa. And getting the opportunity to play with and learn from musicians you've idolized your whole life is a priceless and matchless experience.

What are some of the disadvantages.

Just the nature of the institution. Universities love numbers and GPAs and grading curves, and those things aren't always conducive to learning a skill like jazz. To many university instructors, "teaching" means standing at the front of a lecture theater three times a week, talking and answering questions, and giving a midterm, and a final, and grading papers. For the classical music folks, it's juries and recitals. But jazz doesn't work like that. So while the structure and evaluation procedures of the university dictate that you do things like require graduating recitals and term end concerts, those things have more value to the school than they do to the overall texture of a jazz student's experience at Tulane. Because they get a lot of demands placed on them that they get no academic credit for. In addition to the term end concerts other music students have, jazz students at Tulane have another half-dozen or so performances in the "Jazz at the Rat" series, where they have to learn a whole bunch of music for each one, to a standard of excellence where they won't embarrass themselves playing with the professionals brought in for these things. If they're in the big band or the "Friday" combo, they've got a jazzfest performance on a major stage before thousands of people. They've got the weekly gig at the Steak Knife out in Lakeview that Jesse curates. Jazz students at Tulane just have a lot more performance obligations than most other music students, and they don't get academic credit for most of them. Because, as they've heard me say many times, life ain't a rehearsal. It's a gig.

Do you miss being at Tulane, now that school has started?

Hell yeah! It breaks my heart, man. Working with those students was the best time of my life. And I really feel like the program is going well now, after six years of hard work. There's some very highly motivated, skilled musicians teaching there now, many of whom I brought to Tulane. It makes me very sad to not be there to help take it to the next level.

Can we change the subject?

Sure. Let's talk about your own development as a player. Who did you listen to as a young man?

Ironically, a lot of New Orleans cats. When I was 15, 16 years old, I learned all the tenor solos off of Little Richard's early hits, like Lucille, Good Golly Miss Molly etc. all of them done by the great New Orleans saxophonist Lee Allen. I can still play those solos from memory to this day, along with other New Orleans guys who turned up on a lot of those old R&B records, guys like Herb Hardesty and Nat Perriliat. And of course I listened to other R&B cats like King Curtis and Junior Walker. I didn't get into the more "chops" oriented players like Bird and "Trane until I was into my 20s, and not really seriously until I was in my 30s.

It's funny, because when I finally did get serious about technique, and started really listening and learning stuff from the proverbial "Coltrane Canon," I got kind of snobbish for a while. I stopped listening to guys like Junior Walker and Joe Houston and Hal "Cornbread" Singer, because it wasn't sophisticated and technical and polished. But living in New Orleans these last few years, I've come to understand a few things that, in my arrogance, I kind of overlooked. One is, never jump to conclusions about how much horn somebody can blow. A guy here in New Orleans like James Rivers, who if you just come to town as a tourist and catch him playing "Wonderful World" or something, you might be tempted to dismiss as a lightweight. But James can tear up on "Giant Steps" man. Go toe-to-toe with him at a session and he'll kill you dead. Same thing with Elliot "Stackman" Callier, who played with Fat's Domino for many years. Don't think just because you see him on some brass band second-line gig blowing "It Ain't My Fault' that he is not able to play some serious saxophone. Stackman is killer.

The other thing is, well...I guess Lester Young said it best after listening to Sonny Stitt blow a million-note solo. He said "that's all very fine Lady Stitt...but can you sing me a song"? I've come to believe that, as instrumentalists, we are at our very best when we are most like singers. And by that I mean that we are expressing a kind of lyricism and beauty that is landing in the listener's heart. So now, when I listen to King Curtis, I hear him not so much as a saxophonist but rather as the heir to all the great, southern-fried soul singers of his day, the Bobby Moore's and the Tommy Tate's and the Clarence Carters's. I once had an opportunity to play next to Junior Walker, back in the 80s. I was too stupid and vain to fully absorb what he was doing at the time, but I do remember being absolutely blown away by the strenghth and virility of his sound. It was like a real, physical presence in the room. And when I think of his sound now, I think not only of great singers, but of great preachers, like Rev. C.L. Franklin, or Jesse Jackson. Because it's almost an oratorical thing as much as it is music to those cats. It's a sermon.

I can't fully describe or understand what that "thing" is, but I can give you an example of what it ain't. If you've seen the movie Standing in the Shadows of Motown, you've seen Tom Scott, a great studio player with yards of technique, play Junior Walker's lines on "Shotgun." Scott could probably blow rings around Walker on "Moments Notice" or some other 'jazz Olympics" tune like that, but he sounds puny and ineffectual playing these simple lines. Then he tries to make up for it by playing a bunch of notes, but it's hopeless. He just doesn't have what Walker has, and whatever that is, it's got squat to do with "technique." Because Albert Ayler had it too. It's a certain soulful "presence" in the music.

I don't understand. Are you saying technique doesn't matter?

Oh god no. I'm saying we, I, need to stop kidding ourselves and focus on whatever we deem to be of primary importance. Jesse Mcbride always tells me "focus on the music," which sounds like an easy thing to do, but it's the hardest thing to do in life, because the human capacity to bullshit ourselves is seemingly limitless. As an example, take the "I only need enough technique to do what I want to do" trope. I've heard this a lot from students over the years, as well as from myself, in some pretty sophisticated iterations. But what you have to ask yourself, whenever this comes up, is, "but is this really what I want to do? Or am I just saying it's what I want to do, because what I really want is too hard?" You should be making musical choices based on where your heart and soul is taking you, not on whether there's too many sharps in that key. And I'm saying this as much to myself as to anyone else.

So technique is important then?

Technique is everything when you don't have enough of it, because nothing sucks more than attempting to execute a great idea and fluffing it. But in and of itself, technique is just a vanity, and vanity has no place in matters of the soul.

You're making me crazy.

Imagine how I feel. And remember, you're talking to yourself.

Okay, this is getting ridiculous. Let's take a break and continue in a day or two.

Sounds good to me.

Doheny on Doheny, Pt. One.

2011-09-08T14:51:00.000-07:00

I suppose I've done my fair share of interviews, both print and electronic media. Some of them have been fun, many have been routine promo flackery, and some have been a Season in Hell. There's nothing worse than doing a "phoner" (nowdays it's often a "Skyper") and realizing the person on the other end neither knows nor cares anything about jazz or your place in it, and that it's up to you to do the heavy lifting in a way that doesn't make it obvious to the audience that's what's happening.

Of the "enjoyable" interviews I'd say the Alpha and the Omega would be something like, say, Margaret Gallagher/Paul Grant on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's jazz radio show "Hot Air," and DJ/alto saxophonist Gavin Walker's "The Jazz Show" on CFMI. "Hot Air" tends to be well researched, and because it's pre-recorded, the editing process can make me come off as quite a bit more focussed and erudite than I actually am. This however sometimes comes at the expense of a lot of information I consider important, like the names of everyone who played on the track, and more than a few anecdotes I considered amusing and entertaining but that producers Philip Ditchburn/Neil Ritchie apparently considered less so. But, as Paul Grant once put it to me, it's a music show. That's what people tune in to hear.

Gavin's show is done live, and he's at least as much into the detail/anecdote bag as I am. He's a musician himself, as well as being a guy with an extremely broad knowlege of the music and its history, and he has a wide network of social connections within the business; it's hard to bring up a musician he hasn't met at least once, and in many cases it turns out they've been friends for years. Couple this with the fact that Gavin and I have known each other since the early 1970s, and you've got a recipe for some serious insider chatter. I think we're both aware of this and try to keep it from getting too chronic, but sometimes we're having so much fun in that tiny little studio playing records and talking that we forget ourselves and it may sound, briefly, like a couple of tedious old farts nattering on about god knows what. But that's both the beauty and the curse of live radio. WWOZ here in New Orleans also does the live interview format, with the added attraction of a culture that, unlike the generally polite Canadians, doesn't hesitate to call you up on air to either cheer you on or chew you out over something you just said. It can get to where you feel like you're on a call-in show.

Even the best of interviewers don't always ask the questions I'd like to answer, or take the interview everywhere I'd like it to go. I've always thought of this as just one of life's little challenges, but I recently had the opportunity, while bunking at my friends Don and Mary Hardy's place up in Vancouver, to dip into the "Glenn Gould Reader" and discovered a chapter where he interviews himself. Now, I would never presume to put myself on Gould's level musically, but when it comes to the "ego-large-enough-to-have-its-own-weather-system" category I feel I can more han hold my own. So here, for your edification and amusement, is Doheny interviewed by Doheny.

Good afternoon John. And may I say that you're looking handsome and debonair as always.

Thank you John, as are you.

Well, you old smoothie. No wonder people in general, and women in particular, are utterly charmed by you.

Watch it Doheny, the soft-soap is getting pretty deep in here. Better ixnay on the andjobhay, before the marks wise up.

Right, let's get down to cases. Since you're just coming off six years in the university jazz education system, I'm going to ask you the standard shit-disturbing question; can jazz be taught?

And since I don't have to worry too much about hurting my own feelings I'll lob it right back at you and say that's a really stupid question. I mean, it's not like we're suffering from a shortage of jazz musicians, in fact, we're up to our asses in them. The music is obviously being passed on and taught some kind of way, otherwise we wouldn't be well stuck into the second century of jazz music.

Probably what most people mean when they ask a question like that is "can jazz be taught within the confines of an institutional setting, like a college or university?" Again, the answer is obviously yes, if we're to take "classical" music as an example, since the "old" way of passing on that tradition was very much the same hands-on, mentor-student relationship that characterized the first half-century of jazz. If you went to study with Pachelbel or Corretti or somebody like that, man, you moved into his house. He sat next to you at the keyboard and showed you where to put your fingers, in the most hands-on way possible. It's not until the advent of the schola cantorum that we start to see an institutionalization of music instruction, with larger groups sitting in classrooms and such. And yet I think it's telling that, even in the age of "distance learning" and the "internet classroom' and all this other horseshit, learning an instrument is still largely a one-on-one thing. Or should be, anyway.

Okay, let me rephrase the question. Which do you think is best? The old-school, travelling-big-band-cutting-contest-jam-session model, or the institutional setting of the university?

You're going to hate me for saying this, but I don't think it matters. I really don't think it matters much how the student aquires the tools, although to the romantics and culture-pimps among us I guess the idea of the jazz musician as romantic, existential figure holds great appeal. The trouble is, that is and always has been nonsense. Jazz musicians aren't "cool" people, really. They're nerds. I mean, who else but a nerd would spend thousands of hours alone in a room practising boring stuff? Plus, jazz musicians have no money, which in America is the ultimate in uncool.

Once you strip away the cultural-coolness factors of stupid little hats and goatees, and the idea that jazz musicians are dashing, romantic archetypes (for the benefit of my younger, single students I'd just like to say, ladies, that this part is actually all true, as are the rumours you've heard about the "big tone' and "wide sound" of some of the hipper players), the elements of jazz education are really pretty simple. All students of jazz need access to information, both theoretical and practical, about the music. They need access to competent instruction on their instruments, they need mentorship from older, experienced players, and they need places to 'shed and places to perform. This last especially, because jazz music is music that grows and develops though a synergistic interaction with an audience; at its best, it's like a sermon preached in the Holiness church, it needs the energizing hit of the "amen's" and the "yeah-you-rite"s.

But the question remains, can this environment be achieved within the institutional setting of a university?

Well, as old Willy the Shake once famously said, Aye, there's the rub. But I'm afraid I need to go practise the horn now. Do you think we could continue this on the 'morrow? Because I've got lots more to say.

Indeed.

To Be Continued...

Gigs.

2011-08-19T22:28:00.000-07:00

I've been gigging a little bit more than usual lately, include a "double" last Sunday that was a bit unusual for me; not just two gigs in one day, but two gigs in two different cities in one day, in this case Lafayette Louisiana and New Orleans respectively. Something I don't do often, thank god. By the end of gig number two (with John Dobry's band at the Blue Nile on Frenchmen street in NOLA) I was beat right to my socks.

The the real red letter job this week was my gig last wednesday at Cory Weeds's Cellar club in Vancouver, Canada. Working Cory's room is a gas under any circumstances, because it's a serious listening room populated by a serious listening crowd, and since Cory is a very fine saxophonist his own self, the place is a horn player's dream from an acoustic standpoint, as I'll relate a little further on.

Because I'm not enough of a jazz big-shot to warrant touring with my own band (very few people not named Wynton Marsalis are) I appeared with a local rhythm section. I've done a fair bit of this in recent years, and it can be anything from a pleasant surprise to the longest, most tedious night of your life. In this case I was blessed by the Gig Gods with a truly swinging, first-class rhythm team; Paul Keeling on piano, Sean Cronin on bass, and Andrew Millar on drums. I'd met and played with Sean years before, on a big band gig so awful we both wince at the mention of it, but I also knew him through his association with the great young drummer Morgan Childs, now a Toronto resident. Paul and Andrew turned out to be everything I could possibly ask for; swinging, inventive, supportive, generous...you can bet they'll all be 'first call' on any subsequent visits. And to top it off, we even had the luxury of a short rehearsal the night before. This is not often the case in these situations.

I got to the club about an hour early to check things out and try some reeds, and by a half hour before the hit we already had a nice house. The first tune was a Nat Perriliat composition, a blues called "Little Joy." Paul and company were swinging hard right out of the gate. We followed with Eddie Harris's "Cold Duck Time," taken a fair bit slower than his recording of it. I like to play medium tempo stuff a little on the slow side, because it gives me an opportunity to play 16th note phrasing and "double up" my lines without getting tangled up in my own fingers, but some rhythm sections have trouble keeping the energy up in a slower groove. These guys don't have that problem, they nail that tempo down and power through. And the sound in the room is beautiful, so beautiful that I find myself wandering off mic so I can hear the natural, acoustic sound of the horn. Before the next tune I ask the audience if they can hear me okay without the mic. "Yes" they shout. So we cruise into "Time After Time," dedicated to my wife Darlene because I played it at our wedding, with me standing away from the mic and blowing straight to the audience, without any electronic hoo hah in the way.

Unless you've actually done it, I don't think there's any way to truly understand what a buzz it is to play a tune you know very well with a truly great rhythm section. The lovely melody unfolds under your hands as the timbre of the horn fills the room until it is packed and stuffed with sounds. As you start to play variations on this melody in the first choruses of your solo, the inherent wisdom and logic of the harmonic structure becomes apparent. As you double up the lines, notes come popping out of your fingers and go flying away in skeins and clusters, and the reed sings like a bird in your throat. Fragments of "I'm Old Fashioned" and "If I Only Had A Brain" become entangled in the new line you are creating, not because you're deliberately trying to be clever but because they are inevitably arrived at by the pure logic of the harmonic structure of the tune. And if you're like me, you finish up in the turnaround with a little "routine-ing" on the blues scale, its flat thirds and sevenths going down like good home cooking.

The rest of the night rolled by like the best birthday party you ever had. We played more standards. Some "modern New Orleans jazz classics" like Harold Battiste's "Me and Willie T," and Ellis Marsalis's "Swingin at the Haven." We played "Dancing Squid" by my friend, the late bassist-composer Jasper Clarke. I've got a whole album of Jasper's stuff ready to go, that we recorded last fall in New Orleans at Word of Mouth studios with some of the best young players in town. I'm hoping to have that out in a couple of months.

It was a terrific night, everything a night playing great jazz in a great club for a great audience should be. I could do that every night of my life and never get tired.

John Doheny@the Cellar in Vancouver, August 17th.

2011-08-13T20:55:00.000-07:00

Escaping the withering heat wave for a gig in a place that has apparently skipped summer this year. Checking the extended forecast for Vancouver next week, I see that the "highs" range from 65 to 70 degrees farenheit, with overnight lows dipping into the mid 50s. I'm having a hard time getting my mind around it (since New Orleans is currently running temps in the mid 90s, with overnight lows of 80F), but I'm going to have to pack a coat. I'm actually looking forward to this.

But what I'm really looking forward to is the gig. I'll be appearing with a terrific local rhythm section comprised of Paul Keeling on piano, Andrew Millar on drums, and Sean Cronin on bass. We'll be playing some tunes from my upcoming release "Jasper: the Music of Jasper Clarke," as well as a gang of tunes from New Orleans modern jazz masters Ellis Marsalis, James Black, Harold Battiste, Nat Perilliat, and Alvin Batiste.

The Cellar is located at 3611 W. Broadway in Vancouver. Reservations are recommended. Click the link for more info.
The Cellar.

Profs of Pleasure Free Concert on Tulane Campus.

2011-04-26T11:41:00.000-07:00

Just a quick note to let you know that we'll be playing a free gig in the quad in front of Dixon Hall here on the Tulane campus tomorrow, April 27th, from 1 to 3:00p.m. John Doheny, tenor sax, John Dobry, guitar, Jesse Mcbride, keyboards, Jim Markway, bass, Geoff Clapp, drums.

Doheny on CBC Radio's "Hot Air" Show This Saturday.

2011-03-02T10:43:00.000-08:00

This coming Saturday, March 5th, I'll be appearing on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's "Hot Air" (yes, I know. Very apropos for me) radio show.

I've done the show many, many times, starting in 1999, but this will be my first appearance with new host Margaret Gallagher, and also my first 'remote.' Every other time I've appeared on the show I've done it from CBC's West Coast studios in Vancouver. I did a remote "phoner" for Mardi Gras 2006, but that was a show called "Good Morning Canada," hosted by Rick Kluft. It was the first Carnival after Katrina, a very emotional moment for the city, and a kind of weird disconnect for me. About halfway through I realized Kluft was under the impression I was in the French Quarter, surrounded by breast-baring co-eds, when in fact I was deep-ghetto in Central City, surrounded by ruined houses and a truly surpring amount of people, many of whom had driven hours or days from various places of exile to be there. I cried at one point, which was embarrassing for me, but of course "radio gold" for Kluft.

Anyway, I'm all set up here in my office, ready to go, with my headset-microphone combo that makes me look like Lily Tomlin's 'Telephone Operator' character. If you're interested in listening online, go here:CBC Radio, Hot Air Show we'll be on at 5:05 p.m. this Saturday, PST, right after the news.

More Colleen Savage Session Pics.

2011-02-19T09:12:00.000-08:00

Received an e-mail from Colleen a few days ago. She's back in Vancouver and delighted with the ruffs, and has struck a deal with Tim Stambaugh at Word of Mouth to do final mixes long distance. This isn't really as weird as it sounds, since Tim's rough mixes tend to be pretty close to 'finals' quality anyway. What Colleen walked out of there with at 8:00p.m. Feb. 5th would pass muster as a finished product in many quarters. Additional 'fixes' will consist mostly of just basic cleanups of things like cymbal-wash, compression and 'normalizing' of levels across the track spectrum. I remember finishing the final mix on "Profs of Pleasure:vol. 2." and driving home across the Crescent City Connection bridge listening to it, and being quite surprised at the difference. It wasn't anything overt or obvious. Just a much greater clarity to the final product.

Anyway, here's a few more pics from the session:

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The board

Playing peep-eye behind the b-3

Some of Tim's microphone collection.

Geoff Clapp does the Eddie Van Halen.

Colleen Savage/John Doheny.

If you've seen the tv series "Treme," you've seen this studio. It's where Steve Zahn's "DJ Davis" character (based on real New Orleans "character" Davis Rogan) records his parody version of "Shame, Shame, Shame." Studio owner Tim Stambaugh described the Treme crew as "lighting the place up so it looked like a souvenier shop," but as you can see here, it sorta kinda really does look like that.

Colleen Savage in the vocal booth.

Jesse Mcbride in the piano booth.

Real Cool Killers at the Blue Nile.

2011-02-11T15:43:00.000-08:00

Last tuesday was the CD release on "Parades and Saints" at the Blue Nile Balcony Room on Frenchmen Street here in New Orleans. Trombonist Jeff Albert curates a thing called the Open Ears music series there every tuesday night. Geoff Clapp on drums, Rob Kohler on bass and yours truly on tenor sax congregated there around ten o'clock to lay the voodoo down.

Rob had just arrived in town from Florida that day, so we had zero rehearsal time. That was fine, since we didn't have any 'tunes' to rehearse, we just had to try to recreate the same kind of magic that produced the CD in the first place. I'm kind of into the Arnold Palmer school of thought when it comes to playing jazz; Palmer was notorious for walking up to difficult putts and foregoing the usual agonizing and measuring. He'd just step up to the ball and tap it with no preamble. "I like to miss em quick" was his explanaition, even though he sank the vast majority of his putts. I'm the same way; just step up and play something. So I stepped up, played something (I don't even remember what) and we were off.

Strictly speaking, we did play some tunes, or rather, tunes just sort of happened. Early in the first set I played a series of notes more or less identical to Duke Ellington's "Do Nothing Till You Hear From Me," and Rob and Geoff heard it and were there instantly with the harmonic and rhythmic form of the song, which we then proceded to mercilessly deconstruct. At another point a burning Samba groove suddenly dumped us into the head of Thelonious Monk's "Rhythm-a-ning," which actually appears on the CD (though not as a Samba). But most of the time, we'd just set something up and go with it. It is possible, in the moment, to create a sense of form and style with totally improvised material. Repeating certain leitmotifs helps. Constructing ABA or AABA song structures through unorthodox means (like say, having a bass-and-drums interlude constitute the "As" and a solo saxophone interlude play the part of the "B") works too.

Amazingly, we had a fairly large and enthusiastic crowd for most of the night, though it did wax and wane some. We played three hard, burning 50 minute sets and finished up about one thirty in the morning, soaked through with sweat. Then Rob got in his car and headed back to Los Angeles.

Colleen Savage Recording Session.

2011-02-10T13:22:00.000-08:00

Colleen Savage. Tim Stambaugh.

Jim Markway

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John Doheny

Great recording session with Colleen Savage and the cats last Friday-Saturday. Colleen was in town appearing with the Tulane faculty band the Professors of Pleasure at our first Jazz at the Rat series of the season in the Rathskeller Pub in the student center here on the Tulane campus. The morning after, we all convened at Tim Stambaugh's Word Of Mouth studios in Algiers.

On day one, we did mostly piano trio stuff or variants thereof, with Jesse McBride on piano, Geoff Clapp on drums and Jim Markway on bass. I'd suggested to Colleen that, because of the total lack of opportunity to do any preproduction reheasals at all (ain't that always the way in jazz) that she bring in tunes that she'd had in her book for a long time but never recorded, and maybe we'd push the envelope a little and give them a different spin. It's my contention that a great tune can stand a lot of different treatments, and to that end we recorded things like "You'd Be So Nice To Come Home To" (which Colleen usually does as a straight-ahead medium swing) as a kind of two-beat, Ahmed Jamal groove, with the first chorus just drums and vocals only, then the whole band, then a Stan Getzish tenor solo in a flat-four swinging feel from yours truly, then drums and vocal out. This arrangement came together very quickly in the studio (it was really mostly drummer Geoff Clapp's idea) and we did a fast two takes and moved on, without even bothering with a playback. We did nine tunes this way, in about five hours.

Day two was more of the same, only with John Dobry on guitar substituting for Jesse on piano. John laid down a burning blues solo on Muddy Waters' "I Love the Life I Live," and some filigreed acoustic work on "Jitterbug Waltz." We also did a bass-and-drums-only take on Eartha Kit's "I Wanna Be Evil" and an original called "Riverboat."

I love recording this way, fast and dirty, and with a little 'hair' on it, as the old school cats used to say. I've been on pop sessions where you don't finish one tune in a day, much less thirteen in two. I think we got a very, very good CD out of this, one that showcases Colleen in a way I don't think she's really been recorded before. Killer stuff.

Colleen Savage at the Rat.

2011-01-30T15:00:00.000-08:00

One of the really great things about teaching at Tulane is the university's willingness to direct resources bringing jazz to the students. This year our first session at the rat features both the Tulane Jazz Factulty band the Professors of Pleasure, and my good friend and colleague of 34 years, Canadian vocalist Colleen Savage. Colleen is in town to cut a CD with us at Word of Mouth studios in Algiers, and while she's here has consented to hang with us at the Rat and favor us with a few tunes. We hit at 8:00p.m. February 3rd in the Rathskellar Bar in the LBC on the Tulane campus. Admission is absolutely free, and that's a price you can't beat.

spring 2011 schedule at the Rat
Colleen and I go all the way back to our college days at VCC in the mid 1970s. She was also featured on two tunes on my debut album as a leader, "One Up, Two Back" in 2002.

Profs of Pleasure CD release, Jan. 23rd at Snug Harbor, New Orleans.

2011-01-14T10:07:00.000-08:00

Slower than Christmas but finally arrived, the date has been set for the release party on "John Doheny Presents the Professors of Pleasure, vol.2." January 23rd at Snug Harbor, 626 Frenchmen Street, New Orleans LA. Shows at 8 and 10:p.m. $15 at the door.

http://www.snugjazz.com/site/

The CD has been in stores and online since Sept.In town, the best place to pick it up is the Louisiana Music Factory and of course it will be available at the club.

We'll be whipping out some stuff from the new CD:

and our freshman release, "Volume 1."

Be there or be square.

Christmas Spectacular.

2010-12-20T14:07:00.000-08:00

l.to r.Jacob Larsen, Darren Phipps, Terence Taplin, David Harris, Steve Lands, Troy Davis, Fredrick Sanders, Jonathan Mannino, Clarence Johnson III, David Blask, John Doheny, Bobby Campo.

Very interesting and fun gig with my good friend pianist Frederick Sanders, who is music minister at the Church of the King over in Mandeville. The Church of the King has a heavy involvement in the arts, and every year puts on a "Christmas Spectacular" which is really a sort of mini-Broadway-Musical production. This year the show had a 'big band' theme, and was structured as a live radio broadcast from London during the blitz in 1944, complete with announcers, the "Andrew Sisters," commercials, and big band music with swing dancers as a 'treat for our studio audience.'

Fred had assembled a band of heavyweight New Orleans jazz guys that included trumpeter Bobby Campo, drummer Troy Davis, and tenor man Clarence Johnson III. Getting to hear Troy's stories about his years with Betty Carter and Ahmed Jamal was priceless, and the music was strong and swinging. Troy was doing all that Gene Krupa-esque stick twirling on "Sing Sing Sing," and with his hair slicked back like that he even looked a bit like Krupa, and of course the cat can swing you into bad health. He was just driving that band, man. It was an incredible feeling. Performances by the cast, all of whom were church members, were of professional quality and very entertaining..

I expected people over 70 to be thrilled by the chance to hear this music again, and there was certainly no shortage of delighted, older faces in the crowd at all seven shows. But what kind of surprised me was how much little kids dug it. Children love this kind of music, man. Odds are good they've never seen a live band like that before and, sadly, most of them will never see one again.

This was part of a church service, so Sunday morning we had shows at 8:00a.m., 9:30a.m. and 11:30a.m., very early hits for jazz musicians, and most of us had an hours drive or so over the causeway to get there. But we all tried to hit that first phrase in "In the Mood' as hard and as accurately as we could, every time, because that was the first time the audiences heard the band in each show. They'd seen us, looking sharp in our white dinner jackets, for several minutes as the plot setup unfolded after the lights went up, but when the announcer shouted "hit it, Fred!," we wanted those first notes to be killin, every time, because you could feel the electric response from the crowd. The vast majority of these people had never heard a live big band, and you could see them going "wow!"

Big up to Fredrick Sanders and the Church of the King for making it possible to present this music to a whole new audience.

Nice Review On Professors of Pleasure vol. 2

2010-12-02T07:39:00.000-08:00

in the december issue of Offbeat:

http://www.offbeat.com/2010/12/01/the-professors-of-pleasure-volume-two-independent/

The Professors of Pleasure, John Doheny’s Tulane University faculty jazz band, use their second CD, Volume Two, to put on a clinic in modern jazz performance and composition. In less capable hands, we’d need to worry that the recording would sound clinical, but that isn’t a concern here. Instead, the interactions between the band on a collection of original compositions, Harold Battiste pieces, standards by Miles Davis (“Half Nelson”), Hank Mobley (“This I Dig Of You”), and James Van Heusen (“Nancy with the Laughing Face”), and a rousing version of the Tulane University fight song set to a second-line beat make for a fun, expressive and often whimsical exploration of what Doheny calls modern New Orleans jazz.

Responsible for the sessions’ feel, as is usually the case with jazz combos, is the solid work of the rhythm section: Geoff Clapp on drums and Jim Markway on bass absolutely lock in. Given such a strong foundation, the rest of the musicians get to stretch and showcase their impressive chops without the performances feeling perfunctory. “Elysian Fields,” an original composition of Markway’s, is a personal favorite for the emphasis its stop-time feel places on the bass and drums.

There isn’t much about Volume Two (beyond the Tulane Fight Song second-line) that will put listeners in mind of traditional New Orleans jazz. It’s inflected enough by modern jazz and fusion-funk idioms, and bebop vocabulary in particular, to avoid that easy categorization. Its obvious intent, both in conception and in execution, is to widen the category of New Orleans jazz to include what Tulane jazz performance students learn and modern jazz aficionados everywhere listen to.

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"Parades and Saints" available, in-store and online.

2010-11-30T10:53:00.000-08:00

I've been spending a lot of time in the studio during the last year, both on my own and other's projects. A fair bit of this stuff is now moving into commercial "release," most recently my trio project with drummer Geoff Clapp and bassist Rob Kohler, "The Real Cool Killers."

http://www.louisianamusicfactory.com/showoneprod.asp?ProductID=7044

The dilemma at this point, as any musician knows, is actually getting noticed amid the avalanche of material out there. I honestly don't think the 'signal to noise' ratio, the percentage of crap music to worthwhile stuff, has really changed much over the years. But the sheer volume of music in commercial release out there these days can make if difficult to make one's presence known. When Rob Kohler was in town recently (he lives in Los Angeles now) we were talking about the Killers project, and he said something to the effect of "that's a damn good record. I just hope it gets heard through the noise." The economics and logistics of the music business have changed enormously, and continue to change. At this point, a lot of us are really in the dark about how to actually sell our music.

Below are some ruminations I posted as a comments thread on another site. The moderator had suggested "Parades and Saints" as a Christmas gift.

http://community.livejournal.com/johndohenyfans/4724.html

It's also priced extremely low, at $9.99. In part that's because it was comparatively cheap to produce; we had no studio costs (it was recorded 'live' direct to digital in the Tulane Recital Hall) so I thought it's pricing should reflect that.

However, at the risk of sounding like I'm whining at you to buy my records (which, of course, I am, lol) I'd like to mention here that the changes in the music business in just the last 5 years or so are making it increasingly difficult to document creative, non-pop-oriented music of any kind. The vast majority of my students at Tulane, for instance (who, ten years ago, would have been an obvious, easily reachable market for my stuff) do not own a single CD, and rarely even bestir themselves to pay for i-tunes downloads, unless it's a classic track I've assigned in a class. And even then they sometimes bitch about having to shell out the 90 cents. What things like file-sharing have done is create an entire generation of people who have literally no conception of music as a commodity. It's just 'there,' like tap water.

I have very mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, as an educator, having near instantaneous access to virtually the entire recorded oeuvre of jazz music is a powerful. powerful tool to have at one's disposal, and free downloadables like the Amazing Slowdowner offer students methods of transcribing solos that players of my generation (who ruined countless vinyl copies of "Kind of Blue" playing them over and over again to 'bite' Coltrane's solos off them) could only dream of. On the other hand, the ubiquity of music today, in my opinion, tends to devalue it. Music used to be a sweet treat, now it's everywhere, being pumped into your head via i-pod. And reducing great works of art like Cotrane's "A Love Supreme," a work I played every single day of my life for a number of years, to 'information' that can be 'downloaded' at will...to me it's a bit like putting Rodin's "The Thinker" in a can, you know?

But I digress. What "Parades and Saints" lacks in recording quality it more than makes up for in vibe. That night in the recital hall was truly a spontaneous, magical moment, and it's captured there for you to relive. We had no idea that performance would be a CD, we thought we were just recording for analysis and preparation for the 'real' record later, but Rob called me the next day and said, "you know man, I think this is it. This is the record." And when I heard it, I knew he was right.

There's a lot of 'imperfections' on it that would be excized in a studio recording, particularly the spontaneous shouts, groans and exhortations emmanating from the players. But that was the moment, that's what happened.

Music may indeed be 'free' (and the music on "Parades and Saints" is very free indeed) but my landlord still demands coin of the realm the first of every month. Recording studios and pressing plants also demand their due. If people don't buy my (and others) recorded products, we'll be left without the means to make more. We're not looking to get rich, but we'd like our music to be heard.

End of Year Update.

2010-11-28T15:14:00.000-08:00

A bit premature, I know, but I've got a few spare minutes and, given the nature of my schedule, who knows when that will happen again. As it is I feel like I'm stealing valuable practise time to do this because, among other things...

I got my alto fixed. I own a beautiful 1954 Selmer MK VI alto (I believe that's the first year they made them) that I haven't played for probably nearly two years now because it had some serious leaks. I recorded two tunes on it for the 2007 "Professors of Pleasure' release and played a few scattered gigs on it around that time, including the 2006 ICMC (International Computer Music Conference) at Tulane, then put it away as it was getting to be a real bear to get air through. Just recently I took it to Paulo Tung (who, sadly, is moving to California in the new year) and he fixed it up a treat. It plays beautifully, in no small part because I found the "holy grail' of saxophone mouthpieces, a "New York" Meyer, while cleaning out some boxes of miscellanious junk back in the music library here in the bandroom at Tulane. And a good thing too, because I'm playing lead alto on some big band things with Fred Sanders in December.

The "Jazz Orchestra and Friday Combo" concert is this coming Tuesday in Dixon Hall. Every year, these ensembles get better and better, but this year they took a quantum leap forward with the addition of some seriously killer soloists (tenor saxophonist Ari Kohn, trombonists Ethan Thompson and Molly Heiligman, pianist Ethan Stern and guitarist George Wilde in the Big Band, as well as new drummer Dillon Frazier and, in the combo, tenor man Evan Slaznik, pianist Adam Whitley-Sebti and drummer Mike Mcculoch) kicking the whole thing up several notches, to the point where I'm planning on recording both ensembles professionally in the spring semester. It's time.

For my own self, this past fall has seen the release of my second album recorded as leader here in New Orleans, "John Doheny Presents the Professors of Pleasure vol. 2."
http://www.louisianamusicfactory.com/showoneprod.asp?ProductID=6935
as well as a trio recording that should be in-store (and online) at the Louisiana Music Factory sometime next week, a collaborative project with New Orleans drummer Geoff Clapp and Los Angeles-based bassist Rob Kohler under the name "The Real Cool Killers." "Parades and Saints" is my first serious foray into 'free' jazz, and it's a damn fine record. I'll post a link to it online when it goes up on the LMF in-store database.

The new year will also see the release on my CD of the compositions of the late Canadian bassist Jasper Clarke. Again I'm going to risk being accused of blatant self-promotion by singing it's praises, but the truth is, Jasper's music is killer, and it's being played by some of the brightest and best young players on the New Orleans scene today, including alto saxophonist Rex Gregory (whose new CD "An End to Oblivion" has been voted one of the "twenty best releases of 2010" by WWOZ radio) tenor saxophonist Allen L. Dejan Jr., 17 year old trumpet sensation Latasha Bundy and Wess "Warmdaddy" Anderson's son Wess IV (aka "Quad) on trombone. Along with us geezers (Jesse Mcbride on piano, Geoff Clapp on drums, Jim Markway on bass, and Edward Anderson on trumpet, all of whom teach with me here in the music department at Tulane) they have crafted a swinging, sobbing, joyous tribute to one of the best cats you could have holding down the groove on your bandstand. Jasper never got to record any of his own stuff for commercial release during his lifetime. We aim to put that right.

Then, next february (or thereabouts; we haven't settled on a firm date yet) my good friend vocalist Colleen Savage is coming down to record a new CD with me and my colleagues here in the department, the 'house band,' the "Professors of Pleasure."

So, you know...no moss growing on me.

Tulane Big Band and Combo Concerts, Nov. 29th and 30th.

2010-11-24T13:23:00.000-08:00

November 29th in the Recital Hall at Dixon is the "combo concert." November 30th, 8:00p.m. in Dixon Theater is the Jazz Orchestra and "Friday" Combo.

When I first started doing these things, there were only two combos (the Tuesday Band and the Friday Band) and I directed them both, as well as the jazz orchestra, and I used to put them all on the same concert. When the combo program expanded (there are now five of them, with additional directors Jim Markway, Jesse Mcbride and John Dobry, and we hope to add a sixth "trad jazz" combo next semester) the program got too long, so we split them up over two nights. The focus in the small bands varies, according to who's directing. John Dobry's band, for instance, often showcases original compositions or unusual instruments (this year violinist Tanya Huang is featured; if you've seen the tv show "Treme," you'll recognize a character based on her). Jesse Mcbride's two bands tend to play a lot of repertoire by New Orleans modern jazz composers like Harold Battiste, Ellis Marsalis, and James Black. Jim Markway's group plays more 'traditional' modern jazz material like you'd find in the "Real Book."

My own "Friday Band" has always been kind of the "A" band. It was the first 'for credit' small band at Tulane when we launched the Jazz Performance Studies Program, and it's continued to feature the more accomplished, advanced players. Every year I'm convinced the new version is the best ever, but this year the band has taken a quantum leap forward into serious-good territory, as has the Jazz Orchestra.

We'll be featuring music by John Coltrane, Gil Evans, Mary Lou Williams, Count Basie, Miles Davis, and Sammy Nestico, as well as appearances by guest clarinetist Colin Kemper and guest vocalist Mimi Mcmurray. Admission is free. You should be there.

Prince of Wales Parade/Jasper.

2010-10-14T11:20:00.000-07:00

Like they say, you got to get right back in the saddle after a horse throws you. I can't really decide how I feel about the horrendous events of last months Young Men Olympian parade. Like everyone else, I'm appalled that a two year old child was shot dead. I suppose I'm gratified that the perpetrators have been caught and, despite Orleans Parish's dismal clearance rate on homicides (less than 4% last year) may very well be convicted. I am not, however, about to join the lynch mob on Nola.com's comments strings and elsewhere, who are leading the cheering section for the perp's speedy execution. If homicidal reaction to violence was any kind of a solution, then New Orleans (where half the homicides committed are 'revenge' killings) would be the safest jurisdiction in North America. I'm also left cold by the sanctimonious posturings of various public officials, because we've all been here before, many times. Every two or three years, somewhere in America, an act of violence will occur that is beyond the pale even for this bloodthirsty nation, and the cry will go up. Something must be done! The 'community' must step forward! These 'thugs' will not be tolerated! But we never really move towards substantive change, because we are unwilling to address the larger issues which enable our society to produce these killers in such numbers. And we crank out more of them than any other western democracy.

Meanwhile, last Sunday, outside the Rock Bottom Lounge on Tchoupitoulas Street, the crowd gathered for the annual Prince of Wales Social Aid and Pleasure Club parade. The rope men opened up a hole in the throng, the band fired up, and the club members danced out of the bar in their bright yellow finery. No matter how many times I see this, it never fails to move me (and make me move my feet) because this music and this culture is at the very center of everything important to me as a jazz musician. No way is a thing like a cold blooded homicide going to move me up off it.

When the parade got around the corner headed up Annunciation Street, the band struck up a dirge. This was in honor of Hot 8 brass band drummer Dinerral "Dick" Shavers, who was senslessly gunned down at Dumaine and North Broad, just a few blocks from my house, in 2006. For a full block, while the band played "Just a Closer Walk With Thee," the procession slowed to the cadence of a traditional Jazz Funeral. Then, at the corner, the band kicked off a "second line" version of the traditional hymn "I'll Fly Away," and after a couple of choruses the front line horns playing the melody dropped out, leaving just sousaphone, snare drum and bass drum. And, unbidden, the entire crowd, all of us center stage, sang the lyrics.

Some glad morning when this life is over,

I'll fly away;

To a home on God's celestial shore,

I'll fly away (I'll fly away).

I'll fly away, Oh Glory

I'll fly away; (in the morning)

When I die, Hallelujah, by and by,

I'll fly away (I'll fly away).

Sometimes in life, there are confluences of events so powerful, they knock you to your knees. Katrina was like this for me, following so closely on the heels of my fathers death. And on this bright afternoon in New Orleans too, events felt to me like harbingers of great forces working behind the scenes. Synchronicity, bruh. Just a few days before, I had recorded this same tune for a CD collection of the music of my friend Jasper Clarke, the Canadian bassist/composer who passed away last March at the age of 48. It was the first tune we recorded, and the vibe it created colored everything we did for the rest of the day. The idea was to record a number of Jasper's compositions ("Blue of a Kind," "Hittin At Murphy's" "When It Rains It Pours" "Dancing Squid" and his tribute to bassist/composer Charles Mingus, "Angry Man Of Jazz") as well as his arrangement of a little-known Mingus gem, "Slippers." Then we'd sequence the tracks so that the record ended with a 'traditional' pair of jazz funeral selections, Mingus's tribute to tenor saxophonist Lester Young, "Goodbye Porkpie Hat," and an uptempo "second line" reading of "Fly Away."

At the end of the day we were so fried that we elected to re-convene at a later date to record the last tune ("Pork Pie Hat"). The day after the Prince of Wales parade (Oct. 11th), drummer Geoff Clapp, pianist Jesse Mcbride, bassist Jim Markway, engineer Tim Stambaugh and myself met at Word of Mouth studios in Algiers, Louisiana to record.

On Mingus's original recording, "Goodbye Porkpie Hat" is taken at a dirge tempo, but his drummer (Danny Richmond) plays a standard jazz ride-cymbal pattern, such as you might hear on a ballad or any slow tune. For this version I asked Clapp to play a traditional dirge pattern, a military cadence played on the snare drum with the snares lowered. The effect is intensely funerial.

I'd picked Jim Markway to 'play' Jasper because he's not only Jasper's kind of player, he's also much like Jasper in personality. Jim is a quiet, unassuming man, one who believes intensley in justice. He's a pretty fair carpenter and, like Jasper, likes to work with his hands. And although he teaches with me at Tulane, he's the diametric opposite of an ivory-tower academic. I'd told Jim that Jasper was not a showy bassist; he didn't like to play a lot of flashy notes high up on the neck. He was a deep-rooted, soulful guy, someone you were glad had your back on a gig. As we played this tune, Jim showed me he understood, and dug deep. Jasper was vividly present in the room as we played.

It's been an honor and a privilege to record my friend's music in this way, in a place like New Orleans. To play these tunes, and to now listen to them over and over again during the mixing process, brings him present to me once again and makes me understand the enduring power of art. Playing this music honors Jasper, and it ensures he will never truly die. Because it's not like he was here, and then he was gone. He lives in us, and we speak in his voice when we play his music.

Shots Fired.

2010-09-27T11:54:00.000-07:00

Every fall, I teach a class called TIDES. I taught it for two years before I even knew what the acronym stood for, which is Tulane Interdisciplinary Educational Seminar, but it's really just an introduction to New Orleans for freshmen, the vast majority of whom do not come from here. The music dept. has six sections of TIDES, of about 15 students each, and we meet in both small groups and large lecture-format meetings of all the combined sections, where various profs offer lecture-presentations on their speciality; Jazz, Opera in New Orleans, Drama (usually the Tennessee Williams play "A Streetcar Named Desire") Cajun/Creole Culture etc. It's an enormous amount of fun for me to teach, because the students are usually very interested in the subject at hand, and it's a subject I love to talk about. Nothing makes me happier than to introduce the city I love to newcomers.

One of the course requirements is attendence on two 'field trips,' which usually offer a range of choices. Performances by the New Orleans Opera Company, the Louisiana Philharmonic, trips to the "Fai Do Do" dance at Tipitina's, Zydeco Night at the Rock and Bowl etc. In previous years we even used to bus students out to Angele's Whiskey River Lounge in Henderson Swamp, an incredible Cajun dance hall with fantastic music and some of the most amazing dancing you'll ever see, but the university discontinued that. Too many logistical and insurance headaches.

For the last couple of years some of us have been pressing the TIDES program to include a "Second Line" parade in the field trip choices. We argued that the students will never have an opportunity to see something like this anywhere else in the world, and that the statistical probabability of them being victims of violence (even though the parades happen in ghetto neighborhoods) is actually less than at a Saints game. Finally they came through this year and greenlighted us to take 28 TIDES students to the Young Men Olympian parade, one of the biggest and most well attended of the SAPC (Social Aid and Pleasure Club) parades.

I've been encouraging students in my other classes to attend these things for years, and I'm very gratified now to see increasing numbers of them, including recent graduates, at various cultural events around town. I've even taken groups of two or three students to these things on my own personal time. The first thing I noticed about this group though was how at ease they felt right off the bat; maybe they felt less conspicuous because they were a large group. And they absolutely loved it, man. When we fell into line behind the Hot 8 brass band (and right in front of theRebirth band, which was bringing up the last division of the parade) it was a glorious feeling on a glorious day. The heat has finally started to recede a bit here in New Orleans (though it's still damn hot) and the students danced and kibbutzed with neighborhood folks, who in turn instructed them in the finer points of shaking your stuff in a second line. I remember walking behind a group of three girls (two of whom are in my TIDES section) and thinking how great it must be to be young and seeing and experiencing these things for the first time. I jokingly asked one if she was sorry she came and she laughed delightedly, her face glowing in the heat. For those of you who've never done this, there is no feeling like being part of this kind of parade, not standing on the curb watching it, but being part of it, and dancing through the streets of the city while the Hot 8 plays earth-shaking funk out front of you and the sound echoes off the sides of buildings.

About two hours into the parade we made our first bar stop, at First and Dryades. A quick straw poll was taken among the students (many of whom were starting to feel the heat) and the rough consensus was that, as much fun as we were having, it was time to call the bus to come pick us up. We started moving the students two blocks up to Third and Dryads (the bus would have never been able to make it through the dense crowd in the street in front of the bar) and I went back to First and Dryads to look for stragglers. Then...pop pop pop pop pop pop, very rapid series of six shots, a whole clip of what sounded like a .32. Screams, pandemonium, me almost getting trampled by people fleeing the scene. I don't see any young, white faces near the action so I haul ass myself.

As shootings go, it actually wasn't bad, I know that sounds ridiculous but it's true. You hear automatic weapons that means real trouble, like a firefight between drug gangs. A full clip from a small handgun usually means a personal beef, and unless you're in the nearby crowd and catch a stray round (because these type assholes don't have the jam to get in close, spray and pray is their modus operandi) you're okay. It saddens me to have to say I know this from past experience but there it is. And sure enough I subsequently heard that the only fatality in this was a two year old boy sitting in a car. The target was unscathed.

I caught up with the rest of the students and faculty at the corner of Third and Dryads, and before the cops even got there (and they were there inside of two minutes) some very scary looking dudes on Harleys were scouring the 'hood, looking for the shooter. My primary concern at this point was getting us out of there, because I know these cats from my neighborhood and I know what they're capable of. They would have lit up the shooter on sight if they'd found him, and god's mercy on my students if they were in the line of fire. Fortunately the bus arrived and we got out of there.

Before it did though, a guy about my age, just a middle-aged guy in an undershirt, came over to us and apologized. "I'm sorry you had to see that," he said. "It wasn't always like this. Some of our young black men have a coward streak in them. They're not man enough to step to someone they have a beef with, they'd rather stand back and shoot into a crowd." He shook my hand. He shook Beverly Trask's (dance department faculty) hand. He apologized again and walked away.

When we got back to campus I took the three girls, the ones who had been so happy, aside for a private word. "I'm sorry your first Second Line ended this way" I said. "But maybe it's best in a way. What you've just seen is the Alpha and the Omega of life here. If you stay here long enough, no matter how much you love New Orleans, there will come a time when that love will be tested. And if you really love this place, you have to understand all of it. And love all of it."

I'm going to talk about this some more in class at our next meeting. I could see the shock and confusion in their faces; how could things be so good and then suddenly be so bad? I'm hoping I can help them understand.

New Profs of Pleasure CD.

2010-09-23T13:26:00.000-07:00

Finally, finally, available online and at the Louisiana Music Factory on Decatur here in the French Quarter.

http://www.louisianamusicfactory.com/showoneprod.asp?ProductID=6935

Here's a cut and paste of the liner notes as they appear on the inside CD cover:

Welcome to "Volume Two," the second offering from the Professors of Pleasure, Tulane University's Jazz Faculty band. In addition to some jazz standards ("Half Nelson," "This I Dig of You"), a sumptuous ballad ("Nancy with the Laughing Face") and a 'second-line' version of the rallying cry for Tulane's Green Wave football team ("Tulane Fight Song"), we've also thrown in a number of originals from band members as well as two tracks by the great New Orleans composer, musician and jazz educator Harold Battiste. This last marks the beginning of a commitment on our part to showcase as many 'modern' New Orleans jazz compositions as possible. The history of jazz in New Orleans does not begin and end with the 'traditional' form of the music. Rather it s a continuously growing and evolving entity, encompassing many genres and styles, not the least of which include the modernisms of the post-war period and the vigorous and contemporary 'second-line' culture which can still be found, vibrant and alive, on the streets of this great city.

John Doheny

New Orleans

January 2010.

As usual, many a slip between the cup and the lip on this one, but it's finally out there. I'm already planning the next one, which I hope will incorporate new faculty hires Edward Anderson (trumpet) and Deleayo Marsalis (trombone). These CDs are proving to be a terrific way to showcase what the Tulane jazz performance faculty can do. Volumes one and two have both ended up being sort of "omnibus" recordings, where we've tried to include as many different kinds of tunes as possible (funk, straight-ahead, jazz standards, fusion etc.) but the addition of Delfeayo and Edward will give us a four-horn 'mini-big-band' front line, and an opportunity to more fully show off the arranging talent we have on staff.

Music of Jasper Clarke session Pic.

2010-09-14T16:23:00.001-07:00

Left to right: Allen Dejan, tenor sax, clarinet. Rex Gregory, alto sax. John Doheny, tenor sax. Jim Markway, bass. Jesse Mcbride, piano. Edward Anderson, trumpet. Latasha Bundy, trumpet. Kneeling in front; Geoff Clapp, drums. Wes Anderson IV, trombone.

Are You Ready?

2010-09-08T08:25:00.000-07:00

Today's the day for the only shot at a rehearsal I'm likely to get for next Monday's recording session at Word of Mouth over in Algiers. It's going to be a CDs worth of compositions from my late friend, bassist-composer Jasper Clarke, who passed last March at the age of 48.

Jasper was probably my best friend on this earth, and there was a time when we were extremely tight. Pretty much all of my first few years as an active straight-ahead jazz player involved collaborations of various kinds with him; all sorts of demo recordings, jazz festival gigs, a five year run as the house band at a place called Murphy's pub in downtown Vancouver (now a fugly 'sportsbar' called Mahoney's), literally hundreds of jobbing gigs in various hotel ballrooms, conventions, private parties, political ballyhoos, store openings etc. When Jasper got married and started a family he moved up to Whistler B.C., a ski-resort town about 90 minutes north of Vancouver, and started a masonry company. As a result, by the late 90s he wasn't that active as a player, but whenever I had a gig in Whistler I knew I didn't need to take a bass player because my boy Jasper was already there. We had a three-day-a-week house gig at a hotel up there in the summer of 2000 and it was swingin from the front to the back.

When he died (of a brain tumor, leaving a wife and two teenaged children) my colleague here at Tulane, Jesse Mcbride, suggested we record some of his compositions, and his widow and family ponied up a bare-bones budget. I initially figured it would be a breezy little quartet or quintet session, but I'd forgotten Jasper's penchant for writing for multi-horn ensembles. He was a great fan of "Better Get Hit In Your Soul"-period Mingus and liked to write stuff with metric modulations and multi-horn counterlines and background figures. When Michiko sent me his music, some of it was written for up to ten pieces.

So, the last few weeks have been spent rustling up a bunch of horn players, a suprisingly hard thing to do, considering we're in New Orleans. The main problem is getting everybody in the same room on the same day; cats are in and out of town so much, on the road, and the Tulane guys on the date (me, Jesse, bassist Jim Markway, drummer Geoff Clapp, and multi-reed player Allen Dejan) all have busy teaching schedules. But it looks like it's going to happen, and I pulled the trigger on a studio date (Sept. 13th) last week. We've got one day to put 8 tunes in the can.

It won't all be Jasper's stuff. I've decided to end the record with a 'traditional' New-Orleans style jazz funeral, a dirge (Charles Mingus's elegy to Lester Young," Goodbye Porkpie Hat") and a 'second line' version of the hymn "I'll Fly Away." Because of the logistics of recording we'll do the track with the biggest band first, and that'll be "Fly Away." As Jesse says, when you start a session on a vibe like that, it can color everything you do subsequently.

I don't feel ready. I never do. Everytime I've ever walked into a recording studio I've felt like a reluctant actor pushed out on stage, wondering if he can remember his lines. But if anyone should do this, it's me. I'm going to tell the cats at the rehearsal today, we got to play the best we can. To do less would be disrespectful. They'll understand, because they're from New Orleans. This is Jasper's last party on earth. We have to kill the gig.

I keep thinking of some lines from Walt Whitman:

"I play not marches for accepted victors only,I play for conquered and slain people.

I beat and pound for the dead,I blow...my loudest and gayest for them."

How Does It Feel?

2010-08-28T15:50:00.000-07:00

We're one day out from the "Katrinaversary." Year five, which is apparently some kind of milestone. A few weeks back I did an interview on our front porch which may or may not appear on BBC TV, and the interviewer asked me, at the end, what I wanted to 'leave viewers with.' I had two points I wanted to stress.

1. New Orleans was not 'laid low by Hurricaine Katrina.' New Orleans was flooded when improperly constructed and badly designed floodwalls failed well below their specifications. To this day, this is still not general knowlege, and..

2. The 'Federal Flood' (as it's known around here) and the recent BP Oil disaster are not isolated incidents. They are part of a continuum of sloth, incompetence and mendacity that grows directly out of modern 'conservative' philosophy, which holds that "government is the problem, not the solution" and that all human endeavor should take place within the realm of capitalism. In the aftermath of Katrina I stated repeatedly that New Orleans was the Canary in the Coal Mine and that if we continued down this path, the whole country would eventually look just like us, crumbling infrastructure, hapless emergency response and all. In the intervening years, much of this has come to pass. Bridges collapse, economies falter, various states can longer afford road maintainance and are returning once-paved roads to gravel. The gap between rich and poor continues to widen. Things fall apart, the center cannot hold etc. At least we have better food here. And the architecture is easier on the eyes.

I've done my share of these interviews in the last five years and they're pretty standard for the most part. I've waited in vain though, for that stock MSM question "how do you feel?" In wickers-world America, it's apparently considered good form to stick a microphone in the face of the grieving widow, the fire-displaced family, or the surviving gunshot victim and ask "how do you feel?" As far as I can recall, nobody's ever asked this of me.

Probably a good thing actually because, in the weeks immediately after the flood, I wouldn't have had a coherent answer. I ran on pure adrenaline for quite awhile, but I'd been doing that for some time. In March of 2005 my father passed away, and I'd spent the summer with my family putting his affairs in order and arranging a memorial service. I returned to New Orleans on August 21st, in time to attend a "new faculty' meeting at Tulane University (where I'd been hired as visiting Professor of Music), pick up my parking pass, buy a new 'gig suit' on sale at Perlis's Menswear on Magazine street, and get caught up in the biggest engineering failrure in U.S. history. Any attempt to 'process' my father's death (if such a thing is even possible) was quickly dwarfed by the enourmity of the events that engulfed me.

In a process that will be familiar to every New Orleanian, these epic, catastophic experiences occurred simultaneously with life at it's most banal elsewhere in the country. Because Americans are so accustomed to these sorts of things happening 'elsewhere,' in some distant third world hellhole, there was a tendency to not really 'get it,' Katrina-wise. I remember the jaw-dropping incredulity I experienced when reading e-mails from parents of my students at Tulane demanding to know whether this was going to "affect my child's graduation date," as if we were all still sitting at the University in our offices with lights, air-conditioning, and a functioning administrative staff dealing with some minor glitch in the system, rather than, as was the case with me, sleeping in my car and cadging computer time at the Santa Rosa, New Mexico public library. I was tempted to think of these people as incredibly oblivious and self involved, and maybe they were. But some of them doubtless simply couldn't get past that mindset, so common among first world people, that says this kind of thing Can't Happen Here.

So, if someone had asked me, at that moment, how I felt, I would have said changed. Utterly and completely. And that change is something I'll carry with me the rest of my life. I will never, ever again be able to walk down the street of a modern city and feel any sense whatsoever of permanence or inevitability. The phrase "safe as houses" doesn't mean shit to me. Because I know, on a deep, visceral level that has squat to do with any kind of intellectual acknowlegement of these things, that forces beyond my control can come along any second and blow everything I've worked for, my whole life, straight to hell. It's the difference between a healthy young man blithely asserting he's accepted the fact of his own death, and that same man after he's been told he has terminal cancer. Because talk is cheap, and it's easy to sound brave when fear is abstract.

Later on of course, I got mad. Because the trope moved very quickly from an outpouring of sympathy and compassion to 'blame the victim' mode, seamlessly and without missing a beat. We were told we wore our skirts too short and asked for it, because New Orleans is 'below sea level' (actually about half of it is, but so's half of the Netherlands). Our citizens were depicted as work-shy welfare chisellers and murderous thugs, even though New Orleanians are, in the main, the sweetest-natured, most generous and open hearted people I've ever met. They certainly work harder than Dennis "That Place Looks Like It Should Be Bulldozed" Hastert has ever worked in his whole mean-spirited, fat-assed life. I swear to god, some of the shit I heard come out of peoples' mouths...to this day I can't for sure say I wouldn't happily and cheerfully murder them with my bare hands, I came across them in a dark alley. And that kind of hateful is no way to be. It's dangerous to your health. I'm working on forgivness, I truly am, but it would be much easier if somebody, somewhere, over the last five years (besides Brownie I mean) suffered some kind of adverse consequences for the reckless criminal neglegence that killed thousands of my fellow New Orleanians. Oh yes, let me remind you of that, please, they drowned like rats, some of them, in their own houses. Others perished from thirst or exposure or lack of needed medical care, because certain people decided to pray on the fear of our worser angels with black-savages-run-amok-raping-babies-shooting-at-helicopters yadda yadda yadda all of which, I remind you now, turned out to be utter bullshit, hatched mostly in the fever swamps of the neo-conservative imagination. Nobody has ever been held accountable for this. I can't even hear the phrase 'personal responsibility' now without spitting.

I could go on, but what's the point. We've learned nothing. The same Army Corps of Engineers who buggered up the floodwalls in the first place are now charged with their redesign and repair. The same neo-con talking heads are still blathering the same easily refutable bullshit, unchallenged. The catastrophy that was Katrina has been for the most part pushed from public conciousness by successive, new examples of greed, mendacity, irresponsibility and shameless fear-mongering and race-baiting. The only people who ever pay a real price for any of this are the victims of it. The perpetrators always skate.

So, we deal. Down here, we deal with this shit the way we always have, by holding close to our community, our culture, and each other. In spite of all this, New Orleans is still the only place that feels real to me. So that's how I feel. Real. And lucky. Lucky that I live here. You can say that's delusional, that my sense of reality is illusory, but to that I'd say your conception of the solidity and sensibility of Dallas or Chicago or Portland Oregan or wherever is just as ephemeral, you're just too blind to see it. We're all going to die, someday. I'm in no rush to hurry the process along, but neither am I willing to sentence myself to a life in a faceless suburban American shithole in pursuit of some kind of purely imaginary security. In the words of the immortal Louis Armstrong, "I've seen too many jazz funerals to worry about stuff that might happen."

R.I.P Clyde Kerr Jr.

2010-08-15T11:04:00.000-07:00

From the WWLTV website::

Legendary music teacher, trumpeter Clyde Kerr Jr. dies at 67

Updated Sunday, Aug 8 at 9:54 PM

NEW ORLEANS -- Trumpeter, composer and influential music teacher Clyde Kerr Jr., whose list of students included Nicholas Payton, Terence Blanchard, Irvin Mayfield, Christian Scott and Troy "Trombone Shorty" Andrews, has died. He was 67.

His grandson Drew, who had helped care for him in recent months, said Mr. Kerr died Friday after battling an illness in recent months. However he was well enough to lead the annual Satchmo Summer Jazz Camp last month.

Like his father before him, Mr. Kerr taught several generations of students the finer points of New Orleans music.

"We grew up in a household that should have had a revolving door, when you think about the students and musicians who came through that house," said Gwen Bierria, Mr. Kerr's sister.Mr. Kerr told the Times-Picayune in 2009 that his father gave him his first trumpet when he was 9, but he didn’t have an interest in playing it. It took eight years before he would develop a lifelong love for the instrument

His early career included work as a studio musician, for national acts such as The Jackson Five, The O'Jays, Aretha Franklin, Tony Bennett, Allen Toussaint, Dr. John and the Neville Brothers.

A native of Treme who graduated from St. Augustine High School and Xavier University, Mr. Kerr’s first teaching job was in St. John the Baptist Parish.

His teaching career included stints at other middle schools, high schools and universities in New Orleans, but was most notable for the 16 years he spent teaching jazz at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts and NOCCA Academy. Mr. Kerr retired from teaching at NOCCA after Hurricane Katrina."There were so many lives he touched as a teacher, helping them to reach their full potential," his sister said Sunday.

Last year, Mr. Kerr released his first CD of original compositions, called “This is Now.”
In addition to his sister, Mr. Kerr is survived by three children and 10 grandchildren.
Funeral arrangements are pending.

http://www.wwltv.com/news/local/Legendary-music-teacher-trumpeter-Clyde-Kerr-Jr-dies-at-67-100231364.html

I'm wary of milking the "another jazz master gone' trope too much, because it's seems to me that the media tends to ignore figures like Mr. Kerr (who was certainly well known among musicians in New Orleans but generally off the radar with the general public nationally, or even here in town for that matter), or even those with much higher profiles like the recently passed Abbey Lincoln, until after they're dead. It'd be awfully nice to see some of these ecomiums appear while the person being talked about is still around to hear it.

It's belaboring the obvious but it needs to be said; jazz is a hands-on tradition that needs to be passed on face-to-face. There is a cultural continuity to the stuff that has a tough time surviving in the post-modern age. New Orleans has an advantage here, since by it's insular nature and interconnected social and class structures, it's easier to keep a sense of cultural and artistic community than in other, more modern American cities. His obit states that he was "a native of Treme" and "a graduate of St. Augustine high school and Xavier University.' What would be a series of dry and meaningless entries on a CV in other cities here speak volumes about Mr. Kerr's pedigree. Where you grew up and what schools you attended speak volumes in New Orleans; these things are a shorthand that immediately places Mr. Kerr in specific cultural, racial, and economic contexts. It tells us a great deal about who he was.

What he was was an inheritor of a rich and variegated musical culture that has deep, deep roots, yet continues to evolve and exert a strong presence in the music of New Orleans in both the street and the concert hall. In much of the world today, jazz styles are no longer regional, people don't talk anymore about a player having a "New York sound" or a "Chicago" sound (unless they're talking about elder statesmen who've spent their careers in those cities, like Von Freeman or Sonny Rollins.) But New Orleans continues to produce scores of young players whose sound immediately marks them as products of this place. And New Orleans has always been a town where stylistic boundaries mean very little; our jazz is funky, our funk is bluesy, and our blues is jazzy. And our players routinely and joyfully cross, blur and ignore catagorization in any of these areas.

Cats like Mr. Kerr are the ones who took it upon themselves to guard these traditions and pass them on to new generations of innovators, in many cases at considerable sacrifice in terms of their own careers and visibility. Pick up just about any record made in New Orleans during the really stormin years of New Orleans funk in the 70s and 80s, and if there's horns on it, chances are Mr. Kerr is one of them. Mr. Kerr was there, man, at the genisis of this stuff, he was one of the guys who created it. When it comes to pedagogical weight, to real authority in passing the torch, guys like me, as knowlegable and 'trained' as we are, can't hold a candle to that. We got this stuff second hand. Mr. Kerr has been to the mountain.

I'm eternally grateful I had the chance to play with and hang with Clyde Kerr Jr. while he was here with us on earth. Jesse Mcbride and the Lagniappe Student Activities dept. at Tulane made that possible, and I'll always remember the experience, the vibe, on that stage. For the rest of my days.

Tonight on CITR's "The Jazz Show...

2010-07-26T11:03:00.000-07:00

...I'll be schmoozing with host Gavin Walker, and playing some tracks from our new CD, "Professors of Pleasure, Volume 2."

http://www.citr.ca/index.php/listen/

Tune in at 9:00p.m. I'll be on around 9:45.p.m. PDT.

One Last Kick at the Can.

2010-07-15T07:13:00.000-07:00

Okay, I realize I'm going on about this, but forgive me, I'm a teacher. It's what I do.

One of the more fequent canards you hear about "jazz education" is that jazz "can't be taught." Now put aside for a moment the no doubt purely coincidental happenstance that this is often uttered either by musicians who can't or don't teach, who've tried to find a place in the jazz education system and failed, or who, having found one, have decided the system sucks (and in many ways, it does). Let us ask ourselves, "is this not somewhat counterintuitive?" Because people are clearly learning how to play jazz. As Kenny Werner points out in his excellent book "Effortless Mastery," there's no shortage of jazz musicians out there, if anything, there's an oversupply. Somebody must be teaching them.

The obvious fact is that jazz can be taught, and has been since it's inception as a music. The fact that the 'institutions' of early and mid period jazz education were not formal academies in no way diminishes their status as 'schools,' it just means you didn't get a sheepskin after four years of jam sessions, cutting contests, and picking other players brains on the road with the big bands.

Now admittedly the university as an institution is not particularly flexible when it comes to the kind of collective and individual hands-on mentorship that builds jazz musicians. If I were a terminally candid sort, this is the point where I would lay out all the nefarious corner cutting, creative interpretations of grading curves, accredation methods, lesson plan structure and jury-evaluation procedures I and every other jazz educator worth his or her salt indulges in, with the justification that these moves will satisfy the University's demands for numbers and structure while at the same time giving the students the information and experiences they need to develop as musicians. But I, you know...kind of like my job so, in the words of the late Paul Newman, "Fuck candor."

I will say this, it's doable. But one of the first things you must convince the student himself of is the nonsensical nature of the "evaluation" processes he will be subject to, because he or she needs to know that they are some seriously sad shit. I know, I went through the same processes, and I know that it is absolutely possible to do everything you are told to do, to get "A" in your acedemics, to play all the etudes at all the recitals, solo in the university orchestra, swat up your jury pieces so you gets "A"s there...it's possible to jump all these hurdles and still not be able to play worth shit. Not by professional standards anyway. Because the bar is set much higher than any university is willing to set it. They are businesses first, academies second, and no university music department could possibly survive enrolling only those students willing to do what it takes to play jazz (or any serious music, really) on a professional level.

Kenny Werner says, "if you can talk, you can play," and I think that's right on the money, because good small band jazz very much resembles a social conversation. The problem often is that the paradigm for teaching music at the university level more often remains like preparing a formal speech, which is what classical music is. You practise and practise alone in a room or with your teacher. You rehearse with your accompanist. Then, at the end of the semester, you give your performance. Preparation in jazz relates more to learning vocabulary and song forms, which are then interpreted and created on the spot. Jazz musicians play together a lot, both before audiences and in more informal settings, far more than classical musicians do. It's an essential part of their developmental process.

This is what we're trying to re-create at Tulane. When Jesse Mcbride gets students to come down and jam at his Sunday night gig at Donnas, or when I hire them to play on some hotel-convention gig, we're deliberately setting up the total immersion scenario, the "it takes a village" process, necessary to get students fluent in the language of jazz. There's no mystery to it. Jazz has always been 'taught' this way.

My Story cont.

2010-06-23T10:38:00.000-07:00

...or maybe not so much my "story" as an overview of my approach to teaching, and approach which has been shaped, in large part, by my own development as a player.

One of the shibboleths of the Jazz Musician is the concept of "playing what you hear," ie. the ability to play the things you hear in your head in real time. A great deal of the things we do in the practise room are related to this, all of the transcribing of solos, drills on scales, modes, and various types of arpeggiated chords, all these things are ways of inculcating a kind of 'ear/hand' (or lip, or vocal chords) co-ordination, in which the player is able to instaneously and in real time play the melodies in his or her head.

Unfortunately this sometimes gives people the idea that all that stuff, those brilliant ideas, is already in there, and that all that is needed is the mastery of the instrument, the "technical barriers" to allow all this genius to spill forth. The most annoying manifestation of this way of thinking (at least to me) is the 'computer dweeb' musician model, the guy who thinks he doesn't need to learn how to play or compose, because "the computer does all that stuff for you."

To me this this is a gross misunderstanding of the way learning actually works. To any real musician it is self evident that the process is synergistic, that by studying and practising music and theory and constantly learning new things, you develop your ideas and ways of musical thinking as well, so that you can hear hipper things. It's not this compartmentalized box where you put such and such in here and so and so comes out there, and yet this is increasingly how education, not just music education but all education, is perceived as working. Otherwise why this constant push to cut 'frills' like music. (we'll leave aside for another day a discussion of why it's always arts that are cut, never sports).

I can think of no clearer example of this than a story told to me by a buddy who's a high-school music teacher. Half of his job involves defending his programs against cuts by cash-strapped administrators, and yet there always seems to be plenty of money for all sorts of computer geegaws. When he asked why this was so, he was told "parents know that computers are an integral part of success in the world of work, so they want their children to have an education that familiarizes them with this equipment." My guy thought for a minute and said, "wouldn't they rather their kids have the same kind of education as the guys who invented computers? You know, one with a music and arts component?"

I suppose one reason I find this 'short cut' mentality so irritating is that, as a young player, I suffered from a particularly destructive form of it. I had some very good teachers (the late Fraser Macpherson was a towering presence in my early development) and plenty of experienced musicians around offering me sound advice. But I suffered from crippling hubris, in general thought I was too hip for the room, and heard only what I wanted to hear. The worst tactical error I made in my late teens was the assumption that emulating the personal habits of the great players, particularly Charlie Parker, would somehow magically gift me with their chops. There's no mystery to how Parker aquired his skills. He was, quite simply, an obsessive practiser, as was Coltrane and probably every other player of note. But all I heard, all I wanted to hear, was Parker's famous quote, "if you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn."

Twenty years and a great deal of wasted potential later, having finally smartened up and got clean and sober, I read the full quote. "Music is your feelings, your thoughts, your experiences. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn." I was flabbergasted. Bird hadn't been saying I had to be more like him. He'd been saying I needed to be more like me. Since that moment, nearly twenty years ago now, I've stuck to the real winning combination, diligent practise with no chemical distractions.

That doesn't mean it's been all beer and skittles since then. My fat head still gets in my way, and I have to be very careful to really listen to what people tell me when I ask for advice. In New Orleans, I constantly find myself going head to head with brilliant players much younger than me, and I sometimes get scuffed up pretty bad in jam sessions. It's tempting to just go home and sulk, or maybe find some ways to occupy my time that aren't quite so hard on the ego, but instead I try to make a point to ask musicians whose playing I admire for tips and advice on what and how to practise, regardless of whether they are 20 or 30 years younger than me. In this way I've found myself in line for hearing, truly hearing some good suggestions, but at the back of all of them is the same principle. While hard work alone won't get it for you (all the practise in the world is wasted if you're just playing what you already know) and a great deal of success is tied up in how you practise, the bottom line is quantity. Play all the time. Practise all the time. Live it, breath it, sleep it. That's how the greats did it. There are no shortcuts.

My story.

2010-06-18T14:36:00.000-07:00

It occurred to me the other day that this blog has gone through a lot of changes in the five-plus years I've had it. When Brian Nation of http://www.vancouverjazz.com/ first suggested I might want to contribute something to his site, I envisioned it as a quasi-scholarly commentary on the music and culture of New Orleans. He suggested I avoid aiming the thing at a specific Vancouver audience (even though the blog was, and continues to be, hosted by a site devoted to the Vancouver jazz scene) and insisted I think in terms of my "international readership." This gave me the big horse laugh at the time but I've since come to understand that a pretty far-flung group of people indeed read the thing. I once introduced myself to author Ted O'Brian whom I recognized from his photo, which had appeared in a short story collection I enjoyed (New Orleans Noir) and he already knew who I was. He had my blog bookmarked on his computer.

Katrina changed things a bit, changed the focus. It made my writing more personal, for one thing. Even though I've had probably more than my fair share of people tell me I should "write a book" and by any objective standard my life has been pretty weird, I've always suffered the nagging suspicion that most of my "adventures" have already been dissected by some other memoirist on Oprah. The world really doesn't need another "inspirational" tome from some prodigal son who wasted half his life playing music in bars and chasing cocktail waitresses. But living through Armagheddon here in September of '05 made me think maybe my own life could be a part of my documentation of this beautiful and unique place. Subsequently my writing here has tended to focus on subjects other than myself, or at least subjects outside myself as interpreted through my own conciousness. Forgive me for stating the bleeding obvious, but that's really all any writer has.

Okay, I'll stop dancing around the subject and fess up that I've decided to devote an entire post to...me. Maybe not so much the incredible story of my marvelous fascinating life, but at least an overview of my musical development in the context of my life; again, that context is something we all have, and it's not an insignificant part of any musician's development. And while my own "story" may appear to be counterintuitive and full of wrong turns, I flatter myself to think that it's precisely because I ran up so many blind alleys and got so much stuff wrong that makes me a reasonably good teacher. Some of the most infuriating instructors I've ever had were the brilliant ones, the ones for whom everything came easy, the ones who couldn't figure out why us mere mortals didn't "get it' right away, like they do.

In the beginning I did "get it" right away, at least a little bit. My parents set me up with clarinet lessons when I was ten, and I made quick progress, got a sound easily, started playing simple orchestral things in the local "junior symphony" etc. More importantly, though I didn't realize it at the time, I started to learn to play things by ear. I've always had great respect and admiration for people who take up an instrument as an adult, because at that age you are cognizant of just how difficult what you're undertaking is. Kids have no idea, they just do what's in front of them, and by the time they're old enough to realize how hard absorbing musical fundamentals is, they've already (hopefully) got them under their fingers.

I'd come home from school every afternoon, and my mother would tell me "practise that clarinet, or no cartoons." I'd take out the horn and go through whatever I was working on for Mr. Arnott (my teacher at the time). Initially it was just simple tunes in a book my father had bought for me, "101 Easy Tunes For Bb Instruments," stuff like "Alley Cat" and "In A Little Spanish Town." Later it was technical excercizes and orchestral excerpts from the Klose clarinet method book. I'd chip away at this stuff for an hour or so, then at four o'clock, the afterschool cartoon shows would be on. Since the horn was already in my hand it seemed only natural to play along, and in this way I learned a whole bunch of music "by ear," the themes from the Bugs Bunny Show, Merry Melodies, Loony Tunes, and all of Carl Stallings music for these shows. I didn't know it at the time, but I was developing valuable ear-to-horn musical cognition skills, what childhood music educators call "audiation."

Puberty came along and distracted me for awhile. When I started paying attention again it became obvious to me that the clarinet wasn't exactly a babe magnet, so I switched to saxophone. It is much, much easier to switch from clarinet to saxophone than the other way around, so I was able to start playing "gigs" (really just half-assed teenaged blues band things) within about six weeks. But by the time I was 19 or so, I was able to enter tthe thriving "strip joint" scene that existed in Vancouver at this time, and actually make a living as a professional musician.

This was in 1972, and in Vancouver at that time there were a whole bunch of clubs devoted to "exotic dancing," and all of them employed small bands, usually trios or quartets. My skills at this point were of the most rudementary nature but that didn't really matter since none of the customers were paying attention to us anyway. The bands I played in were all composed of buddies who had similarly limited skills, and we all developed together. The material was mostly blues-based funk, and for a couple of years I skated by on pretty substandard musicianship.

What we learned, we learned by dead reckoning and shared knowledge. There was no "jazz education system" to speak of in our area, although all of us certainly could have benefitted from one. The tunes we learned, we learned off records, and the records we learned off of were the ones we dug. James Brown, Paul Buttefield (for me as a horn player, especially, his "Ressurection of Pigboy Crabshaw" album, with Gene Dinwiddie on tenor), Al Green, Tower of Power. Lots of Chicago blues. Jazz we considered beyond us, for the most part, and we were in awe of the people who could play it.

If I'd been studying with someone jazz and theory savvy at this point I probably would have made quicker progress, but, with some caveats, there is a good deal to be said for figuring stuff out on your own. And there's a whole hell of a lot to be said for just doing a lot of blowing and getting paid for it. Throughout this whole period (roughly 1972 to 1974) I played six or seven forty five minute sets, six nights a week. I probably could have done this 52 weeks a year if I'd wanted to, but I'd arbitrarily take time off whenever I'd feel the routine start to beat me down, usually every two or three months. I was starting to develop some issues with alcohol and drugs at this point as well, so it wasn't just simple fatigue, but that was a big part of it. The repetition though, was great for instilling a deep, reactive musicality, at least as regards to the relatively simple material we were addressing. There's nothing like working every night, night after night after night, to instill a sense of professionalism and confidence in your playing.

I did this sort of thing for many years before I finally made a serious study of music, and when I did there were still many blind alleys and false starts. The capacity for denial in human affairs is, quite simply, boundless, especially if you're as stubborn and insecure and lazy as I was. I also suffered (and this I have found is not uncommon in players of my background) from a deep bifurcation in my musical mind between written and aural skills. On the one hand, I can still, almost forty years laters, reel off the various Lee Allen and King Curtis solos I learned by ear off records as a 17 year old. But I'd be hard pressed to play, from memory, even just a couple of bars from the scores of musical theater productions I played literally hundreds of times as a pit musician. And until fairly recently, the fact that I relied on "fake books" (for the non-musician, these are books filled with sketches, basically lead sheets and chord progressions, of hundreds of 'standard' tunes) to get through "jobbing' gigs meant that I just didn't know enough damn tunes.

Ellis Marsalis once told me that in his opinion the problem with most "jazz friendly" universities was that their admission standards and audition practises were very concerned with how well potential students could play and sight-read music, but didn't care all that much how well they could hear. And that's the crux of it, really. At it's core, jazz is an "aural" skill. It's about playing what you hear, not what you read. It's the difference between Shakespeare and Improv Theater, between a social conversation among friends and a prepared speech before an audience.

Po'boy.

2010-05-31T13:42:00.000-07:00

For the benefit of non-New Orleanians, a 'po'boy' is a sandwich. It takes it's name from an early 20th century streetcar strike, when merchants sympathetic to the strikers offered jumbo sandwiches that were good for a whole meal for only a nickel. The "poor boys" up against the Company could afford that.

Most days I ride my bicycle past one of my favorite po'boy places on my way to and from Tulane. It's called the Parkway Bakery and Tavern, and most days I ride right on by, even though this is not easy. The smells wafting out of that place make it awfully tempting.

The Parkway has been around, in one incarnation or another, since the 1920s. Back then it was the favored lunch spot for workers at the American Can Company, directly across Bayou St. John. In the 1960s, my friend and colleague John Joyce Jr. would occasionally sub for Pete Fountain's regular drummer, and Pete was tight with the owners of the Parkway, which in those days made it's own french bread. It was Pete's routine to stop in, band members in tow, at the Parkway after the gig, at about four o'clock in the morning, when the bakers were pulling the day's fresh bread out of the oven. John tells me of ordering a roast beef sandwhich and being asked "ya want extra gravy on 'at?" and watching a baker run the sandwich under a faucet sticking out of a large tank by the door. It took him a second to realize that the establishment enjoyed "gravy on tap." (Incidentally, to this day, many of these joints offer "debris gravy," gravy into which all the "debris," the bits of scorched and blackened meat on the grill, has been scraped. I know some of you are thinking "eek! Carcinogens!" Those who know are thinking "delicious!") John also tells me the bakers would fire the completed sandwich, wrapped in butcher paper, out a servers window behind the bar, where the bartender would catch it, football style, before handing it off to the customer.

The Parkway suffered catastrophic flooding in the early 70s and sat vacant and ruined for years. The American Can Company went out of business, and eventually the building was converted to condos and rental apartments. Then a few years back current owner Jay Nix bought the place and re-opened it. After Katrina, when the neighborhood around it was mostly empty and in ruins, the place would still be packed on weekends with people taking a break from repairing their houses and arguing with their insurance agents. The place used to have music on saturday afternoons, which was really cool. Lots of toddlers dancing to the Hot 8 Brass Band in the parking lot.

Last wednesday I was grinding my way home on my bike and started feeling weak and dizzy. New Orleans has no hills to speak of, so the five mile (each way) bike ride to Tulane and back never gets to be a particularly athletic affair, but it is getting damn hot out there these days and I was feeling dehydrated. I decided I was suffering from po'boy anemia.

I pull in, rack my bike and go inside to the order window. Nobody there. I pull a Barq's root beer out of the cooler, pop it open on the bottle opener mounted on the counter, and drain it in four swallows, so great is my thirst. Plunk the empty on the bar, still no one around. I lean over the counter and look down, and there's Lakeesha, the counter girl, crouched down on the floor, looking back up at me.

"Keesha!"

"Johnaaaaaaye!" (Keesha always manages to make my name sound slightly naughty).

"Are you hiding down there Keesha?" I ask.

"No Johnny, I surely ain't," she teases. I have no idea what she was actually doing down there, and I don't care, I'm so hungry. "What I can get you you ain't already got?"

"Gimme a large shrimp sandwich, dressed," I tell her. "Dressed" means with mayonaisse, pickles, lettuce and tomato. "I was riding by and the smell just pulled me in here."

She smiles. "Oh I feel ya. When that shrimp drops and that smell comes out, baby I work here and I never get tired of that smell."

Po'boy fillings vary, you can have roast beef, shrimp, hot sausage, fried oysters, all kinds of things, but the basic construction of the sandwich is always the same. You take a loaf of french bread, cut it in half through the midde, then slice each half lengthwise, and put the filling in there. Most places, they give it to you wrapped in butcher paper. And it has to be 'real' french bread, cooked in a hot, brick oven so the crust is hard but the inside is fluffy. There used to be all kinds of bakeries in New Orleans that did this, but pretty much the only one that still does it is Leidenheimer's. The Parkway uses Leidenheimer's bread, exclusively.

I got Keesha to throw in a couple sides of sweet potato fries, took the sandwich home to my wife, and we split it. It was enough for dinner. Seriously.

Bayou Boogaloo, May 21-23 2010.

2010-05-26T13:59:00.000-07:00

So we've slogged our way through another 'festival season' in New Orleans, caroming from Mardi Gras (really "carnival season,' stretching from 12th night through to Fat Tuesday), Faulknerfest, French Quarter Fest, Crawfish Fest, Jazzfest, and all the little mini-festivals (like the one in my neighborhood, Faubourg St. John fest, which got rained out this year) in between. The tourists have mostly gone home (too hot). So it's time for a celebration for Just Us Locals. And that would be the Bayou Boogaloo.

The Mid City Bayou Boogaloo is hosted by the Mothership Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to achieving social change through the promotion of arts and culture. The Boogaloo is only 5 years old (it's a post-Katrina affair) and we've been in the neighborhood for four of those. In fact, the main stage (there are three) is only three blocks from our house, yet coming home for bathroom breaks (is that cool or what) you can't even hear the music in the house. As festivals go, the Boogaloo is an extremely good, non-disruptive neighbor. I don't even mind the parking headaches it brings, because, unlike at Jazzfest, virtually all the licence plates are local.

The other nice thing is...it's ABSOLUTELY FREE, so you can come and go as you please, taking in as much or as little of the music and arts and crafts as you like. This year Darlene and I opted to simply stroll over after dinner on Friday (for Bill Summers featuring Donald Harrison Junior on alto, and yes he closed with Chameleon) and BeauSoliel on Sunday.

It was...interesting, hearing that high lonesome Cajun fiddle wafting out over my neighborhood. New Orleans is not a big, cosmopolitan city, but it has an urban vibe, despite the picturesque houses. Where we live in the 6th ward the neighborhoods run from serious ghetto to the grand homes along Esplanade Avenue. But up towards our end (Bayou St. John) the presence of a body of water lends a more rustic feel. Bayou St. John is the last 'real' bayou within the city limits, but it's really a concrete channel, an open-air extension of the canal system that pumps rainwater out of the city into Lake Ponchartrain. Still, with the sun going down, and the sound of accordian and fiddle (and later, special guest bluesman and eco-wetlands warrior Tab Benoit) and lyrics in french, my little corner of the 6th ward felt real country, for a little while.

http://www.thebayouboogaloo.com

Harold Battiste Booksigning.

2010-05-19T13:38:00.001-07:00

There's so many major cats here in New Orleans who are important to the music, yet are virtually unknown outside the city. Jazz media tend to be kind of "New York-centric" so New Orleans is largely off the radar, even though the music kind of, you know...started here. And let's be clear; jazz in New Orleans does not begin and end with the traditional form of the music, nor is "modern" jazz in New Orleans something that begins and ends with Wynton Marsalis.

Harold R. Battiste Jr. is one of that generation of post-war jazz men (Edward Frank, Ed Blackwell, Ellis Marsalis, Alvin Batiste, Idris Muhammed, James Black, Nat Perrilliat) who were forging their own regionally unique brand of modern jazz here back in the late 40s, 50s, 60s. To the extent that modern jazz in New Orleans is a style distinct from the rest of the United States (and I absolutely believe that it is) these men are at the back of it. Harold himself has worn many hats; producer, composer, arranger, musician, A&R man. He arranged and produced Sam Cooke's early hits. Produced the first three Dr. John albums. Produced Sonny and Cher's hits, and was musical director on their TV show. He also taught in, and helped develop (along with Ellis Marsalis), the jazz education program at the University of New Orleans.

Harold is also my neighbor here in the Bayou St. John area, and I figured I knew him fairly well. Reading his recently published autobiography though (Unfinished Blues: Memoirs of a New Orleans Music Man") reminded me again of how little we really know about others. I'm just happy Harold is getting some props while he's still around to enjoy them.

Super Sunday 2010 Mardi Gras Indian Parade Pics.

2010-03-30T10:55:00.000-07:00

Jasper Clarke RIP. April 11th 1961-March 22 2010

2010-03-24T18:58:00.000-07:00

Not New Orleans related, but important nonetheless. Here's a cut and paste of the obit I put up on Vancouverjazz.com for bassist Jasper Clarke, one of my closest friends and musical collaborators.

April 11th 1961-March 22 2010Yesterday afternoon, peacefully and surrounded by his family, bassist Jasper Clarke lost his two year battle with brain cancer at his home in Squamish. He was only 48. Jasper hadn't been on the Vancouver scene much the past ten years since he moved up to Whistler with his family in 2000, but he was a very active player in the 90s.

We met when we were both students at VCC in 1991, when Jasper approached me about forming a quartet to play some recitals at the college. That first group included drummer Ian Brown (who went on to fame and considerably more fortune with the Mattew Goode Band) and faculty member Alan Matheson on piano. We recorded some demos with my then-girlfriend Linda Nessel on piano and the late Al Wiertz on drums (now that Jasper's gone, half that band is dead) and then Jasper scored us a tuesday night gig at Murphy's Pub downtown, where we held forth for almost five years.

I basically owe Jasper my introduction to the Vancouver scene, since almost every player I subsequently worked with in town I met and played with first at Murphy's, including bassists Danny Parker, Al Johnston, Chris Tarry and Darren Radke, drummers Stan Taylor, Al Wiertz, Claude Ranger, Paul Townsend, Bruce Neilsen, and George Ursan, trumpeters Brad Turner, Jeff Mahoney, Bill Clark, Alan Matheson and Norm Quinn, guitarists Budge Schacte, Jon Roper and Ronnie Thompson, and saxophonists Max Murphy, Mike Allen, and the late Al Clooten. All of these players could be found at Murphy's over the course of that run, and you could hear them for the price of a glass of draft.

I recorded all kinds of demos with Jasper and worked all kinds of gigs. Sometimes we played as a duo (we did this for a couple of months every wednesday at the old Blue Note at Broadway and Cambie and sometimes just for laughs on the street at Granville Island). When Jeff Mahoney had his quartet at the Note with Clint Sargent on guitar and Sarah Maclaughlin's drummer Ash Sood, Jasper was his first and only choice on bass.

Jasper was on my quintet for my first ever gig at the Vancouver jazzfest, in 1997. It was at his suggestion that we played Mingus's multi-key multi meter opus "Sue's Changes," and it was Jasper who powered us through every one of those difficult metric modulations on bass, just as Mingus had done.

Jasper was a Mingus freak, and made a serious study of his music from both a compositional and a playing perspective. He played the same super-heavy gauge strings Mingus did (I've seen other players try to play Jasper's bass at jam sessions and have to give up mid tune) and loved to move meters back and forth between 4/4 and 6/8 time signatures, as did Mingus. I've been a great advocate of this sort of thing ever since.

His wife Michiko tells me he played a gig as recently as last february, so, you know...he went down swingin, as we all would like to. I spoke to him on the phone about a week ago and he recognized my voice, but could only get out about six words. I took the opportunity to tell him how much his friendship and support meant to me, and I told him I loved him. It's important to do these things while people are still around to hear it.Next to my wife, Jasper was the best friend I had in this world. I miss him already and wish I'd kept in touch more than I did.

Clapp Quintet w/Ellis.

2010-03-18T13:08:00.000-07:00

Very nice gig with Geoff Clapp's Quintet last night. Interesting how, after a certain point, you stop looking over and thinking "holy crap! That's Ellis Marsalis sitting there" and realize he's just another piano player. A really great piano player and the patriarch of a jazz dynasty, but still, just a piano player on just another gig, really.

My apologies for the blurry group shot, but it's the only one I have of all of us together. Left to right it's Ellis, vocalist Johnaye Kendrick, me, bassist David Pulphus, and leader/drummer Geoff Clapp.

Geoff Clapp Quintet w/Ellis Marsalis.

2010-03-15T10:09:00.000-07:00

This coming wednesday (March 17th) at 7:oop.m. in the Dixon Theater on the Tulane campus, I'll be appearing with Tulane drum instructor Geoff Clapp's quintet. Geoff on drums, Ellis Marsalis on piano (yikes), David Pulphus on bass, and Johnaye Kendrick on vocals.

One of the big perks of living in New Orleans is the opportunity to work with players of this caliber on a regular basis. David Pulphus I first saw with Stanley Turrentine's band back in 1999. Johnaye I know from her tenure in the Monk Institute band at Loyola, and her longrunning thursday night gig at Irvin Mayfield's Jazz Playhouse on Bourbon Street. Geoff has been drum instructor here for about two years now and we've worked all kinds of gigs together, but I first saw him play in the same theater we're playing together two nights from now, with the Ellis Marsalis Quartet, back before Katrina in 2004.

Now supposedly Mr. Marsalis is just the piano player on this gig, but Geoff has programmed some very difficult music, a fair bit of it composed by Ellis himself. So, you know...I'd rather not screw it up.

Real Cool Killers on Artisan Radio.

2010-03-03T06:10:00.000-08:00

My good friend Gregg Simpson has a show, the Gregg Simpson Jazz Hour, every Thursday at 4:00p.m. PST (that's 6:00p.m. here in New Orleans) on Artisan Radio. Gregg is a very interesting cat in his own right; in addition to being a visual artist of some renown, he was the drummer in pianist Al Neill's legendary mid 60's trio. Al started out as a be-bopper after WWII, but eventually morphed into an avant guardist so "out" he makes Cecil Taylor sound like Art Hodes.

But I digress. This coming Thursday, Gregg will be playing selections from my new record with bassist Rob Kohler and drummer Geoff Clapp, "In The Hive." We recorded this in one monster session a couple of months back, under the monicker "The Real Cool Killers."

Click the link to listen:

http://www.artisanradio.com/

The End of It.

2010-02-25T22:31:00.000-08:00

Well that's it, I'm done. With jury duty.

I was planning on doing a long post of Saints fever in the jury pool the day after the Super Bowl (which was indeed off the hook) and maybe finishing up with a character study of my last judge, Julius Parker, a pie-faced, built-like-a-fireplug Irish Channel Yat who looks exactly like my conception of James Lee Burke's literary creation Clete Purcel from his Dave Robicheaux detective novels.

But I don't have it in me. I'm sick (some kind of flu) and tired. There's a whole bunch of stuff I thought I was handling, but it turns out it's handling me. I've been thrashing about, driven by urges I don't understand and can't control.

After Katrina, I was filled with purpose. We did better than most people, no water in the house and nobody drowned (although the landlord's house in front of us burned to the ground in February 2006, necessitating our move here to the 6th ward). Sometimes I wonder though, what a thing like that does to your head. More specifically, my head. It'll mess with your sense of security, that's for sure. The phrase "safe as houses" doesn't mean shit to anybody here. And now and probably for the rest of my life, I can't walk down the streets of any modern city without an acute sense of how illusory the whole thing is,how once the lights are off and the shit hits the fan, things can get all 16th century on your ass real quick. Modernity and civilization are facades, we are all skating on very thin ice and when we break through we fall and fall. Don't think it can't happen to you because it can.

Lately some dark thoughts have taken up residence in my head and I'm working real hard to get them out of there. I'm going to stand up and walk away from this mess, just wait and see. Cause this shit is not me. Not at all.

Right now I've got a fever of 100.8 and a cough that's keeping me up all night. It feels like my lungs are coming up in chunks. But tomorrow's a new day, and spring is coming.

Jury Duty cont.

2010-02-09T09:45:00.000-08:00

They called for 25 potential jurors and herded us into the elevator, where a small, elderly very dark skinned man with a voice like Howlin Wolf informed us that "somebody meetcha on th' second flo." We were lined up outside the courtroom in the hall by number (as 'juror number one' I got to stand closest so I could get whacked by the door as it was repeatedly flung open by various attorneys, cops and bailiffs) and then ushered into the courtroom of Judge Daryl Derbigny, who turned out to be a sixty-ish, light-skinned Creole of Color with glasses and bright blue eyes.

Absolutely nothing happened that we all haven't seen before on TV, many times before. Judge Daryl instructed us, in his soft, cultivated 7th ward accent, on the various procedural and legal niceties; presumption of innocence, beyond a reasonable doubt etc. I couldn't help but notice that the two prosecuting attorneys were both very young versions of a 'type' I've come to think of as "Garden District Bird Bones,' tiny, perfect little white women with bones like birds, who speak in a manner known as 'uptalk'? You know, where every sentence elides upward like it was a question? The defence attorney, on the other hand, was a solid, muscular Queen Latifah style African American woman who looked like she could kick both their asses.

The defendent was a suitably shifty looking young guy in dreadlocks and a cheap suit. Since it was a simple burglary beef, I couldn't figure out why he didn't just plead it out, since he'd likely get minimum to no actual time. Either he really didn't do it, or he was up against some nitwit "three strike felony" law and had nothing to lose by demanding a jury trial. Me, I kept hearing Frank Zappa's lines from "The Illinois Enema Bandit:

"The jury was composed, of ordinary folks.

And the judge instructed....no poo poo jokes."

Anyway, all that talk I'd heard about how they don't like teachers as jurors must be true, because they kicked me loose, along with the Tulane-grad high school teacher who'd been sitting in front of me. By the time we got back down to the jury lounge they'd filled all twelve dockets and let us go around one o'clock. I didn't have any teaching to do until two, so aside from feeling burnt from lack of sleep (I'd been playing at Donna's on North Rampart the night before) my day wasn't scuffed up too bad. I walked over to the Rite Aid at Canal and Broad and Darlene came and picked me up and drove me over to Tulane.

Wednesday was the same ole same ole, a bunch of tired, pissed off people sitting around reading the paper and bitching. This time I was called up in a 50-juror job lot to the coutroom of Terry Q. Alarcon. Where judge Daryl had been soft spoken and cultivated, Judge Terry, while he looked distinguished (he was a graying, middle-aged white guy) had the voice of Super Yat. (for the uninitiated, a 'yat' is a working class, usually white New Orleanian. The 'yat' is taken from the standard greeting "where y'at," and the accent is a hard edged, urban bray, where 'church' is pronounced 'choich' and there are plenty of 'dese, dem and dos-es.' Think Archie Bunker, but with southern diction). The case was a "possession of marijuana with intent to distribute" beef, the defendent was another shifty young guy with dreads, the defence attorney was a male version of monday's Queen Latifah (only with a folksier vibe) and the two DA chicks were light-skinned, 7th ward versions of the Garden District Bird Bones. Judge Terry spent a lot of time talking about how we'd need to render a 'just and fair verdict' regardless of our personal opinions on the efficacy (or lack thereof) of criminalizing marijuana. He waved around a blue-jacketed volume of the Louisiana Criminal Code. "Regahdless a my poisanal opinions on da details o' dis heah book, my pernt is dat I gotta rule on da law AS WRITTEN. I can't jus' say I'm down wit' page twenny but I can't git wit' page twenny foah." But when it came time for me to address this dilemma I had to say that no, I simply can't guarantee that I'll rule impartially on the case. As I put it to judge Terry, "I have some very strong personal objections to putting people in jail for possession with intent to distribute flowers." We went back and forth on this for some time. Finally I said, "look judge, what I'm saying here is that I will try my best to interpret the law as written, but that I have a big problem with being part of a process that I perceive as unjust. Let me put it this way; if I were the prosecuting attorney, I'd get rid of me with my first pre-emptory challenge." I figured I was off this jury for sure right there; not only a professor, but somebody using legal terms as well. Anyway, they all went back to chambers to do their thing while we sat there. Then a bailiff came out and said, "Mr. Doheny, Judge Alarcon would like to see you in chambers.

Oh shit. The walk back there felt like getting called into the principal's office. But it turned out that judge Terry just wanted to make sure I didn't think he was insulting me by belaboring the point. He also let on that his own opinions weren't far from my own ("but I gotta rule on da lawr AS WRITTEN because hey, dat's da gig") and that I was going to miss out on a nice lunch ("we usually order in from Mandina's") by mouthing myself off the panel. We shook hands, I went back outside, and they kicked me loose again, just in time for me to make my 2 o'clock class at Tulane.

Next: Who Dat's in the jury lounge.

Jury Duty.

2010-02-02T14:40:00.000-08:00

I know this doesn't have much to do with jazz, but I thought some people might find it interesting. Because a "jury summons" in Orleans Pariah is a different kind of experience.

At least I assume it is, cause I've always managed to avoid these kinds of things in the past, mainly by taking the cranky, anarchist stance of not voting because it "only encourages them," and because then "the government has your name on another list." Then came the 2004 presidential election, and I decided the state of the union was so dire that I had to bite the bullet and take the plunge. I voted for Kerry (fat lot of good that did ) and for Obama (we'll see, but it's not looking good). And then, a couple of weeks ago, I got that dreaded little red-lettered summons in the mail.

I'd gotten one before and was enormously relieved to see that it had been delivered to the wrong address. Some poor bastard in the thirty two hundred block of St. Philip was on the hook, not me. Boy, he was not thrilled when I brought it down to him either. But this time it was for me, and since it said, it big red letters, "failure to appear may result in fine or imprisonment," and since it's conventional wisdom around here that the Orleans Parish Criminal Justice system has a real thing for slinging people willy nilly into the OPP jail and is not to be messed with, I figured I better show.

At the appointed hour of 8:30a.m. I was at the Broad St. courthouse, along with a whole gang of very unhappy looking people. Since I hold a whole raft of opinions that are box-office poison to prosecuting attorneys (do the police ever lie? Of course they do, just like the rest of us. Do you support the death penalty? No, because the justice system, like every other human endeavor, is wildly imperfect, and I'm not a big fan of making those kind of 'mistakes') I figured I'd be gone by lunch. But it was not to be.

The Orleans Parish jury system, possibly because the demographic of people without felony convictions in New Orleans is rather shallow, slings a wider net than most other places. I was not just required to show up one morning, voice my dangerously liberal opinions, be vetoed by the prosecuting attorney during voir dire and sent home in time for lunch. Instead I was to show up at 8:30a.m. every monday and wednesday for the entire month of february, and, get this, get shuffled through all twelve coutrooms in the system until their dockets had been cleared. If I'm not selected for one jury I return to the jury lounge to await a call for the next.

Unconcionably early and not at all bright, I arrived last monday at the 'jury lounge,' (after of course first passing through the metal detector) along with a couple of hundred other tired, pissed-off looking people. Around 9:00a.m. a guy comes in wearing a blue blazer and gray slacks (only the blazer is the kind of electric blue worn by airline ticket agents), leans into a mic and says "good morning." After getting a few mumbles and grunts, he leans in again and says "Who dat" and gets the thunderous response he's looking for (for the uninitiated and non-New-Orleanian, "Who dat?" is an abbreviation of the New Orleans Saints fan's tribal war whoop, "Who dat say gonna beat them Saints.") and announces he's a judge, and procedes to lay the voodo down. We will be rrequired to sit here pretty much exactly like a bunch of two dollar hookers awaiting our call, until one of the judges in the 12 courtrooms upstairs announces he or she needs a jury, and which point we'll be lead up to the appropriate courtroom, questioned by both prosecuting and defense attorney's regarding our various quirks and pregudices, instructed further in the law by the presiding judge and, if deemed acceptable by all parties, sworn in as a juror and paid $20 a day for our trouble. If not, it's back to the jury lounge for the next cattle call.

From conversations with those around me (and since this is New Orleans, there's plenty of conversating) I learn that we're a pretty eclectic bunch. We actually are a pretty good cross section of the city's population. Visually, the crowd is maybe 60-40 African-American (again, about like the city) and there's all kinds; employers, employees, professionals, laborers, retired people, a couple of guys who look like thugs but turn out to be counter help at Auto Zone. A guy who owns a fence company. A retired high school teacher.

The first call is for 75 potential jurors, and as they read the names off, it feels like the grim reaper setting down and spiriting people away. Most of us don't want to go, because it offers the possibility of wiping out the rest of the day, whereas if we just sit down here we're told the dockets are usually cleared by 1:00p.m. I don't teach anything before 2:00p.m. mondays and wednesdays, so it's possible this whole thing won't inconvenience me beyond loss of sleep and weekends in the office to make up for the administrative stuff and personal practising I usually do in my office in the mornings. 75 jurors are called and I'm not among them.

Next round, I'm not so lucky. Potential jurors are numbered, then called by name. When the next round is called, the first thing out of the speakers is "juror number one. John Doheny."

to be continued.

Another Year Gone...

2009-12-30T11:49:00.000-08:00

...in this delightful, horrifying place.

I've never been able to explain the appeal, really, when I'm away on the road and people ask why I live here. The fact is that after six years in residence, the things that are an easy 'sell' to tourists don't interest me at all. The French Quarter wears pretty quickly, I seldom go down there unless I have a gig. It's full of t-shirt shops and obnoxious tourists; sometimes it seems like every jerk in America is there for the express purpose of getting blind drunk and acting the fool. The Garden District is physically beautiful but devoid of streetlife, everyone hiding inside with the air-conditioning, guarding their money. The St. Charles Avenue streetcar makes for a scenic ride, but you'll get where you're going a lot faster on the Freret Street bus.

Don't get me wrong, all this stuff still blows me away. I was recently reading a blog written by a guy who moved to Argentina a year ago, and he was saying that the trouble with actually living in a place like Buenos Aires was that after a while, it starts to seem normal, even mundane. I'm guessing Buenos Aires must have a better functioning infrastructure than New Orleans then, because here, mundane don't enter into it. What with all the shooting and cutting and hurricane evacs and the general sense of insecurity, like we could all be flooded out again at a moments notice, or blown away, or take a stray round through the head, there's never any chance of things feeling ho hum. But get up in the morning and go to work? Wait in line at the grocery, pick up the dry cleaning? We all do that. It's just that in New Orleans, the conversation is a lot more entertaining.

I guess that last sentence catches the corner of it. I could (and often do) go on about "da cultcha," the music, the food, the architecture, the various elements that create the lived experience of being here, something everyone in town walks out the front door and into every day. But it the end it's just that simple; it's the people, the sense of engagement, the feeling of every human encounter and transaction being something to be savored and enjoyed, not rushed through so one can get to one's 'real life.' All that mundane shit, that is your real life, and if you don't get that, you're gonna miss it.

That's it, isn't it? I put up with the weather, the violence, the poverty, the diminished lifespan and career expectations, all because I had a funny and enjoyable conversation with a stranger on line at the Post Office this morning.

Well, that, and parades like the Young Men Olympian last fall:

(warning: turn down the volume on your computer playing this video. This is pure, uncut, hardcore New Orleans street shit, bruh.)

The Best Jazz Singers You've Never Heard Of...

2009-12-27T08:46:00.001-08:00

...or maybe you have, if you live in New Orleans, but I'm assuming (in my vanity) an international readership.

Philip Manuel, Betty Shirley, and George French are people with almost no 'internet' presence whatsoever, yet their rep among discerning listeners here in New Orleans is stellar. More importantly, their reputation among working musicians is such that the best players in town go out of their way to gig with them, even if the money is less than impressive. And that is the most impressive recommendation of all.

"Researching" this entry proved to be an excercize in futility. Searching Youtube (where conventional wisdom has it you can find "almost anything" nowdays) turned up only three entries on Manuel, none of which show him at his best. (This version of "Don't Get Around Much Anymore" with drummer Herlin Riley, bassist Roland Guerin, and New Orleans piano guru Larry Sieberth, is about the best of the bunch, even though the tune has been done to death: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8WUddNmriA ). Just about everything I know about the guy comes from either watching him work, or talking to him on the street (when we lived uptown in the 13th Ward, our next door neighbor was one of Manuel's close friends).

I've got a few of Manuel's CDs in my collection (my current favorite is the 2000 release "Love Happened to Me," which contains stellar performances of jazz standards like"Just Squeeze Me" and "If I Were A Bell," as well as pop tunes like Stevie Wonder's ""I Wish" and Sting's "Fragile," and an all star cast of players including trumpeter Nicholas Payton, saxophonist Brice Winston, pianist Ellis Marsalis, drummer Adonis Rose, and my good friend Fredrick Sanders on organ) but nothing compares to hearing him live, where the astonishing range and resonance of his voice is compellingly present. My wife Darlene and I caught him this past december 23rd at Snug Harbor (with Sieberth on piano and bassist Chris Severn) and when he hit low notes, the whole room vibrated.

Son of oldschool jazzman Albert "Papa" French and brother of drummer and WWOZ DJ Bob French, I first heard George French as a singer on the now sadly out of print Rounder CD "Mood Indigo," featuring the CAC Jazz Orchestra and singers Germaine Bazzle and the late Johnny Adams. It wasn't until I moved to New Orleans that I found out he was also a bass player. He and Bazzle had a long standing gig every Monday night at Donnas on North Rampart, and lately he's been appearing with a trio at the Ritz Carleton on Canal. French has one solo CD, "It's A Beginning" http://www.louisianamusicfactory.com/showoneprod.asp?ProductID=1766 which unfortunately falls rather flat, to my ears. It's got some killer players on it (including New Orlean's unsung hero of the tenor saxophone, Eric Traub) but it's basically a representation of his club set, which tends to be pitched at the tourist trade. French has a gorgeous voice (very Lou Rawls-ish) that sounds good on anything, but tunes like "Sunshine of My Life' and "What A Wonderful World" have, quite frankly, been done to death. French sounds better to me on other people's records, like his brother Bob's "Original Tuxedo Jazz Band"http://www.louisianamusicfactory.com/showoneprod.asp?ProductID=1946
particularly his duet with Tricia "Sista Teedy" Boutte (sister of John Boutte, another underappreciated singer) on "Over in the Gloryland." But his best recorded performances are on "Mood Indigo." If you can find a used copy, snap it up.

Betty Shirley I first heard about from bassist Jim Markway, who insisted I come down and catch a gig he was playing with her at the Royal Sonesta a couple of years ago. Once again, Youtube proved slim pickings, with only a WDSU news story on "Women of Jazz" showing up (that's Betty with the long curly hair, and Tulane drum instructor Geoff Clapp with no hair at all) :http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1MTkokHKf4 However, unlike French and Manuel, Shirley actually has a website: http://www.bettyshirley.com/

Your best shot at hearing her, short of coming to New Orleans, would be to pick up her CD "Close Your Eyes." :http://www.louisianamusicfactory.com/showoneprod.asp?ProductID=5333

Or you could give yourself the best Christmas gift ever; a trip to New Orleans.

Left on the Cutting Room Floor.

2009-12-15T08:10:00.000-08:00

This year the Professors of Pleasure were asked to record a version of "Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow" for Tulane's holiday e-card. The session itself was a breeze (we tacked in on to the end of the first of two days of recording for the new CD) , if I recall correctly we did two takes, the second just for insurance, since take one sounded fine and ultimately that's the one we used. The "video shoot" a couple of months later was another matter. I'm starting to develop sympathy for Britney Spears and the rest of the MTV set who suffer from "lipsync malfunctions." It's harder than it looks to fake playing to a pre-recorded track, especially if you're trying to hook up finger motions to a solo you recorded two months before.

Basically, we looked so lame that Tulane decided to cut us out of the visuals altogether. Here's the final version:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NhC-JqlbSA

We get the same bread either way, so that kind of takes the sting out of it.

Delfeayo Marsalis @the Rat, 8:00p.m. Nov. 19th.

2009-11-17T10:22:00.000-08:00

...Rathskellar Bar in the Lavin-Bernick Center for Student Life, on the Tulane campus.

Delfeayo is, of course, the trombonist of the clan, but he's also one of those all-round cats that so many jazz musicians are or aspire to be these days. As a producer he's supervised numerous recordings over the years, both for his brothers (most recently "From the Plantation to the Penitentiary," "Don't Be Afraid," and "Swinging With the Cats" for Wynton, and "Steep Anthology" and "Romare Bearden Revealed" for Branford) and others (both trombonist and producer on Jeff Watt's "Citizen 'Tain," producer only on Marcus Roberts' "Marcus Roberts Plays Ellington"). As a trombonist his CV is equally impressive, with releases as leader (2006's "Minion's Dominion," 1996's "Musashi") and sideman (Brother Branford's "I Heard You Twice the First Time," former Sun Ra sideman Michael Ray's band the Kosmic Krewe's "Funk if I Know," Elvin Jones' "It Don't Mean a Thing").

That's only a sliver of the man's pedigree. For the full story, check his website: http://www.delfeayomarsalis.com/ .

I recently had opportunity to play with Delfeayo in a small band setting (with Jesse Mcbride's Next Generation at Donna's on North Rampart) and here's the deal. Stellar technique. Great ears. Endless supply of ideas, and total fluency with the language of jazz from the beginning to right now. You cannot lose him playing background figures, it's like trying to outrun your own shadow.

As usual, admission is absolutely free. Be there.

Kohler Recording Session.

2009-11-09T11:51:00.000-08:00

After many false starts and a little actual pre-production, drummer Geoff Clapp, bassist Rob Kohler and I finally managed to get together for our first recording session last Sunday night in the Tulane Recital Hall. The Hall has excellent acoustics (the band room is dampened all to hell and makes my horn sound dry and puny) and is a wonderful environment for recording and performing.

We'd actually looked at a number of tunes in the one rehearsal we'd had (three of Rob's, one of mine) but Rob dragged in after an extremely rough week and said, "hey man. Let's just play 'free,' alright?," then set up a 6/4 groove in C minor and we were off.

I've always had a kind of conflicted relationship with 'free' playing. In some circles I've been lumbered with a rep as someone contemptuous of the genre, but that's really not true. I've simply avoided (for the most part) playing it because I don't think I've got the chops. It's one thing to play reactively with others within the perameters of a set of chord changes, it's quite another another to put yourself in a space where the music can go absolutely anywhere at any time, and you have no choice but to deal with it. It takes great ears, great chops, and the ability to play pretty much anything you can hear to pull it off with style.

I don't lay claim to being 100% in any of those areas but that didn't stop me, (or the other cats) from having an absolute blast. Geoff Clapp was playing so hard at one point that the air whooshing out of the hole in his bass drum head was making my pant leg flap around ten feet away. The stuff we did had structure, varying moodscapes, historical referrences (to funk, 20th century classical, be-bop, and early jazz) and humor. In fact, at one point something we played struck me so funny I fell out of my chair laughing.

Next session we'll probably tackle some actual tunes, but this is a very good start.

Bill Summers/Alexei Marti Pics.

2009-11-06T15:40:00.001-08:00

Louisiana Repertory Ensemble.

2009-11-04T10:44:00.000-08:00

Of all the oddball gigs I've done since moving to New Orleans, this one is probably the furthest outside my 'comfort zone.' Or maybe not, it's all music, after all.

The Louisiana Repertory Ensemble was originally formed by musicologist (and drummer) John Joyce Jr. and musicologist (and saxophonist) Fred Starr as a vehicle for reproducing early jazz, using transcriptions from recordings (where such recordings existed) and painstaking research into the performance practises of the period. A kind of Tafelmusic for early jazz buffs, if you will. Their initial recordings, like Moods of Old New Orleans http://www.naxos.com/catalogue/item.asp?item_code=9506 and Marching, Ragging and Mourning http://www.louisianamusicfactory.com/showoneprod.asp?TypeID=70&ProductID=131 are painstaking reproductions of what jazz sounded like at the moment of it's genesis, around 1890-1910. "Mourning" in particular works very hard at capturing that moment when early jazzmen starting walking out of the paradigm of the traditional brass 'marching' band, breaking free of the written arrangements and improvising on top of them.

Over the years the band has evolved some, using a revolving cast of players and slipping more into the 'jammed' style of ad-lib playing that came to dominate jazz by the 1920s. But the ensemble still remains tied to it's pedagogical roots, and last night's concert at Dixon Theater (with drummer John Joyce Jr. at the helm) was conceived as much as a teaching device for the numerous Tulane jazz history students in attendance as it was as an entertainment.

Professor Joyce (J.J. to his friends) kind of took me under his wing when I arrived here as a grad student and we've remained friends ever since, so I suppose it was inevitable he'd eventually ask me to sub on one of these gigs. I don't claim to be any kind of expert at playing early jazz, but if you work as a musician for any length of time in New Orleans, you pick up a fair bit of traditional repertoire. What J.J. wanted me to do, though, was play the tenor sax part on Sam Morgan's "Bogulusa Strut" from the score of his transcriptions of the complete Sam Morgan recordings from 1927.

What surprised me about this, when the tune actually kicked off, was how hard this was. I suppose I might harbor a touch of the 'modern jazz player's' snobbery towards this stuff, but I'd like to think that after six years of studying the music I'd be past that. I really was surprised at how tricky the chart was, not an easy thing to sight read at all. "Bogalusa Strut" itself, as a tune, is actually fairly easy, I'd even played it before on gigs. But the tenor part in Morgan's nine piece band is actually a continuous counterline that has zip to do with the melody, and if you kack one eighth-note's worth, you're cooked.

The band this time out was packed with some of traditional jazz's brightest lights. On my left were trumpeters Duke Heitger and Charlie Fardella, and trombonist Rick Trolsen (also well known in funk and avante guard circles). On my immediate right, clarinettist-saxophonist Tom Fischer, banjoist Johnny Parker, pianist Steve Pistorius and Louisiana Philharmonic Tubist Robert Nunez (grandson of old-time New Orleans jazzman Alphonse "Yellow" Nunez). And of course John Joyce Jr. on drums.

The opportunity to play with both the bright lights of traditional jazz and the very best modern jazz players in America is one of the things that makes living here so special. I'm a lucky guy.

Percussion Discussion.

2009-11-02T13:49:00.000-08:00

The Bill Summers gig at the Rat was a perfect encapsulization of why these sorts of things (the opportunity for students to share the stage with top-drawer professional jazz musicians) are so vital and inspiring for young musicians.

I'd told my students in front, "listen, Bill isn't messing around. He's not going to treat you with kid gloves, so you need to know your material strong or he will put you in the ditch. Don't be half steppin up there." These events are sometimes referred to among the jazz faculty as the "ritual humiliation" part of the course, the part where you get scuffed up a bit by players far above your level. I tell em I'm a fellow sufferer, because I get to play with these guys too, and while on the one hand this is both an honor and a privilege, it's also kind of scary. I mean, Bill was on Herbie Hancock's Headhunters. man! He played on Thrust! And of course he showed up with his wingman, master percussionist Alexei Marti.

The first tune was Wayne Shorter's "Footprints" as performed by one of Jesse Mcbride's combos. Bill and Alexei set up an introduction that was only distantly related to the tune's 6/4 time signature, but when it came time for the students to come in, led them there in the most obvious way. This gracious and selfless approach was the order of the evening; Bill and Alexei played their asses off on every tune and with every band, but went out of their way to not confuse anyone (they confined the tricky stuff to percussion breakdowns within the tune, leading the various bands back into the head with simple, clear percussion calls, or sometimes just counting it off with a stick against the side of the timbales) and really made the students sound good, creating luxurious pockets for the student drummers to solo in, and cooking grooves for student soloists and rhythm sections.

We finished up the evening with a short faculty set (our faculty bass and drums were unavailable, so Jesse brought in bassist Mike Ballard and drummer Jamal Batiste), and of course that's when Bill and Alexei really cut loose. "Afro Blue" had six kinds of time going, "Impressions" felt like Coltrane-meets-Tito-Puente taken at a hair raising tempo and went on forever, complete with feints, fakeouts, mini-dialogues within meter changes and scarifying percussion breakdowns. I've never seen the club so full, and the place was bumpin.

We really need to get these guys on faculty.

Bill Summers at the Rat.

2009-10-26T11:38:00.000-07:00

After much back and forth we've finally got a hard date on the first of our series of performances at the Rathskellar Bar in the basement of the Lavin-Bernick Center For Student Life here on the Tulane campus. This coming Thursday, October 29th at 8:00p.m. percussionist Bill Summers will appear with the Tulane Student Combos.

Summers of course is best known for his work with Herbie Hancock, most notably the groundbreaking 1973 album "Headhunters," but his career is much broader than that, encompassing film and television work ( The Color Purple, Roots) as well as nine solo releases. In New Orleans he led the band "Summer's Heat" (guitarist and singer duo Bill Solley and Kim Prevost are alumnae) and currently works in Irvin Mayfield's Afro-Cuban Nuevo-Orleans project "Los Hombres Calientes."

I've told the students to be ready, cause Bill doesn't mess around. If they don't know their stuff strong, he will put them in the ditch.

Young Men Olympian 2009 Parade Pics.

2009-10-21T12:41:00.000-07:00

Robert Glasper and Re-Birth Clinics.

2009-10-20T11:48:00.000-07:00

Yikes! Sorry for the short notice on these, but I've been slammed, absolutely slammed with stuff.

Today, yes that's today, Oct. 20th at 4:00P.m. in the band room at Tulane (Dixon Hall, Rm. 260) snare drummer Derrick Tabb and bass drummer Kieth Frasier will show the evolution of traditional parade rhythms as they developed into the current 'new school' of funky innovations and applications. Charles Keil will moderate.

And right the next day, Oct. 21st, pianist Robert Glasper and his trio will hold forth on the state of modern jazz piano. 1:30p.m. Dixon Hall, rm. 260. Be there or be square.

Kohler/Doheny CD

2009-10-04T11:15:00.000-07:00

I'm trying to put my hand on the name of the famous physicist who supplied us with the quote, "time is God's way of preventing everything from happening at once." Was it Stephen Hawking? Albert Einstein? Lenny Bruce? Doesn't matter because it's at least partially hogwash. Right now a confluence of at least five events (the Profs of Pleasure CD, the fall term at Tulane, the upcoming midterms at Tulane, an additional TIDES (Tulane Interdisciplinary Educational Seminar) course I've taken on, and some deadlines on academic writing) is making it seem like everything is happening at once.

The "Profs vol 2." CD is in the mixing stage now, so the pressure is partially off there. But a new project looms large, and that's the recording I'm scheduled to do this month with bassist/composer Rob Kohler. Rob's will be a familiar name if you know the jazz program at Stanford University in California (he's on faculty at the jazz camp there) the Bozeman Bass Bash in Bozeman, Montana (where he also teaches) and especially to those familiar with the jazz scene in Vancouver, Canada, where he is a frequent collaborator in recordings and live performances by Vancouver guitarist and educator Jared Burrows (the Jared Burrows Trio) and British saxophonist and composer Len Aruhlia (the Len Aruhlia Quintet). Just to show you what a small world the jazz community is, when he first moved here to New Orleans two years ago we discovered we not only knew and had played with both Jared and Len, but also a half dozen or more musicians on two continents, including drummer Stan Taylor, who played in my Vancouver quintet for years and appears on my first solo CD "One Up, Two Back."

I'm afraid that those of you who think this is all part of some sort of 'master plan' to catapult my personal agenda forward are doomed to disappointment, as events in my life tend to resemble more a collection of random objects falling down a flight of stairs than any kind of coherent plan. At this point we're not even entirely sure who's going to be on the record besides us, although New Orleans drummer Geoff Clapp appears to be definitely on board. We have a couple of tantalizing prospects for piano and/or guitar (I'll say no more about this, lest I jinx it), but we still might do a few tracks as a bass-drums-tenor trio. Hell we might do a tune or two as a bass-sax duo, Rob and I have played entire gigs in that format, and he's just released a duo CD with Billings, Montana percussionist Clay Green, "Harmony and Bells." I'm not even sure what we're going to play, although I have some ideas and suggestions, as does Rob. All I know for sure is, by this time next month we'll have a CD in the can.

In Algiers.

2009-09-30T07:51:00.000-07:00

The Professors of Pleasure outside Word of Mouth Studios in Algiers LA. Left to right: Jesse Mcbride piano and Fender Rhodes piano, Geoff Clapp drums, John Dobry guitar, Allen Dejan Jr. tenor alto and soprano saxophones, Jim Markway acoustic and electric bass, John Doheny tenor and soprano saxophones, Andrew "Da Phessa" Baham trumpet. Sept 21, 2009.

Professors of Pleasure vol. 2. Bagged and Tagged.

2009-09-23T11:51:00.000-07:00

Actually we're not quite there yet, as I need to do some serious listening to the ruffs and then get with engineer Tim Stambaugh for mixes and fixes but, for all intents and purposes, this record's done. And, much to my surprise, I like it.

Normally at this stage of the game, I'm somewhere between the "bargaining" and "denial" stages of recording. Those of you who've made records know what I'm talking about. There's "elation" (hey! We're going to record!!!), "apprehension" (Oh my gawd. Every wrong note will be on the permanent record), "bargaining" (hey, maybe no one will notice that huge clam), and "denial" (you know, if you listen to that clambake often enough, it doesn't sound too bad. Anyway, it's too late to fix it now). But I'm listening to a rough mix in a trial sequencing order and I gotta tell ya, it's sounds pretty good.

Day two of recording started out with trumpeter Andrew "Da Phessa" Baham coming in to lay a trumpet part on the bed track for "The Tulane Fight Song' we'd recorded the previous monday. We still didn't have a chart for the damn thing but it turned out 'Drew had gone to J.F. Kennedy and played all the football games so he knew literally every school song by heart. Allen and I chimed in on soprano and tenor respectively for a 'second line' front line and banged the thing out in one take, no sweat. Then it was a fast pass on a be-bop version of "Let It Snow" that we'd agreed to record for Tulane's e-christmas card. This one took two takes, but only because they'd specified it be about two minutes long and we had to make a slight tempo adjustment to get it to fit the allotted space.

The rest of the session was spent laying down "Funky Breeze" (a Jim Markway original he'd written when working in local tenor player Brian "Breeze" Cayolle's band) a beautiful Afro-Cuban thing by Harold Battiste called "Child Playing," nicely arranged by guitarist John Dobry for alto, tenor, and guitar, another Marway composition, the quirky "Elysian Fields" (on which I discovered, to my surprise and delight, that I could actually play a borrowed soprano sax in tune), and John Dobry's Pat Metheny-esque "Cautious Optimism."

It was a lot of music for two days (if we were releasing it on vinyl, it would be a double LP) but we actually finished a couple hours early, and that included a 90 minute lunch break and stroll through scenic Algiers Point, where Word of Mouth Studios is located. Now it's on to artwork, sleeve design, pressing, and release.

In The Studio.

2009-09-19T09:14:00.000-07:00

This past monday was the first of two days in the studio to record what will ultimately become John Doheny Presents the Professors of Pleasure vol. 2. I've managed to do a little money management within the departmental budget that should, if we keep recording costs rock bottom and session fees for adjunct instructors (who are paid an hourly rate for teaching. Since John Dobry and I are full-time, salaried faculty, we're contributing our services to the project gratis) as low as possible without being totally insulting, we should be able to do one of these CDs every two years. Aside from raising the profile of the department through CD sales and touring, we hope to be able to generate income streams that can be diverted into a scholarship fund. Tulane is an expensive school, and talented students with potential are not always fortunate enough to win the genetic lottery by being born to wealthy parents.

Anyway, in the interests of keeping costs down (and again I must stress that everyone playing on this project is either doing it for nothing, or for peanuts) we decided to use Tim Stambaugh's Word of Mouth Studios over in Algiers. As much as we loved recording at Piety Street Studios last time out, it would have broken our budget, even at studio owner and head engineer Mark Bingham's special jazz-bum rate (as Mark puts it, "yeah, there's a 'book rate,' but only Green Day and Dave Mathews pay it"). Stambaugh's facility simply offers a much more affordable price, and a couple of guys on the band had done projects there and had good things to say about it.

I must admit that my only real trepidation was over "seperation issues." Piety offers the option of recording in one big room without the use of headphones. Headphones are a major source of irritation for me, as I hate spending time getting a good mix in the cans, and the best headphone mix in the world is never going to be as good as hearing each other live in the room, as God in Her wisdom intended it to be. But Stambaugh's place offers the best possible equipment to achieve a semblence of this; each player has a series of buttons on his headphone 'tree' that allows him to essentially creat his own mix. No more watching the air get sucked out of a session by an hour of shouting back and forth about levels. The total separation of instruments (at Word of Mouth you are literally in seperate rooms, although they are glass-walled, so there's still visual contact) allows for real time punch-ins and fixes as well, something I was long suspicious of. I felt that a solo overdubbed over an existing rhythm track, for instance, was likely to sound "un-jazz-like," since a recorded track cannot 'react' to a real-time soloist the way a live rhythm section does. I still feel that way, but I must admit I really enjoy being able to go back in and fix that one Bb where my finger slipped playing the head out, rather than having to re-record the whole friggin' tune over again.

On monday the first thing we did was a two-tenor feature for me and new guy Allen Dejan Jr. (and yes, for you jazz history buffs, he is related to the late saxophonist and Olympia Brass Band leader Harord "Duke" Dejan). We chose the Tadd Dameron's "Ladybird"-based tune that Miles Davis wrote while playing in Charlie Parkers quintet, "Half Nelson," and took it at a tempo somewhere in between Miles' burning 'up' version from "Working With the Miles Davis Quintet" and the medium-swing Dexter Gordon-James Moody interpretation on Dexter's "More Power." On the first take we tried the "Mingus" gambit of first trading choruses, then eights, then fours, twos, ones etc. but in the playback that sounded too stiff, so on the next pass we started with chorus-trading but then just started getting loose with it, eliding phrases over bar lines, pushing and pulling each other, and ending with a chorus of New Orleans-style collective improvisation. Often this is only something you can pull off convincingly if you've been playing with someone for a while. Allen and I hadn't played together much before , and we certainly had never attempted anything like this, but it worked like greased lightning the first pass and we somehow peaked just in time to launch into the "Ladybird" shout chorus before trading eights with drummer Geoff Clapp, then head two times and out. Tune one bagged and tagged in less than an hour.

The whole session went more or less like that and by the end of the day we had rough mixes of "Half Nelson," a tune by bassist Jim Markway called "Don't Know About That," a beautiful reading of "Nancy With the Laughing Face" featuring Allen Dejan Jr., pianist Jesse Mcbride featured on a Harold Battiste waltz-ballad called "Beautiful Old Ladies," and yours truly featured front and center on the Hank Mobley cooker "This I Dig of You." We also got a bed track on a 'second-line' version of the "Tulane Fight Song" the university asked us to record for their web site, with me honking away pretending to be a trumpet on what I could emember of the melody (we didn't have a chart, just some chords Jim Markway had cribbed off a Youtube of the Tulane Marching Band that morning). Andrew "Da Phessah" Baham comes in next monday to record the trumpet part for real.

So far, it's going great. I'm pleased, and that has not always been the case for me with previous projects. Hell, I even like the way I sound.

We're Number One!

2009-09-09T09:37:00.000-07:00

Relax, I'm not going to get one of those silly big foam-rubber fingers and start jumping around shouting this. I'm much too cool for that. I'm just reacting to the Society of American Travel Writers rating of the Top Ten Cities For Live Music in North America.

http://www.satw.org/admin/detail_news.asp?id=739&parent=15&SId=26&C=

1. New Orleans, Louisiana

2. New York City

3. Austin, Texas

4. Nashville, Tennessee

5. Chicago, Illinois

6. Memphis, Tennessee

7. Montreal, Canada

8. Las Vegas, Nevada

9. Branson, Missouri

10. Denver, Colorado

On reflection, I'm really not surprised they rated New Orleans over New York. New York has been the center of the jazz universe for over half a century, but in terms of the breadth and depth New Orleans has in a wide, wide variety of live music, and the the sheer ubiquitousness of it...I mean, live music can hit you any time here, a second line never roared past my front door in New York.

Austin? Hmmm. Certain times of the year, particularly festival times (South by Southwest comes to mind) Austin can look like music central, but that's kind of illusory, because a lot of those bands are from out of town. The old Antones-Jimmy-Vaughn-Thunderbirds-Lee-Ann-Barton axis ain't what it used to be, and I don't see anything that organic coming up to take it's place.

Nashville? Corporate country. Big black hats. Pass.

Chicago? Lots of good blues. Some great jazz, if you know where to look.

Memphis? Some great music. The Stax museum. Beale street has some good sounds, but I can't help thinking of everything they mercilessly tore down to build that sanitized safe-for-tourists strip. In some respects the real story in Memphis (and in New Orleans as well) is in hip hop music. I recommend a viewing of "Hustle and Flow." for the uninitiated.

Now Montreal...there's a well kept secret. Quiet as it's kept, the birthplace of Oscar Peterson has had a vibrant scene going back to the first half of the 20th century if you know where to look. Plus it's just a great allround cosmopolitan, sophisticated burg.

Vegas? I don't think so.

Denver I don't know much about, but I know cats there who can really play, and they tell me it's happening.

I'm dissapointed Vancouver, Canada didn't make the list. I lived there for many years and know from personal experience that the place is crammed with first rate musicians. A very underrated scene. The main problem is there's just not enough places to play, so maybe that's why it didn't make the cut.

Okay, so we're 'number one' in live music. Now if they'd just bring the bread up to that standard, everybody'd be happy.

Quick Hit.

2009-09-02T08:06:00.000-07:00

Into our second week of classes here at Tulane and of course very busy. No dates confirmed yet for the fall Jazz @ the Rat series but I'll post them here as soon as I get them. The two confirmed artists are Bill Summers and Idris Muhammad, so I guess we're on a percussion tip.

Summers of course is best known for his work with Herbie Hancock, most notably the groundbreaking 1973 album "Headhunters," but his career is much broader than that, encompassing film and television work ( The Color Purple, Roots) as well as nine solo releases. In New Orleans he led the band "Summer's Heat" (guitarist and singer duo Bill Solley and Kim Prevost are alumnae) and currently works in Irvin Mayfield's Afro-Cuban Nuevo-Orleans project "Los Hombres Calientes."

Idris Muhammad I'm even more excited about than Bill. Muhammad is kind of a legend around New Orleans where he started life in 1939 as Leo Morris. The Morris family has been well known around town for producing top shelf drummers so apparently when young Leo arrived in his school band program they didn't even ask him his instrument-preferrence, just handed him the sticks. One of his earliest recording sessions (at age 15) was Fat's Domino's "Blueberry Hill."

As a leader he's released twelve discs, beginning with 1970's "Black Rhythm Revolution" on Prestige Records. As a sideman he's recorded with Johnny Griffin, Lou Donaldson, Pharoah Sanders, Freddie Hubbard, Grant Green and John Scofield. Since 1994 he's held down the drum chair in Ahmad Jamal's trio. To say that I'm excited by the prospect of playing with the man is the understatement of the century.

In other news we've confirmed recording dates (Sept. 14 and 21) at Word of Mouth studios
http://masterdigital.com/studios/data/wordofmouth.htm Bassist Jim Markway, pianist Jesse Mcbride, drummer Geoff Clapp, guitarist John Dobry and myself, along with new guy reedman Allen Dejan, will be recording Professors of Pleasure vol. 2. Now all we have to do is figure out what we're going to play, learn the music, and record it. But, as anyone who's done this knows, that's the easy part.

Vacation (not).

2009-08-13T10:13:00.000-07:00

I'm noticing a palpable slowdown in activity this time of year. People are harder to get hold of, or, if you can get hold of them, are more reluctant to commit to things. Apparently this is because of the Vacation.

Up until I started working at Tulane, my response to this would have been, "what is this 'vacation' of which you speak?" I've now come to understand that this means a period of time in which one does not work, and yet paychecks continue to be deposited in one's bank account. Many people actually leave home and check into a hotel somewhere (something I've always associated with work) during this period of idleness.

All kidding aside, I was 50 years old before I ever had a 'paid vacation.' Prior to that I'd certainly had times of no-work, but that was called being 'unemployed' and simply meant it was time to panic and start casting around for gigs or, if those were particularly thin on the ground, the dreaded 'day job,' usually some low-level scut-work thing that didn't require much in the way of commitment, like cab driving or bartending or day labor. Even when I was a high school band sub, I was paid on a per diem basis. If I wasn't working, I wasn't earning. Then, in late August of 2005, Tulane hired me as visiting professor of music under a one year contract. A week later, Katrina hit.

So, my first 'paid vacation' consisted of fleeing the greatest natural disaster and engineering failure in U.S. history, not exactly a low-stress holiday. But when I discovered (much to my surprise and delight) that Tulane had electronically deposited two months pay (my official hiring date was July 1st, 2005) into my bank account, it actually did soak up some of the worry. I had no idea whether our house was still standing or not (or whether it was submerged) but both Darlene and I still had jobs, and we even had a few bucks in the bank. I could take gigs on the basis of whether they were interesting and fullfilling, rather than just grabbing the best paying ones. It has been my experience that there is often a direct, inverse relationship between how much a gig pays and how interesting/fun it is.

Tulane, god bless 'em, kept it's faculty on full salary the whole four months we were gone. The next spring, I had an opportunity to take advantage of my first 'paid vacation' over the summer break.

I took a pass, instead using the break to tour personal projects, write new music, write articles for academic journals, and incubate schemes for expanding and improving the jazz performance studies department. I've continued to do these things every summer since, and quite frankly, I wouldn't have it any other way. Lying on the beach is overrated.

Currently, I'm spending time in my office practising, preparing music for two CDs (one with the faculty band the Professors of Pleasure, and one with bassist/composer Rob Kohler), preparing syllabi and course outlines for the fall semester, and conferring with Jesse Mcbride about who we'll be booking for the upcoming "Jazz at the Rat" series. More on this in my next post, and remember; idle hands are the Devil's tinsnips.

Brass Bands.

2009-07-25T11:47:00.000-07:00

Good to be back home. It's fun to go out on the road and play with new people for fresh audiences, but it's also, as Frank Sinatra once famously sang "so nice to come back home." I had a ball in Vancouver playing with my old pal Colleen Savage, and all the folks in her band (drummer Phil Belanger, bassist Dave Guiney, and pianist Brenda Baird) are people I've known and worked with for many years, so that took care of the "old home week " portion of the trip. My gig as a leader, with bassist Jen Hodge (AKA "Hudge Hudgins"), drummer Mike Ardagh and pianist Cat Toren was an opportunity to make new connections with some of the up and coming, gifted young players the city continues to produce in such abundance.

Ruminating on this while going through security again *eye roll* at LAX got me to thinking about some of the aspects of the scene in New Orleans that make being a working musician here so different from anywhere else in North America. It's no secret (or shouldn't be) that there's good players everywhere, not just in New York. It's kind of like minor league baseball, there's lots of major league level players in the triple A who are there simply because there's only a certain number of spots in the bigs. Similarly, New York City can only (sort of) support a certain number of jazz musicians; there are plenty of world class players who choose to live in Vancouver or Miami or Cleveland or Kansas City or wherever for all sorts of reasons having nothing to do with ability. The result is it's possible for someone like me to go to pretty much any city in North America and find a first class rhythm section capable of handling the entire canon of straight-ahead jazz at the drop of a downbeat.

You can do that in New Orleans too, of course, but there's also a lot of musical situations here that don't really exist anywhere else. There's R&B gigs everywhere (for players of my generation being able to bust out with "Cleo's Mood" and "Honky Tonk," as well as knowing that the bridge to Aretha Franklin's version of "Respect" is the same changes as the one in Sam and Dave's "When Something is Wrong with My Baby" often meant the difference between eating and not eating), but New Orleans has some specific repertorial requirements, like Smoky Johnson's "It Ain't My Fault" and the Meters' "Cissy Strut." There's also some South-Louisiana-specific genres like Cajun music and Zydeco.

But the big jobbing-gig thing here, kind of the local equivalent of the wedding band, is the brass band. These can be old-school outfits like the Majestic or Michael White's Liberty Brass Band, which plays traditional repertoire almost exclusively, or bands that play in the more funk-based contemporary style of the Dirty Dozen band, or the Rebirth. Even newer-school outfits like the Hot 8 or the Soul Rebels play a kind of 'brass hop' style of hip-hop, rap music adapted to brass band instruments. There are also more esoteric groups like the Panorama Jazz Band that play hybrids of traditional brass band, early New Orleans jazz, and various Latin and Afro-Cuban styles. The one thing they all have in common is portability, marching capability, and (usually) percussion sections made up of two or more seperate players (one player on bass drum and one on snare).

In addition to these relatively fixed-personell outfits there are dozens of 'pick up' type brass bands where who shows up at the gig is related to who's available. My buddy Kevin O'Day, for instance, has a band called the Oakside Brass Band that consists entirely of him on snare and his brother-in-law Frank Lodato on bass drum. When he gets a gig he just starts calling people and you never know who's going to be on the gig. Could be some guy you've never heard of on trumpet, could be the great Kirk Joseph on Sousaphone.

Because of the large amounts of Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs in New Orleans (all of whom need at least one band for their annual parade), the persistance of the "jazz funeral" tradition, and the large numbers of other functions which employ these bands (weddings, picnics, political rallies, wine tastings, art gallery openings etc.) there is quite a lot of work for these types of ensembles, and if you're around, competent, and available, sooner or later you'll get called for one of these gigs. What follows are a few pointers for the novice:

Music:

Needless to say, there ain't no charts. If you're like me, and your knowledge of traditional New Orleans music is rudimentary at best, you'll be relying on your ear to get you through these things initially. The good news is, brass band music, both new school and old, is pretty simple, both melodically and harmonically. Listen to a chorus or two and then sneak in there, you'll probably be cool. The down side of this, for me anyway, is that I now know a whole bunch of tunes I don't know the name of, since nobody ever seems to call anything, one guy just starts playing and everyone joins in. Oh well.

The March:

Hopefully, you're not so uncoordinated that you can't walk and play at the same time. If you're lucky, you'll get eased into this kind of thing at a "fake" second line of some kind; the art gallery openings and weddings and things that also hire this type of music. At these things the actual 'parade' is usually fairly short, like up and down the block a few times or (a wedding I played a while back) from St. Louis Cathedral to Tipitina's French Quarter location, a distance of about five blocks. But a genuine second line parade for one of the SAPC's, I'm telling you bruh, that march can be a killer, especially in hot weather. Parade permits are issued for four hours. Thank god for bar stops.

Attire:

Traditional bands require "black and white," meaning white shirt and black pants. The first few of these I did I wore my black wool tuxedo pants. In hot weather this proved to be a tactical error. Black jeans or black cotton summer-weight pants are acceptable to most leaders.

Oh, and hats. Ugh. The more casual outfits don't require the traditional five-pointed, visored 'bandsmen's hat', if you're subbing for someone in a band that does, you will be handed someone else's. It will not fit. It will stink. In fact, as my buddy Jim Markway puts it, it will smell "like somebody's old shoe."

New school bands generally don't go in for black and whites or hats. As a rule, loose jeans or shorts and oversize t-shirts, either all white or all some other color, are the rule. Sometimes the shirt will have the name of the band on it, sometimes the name of the social club. Or, if it's a funeral, it might be a "memory shirt." These are t-shirts specially made up with the name and photo of the deceased on them, and his dates of birth/death. Sometimes these are rendered as "Sunrise" (date) and "Sunset" (date). If the deceased was a drug dealer or gangster of some kind it will be "Thugged in/ Thugged out."

General social issues:

As a rule, being the 'new guy' on these things is not that different from any other type of gig, ie. not unlike your first day at kindergarten. Try to make friends and not be a tightass. One big difference though is you get a lot wider range of capabilities than you do on the average jazz gig, everything from self-taught guys who's chop capability begins and ends with "That Old Rugged Cross/Didn't He Ramble" to schooled players who can sight-read fly shit and make any kind of gig. It's not a good idea to jump to conclusions about which is which either. That guy you assume is just a neighborhood bar gnat might be Terence Blanchard's new tenor player.

Oh, and if the gig is a straight up second line through the 'hood with a 'new school' funk-style band, you are pretty much guaranteed to be the only white guy around, aside from the Times-Picayune photographer and a few ethnomusicologists doing field studies. You are going to take some teasing about this. Be a good sport and suck it up.

And welcome to New Orleans.

Vancouver Jazzfest 2009 Pics.

2009-07-13T16:18:00.000-07:00

Jen Hodge, bass. Mike Ardagh, drums. John Doheny, tenor saxophone.

Photos by Tom Weibe.

Vancouver Jazzfest

2009-06-28T18:33:00.001-07:00

So I'm holed up here at 7th and Oak in Vancouver, a neighborhood known as Fairview Slopes. I know I'm in Vancouver because, even though the weather is a bit chilly (believe me, I appreciate it. It was 103F the day I left New Orleans) every second person I pass on the street is wearing shorts, hiking boots, a North Face fleece vest and some variety of expensive, designer baseball cap. I'm doing the Vancouver thing, getting up in the morning and hiking up the hill to Broadway for coffee at Starbucks, reading the paper, like that. It's nice, you know?

It's funny because I used to live in this neighborhood in the 1970s, when it was a radically different place. Nowdays it's all ticky-tacky but very expensive condos, many of them leaking due to poor design and construction. Back then it was filled with beautiful but run-down Victorian and Queen Anne period houses inhabited by slackers like me. In 1971 I lived in a three bedroom house at 2328 Willow Street with my girlfriend and two other people. The rent was $150 a month and my share was $25. We made our own beer in the basement crawl-space and shared a communal can of tobacco. My total monthly nut; rent, food, beer, smokes, was about $70.

All that's gone now. In the mid seventies real estate developers went through this and other Vancouver neighborhoods like the Four Horesemen of the Apocalypse, flattening hundreds of beautiful period houses and replacing them with expensive (though often poorly designed and cheaply constructed) condos. The irony is that in the long run (though, of course, they had no interest in the long run) there would have been more money to be made renoing the existing housing stock than in flooding the market with cheapo construction. The architectural rape of Vancouver is one of the great untold stories of the 70s and 80s.

Because of my long history in the city, playing the Vancouver Festival is much more than just another gig to me. I've played it every year since 1997, both as a "local guy" and an out-of-towner, and Ken Pickering and the folks at the Coastal Jazz and Blues Society have been very supportive of me all that time. Unlike the New Orleans festival, whose artist passes are only good on the day of performance, CJBS hands out passes good for the whole festival, giving me the opportunity to catch a lot of music I'd otherwise be unable to afford. And the opportunity to play with and socialize with my many friends and colleagues in the Vancouver jazz community is a treasure beyond price.

My gig on Staturday was with singer Colleen Savage, whom I have now known for...good lord, 33 years. We first met as students in Vancouver Community College's fledgling Jazz and Commercial Music program in 1976. When I recorded my first CD as a leader, 2002's "One Up, Two Back," Colleen guested on two tunes, Jobim's "Djindi" and a great arrangement of "Time After Time" that Colleen has in her book. We played that same arrangement at the gig Saturday night, at the tempo I should have recorded it at back in 2002. It's hard to record slow stuff slow enough, you know? It really takes nerves of steel. I chickened out on that session seven years ago, and counted it in too fast. Last Saturday Colleen nailed it dead solid perfect.

Speaking of hard, Colleen's book is hard. I'd forgotten just how hard it is. It would be a real mistake to go on a Colleen Savage gig expecting just another My-Funny-Valentine-chick-singer kind of job. She's got a lot of tricky arrangements and obscure, oddball tunes in there, stuff like Eartha Kitt's "I Wanna Be Evil" and Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames' "Yeh Yeh." A tune like "It Could Happen To You," which most singers take at a medium swing, Colleen does in it's original form, as a sloooooow ballad. Gigi Gryce's "Music In The Air," with it's constantly cycling key centers, is taken at a blistering tempo.

This is the third year I've played the Capilano Suspension Bridge stage with her, and I talked to several people afterwards who'd been in attendence every year. Despite the rain and cool weather we had an excellent house and Colleen had them eating out of her hand by the end. I doubt anyone there would have guessed that she was just getting over a terrible cold she'd brought back from California.

My own gig on July 1st at the Railspur Alley Stage is with what I've been referring to as the "mystery rhythm section," because I haven't met them yet. Actually I do know bassist Jen Hodge fairly well, but I've never played with her. I'll be meeting up with drummer Mike Ardagh and pianist Cat Toren on the day of the gig.

I've had some very, very good experiences playing with fresh rhythm sections in Vancouver over the last few years. In 2006 Cory Weeds offered me a date at the Cellar and the band I was using in Vancouver at the time (Tony Foster on B-3, Joe Poole on drums, and Jon Roper on guitar) was unavailable. I considered calling up the "usual suspects" then remembered that Morgan Childs, a young drummer I'd worked with once on a casual big band date, had been playing regularly in a trio with pianist Amanda Tosoff. Along with bassist Josh Cole they made up the rhythm section on that Cellar gig, and it was one of the most fun experiences I had playing jazz that year. I'm hoping for a similar experience with Jen's bunch.

When you have long working associations with certain players, as I do in Vancouver, it's very tempting to stay within the comfort zone of people you've worked with a lot. But it can also be great fun (and pay tremenduos musical dividends) to take a shot and work with some of the many terrific young musicians this city continues to produce in such abundance.

Saddle Up (Again).

2009-06-21T17:19:00.000-07:00

Seems like we just got back from Tulsa but it's already time to hit the road again. I'll be in Vancouver, Canada for two gigs at their jazzfest; June 27th with my good friend vocalist Colleen Savage at the Capilano Suspension Bridge, and July 1st fronting a new (for me) local rhythm section of Cat Toren (piano) Jen Hodge (bass) and Mike Ardagh (drums) at the Railspur Alley Stage on Granville Island.

I'll also be out at the South Delta Jazz Festival in Whiterock July 9th for a concert (with Jarrod burough's on guitar, my old Vancouver runnin podnuh Stan Taylor on drums, and my New Orleans crony Rob Kohler on bass) and clinic/lecture.

http://www.southdeltajazzfestival.com/faculty09.html

Man it is so hot and humid here right now. I've been riding my bike back and forth to my office at Tulane, and it was so bad yesterday that the condensation on the inside of my watch crystal caused the watch to stop. I think it's rusted shut in there.

All in all, a good time to get out of town for a while. I'll try and do a little blogging from the Vancouver fest, always one of my favorite playing opportunities. If you're in town and make either of those gigs, hollah at me.

Meyer the Hatter.

2009-06-04T15:51:00.000-07:00

It should come as no surprise to anyone that, in a place like New Orleans, the sun is not your friend. After years of living in Vancouver, Canada, where a warm sunny day is such a rarity that a kind of mass hysteria grips the city when one occurs, compelling tens of thousands of Vancouverites to skip work in a mass stampede to the beach, to the bike path, to rollerblade, here I deal with an embarrassment of riches. The sun, much of the year, is so brutal that locals use umbrellas as much for protection against sunlight as against rain, and only non-natives (like most of my students at Tulane) are crazy enough to actually lay out in it. And if you're walking any distance out in the open, you're nuts not to wear a hat.

I own quite a few of them already (when I was a kid I loved hats of all kinds, and had a whole box of them); my current stash includes two felt fedoras ( Biltmores, in brown and grey), a pricey straw panama with a black band (the kind favored by the recently deceased pianist and raconteur Jack Velker), a cheap straw fedora with a band that says "Vancouver Sun Golf Tournament" that I bought for two bucks at a thrift shop in Vancouver, a "one size fits all" vent-air fedora (another thrift shop purchase, this time in Vicksburg, Mississippi), and a stingy-brim job I got for $4.98 at Walgreens drugstore on Tchoupitoulas last year that's actually made of paper, even though it looks like straw, and that never fails to get me complements from middle-aged African-American sports at second lines. I also recently aquired a straw version of the British "flat cap," which Mr. Arthur, our local truck-vendor fruit and vegetable man, refers to as my "Dago" hat. But since I'm going on the road for a few weeks worth of gigs this summer, and none of these hats are what you'd call "suitcase ready" (and hat boxes on the plane are a real pain in the ass) I decided today that I needed to pay a visit to Meyer the Hatter for something more portable.

Meyer the Hatter is a long, narrow store on St. Charles Avenue, just off Canal and right across from the streetcar stop in front of the Pearl Oyster Bar, that sells nothing but hats. It's sign advertises "quality headgear since 1894." When I was in there last winter the place was full of derbies (some of them green, for St. Patrick's Day) felt fedoras, porkpies, and dark colored Kangols, as well as the odd stovepipe and topper. Today it's filled with straw boaters, panamas, fedoras , various and sundry Palm-beachers and summer hats and of course the white, eight-point black visored caps that bandsmen wear in brass-band jazz ensembles. But I don't see what I'm looking for, a lightweight cotton version of the British flat cap, known in New Orleans as a "bebop cap."

A chubby little guy with a goatee, wearing, incredibly, a peaked-brim cap with earflaps, ala Ignatious Reilly in John Kennedy Toole's "A Confederacy of Dunces," skates up to me and says, "How ya dooin cap. Ma heptcha?" A major y'at for sure. God I love this place.

(For the uninitiated, a "y'at" is a working class, white New Orleanian. Their manner of speech is surprisingly un-southern, containing a lot of dese-dem-and-dose-isms. Think Archie Bunker with southern diction. The term "y'at" comes from the once-ubiquitous greeting "where y'at?" and he was asking me "how are you? May I help you?" The expression "cap" (short for "captain") is roughly equivalent to "buddy" or "pal," and is another form of address that one doesn't hear as often as even just a few years ago. Sadly, the homogenizing effects of mass American culture are spreading even here).

But I digress. Clerk: "Ma heptcha?" Me:"Y'all got any a those bebop caps in the store, in maybe a white or a powder blue?" Clerk:"Ohyesindeedy bruh, y'all follow me through heah, watch yah step" (he proceeds to lead me through a narrow opening between mountainous hat trees to a tiny, secluded oasis of hat drawers) "it's a little tight up in dis piece an dat's fuh sho." And after 15 or so minutes of this kind of back and forth, in which we discuss jazzfest ("too expensive for me bruh. I pay $50 to hear music, I want a chair, know what I'm sayin?") the absolute joy and perfection of life in New Orleans ("although I could use a bit less a da flyin bullets, an dats fuh sho") and his total commitment to my continued sartorial well being ("I gotcha covered like dew on da ground, baby"), I walk out of there in a spiffy new white Kangol be-bop cap.

And by god looky here, right under the brim. Meyer's has a website:
http://www.meyerthehatter.com/meyer/

Oblique New Orleans Encounter #971.

2009-05-15T12:09:00.000-07:00

I take my bike to Tulane about two or three days a week, as Darlene and I split one car between us and she works way out on Veterans Highway in Metairie. It's about a five mile ride from Saint Philip Street to my office, through all kinds of interesting and diverse neighborhoods. Things start out quasi-ghetto in the 6th Ward, then go a little more upscale as I pass Bayou St. John. There's a bike path on the neutral ground on Jefferson Davis Parkway and I stay on that from Toulous St., past the Boulevard Club just before Canal Street, and all the way past Tulane Avenue and over the freeway as far as the Washington Avenue canal. Then I cut behind the wreckage of the Blue Plate Mayonaise factory and straight down Audubon Street, across South Claiborne and onto the Tulane campus.

Back behind the Blue Plate factory is a scruffy little neighborhood that's only about half re-populated since Katrina. There's a couple of bars that are still wrecked (Leroy's Place and the Gert-town Lounge) and a bunch of churches. There's an old guy I see everytime I pass by, looks like he's 90 if he's a day, sitting on his porch. There's a trailer in his yard so I suspect he's still living in that and just sits up on his porch in an attempt at some sort of pre-Katrina normalcy. I'm such a familiar sight, grinding slowly by on my $50 Walmart bike, his dog doesn't even bark at me anymore.

Me: "Good morning sir."

Him: "Oh you don't hafta call me 'sir,' young fella."

Me:" Well, you know how it is. I was raised to respect my elders."

Him: "Well looka here, youngblood," (at this point I'm off my bike and it's become an official conversation)"just be glad you have elders. At my age, everbody older than me is dead."
Hard to argue with that.

A few blocks later, a woman I'd never met before called me 'baby.' "Good morning baby," she hollered.

Of course she was about 60 and standing in front of the House Of Refuge Ministries, but still, it was nice, you know?

Getting ready to go on the road this summer for a bit, and I'm really going to miss this kind of stuff while I'm Gone.

Germaine Bazzle.

2009-05-11T08:23:00.000-07:00

The debate continues, always, where is jazz going, who is the "future of jazz"? Is it Dave Douglas? Does the music need to incorporate more contemporary pop influences? Hip hop beats? Croation throat singing?

Those of us over 50 (or even 40) have heard it all before, and some of us (like me) are bored gormless with the whole discussion. I like what I like (and my tastes are actually pretty broad) and being an old guy means absolutely not giving a rat's ass about whether one's likes and dislikes are 'cool.' And of course the slant that often gets left out of discussions about whether playing the same music now that you were playing 40 years ago is 'valid' is that, in many cases (Ellington springs to mind) you're doing it a lot better now.

Case in point: Germaine Bazzle, who gets better every time I see her. Last night at Snug Harbor Bazzle, joined by the stellar talents of Larry Sieberth (piano), Simon Lott (drums) and Neil 'dig my sharp new haircut' Caine (bass), rolled out a program of standards very similar in content and execution to every one I've seen her present over the years, but she does it so well that any trifling over the fact that it's the 'music of the last century' seems like pointless nitpicking.

Bazzle is a jazz singer in the true meaning of that word. Her sense of swing is innate, and she is constantly engaged in the internal dialogue that is part of any small jazz band, an equal participant, not a 'singer' supported by 'accompanists.' Her choice of tempos (excruciatingly ballad-slow for "I Thought About You," burning-up for "Surrey with the Fringe On Top," dead-center-in-the-pocket for "What A Difference a Day Makes") was spot on, placing each tune exactly where it needed to be for maximum swing-osity groove from all participants. Tempos are hard; it takes years of experience to know where to put them. Bazzle knows.

Then there's scat singing. My usual position on this is that a little goes a long way; unless you actually are Sarah Vaughn or Ella Fitzgerald, just sing the song already. But Bazzle is just that good that I actually welcome chorus after chorus of finely honed, harmonically inventive scat from her, she's one of the most original practicioners of the art since hugely underrated Basie tromonist and singer Richard Boone. Her musicianly facility may well be a product of her own schooled background (Bazzle played bass on Bourbon Street for years with saxophonist Alvin "Red" Tyler, and currently teaches piano and vocal diction at Xavier Prep). Bazzle in no way limits herself to the 'shooby dooby doo' school of scat singing, instead deploying instrumental imitation (trombone, bass; at one point duetting with her 'singer' self and her inner trombonist) and a wide variety of pops and tongue-clicks that at one point (on the out-vamp to "Surrey") had drummer Simon Lott gasping in amazement at their polyrhythmic complexity. Bazzle has the ability to keep surprising even herself, often emitting delighted little yips and cackles in the midst of her improvisations. And she has that quality of sly innuendo, so common among 'Creole of Color" ladies of a certain age, that creates the illusion that the knowing wink, the breathy chuckle, and the implied double entendre in the lyric are all meant just for you.

In my experience the ultimate litmus test for singers is the regard they are held in by their fellow musicians, and in this regard Bazzle is absolutely 'one of the cats.' I've never heard a musician say anything but good things about the experience of working with her, and Sieberth, Caine, and Lott clearly considered it an honor and a privilege to share the bandstand with her. Everyone was getting stretched up there, and Bazzle was absolutely fearless about taking risks and challenging them and herself. Musicians love that.

Bazzle is greatly underrecorded (her only solo CD, "Standing Ovation," was released in 1992) and almost never performs outside of the city of New Orleans. But if you want to see someone totally inside of what they do, someone who's been doing it a long time and has honed her focus to a fine pinpoint conception, come here and catch her. There are days when I think Ms. Bazzle is the best jazz singer in America, and last night at Snug Harbor, she was.

Wrap it!

2009-05-05T09:59:00.000-07:00

The subject line referrence, for those not familiar with mid-80s Canadian rock band esoterica (a large demographic I'm sure) is to the title of Doug and the Slugs second album. The cats in Doug's band were all old compadres of mine from bar and strip-joint gig days, and after the Slugs became a big deal I'd often cross paths with them on the road. Recently I've reconnected with some of these folks, and it's interesting to remember how we'd gripe, 20 odd (very odd) years ago, about the road "making old men out of us" in light of the fact that we really are, now, old men.

But, I digress, and I haven't even got started. "Wrap it" also in this case refers to the end of the academic year, and what a wild ride it's been. The photo above is of me trying to look noble while Tim Warfield hands me my ass on "Tenor Madness" at this year's New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. Tim was in town for our "Jazz at the Rat" series (where we bring in guest artists to do a clinic and then play with the students at the Rathskeller Bar in the student center) and it seemed like a no brainer to have him come out to Jazzfest and play a couple of tunes with the Tulane Jazz Orchestra. We featured him on "The Blues Weaver," a Sammy Nestico chart, and Thad Jones' flagwaver "Don't Git Sassy." When it became apparent that we needed an extra five minutes on the program I grabbed my horn (because I never go anywhere without my horn) and told the rhythm section to play a Bb blues. I took a few choruses, thought I'd aquitted my self pretty well, then stood aside as Tim proceded to take everything I'd played, turn it inside out and upside down, and make it into something much, much better. He's such a nice cat you don't even mind when he cuts you to ribbons.

The Jazz at the Rat program has been such a terrific thing for the students. The Lagniappe people (Tom Moody and Trina Beck) have expressed a desire to continue funding the project next year, and we've already come up with a partial list of people we'd like to bring in. The "embedded professional" nature of the program really kicks things up a notch for the students; they get an idea what it feels like to share the stand with some really top flight players. Then when the faculty band plays the gig, we flip the script and do the "embedded student" thing, so individual students get to experience the vibe of being in amongst professionals.

Because of some scheduling mishaps we wound up with four of these Rat things in the month of April, which, along with Jazzfest and it's attendent spinoff gigs plus student term-end concerts and recitals conspired to create a 'perfect storm' of balls-to-the-wall activity for everyone. In the last two weeks of April I was out every single night, either playing or attending someone else's gig; the last week I had a concert with my combo and big band on Tuesday, the Rat gig Wednesday night, Jazzfest Thursday morning (the bus picked us up at 9:30a.m.) a Jessse Mcbride's Jazz Allstars concert that night (Jesse, Tim Warfield again, Antoine Drye on trumpet, Rex Gregory on alto, James Westphall on vibes, Jason Marsalis on drums, Jasen Khalil Weaver on bass, and special guest 13 year old drummer Eric Calhoun) then, to top it off, I had another gig, with Rob Kohler's trio, at 8:30 the next morning.

But I'm not complaining. I worked long and hard to get myself to a place where I could be this busy and aside from occasionally feeling like the company on the bandstand is mighty fast, I have no complaints. I've got some marking to do, an exam to invigilate, and a couple of makeup lessons. Then I intend to take at least one...maybe two days off, before starting preproduction on a CD I'm making with bassist Rob Kohler in June, then up to Vancouver to play a couple of gigs at their Jazzfest, then back to New Orleans to record a new record with the Professors of Pleasure. Then it'll be time for school to start again.

Fredrick Sanders Clinic and Performance.

2009-04-20T14:54:00.000-07:00

I'm personally looking forward to this one because, aside from a houseparty and a couple of nights at Sweet Lorraine's last year, I haven't really had any opportunities to play with Fred since he left his teaching post at Tulane. And I really, really miss playing with him.

There's a slight wrinkle in the schedule this time: the Sanders clinic will be at 4:00 Tuesday April 21st in the bandroom (260 Dixon Annex) at Tulane. The performance will be the following night: Wednesday April 22nd, at 8:00p.m. in the Rathskeller Bar in the Tulane Student Center. Both events are free and open to the public.

Stefon Harris Clinic and Performance.

2009-04-14T15:33:00.000-07:00

Just a quick reminder that our guest tomorrow night (April 15th) at the Jazz at the Rat series on the Tulane campus will be vibraphonist and percussionist Stefon Harris.Mr. Harris will also conduct a clinic in the Tulane Music Department band room in the Dixon Annex.

Clinic at 4:00p.m. Gig at 8:00p.m.

Both events are free and open to the public.

Harold Battiste.

2009-03-28T09:42:00.000-07:00

The "Jazz at the Rat" series, co-curated by the Lagniappe organization and the Tulane Jazz Performance Studies Department, continues to serve up opportunities for students to interact with major figures in the music. April 1st at 8:00p.m., Harorld Battiste will be appearing with various combinations of students and faculty at the Rathskellar Bar in the Lavin-Bernik Center for Student Life on the Tulane campus.

Mr. Battiste may not be well known to the general public, but his credentials in the music business go back more than fifty years. In the 1950s he was a member in good standing of the first wave of New Orleans 'modern' jazz icons Ellis Marsalis, Alvin Batiste, James Black, Alvin "Red" Tyler, Nat Perrilliat and many others. During his thirty year tenure in Los Angeles he worked as an arranger-composer (Sam Cooke's "You Send Me," Barbara George's "I Know") as well as arranging and producing for Lee Dorsey and Dr. John. He started (and continues to run) New Orleans first black-owned artist run record company AFO (All For One) recordings. For 15 years he was musical director of Sonny and Cher's television show, earning six gold records along the way.

Upon his return to New Orleans in 1989 he was instrumental, along with colleague Ellis Marsalis, in creating the University of New Orleans Jazz Education program as it currently exists under the stewardship of director Steve Masakowski.

His influence as a jazz educator continues with the release of "The Silverbook," his compendium of compositions by New Orleans modern jazz masters. In addition to being an invaluable source of compositions that have become New Orleans modern jazz standards with which every practising modernist in the city worth his salt must be familiar (James Black's "Dee Wee," "Monkey Puzzle" and "Magnolia Triangle," Nat Perrilliat's "Little Joy," and Battiste's own "Nevermore," Opus 43," and "Beautiful Old Ladies"), it is also a comprehensive method for the study of jazz performance practise. As Battiste writes in the forward :

"The Silverbook concept is based on a process which started around 1946 when the Jazz learning process for a group of young New Orleans boys conciously began. Of course there was no forethought that they were developing a 'learning process' but fortunately, by documenting their activities and keeping track of the music they studied, I have been able to see "the process" in retrospect."

Those "young New Orleans boys" included Alvin Batiste, Edward Blackwell, Ellis Marsalis and of course Battiste himself who, in what I've come to recognize as a typical set of New Orleans-style social coincidences, is not only friend and mentor to my colleague, jazz pianist Jesse McBride, but is also an old and dear friend of my neighbor Miss Vera, and thus has ceased to be a distant and intimidating figure in music history and instead has become "Harold," a very nice cat who lives just a few blocks around the corner from me.

April 1st, 8:00p.m., Rat Bar, Tulane campus.

Harold Battiste, New Date.

2009-03-16T13:44:00.001-07:00

We have a new date for the Harold Battiste/Jazz at the Rat concert. Mr. Battiste will be appearing at the Rat on April 1st at 8:00p.m., not March 18th as previously announced.

the Dean's Breakfast.

2009-03-12T18:21:00.001-07:00

One of those oddball gigs that show up on my calendar is this one, the Dean's Breakfast. It's a coffee and donut thing thrown the first friday of every month at Cudd Hall on the Tulane campus by the Lagniappe people, in this case the straw boss is Tom Moody, who snapped this picture of the trio. Left to right we're John Doheny, Rob Kohler (whose gig it is, so I guess we're the Rob Kohler trio) and yes that is indeed the Cadillac of Jazz Guitar, Steve Masakowski, on the right. We've had kind of a revolving cast of chord guys on the gig since it began last September, including Jesse Mcbride and Mike Pellera from NOCCA. Rob's brother Lee even drove in from Florida for a couple. It's looks like Steve's got the chair for the next few and we're very happy about that. People kept swimming up close and whispering "hey. That's Steve Masakowski!" and we'd say "aw, you know, we tried to get somebody good, but..."

Lagniappe is also underwriting the Jazz at the Rat series, a terrific opportunity for students at Tulane to listen to and in some cases play with some very heavy guest artists. Big up to the Lagniappe folks.

The really weird thing about the Dean's Breakfast gig is, the downbeat is at 9:45. In the morning. Amazingly, there are apparently two 9:45s in the same day. Who'd a thunk it?

Keep'n It Real.

2009-03-08T13:18:00.000-07:00

Today was the annual parade for the Keep'n It Real Social and Pleasure Club, a young club (established 2004) with a route that passes right through my neighborhood, down Orleans Avenue from Bayou St. John, left on North Broad. Where they go after that I couldn't tell you, I usually let them go around St. Bernard Avenue. No matter how much fun following a parade is, it's good to keep in mind you have to walk the same distance back.

This year, as last, the band was the Hot 8, a 'new school' brass band specializing in funk oriented repertoire like "Miss My Homies," "Jisten To Me," and "You Can Run But You Can't Hide From The Truth." But this year, like last year, when the band approached the intersection of North Broad and Dumaine, they suddenly stopped and struck up the old spritual, "That Old Rugged Cross." This is the intersection where, a little over two years ago, Hot 8 snare drummer and Rabouin High School band director Dinerral "Dick" Shavers was shot dead in a stupid and tragic bit of violence.

I've often spoken of how much I love New Orleans and my life here, but there are times, and this is one of them, when the place will cause your poor heart to break. The deep and powerful humanity of the place contains this tragic element as part of it's fabric; you can't have one without the other and if you try, like many tourists and part-time residents, to just take the good without the bad, you are both setting yourself up for disillusionment and denying yourself the full experience of life here. If you really love New Orleans, you must love, understand and accept all of it.

On my good days, I feel like I've got this down. On bad ones, all I want to do is cry. But then, after a while, the band (as did the Hot 8 on this day) strikes up "Over In The Glory Land," and blasts it out all the way to Esplanade Avenue, and we all reaffirm to ourselves that life is fleeting, we're only here for a short while, so we might as well cut some decent steps on our way to the boneyard.

Profs of Pleasure at the Rat...

2009-03-02T13:43:00.001-08:00

...or, more properly, the Rathskellar Bar in the Lavin-Bernick Center For University Life, but that's kind of a mouthful.

A little backstory on the Profs. When we all came back after Katrina, a number of applied music instructors (basically, the folks who teach private lessons) elected, for various reasons, to not return to the city, or not return to Tulane to teach. The chair of the department at the time, Barbara Jazwinski, asked if I could recommend replacements. While it would seem that this ran the risk of opening the door for rampant cronyism on my part (and to a certain extent it did; hey, you tend to hire people you've worked with in other contexts) it was also a wonderful opportunity to bring fresh ideas and attitudes into the department. The freshest of these turned out to pianist Frederick Sanders who, in his year here, was instrumental in cementing the idea that Tulane could and would have a jazz performance studies department that took a back seat to no one. Through long brainstorming sessions Fred and I developed the concepts that guide the department today; that jazz is a hands-on skill that should be taught by players active in the jazz-performance community, and that this connectivity in turn could and would be a means to stream the most gifted and hardworking of our students into the professional world. That's the way it happened for all of us (although admittedly, in most cases, in a non-academic environment) and we saw this as a way to pay the gift of our mentorship under master player-teachers forward.

Alas, Fred's family commitments dictated his stepping down after just one year, but his replacement, Jesse McBride, turned out to be first rate. Fredrick recommended two people to replace him, and by coincidence I'd just seen Jesse play a few weeks before at Snug Harbor, with Wess "Warmdaddy" Anderson. Shortly after that, I played a casual with him at Commanders Palace and we wound up talking about jazz, and jazz education, for over an hour after the gig was finished. The great thing about Jesse is that he just lives to "pass it on," and he doesn't really care how. It could be in an academic context like Tulane (or Dillard, where he also teaches), in the informal areas of the jam session or the after-hours hang, or in one of the two versions of the Next Generation (the ever-evolving institution comprised of up and coming students, a tradition started by the great Harold Battiste at UNO and taken over by Jesse upon Harold's retirement) that he currently has performing Tuesdays and Thursdays at Snug Harbor and Donna's Bar and Grill respectively. By any means necessary, Jesse is going to hand off the baton.

But I digress. At some point in late 2006 it occured to me that since we had all these great players working on campus it would be kicks to form a band, so we did. We played a few little gigs around campus, opened for Irvin Mayfield at Macallister Auditoreum, recorded a CD, and eventually, took it on the road up to Vancouver, Canada, to play the jazz festival up there in June of last year. The band we'll be taking into the Rat this wednesday March 4th will consist of Jesse Mcbride on piano, longtime Tulane bass instructor Jim Markway on electric and acoustic bass, new drum instructor Geoff Clapp, my office mate and partner-in-crime in the jazz studies department John Dobry on guitar, and yours truly on tenor saxophone.

8:00p.m. March 4th

The Rathskellar Bar in the Lavin-Bernick Center on the Tulane campus.

Admission is free.

Because It's Carnival Time.

2009-02-20T12:32:00.000-08:00

The subject line referrence is to the Al "Carnival Time" Johnson hit of the same name, the destination sign on the Freret Street bus as I passed it on the way home from a parade yesterday, and the reason for my abscence from bloggerdom for the next week or so. It's just not possible to get much of anything done around here at the height of Carnival Season.

Incidentally, the pic is of the same Zulu poster that my tax preparer recently gifted Darlene and I with. Mr. Jimmy is a member in good standing of the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club and has offered to sponsor me as a member. A pretty attractive proposition I'd say, especially considering that the President of the United States social secretary, Desiree Glapion-Rogers, is a former Zulu Queen. And for you history-dweeb types, yes that's the same Glapions as the late, great, widow Glapion, otherwise known as Voodoo Queen Marie Laveau.

Y'all Be Ready, Y'all Be Right.

2009-02-18T07:22:00.000-08:00

Tonight is the second in our series of workshops featuring guest jazz artists at the Rat, otherwise known as the Rathskeller Bar in the Lavin-Bernick Center for Student Life on the Tulane campus. Tonight's guest is drummer Adonis Rose.

Jesse Mcbride is curating this series, and he's been running it like a kind of student/faculty jam session with guest artist. The last event featured trumpeter Clyde Kerr Jr. with several student groups playing a mix of standards and Clyde's own compositions. It was a freewheeling affair, and the only ground rules were "know the music (no charts on the stand)" and "be ready."

The last set consisted of Clyde on trumpet, me on tenor, faculty members Jesse Mcbride on piano and Geoff Clapp on drums, and a student bass player who shall remain anonymous. We didn't play anything particularly hard, but during a medium up version of "Blue n Boogie" I could tell Mr. Bass was having a bit of trouble finding the pocket. Geoff Clapp can be a little rambunctious at times, but really, he was just swinging hard and shouting encouragement. New Orleans musicians like to exhort and shout on the stand, and you hear a lot of "uh huh" and "yeah you right!" At least you do if you're playing well. I like it.

Mr. Bass helped me drag some of the equipment back to the music building after the gig and allowed as to how he wasn't used to playing with drummers who were that agressive. " I'm used to guys who just play ting ting ting ta-ting," he said.

I countered with a few tales of my own public bandstand-humiliations, many of them much worse and some of them quite recent. Cause that's just the way it is in jazz; every once in a while you get your ass handed to you, and at my time of life it's increasingly getting handed to me by people half my age or younger. But what are you gonna do? The only proper response is to head back to the shed.

I told Mr. Bass, "Just wait till you see what Adonis has up his sleeve. Y'all better come correct."

Clinics (with Nicholas Payton) and Concerts.

2009-01-27T13:09:00.000-08:00

Big doings in the Tulane Music Department. A bunch of us 'jazz insurgents' have been scheming and plotting to bring more jazz to the department and the Tulane campus in general, and this year some of those efforts are paying off. Beginning Wednesday February 4th, our jazz piano instructor, Jesse McBride, will be curating a music series Wednesday nights at the Rat, the bar in the basement of the Student Union building on the Tulane University campus. The schedule is as follows:

February 4th: Clyde Kerr Jr.

February 18th: Adonis Rose

March 4th: John Doheny and the Professors of Pleasure

March 18th: Harold Battiste

April 15th: Stefon Harris

April 22nd: Fredrick Sanders

April 29th: Tim Warfield

Downbeat is at 8:00p.m. and admission is absolutely free. That's a helluva price to catch some very heavy cats. Trumpeter Clyde Kerr Jr. has been a mover and shaker on the scene in New Orleans since the 70s, both as a session player (just about everything that had brass on it in the 70s, from the Meters to the Nevilles to Allan Toussaint, Clyde played on) and as a straight-ahead jazz player (I'm particularly fond of his work on Alvin "Red" Tyler's Rounder release from the early 90s, "Heritage"). As an educator he's taught some of the cream of the crop of contemporary New Orleans trumpet players, most notably Nicholas Payton and Marlon Jordan.

Drummer Adonis Rose has recorded and performed with Wynton Marsalis, Dianne Reeves, Harry Connick Junior, Nicholas Payton, Gerald Levert, Chaka Kahn, and Public Enemy.

The Professors of Pleasure are Tulane University's flagship faculty band, and feature Jesse McBride, piano, Jim Markway bass, John Dobry guitar, Geoff Clapp drums and yours truly on tenor and alto saxophone.

Harold Battiste has worn many, many hats during his long and industrious career, from pianist, composer and saxophonist,to record label owner (AFO records, New Orleans first black-owned co-operative record label) record producer (Sam Cooke, Dr. John, Sonny and Cher) musical director (Sonny and Cher again, in both their touring band and their long running hit television show) and jazz educator (University of New Orleans). He has also been mentor and "life coach" to many, many young New Orleans musicians (including our own Jesse McBride) and has recently assembled and published a treasure trove of New Orleans modern jazz compositions by masters such as Ellis Marsalis, James Black, Nat Perrilliat, Alvin Batiste and Melvin Lastie under the rubric "The Silverbook."

Vibraphonist Stefon Harris has recorded with Wynton Marsalis, Cassandra Wilson, Charlie Hunter, Joe Henderson, Steve Coleman, Joshua Redman, Kurt Elling, Greg Osby and many, many others, as well as releasing six albums under his own name. His latest on the Blue Note label, "African Tarantella," features Steve Turre, Derrick Hodge and Terreon Gully.

Pianist Fredrick Sanders is originally from Dallas, and has played with Roy Hargrove, Dr. John, the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra and the Dirty Dozen Brass Band. He has released two CDs as leader ("East of Vilbig" and "Soul Trinity") and played on the Professors of Pleasure's first release, earning him the title "Professor of Pleasure Emeritus."

Saxophonist Tim Warfield is a veteran of the Nicholas Payton and Marlon Jordon bands, and was featured on the 1991 Island/Antilles release "Tough Young Tenors." Warfield’s first recording, "A Cool Blue," was selected as one of the top ten recordings of the year in a 1995 New York Times critic’s poll, as was his 1998 recording Gentle Warrior (featuring Cyrus Chestnut, Tarus Mateen, Clarence Penn, Terell Stafford, and Nicholas Payton), proclaiming him possibly the most powerful tenor saxophonist of his generation. In 1999, he was awarded “Talent Deserving Wider Recognition” in DownBeat Magazine’s 49th Annual Jazz Critic’s poll

And...

On February 4th and 5th, from 3:30 to 5:00p.m., the Tulane Jazz Performance Studies department will present Nicholas Payton conducting clinics. The clinics are absolutely free and are open to the general public, and will be held in the music dept. bandroom on the Tulane campus, which is room 260 in the Dixon Annex. If you are a young jazz musician in the New Orleans area you cannot afford to miss these events. There's just no rationale for it, unless you've got a gig or something.

Be there, or be square.

Walk In Jerusalem, Just Like John.

2009-01-11T15:35:00.000-08:00

Every conversation I have about Obama's upcoming inaguration always seems, at least among musicians, to end with something like, "and you know the music's gonna be killin." That is doubtless true, and won't it be wonderful to be spared the deathless prose of say, Hank Williams Junior ( "John N Sarah tell ya just what they think. And they’re not gonna blink. And they’re gonna fix this country. Cause they’re just like you n’ ole Hank.") in favor of Aretha Franklin and Stevie Wonder. But I can't help but cringe at the prospect of "America's Pastor," the odious, crypto-nazi Rick Warren, reading a prayer at the ceremonies.

It's all in the name of 'bipartisanism' I guess, 'reaching across the aisle' and 'listening' to everybody's point of view. Except a lot of people, myself included, think that when your point of view includes equating homosexuality with pathology and child abuse and abortion with genocide, you should be relegated to expressing those opinions from atop a soap box in a public park, not at the inauguration of the first African American president of the United States.

I can't help think what a grand gesture it would be, had not some mutant shot him dead down in the 9th ward a little over ten years ago, if New Orleans gospel genius Raymond Myles could deliver a speech, and maybe favor us with a tune. Something like the version of "Walk In Jerusalem" that he used to set the walls on fire with at places like the Franklin Avenue Baptist Church, with his group the Raymond Anthony Myles Singers (the RAMS) dressed in his regal finery, the kind of threads that made Little Richard look like a small-town Episcopalian minister. Raymond who was so flamboyantly, unabashedly gay and yet he plied his trade in the supposedly 'socially conservative' precincts of the African-American church community, Raymond who was a Christian to the core and yet was so open and accepting of all his fellow souls on the road to enlightenment (unlike certain Jesus jumper honky lardbags who shall go unnamed) and who subscribed to that phrase I have personally heard often in the smallest and humblest of storefront churches in Black America, "you come in your own way, brother."

Come in your own way. Imagine that. Not "do it my way or suffer eternal damnation." Not (as in the smiley-faced, Ned-Flanderish fascism of the Rick Warrens of this world, oops I guess that just slipped out) "don't you dare love the wrong people or use your genitalia in a non-Rick-Warren-approved way (oops. did it again) or you're going to Aitch Eee double-hockey-sticks."

I'll be tuning in to the inauguration on the TeeVee, and I'll be 'kvelling' (as our Jewish brothers and sisters say) over the new president like everybody else, but when a certain boorish, pasty-faced motorscooter comes on (and you know who I mean) I'll be hitting the mute button. And I'll be putting on Mr. Raymond's CD "Heaven is the Place" http://www.louisianamusicfactory.com/showoneprod.asp?ProductID=550
and when the Maestro says "I wanna dance !" that is just what I'm going to do.

Ya heard me?!

The 12 Yats of Christmas.

2008-12-19T21:34:00.000-08:00

I'm currently freezing my butt off in northern climes, but I'll be back home in New Orleans on December 22nd, just in time for Christmas. Here's a link to a seasonal favorite.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7rUoX5_VGI&feature=related

There's an awful lot of New Orleanians who can't get home for Christmas, and my heart goes out to them. As Benny Grunch himself is wont to say this time of year, this goes out to all displaced New Orleans people, everywhere. Merry Christmas, from ya mom 'n' nem.

Yeah You Rite!

2008-12-08T11:58:00.000-08:00

A variety of New Orleans dialects.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpFDNTo4DNg

Colleen Savage in New Orleans.

2008-12-06T14:50:00.000-08:00

When I was in the middle of recording my first CD as a leader, back in 2001, I was simultaneously working a two week gig with singer Colleen Savage in the lounge at the Pan Pacific Hotel in Vancouver. There are times onstage that are special, and there are times on stage that are utterly banal. And then there are times when you are playing music and look into another performers face, and you are both engulfed in a kind of luminosity. We had some nights like that at the Pan Pacific, Colleen and I, and we also realized that we had first met 25 years ago that month. Having her come to the studio and contribute two tunes ("Djindi" and "Time After Time") seemed like a good way to commemorate the occasion.

Fast-forward seven years. Colleen and I have now been friends for 32 years, and she was here in New Orleans last Tuesday to put in a stellar performance with my 'A' student band at Tulane's Dixon Theater.

Life is good.

Obama.

2008-11-16T14:27:00.000-08:00

Well, that's a relief. There were a few points there where it actually looked like McCrankypants and Alaska's answer to Eva Perron were going to be moving into the Whitehouse. Instead it looks like Smart is back in style in American politics.

Despite the ongoing Katrina diaspora New Orleans remains a majority-black (and majority democrat) city. Even white voters in Orleans Parish voted in a clear majority for Obama, which makes me feel a whole lot better about living here. Outside of our little blue bubble here though, white folks in Louisiana went McCain/Palin by a margin of about nine to one.

For African-Americans in New Orleans it would be hard to overstate the joy and enthusiasm that greeted the Obama victory. I have a couple of Obama t-shirts that I wear occasionally, and my reception in places like, say, the Tulane Health Clinic (where virtually the entire nursing staff is black) has been pretty warm lately. Not that black folks in New Orleans are ever anything less than friendly and welcoming (to me, anyway) but we're talking hugs and kisses from total strangers here. When Darlene and I ducked into the Brooks Brothers store in Canal Place the other day, the saleslady just about squeezed the life out of me.

For some reason I wound up doing a spate of convention gigs right around election time, many with African-American musicians, and while the mood was upbeat and joyous, there was also an aspect of letting ourselves truly feel, for the first time in eight years, how angry we are with the Bush administration and what they've done to this country. The general consensus seems to be that Some Motherfuckers need to be in jail. None of this "move on and let the nation heal" crap like after Watergate. Republicans like to talk about "accountability" and "rule of law." It'd be nice to see some of that applied to them.

As usual in America, race is the Elephant in the Room that nobody wants to talk about (well, nobody white anyway). But in todays Times-Picayune, there's a very interesting and germain article by Alex Mikulich, who's Research Fellow on Race and Poverty at Loyola and author of "Interrupting White Privilege: Catholic Theologians Break the Silence."

White people reap disproportionate benefits while people of color bear disproportionate burdens in every sphere of life, including wealth, health, education, criminal justice and employment.

In her study of hiring in several cities, the sociologist Devah Pager reveals that white applicants with a criminal record were just as likely to receive a callback as a black applicant without any criminal history. Despite the fact that white applicants revealed evidence of a felony drug conviction, employers seemed to view this applicant as no more risky than a young black man with no criminal record. The stereotype of black people as criminals persists in the conciousness of white Americans, irrespective of white citizens' self-stated lack of prejudice.

It's the old "I'm not racist, but..." routine.

On the political level this plays out in the numerous instances of IOKIYAR syndrome (It's OK If You're A Republican). Barack Obama's marginal associations with William Ayers and Rev. Wright are big news, but John Mccain's much closer association with domestic terrorist and convicted felon G. Gordon Liddy, and Sarah Palin's husband's membership in the radical-seperatist Alaska Independence Party appear to be viewed quite differently by white republicans. Ms. Palin's gaudy family history is another example. If the Obama's had had a pregnant-out-of-wedlock teenaged daughter about to get married to a mouthy thug in warmup duds and chin whiskers, don't you think we'd be hearing an awful lot about 'dysfunctional black families' right about now?

The next four years are going to be a bumpy ride, one that will make the Clinton era look like high tea at Claridges. There is a substantial constituency of white people in this country who are absolutely infuriated by the thought of a black man in the Whitehouse.

But, on the bright side, I'm no longer embarrassed to be an American. And the music at the Inaugural Ball is going to be killin'.

Young Men Olympian Parade Pics.

2008-10-25T08:37:00.000-07:00

As promised, here's the pics from the YMO 124th anniversary parade a couple of weeks ago. Normally my wife Darlene supplies me with photos of these events, but when we arrived we discovered she only had three shots left on the roll, so author and musicologist Ned Sublette kindly e-mailed me a batch of his.

I Love This Town.

2008-10-04T08:30:00.000-07:00

I walked out of a rehearsal last night at Tulane (with my "A" student combo) into a free concert by the Funky Meters.

The Funky Meters ain't the real Meters. Like the Beatles (John, Paul George and Ringo) if it ain't Art, Zig, George and Leo, it ain't the Meters. But the Funky Meters do have two original members (organist Art Neville and bassist George Porter Jr.) a drummer with a much different but nontheless deeply valid take on the funk canon than Zig ( Russell Batiste) and a revolving cast of guitar players (the chair is currently filled by Art's son Ian, who also plays with Aaron Neville's son Ivan in Dumpstafunk).

I walked out of the music building and Art was singing "Fiyo on the Bayou."

I love this town.

Coming soon: pics from last Sunday's Young Men Olympia Social and Pleasure Club 124th Anniversary Parade, as soon as I get them back from the drug store.

The Spanish Tinge Redux

2008-09-20T13:13:00.000-07:00

I've held forth here previously about the Latin American influences in New Orleans culture. Jelly Roll Morton's assertion that without "tinges of Spanish" in the music, one will never achieve "the right seasoning, I call it, for jazz" is one that has been unpacked by a scholar or two (most adroitly, in my opinion, by Lawrence Gushee). To musicians, these influences are readily apparent. If one interprets Morton's use of the term "Spanish" to mean "Afro-Cuban" (and again Gushee and others, myself among them, argue strongly that this is the case) then New Orleans music, from early jazz to R&B to Funk to Hip Hop, is littered with the phraseology and rhythmic organizing principles associated with 'Latin' music. Some of the most spirited between-sets discussions I've had with other musicians on gigs have been about the similarities between 'second line' grooves and Afro-Cuban clave figures. Drummers in particular like to hold forth on this subject; I remember a particularly spirited discussion with Julian Garcia in front of Sweet Lorraine's club, where the leader had to practically drag us back inside for the second set.

This stuff gets short shrift in the tourist brochures, where it's all about the French. The French Quarter, the French influence on cuisine and dance, the rapidly disappearing French speaking population (even though that population is 'rapidly disappearing' from rural Acadia; French as a spoken language has been gone from the city of New Orleans since the beginning of the 20th century, and in any case the two populations are quite dissimilar. Rural 'Cajun' French is a product of Acadiana. Urban New Orleans French came from France and St. Domingue). But the Spanish period of New Orleans' history (roughly 1762 to the Louisiana Purchase of 1803) is of tremendous importance culturally.

I bring this up because I'm in the process of teaching (in a TIDES course at Tulane) a new book by Ned Sublette called "The World That Made New Orleans." Sublette, a writer of great depth who nonetheless manages to have broad popular appeal, draws some rather nifty connections between the complex layering of cultures that made the city, then and now, such a unique place. His central thesis is that these layerings were all in place by the time the Americans took the helm. He's quick to point out the seminal role the Spanish Period played in the musical development of the city:

Brief though it was, the Spanish period in New Orleans was crucial to the creation of Afro-Louisianan culture, and constitutes a singular moment in African American history. During the years when the Spanish governor of Louisiana reported to the Spanish captain general of Cuba, the rules in New Orleans regarding slaves were much like those in Havana. There was a large population of free people of color. Slaves were treated badly, but enslaved people had some liberties-most important, they had the right to purchase their freedom. That was more than black New Orleanians had before, and more than enslaved people in the United States would have.

In Cuba, where such a regime lasted through the entire experience of slavery, there is every indication that this greater degree of freedom within slavery was good for music. The big city of Havana...took music in from all over, including Louisiana, but radiated it out even more powefully. As New Orleans grew, it would do the same, inhaling and exhaling music, up through the days of jazz, rhythm and blues, rock and roll, and the town's latter day lingua franca, funk.

The phrase 'melting pot' is not really appropriate for this process, as it implies a sameness of result. Amalgam works a bit better; I personally like 'layering' of culture. Louisiana had basically three colonial eras in quick succession; French, Spanish, and Anglo-American, and each of these eras had it's own slave regime, with new laws and customs, allowing black New Orleans to develop in a different way with each successive political paradigm. In addition, all three regimes were in the habit of importing slaves directly from certain specific regions of Africa. These "fresh off the boat" Africans arrived in successive waves, Bambara, Bakongo etc. and created their own cosmopolitan layering effect within the larger Creolized culture of the city. The result of these processes is immediately apparent in the city today. It is utterly unlike anywhere else in the United States. My favorite descriptive of the city (I've forgotten where I first heard this) is that it is "a cross between Port Au Prince, Haiti and Patterson, New Jersey."

Sublette, again:

On sabath evening," wrote a visitor to New Orleans in 1819, " the African slaves meet on the green, by the swamp, and rock the city with their Congo dances."

Most of the United States was quiet on Sunday. In many parts of the rural, mostly Protestant nation, dancing was frowned on. But the mostly French-speaking, mostly Catholic, black-majority port city of New Orleans, proudly unassimilated into the English-speaking country that had annexed it, was rocking.

Jump forward 128 years to Roy Brown's "Good Rockin' Tonight." If I had to name the first rock and roll record, I would first say that there is no such thing, then I would pick "Good Rockin' Tonight." It was recorded at Cosimo Matassa's rudimentary studio on the edge of New Orlean's French Quarter: a microphone and a disc cutter, in the back room of a record store at Rampart and Dumaine.

Cosimo's place was catty-cornered from the legendary "green by the swamp," known in the old days as 'Place Congo,' or Congo Square.

The distance between rocking the city in 1819 and "Good Rockin' Tonight" in 1947 was about a block.

Preach it, brother.

The Nanny State.

2008-09-05T12:22:00.000-07:00

One of the most consistantly irritating tropes pointed our way post-Katrina has been the notion that the botched response to the Federal Flood was not an example of abysmally bad governance, but a symptom of the "culture of entitlement." In this paradigm (which seems to exist, as far as I can tell, only in the fever swamps of the neo-conservative mind) a large "underclass" of welfare recipients, accustomed through the generations to a life of leisure on the dole and deprived by the "nanny state" of the will towards self-sufficiency, simply sat on their behinds before and after Katrina and waited for "the government" to do everything, down to and including wipe their asses.

Now, there's a few things about this scenario that don't make sense, starting with the fact that "welfare," as we knew it in the past, simply no longer exists in this country since the welfare reforms of the Clinton administration in the 90s. It's very difficult to qualify to receive assistance and almost impossible to stay on it for more than two years, even if you have small children. So the idea that, say, public housing is somehow a repository of welfare bums lying around suckling at the public teat doesn't really fly. Most people in the projects, at least as they existed pre-Katrina, worked various types of minimum wage (and in the case of some service industry positions, sub-minimum wage) jobs. Viewed this way, public housing could been seen as a taxpayer subsidized labor pool for certain types of industry, mostly service and tourist oriented. It certainly goes a long way towards explaining the post-Katrina labor shortage in those areas, since 'the projects' have yet to re-open.

But on a purely anectdotal level, I got a nice little lesson in how this stuff works today as I rode my bike over to Tulane to check on my office for the first time since Gustav. Passing through the areas off Orleans Avenue in Mid-City, people were hard at work clearing brush and dealing with downed trees. In fact, when Darlene and I got back late yesterday afternoon to our pad on St. Philip, our neighbors who stayed had almost completely cleared the street and storm drains of debris. As I pedaled past Palmyra and Jeff Davis, I saw some local guys had jerry-rigged a winch with a rope and a Buick sedan, and were hauling a downed tree out of the road.

Further on towards Tulane, I saw the only really substantial damage on my route. A bar called Leroy's Place, at the corner of Audubon Court and Olive street, had suffered a total collapse of it's streetside wall, filling the road with brightly painted aquamarine blue bricks. But the place had never re-opened after Katrina and had been listing pretty badly of late. I wasn't too surprised to see it topple.

As I got closer to the university, the neighborhoods became more affluent and there was more crap on the street. Trees, brush, a couple of downed power lines. I saw a soccer mom type in a huge SUV drive into a street blocked by a downed tree and just stop, as if confused. After about three minutes, she backed out of the block and drove away.

Compared to the ghetto neighborhoods the streets were quite empty. It finally occurred to me (after I realized these more affluent neighborhoods had power) that everyone was inside enjoying the air-conditioning.

And waiting for someone else, 'the government,' or maybe just the hired minions the wealthy pay to do these things, to come and clean up the mess for them.

Doheny's Magic 8 Ball.

2008-09-01T08:00:00.000-07:00

Before Katrina even hit I had a major revelation of it's long term consequences, a sort of historiological version of having your life flash before your eyes at the moment of death. I was stuck in traffic on my way to Baton Rouge for 14 hours (normally a 2 hour drive). The car was getting buffeted by the outer wind and rain bands from the storm, my average speed was around five miles an hour (considerably slower than Katrina) and I didn't stop for anything, not even a piss call. I had a bottle of water and a big bag of carrots I'd snagged from the fridge before I left, and I drove and ate carrots and listened to the doomsday prognosticators on the radio and cried. And as I did that, the post-Katrina landscape unrolled before my eyes; first the outpouring of sympathy and charity for the victims (nothing pumps up Americans sense of themselves as a righteous people more than a little "faith based" charity) but, very quickly, the ugly face of a curious phenomenen in America, a vicious hatred of the poor. The political spin would start almost immediately (as indeed it did) and blaming the victims would be the order of the day (as indeed it was).

I was planning on riding this one out, mostly because I didn't trust our 17 year old car to make it through another evac. But she came through with flying colors and we're now camped out in Vicksburg Mississippi for the duration. We are of course glued to the TV coverage of the event, which ranges from comprehensive and well researched (mostly local) to awesomely stupid (CNN). Just minutes ago I barely restrained myself from kicking in the tv screen after watching screaming diva Anderson Cooper cut away from an Army Corps of Engineers representative commenting on a major breaking story (what looks like overtopping of the floodwalls on the Industrial Canal, which seperates the upper and lower 9th Wards) to a tight shot of his little gamine head blabbering away about nothing in the French Quarter. The man really is an embarrassment.

In the days leading up to this there's been a lot of speculation about how this is going to play out politically. The general consensus seemed to be that the storm's confluence with the opening day of the Republican National Convention would reflect badly on the GOP. Some people who really should know better said some stupid and hurtful things (yes, I'm talking to you Mr. Michael "this storm shows there is a god" Moore). What I'm seeing here on the teevee seems to be spinning exactly the other way, with John McSame acting as pro-tem president ("behold my awesome leadership capabilities!") and Bush in the unlikely role of paper pushing bureaucrat back in Texas at the hurricane center. The fact that he's now too "busy" to show up in Minneapolis and stink up the place with the rotting corpse of his credibility is the best gift the Republican party could possibly have hoped for. And of course the state of Louisiana conveniently has a new Republican governor (Bobby "the Exorcist" Jindal). I think, if things continue to go well, we may even see a slight rehabilitation of Mayor Ray Nagin's tattered rep, with emphasis on his Republican backround (Nagin switched parties for his mayoral bid, because New Orleans wouldn't vote Republican for dogcatcher).

The nailbiter now for New Orleans is the floodwall system. If there are major breeches and the city floods again, it's probably game over as far as rebuilding goes. In the days before the storm, as I drove around the city laying in supplies (gas for the generator, batteries for the radio, water, food, etc.) I kept thinking, "this storm really needs to go somewhere else." I've watched too many people work like mules at two or three jobs, investing their heart, soul and live savings in rebuilding their homes and businesses. To see it all blown or flooded away again would be heartbreaking.

We're keeping our fingers crossed on those levees. Since the Army Corps of Engineers (the same bunch that screwed up the old ones) have been charged with the task of strengthening and repairing them, we're obviously very concerned. But maybe, just maybe, they'll hold.

We'll know by tomorrow for sure.

Not Good.

2008-08-30T16:12:00.000-07:00

That's a cat 5 you're looking at there before landfall, though they're saying it'll go down to a cat 4.

This is looking very grim.

Stay or Go.

2008-08-28T18:41:00.000-07:00

As of twelve noon tomorrow, Tulane university will be closed, as will it's dormitories. Those students unable to leave town on their own will be bused to Jackson Mississippi on Saturday. I've heard, from two sources (one of whom claims to be tight with someone high up in the Nagin administration) that tomorrow (friday) at noon the mayor's office will order a mandatory, city-wide hurricane evac.

My opinion (and it's one shared by many native New Orleanians) is that this is nuts. At this point Gustav has not even entered the gulf and is technically still a Tropical Storm. The storm track and cone of probability (oh my gawd! We're in the cone!) show a possibility of landfall anywhere between Galveston Texas and Jacksonville Florida, and the little red hurricane symbols notwithstanding (the ones that always make it look like the damn thing is headed right down the mouth of the Mississippi) the statistical probability of Gustav making landfall at New Orleans is no greater than that of it making landfall anywhere else on those 700-plus miles of coastline.

Still, you never know, right? Better safe than sorry. And since the storm is currently travelling at a breakneck speed of 7m.p.h. (reminiscent of that scene in "A Fish Called Wanda" where Michael Palin is attempting to kill Kevin Kline with a painfully slow-moving steamroller) it really does beg the question, so often posed by right wing pundits after Katrina, "how can you be too stupid to get out of the way of a hurricane?" Because, in neoconservative-land, everything is simple. Up, down. Right, left. Black, white...especially black, white. Here in the real world of course, things are messy and complicated. I'd like to offer up a couple of personal anecdotes to illustrate.

I have a co-worker whose father is dying of bone cancer. He's at home (here in the Land of the Uninsured a hospice is of course out of the question, unless you're lucky enough to be John McCain and get free healthcare) and is actually more or less able to take care of himself, with a little help from my co-worker and her husband. However, if the 'Cane hits and we lose power, he could go downhill pretty fast. On the other hand, a 22 hour stop-and-go drive in a hurricane evac could kill him. If they leave today, before the evac is called, they might miss most of that traffic from hell. But both she and her husband have work commitments that will keep them here through friday...at which point the evac will have produced the Traffic Jam From Hell.

Their solution? Wait. And pray. The truth of the matter is, no hurricane track prediction really means very much until the storm is about 18 hours out, which will likely be monday afternoon. Thirty six hours before landfall just east of New Orleans, Katrina was predicted to hit Florida.

Darlene and I are in a slightly different pickle. We have a standing offer of a place to stay from our friend Candace in Dallas (I bunked with Candace for a week after Katrina, and Darlene and I both stayed with her on the evac from no-show Ivan in '04). We also have an advisory from Mr. Donald, our mechanic, to avoid long trips in our on-its-last-legs 17 year old car. If we leave now, we could maybe avoid the traffic jam that turned a two-hour drive to Baton Rouge in '05 into a 14 hour stop-and-go nightmare. But, we both have work commitments that keep us here at least till friday night, and in Darlene's case possibly until saturday. When, you guessed it, traffic may very well kill our car. My friend and mentor, Tulane jazz history professor John Joyce Jr., who has lived in New Orleans nearly all of his 68 years and never left for any hurricane, including Katrina, says, "the worst place to be during a storm, worse than up to your chest in water in the 6th ward, is broke down by the side of the road."

So there it is. My feeling is in the end it'll be a big to-do over not much. But the story is much too juicy and literally writes itself; "Mayor Calls City-Wide Hurricane Evacuation on the Eve of Third Katrina Anniversary." You can practically hear the print reporters and cable-news gas-bags licking their chops. And gee, just think what a black eye it'll give the republicans if there's another Katrina on the first day of their convention.

You'll of course forgive us if we're less than anxious to take one for the team.

Swell.

2008-08-27T12:13:00.001-07:00

Ever get the feeling you've inadvertantly pissed off somebody higher up in the pecking order?

Why I'm here, continued...

2008-08-25T13:16:00.000-07:00

I've had several readers point out that I never did get to the point of my last screed, which is, essentially, why would someone with options choose to live in a place like post-Katrina New Orleans.

The short answer, that this place, even in it's damaged state, is like no other isn't quite enough. Contrarians always argue that every place on earth is unique unto itself, and this is of course true. Evanston Illinois, or Port Coquitlam British Columbia are both unique in their own way. They even have their own distinct cultures. Sterile, barren, mass-produced post-modern cultures, but culture nontheless.

I've spoken at some length previously about the pre-modern agrarian-cycle nature of New Orleans culture. It is also a participatory culture in that being a New Orleanian is something you do as well as an identity you carry. All the cornball, "What is New Orleans" litanies, red-beans and rice on Mondays, Creole Gumbo for lunch at L'il Dizzy's, shrimp po'boy (dressed) at the Parkway, Kermit Ruffins at Vaughn's Lounge on Thursdays, Rebirth at the Maple Leaf on Thursdays, St. Joseph's altars, three pennies at the crossroads for Papa Legba, Indians on Super Sunday...all present and accounted for. Food, music, ritual. Things both the native-born and the newcomer can participate in without hesitation or embarrassment, if one simply comes with a open heart. And while there is sometimes a touristy element to some of these things that tempts cynicism, if you've ever seen, say, a real neighborhood second-line (as opposed to the fake ones at jazzfest, or at rich people's weddings or corporate functions) or seen the Indians come out on Carnival Day, your deepest instincts will tell you you're in the presence of some serious, hardcore shit. The kind that doesn't come around too much anymore in our smart-ass, been-there-done-that 'ironic' world.

So really, bottom line (as the been-there-done-that smartasses like to say) am I coming out ahead by staying here? In the area of straight-up money, no. Even by the luke-warm standard of arts faculty salaries, I could probably do better in Dallas, or Los Angeles, or Chicago. New York City too, but the insane cost of living would more than cancel out any salary bump. And New Orleans, while it has plenty of places to play, is not immune from the kind of cliquey-ness that makes getting a gig a rough slide in other cities, and straight-ahead jazz is as tough a sell here as anywhere. The real action is in more commercial genres; funk, for the college kids, trad jazz for the tourists. And post-Katrina booking policies have gotten tight, with some rooms shutting down and some pushing play-for-the-door policies.

Then there's the crime, the weather, and the ever present possibility of getting flooded out again.

So, am I crazy? Maybe. But I'm inclined to think that my decision to make my life here has less to do with any big-picture laundry list of "quality of life" items than a profound appreciation of the moment, or more properly the continuing string of moments that are the actual stuff of life. Money is a fine thing, and I think we should all have scads of it, but as Redd Fox used to say, you ain't never going to see a Brink's truck following a hearse. And when the sum of any individual life is totalled, it's got squat to do with how many CDs you played on or who you gigged with. What counts is the connection you made with the people in your life.

There comes a time when you reach a certain age...you start thinking about death in a different way. Not the tragically romantic but nevertheless abstract way that young people do, but as a conceivable certainty. You develop a bone-deep understanding of the inevitability of that D.W. Rhodes funeral carriage, the one that, literally or figuratively, waits for us all. No exceptions will be made. No you can't cut some kind of deal. You, yourself, your physical person, will get stuck in a box and buried underground, or roasted in an oven. And who has "the most toys" does not mean shit.

We're all going to be dead someday. New Orleanians understand this better than any other people in America. The time we have on earth should be spent with each other in ways that matter.

Tonight We're Gonna Party Like It's August 29.

2008-08-13T09:34:00.000-07:00

Today's post is by our first ever "guest columnist," my good buddy Lou Maistros, who offers up what I think is en excellent plan to offset the crepescular gloom that sets in every year around this time since "the Thing" happened.

"So it’s August and the big anniversary is coming up. Me and the family usually head to Gulf Shores, Alabama to lie on the beach, count our blessings, and forget. We really don’t need a flashy annual reminder of what turned our lives upside down.

I understand the desire to commemorate what happened, and to pay tribute to the lives that were lost. But that’s really not us, y’know? This is the land of jazz funerals; where the usual drill is to look death in the eye, thumb our collective nose at it, and strike up the band. All this commemoration stuff is a just a flat-out bummer, and it’s out of character.

This year, let’s do what we do. Turn the beat around. Take a sad song and make it better. Transform the blues into a turbo-charged, sugar-frosted luv-mo-sheen. Let’s take the anniversary of the worst thing that’s ever happened to this city and make it a day that promotes change for the better and celebrates the power of redemption over catastrophe. Let’s be a city of wise-aching smart alecks. Yes, this is what we do.

I have a proposal for my fellow New Orleanians.

This year, on August 29, instead of mulling over our misfortunes, let’s take a cue from the president. Let’s follow his lead – with an act of solidarity and tolerance that will push the boundaries of human comprehension.

This August 29, let’s shuffle off the collective gloom by having a citywide party that celebrates the birthday of John McCain.

Huh?

Pop quiz: Where was President Bush when the big storm hit, on August 29, 2005?

He was in Arizona having a piece of birthday cake with his buddy, John McCain.

The president didn’t get caught with his pants down, the storm did not take him by surprise. Everyone saw it coming, knew exactly when it would make landfall. The president’s master plan for zero hour was, apparently: Gotta get me summa that cake!

I’m not sure if I blame the president. Think about it. John McCain, in effect, lured a mentally-disabled manchild to Arizona with the promise of a tasty hunk of birthday cake. How can we expect a feeble-minded person to resist such yummy temptation?

I’m not sure if I blame Senator McCain either. When you reach his age, you really have to celebrate each birthday as if it might be your last – bodies floating down the streets of a major American city be damned!

So this August 29, let’s follow the example of these two great Americans – one who is president, and the other who will be the next president if we’re not careful.

Let them eat cake. And let’s have some, too!

Start making plans. I want to see McCain birthday parties popping up all over the city this August 29. It will be a chance to turn a frown upside-down, and to provide the sort of high-minded, outrageous political mockery that New Orleanians have always been famous for.

Start blogging about your McCain Birthday Bash plans, set up websites, and spread the word!

Come as you were: life preservers and air-mattress-as-flotation-devices are optional but recommended! Don’t forget those pointy little paper birthday hats – and be sure to bring lots and lots of candles!

If our citywide McCain Birthday Bash makes the national news (as it should!), it will be an opportunity for us to remind the rest of the country (in a very important election year!) what Candidate McCain really thinks of American citizens who are staring down the darkest moment of their recorded history: Not much!

He didn’t let us ruin his party, so let’s not let him ruin ours!

If we play our cards right, we can: pass a good time, make a point about the common-decency-deficit in the Republican party, help get Senator Obama elected, let the world know we’ve still got a sense of humor, and wish an old man a happy birthday.

Everybody wins!

That’s right, New Orleanians, this August 29th we can save the human race with a good old-fashioned hunk of birthday cake. It’s not been done before, but there’s a first time for everything…"

Why am I here?

2008-07-23T12:06:00.000-07:00

Everyone in post-Katrina New Orleans asks themselves this question at least once a day. But when I moved here in the late summer of 2003, New Orleans wasn't the poster child for bad disaster management and lightning rod for racial animosity and resentment of the poor that it's become. It was a "colorful" destination city with some serious history, and a music town of some note. Off the beaten path, sure. Invisible to the more New-York-centric jazzerati, absolutely. But to most people interested in music and exotica, an undeniably Cool Place.

My original purpose in coming here was simply to get a masters degree at Tulane. Of course I had other ambitions on the backburner, a new start in a new city, a post secondary teaching gig of some kind, a chance to participate first hand in a vital, active vernacular culture. But I was into seriously minimized expectations at that point in my life, a kind of Mel Brooksian "hope for the best, expect the worst" mindset. I figured the absolute worst-case scenario was I'd go back to Vancouver (with a masters) and the school board would have to pay me an extra $75 a day to be a substitute band teacher. It never even ocurred to me that Tulane would hire me as Visiting Professor of Music, which they did, in June of 2005.

I was up in Vancouver at the time. My father had died a couple of months before, and there was family business to attend to. I also had a gig at the Vancouver Jazz Festival with my Canadian-based quintet. I arrived back in New Orleans in late August, just in time to get my faculty ID picture taken, attend a "new hire" orientation meeting, sign up for the health insurance plan and flee the city hours ahead of the worst engineering failure in the history of the United States.

My wife Darlene was in Canada on business at the time, and I initially drove to Fort Worth, Texas and stayed with our friend Candace for a week. It was there that I learned that the Army Corps of Engineers 'flood protection' system had failed, well below it's own design specifications. The city was flooding, and reports began to emerge of chaos inside the Superdome (the city's shelter of last resort), of multiple rapes and homicides, and of armed bands of looters firing on rescue helicopters. At the time, this sounded like hooey to me, an example of White America's longstanding fever-swamp fears of "armed negroes" storming the barricades, the product of a collective guilty concience. And indeed, the reports subsequently were discredited but not before rescue efforts by the Red Cross and others had been delayed for days because entering the city was "too dangerous."

(For the record, after both the Superdome and Convention Center were clear of evacuees, "officials sent in forensic teams, expecting to find as many as 200 corpses. Only 10 bodies were found at the Superdome. Of these, four were apparently brought in from the street outside, and six were believed to have died within (four of natural causes, one from a drug overdose and one from a fall from a balcony that was an apparent suicide). Of four deaths known to have occurred within the Convention Center, three were from natural causes, and one was an apparent homicide. The bodies of 20 people were found outside the center, but those deaths are not believed to have involved crimes." As for the sniper stories, "there were numerous confirmed incidents of gunfire on the streets of New Orleans after the hurricane, but seperate investigations by the Air Force, Coast Guard, Department of Homeland Security and Louisiana Air National Guard had been unable, as of the first week of October, to confirm a single case of airborne rescue teams taking fire from the ground." Source, Time Magazine, December 2005).

Anecdotally speaking, I know a number of people who were "Domed" and the consensus seems to be that, while the experience was no picnic, folks were surprisingly well behaved considering there was no fresh water, air-conditioning, food or working plumbing, they were being confined ankle deep in human waste by armed guards and were not, as were the recent California wildfire victims, being entertained by stilt-walkers, rock bands, and mimes. If you detect a certain peevishness in the previous comments it's because I, and most other New Orleanians, are good and fed up with the post-Katrina tendency in this country to compare every subsequent "natural disaster," no matter how unrelated in scale and kind, to Katrina, and to cynically use said disasters to score cheap political points.

But I digress. After leaving Fort Worth, I continued on to San Francisco where I met up with Darlene. It was there that we had the inevitable discussion about whether we would, if possible, return to the city. We both immediately agreed that we would return, at the soonest opportunity. I was a very angry man that fall, but Darlene, a much wiser soul than I, counselled that "it's better to go back and try to help than sit in exile and be pissed off."

We returned the first week of December, 2005.

Since then it's been quite a ride all over the emotional map. In those early days, most people in the city felt united by a sense of common purpose. Those who had come back, it was felt, were those who really and truly wanted to be here. Hard-core New Orleanians, and plenty more who couldn't get back yet but would as soon as they possibly could. The more optimistic and trusting among us (I was absolutely not one of them) took the president at his word, and anticipated that the full support and intent of the American people, through the instrument of their federal government, would be brought to bear in the service of restoring the city. After all, it was reasoned, the Army Corps of Engineers own report admits culpability. Those flood walls failed well below design specs. This is not our fault and surely the feds will step up to take responsibility.

Instead we have seen a level of political cynicism for which, to the best of my knowledge, there is no precedent in the history of this country. Blame the Victim has been the name of the game almost since day one. Narratives spun by the administration which were easily disprovable lies (the governor didn't call a state of emergency till three days later, money meant for levee maintainance was spent on casinos, and of course the aforementioned Black Savages Run Amok trope) are still, to this day, repeated without challenge on cable news shows.

That is, when the tragedy is discussed at all. Because here in Attention Deficit Nation, the news cycle has Moved On. The problems of Katrina, like most other problems in America, are complex and deeply rooted. They involve a lot of poor people, who in America are often swept under the carpet, because the problems of the poor tend to be difficult to address or get any traction with. They're a real bummer, a buzz killer. They mess up the ratings and depress people, and when people are depressed they don't feel like shopping and we can't have that. Better to lede with a story on giant stingrays off the coast of England, or some prurient stuff about teen sex. That always perks up the proles.

Meanwhile, in New Orleans, things creep along. The big building boom never materialized. The forest of construction cranes never appeared. The billions of dollars the president promised languish in a bank account somewhere collecting interest for the feds, a victim of the red tape they promised to cut. And it becomes increasingly clear to us that this is it. This is the way it's going to be, for the rest of our lives. Yet we stay, because we can't turn our backs. The place is just too real, too vividly present in both the now and the then. The past really does live here, and walk among us and influence our contemporary affairs. There a ghosts here, and spirits and Lwas and saints.

They say New Orleans is a dying city, but if we are allowed to slip away, through neglect, or outright malice, or whatever...it will be the rest of the country that's dead. Not us.

Profs of Pleasure on "Hot Air."

2008-07-18T09:42:00.000-07:00

After the gig up in Vancouver last June 23rd, guitarist John Dobry and I stayed over a couple of days to do a show on CBC Radio (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) called "Hot Air."

I've done quite a few of these on my own over the years, both as a out-of-town jazz guy coming in to play a festival or club date and as a Vancouver jazz musician when I still lived there. This year marked the first time I was able to bring my band up from New Orleans, and the first time I've shared a radio mic with Dobry.

The show airs tomorrow, July 19th at 5:05 p.m. Pacific time, at 690 on your A.M. dial. If you're not in the broadcast area you can listen online here:

http://www.cbc.ca/hotair/

Jesse Mcbride At The Piano.

2008-06-25T10:26:00.000-07:00

Left to right: Jesse Mcbride, piano, Jim Markway, bass, John Dobry, guitar, John Doheny, tenor saxophone.

Hidden: Kevin O'Day, drums.

My mentor and friend, the late, great tenor saxophonist Fraser MacPherson, once told me, "the audience has no idea what you went through to get there, nor do they care, nor should they care." True, dat.

In my earnest and fumbling efforts to stay within the budget I'd originally submitted to Tulane University's Deep South Humanities Center of the School of Liberal Arts (who were underwriting a portion of the trip) I'd decided to fly us into Seattle, rent a van, and drive to Vancouver. There was always the possibility of picking up a gig in Seattle (which turned out to be a wash) and it would save us almost $300 a man in airfare. Of course by the time we actually booked the tickets the price had doubled, wiping out any potential savings and adding needless complexity and travel time. To top it off, our drummer, Kevin O'Day, had been offered some last minute touring opportunities (the Bonnaroo Festival in Memphis with Anders Osbourn, and some scattered dates with bluesman John Mooney) and would not be travelling with us, instead he'd be flying to Seattle from Vicksburg, Mississippi.

Everybody on the band had gigs the night before (mine was with the Oakside Brass Band at Broussards) so we were all fried at the airport in New Orleans at the 5:30 a.m. boarding call. They routed us through Atlanta (go figure) then a five hour hop back across the country to Seattle, where the Alamo Rental Car computer promptly rejected my credit card. Our pianist, Jesse Mcbride, saved the day with his fat bank balance courtesy of two weeks teaching at Donald Harrison Jr.'s summer jazz camp. Apparently my bank needed at least two business days to process Tulane's expense check onto my card. Funny how they can debit stuff instantaneously, but take their sweet time with the credits.

From there it was onward and upward to Canadian Customs, where, as per usual, we were treated like errant 15 year old boys who'd been summoned to the principal's office, and into Vancouver and our rooms at the Listel on Robson. Total travel time: fifteen hours. I managed to drag myself downstairs to O'Doul's to catch a set of Alita Dupray and to say hello to bassist James Forrest and drummer Joe Poole. I really wanted to make Mike Allen's jam, but there was no way. I shuffled off to bed about eleven.

Up at seven to deal with a seemingly endless stream of minutae and screwups, some my own doing, some not. At one point I had a cel phone in one ear and the hotel land line in the other. Stress city. In another economy move my wife Darlene and I (who was travelling with us) were moving into vocalist Colleen Savage's apartment (she's out of town) and because the place has both a kitchen and a piano, and because in New Orleans beans and rice are a traditional monday/washday dish and music is good any day of the week, I'd planned to invite the guys over for a big feed and jam session before the gig. Jesse was going to cook, as he almost always has people over to his place in New Orleans for monday red beans. But Jesse was getting sick. Bad. Some kind of stomach bug. He spent the afternoon in bed trying to get himself together, and I got to put my head down for a couple of hours to try and forget all this stuff and get my head correct and focus on the music.

We get to the gig, and it's a great space, nice acoustics. Good sound. The sound guy was tenor man Graham Ord, so I knew I was in good hands. We had a good house, I'm told that's somewhat unusual in that venue on a monday. And despite being sick as a dog, Jesse played his ass off. I mean burnin, bro. There were at least three points where he played something and all four of us turned and looked at him and went "Whoah!" Yeah you rite! Everybody played great. Even the three tunes we had literally never played before (we learned them at the sound check) came off without a hitch. As is sometimes the case, the mistakes happened on tunes we've played a lot. A ballad grew a new coda to make up for a missed entrance, for instance, and the form on another tune got re-routed around a drum solo. But those aren't 'mistakes,' really. They're happy accidents that lead to new and interesting things, and a big part of why playing jazz is such an exciting and scary experience.

Life is long and strange. One minute you're in New Orleans, playing "Just a Little While to Stay Here" in a brass band. Then, in what seems like the blink of an eye, you're three thousand miles away in another country playing completely different music. But it's not different, really. It's all of a piece.

Keepin' It Real parade.

2008-06-10T12:11:00.000-07:00

This parade was mounted by a relatively new club, the Keepin It Real social and pleasure club. It ran through our neighborhood a couple of months ago, starting up at Orleans and Moss, running down Orleans Avenue, then taking a left onto North Broad at Orleans.

This guy is outside a great, old-school restaurant called the Crescent City Steak House, at the corner of Broad and St. Philip. Our house is about four blocks up St. Philip behind it.

NOLA Jazzfest 2008 Photos.

2008-06-08T13:13:00.000-07:00

Alan Matheson and I at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, spring 2008, with the Tulane University Jazz Orchestra. The stage manager had asked if we could do an extra ten minutes, so we called a Bb blues (Joe Newman's "Cue-in the Blues") with just the rhythm section.

Vocalist/pianist Rachel Brotman sings Alan's arrangement of Harold Arlen's "Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea."

Alan solos on the arrangement of "Indiana" that he originally wrote for Clark Terry.