A melancholy song from the broken cradle of jazz

Two years after Katrina, New Orleans music scene is a faint echo of its past

By Teresa Wiltz
THE WASHINGTON POST
Monday, August 27, 2007

NEW ORLEANS — In a crowded bar in the French Quarter, locals are passing a tip bucket while singer John Boutte whoops and hollers, crooning tales of regret and rage over the havoc wreaked by that witch Katrina. Adding his own spin to an old Randy Newman song, "Louisiana 1927":

President Bush flew over in a airplane...

President Bush said, "Great job, good job!

"What the levees have done to this poor Creole's land . ..."

Backstage, the Virgin Mary gazes down from her perch on the wall while the bar's managers count the proceeds ... $147. They count again ... $147. And then hand the loot to Boutte, the son of seven generations of musicmaking New Orleans Creoles.

"I'm rich," Boutte says sardonically.

Two years post-Katrina, it's like this for the city's musicians: New Orleans may be the music mecca, the birthplace of jazz. But it's no place to make money.

Nearly 4,000 New Orleans musicians were sent scattering after Hurricane Katrina hit on Aug. 29, 2005. Many of them have been trying to return ever since. Today, the soul of the city — its rich musical legacy — is at risk.

"Everything is shrinking," says David Freedman, general manager of WWOZ-FM, a public radio station in the city. "In the clubs, you get the impression that all's back to normal. When you start scratching the surface, it's smoke and mirrors.

"So many musicians have not come back. How many can we lose before we lose that dynamic? To what degree do we just become a tourist theme park?"

By industry insiders' estimates, a third of the city's musicians, like Boutte, have found a way back home for good. Another third, such as Lumar LeBlanc of the brass band Soul Rebels, are doing what he calls "the double ZIP code thing," parachuting into town for gigs and then heading back to temporary homes in Houston, Atlanta, Los Angeles. The final third have yet to make it back.

Among the double ZIP-coders is Ivan Neville, singer, songwriter, keyboardist, son of Aaron. His mom's house was washed away. She died in January. His dad settled near Nashville. Neville relocated to Austin, jetting in and out of New Orleans a couple times a month. As for making a permanent move back home?

"I don't see it," Neville, 48, says between sets at the Maple Leaf in the city's Uptown section. "Not in the near future. The spirit of New Orleans is alive. But it will never be the same again."

How do you measure loss? There are tangible ways, of course: Fifty public schools remain shuttered; enrollment is down 40 percent. With the loss of schools comes the loss of teaching jobs, work that musicians counted on to pay the rent between gigs. With the loss of students comes the loss of a future generation of musicians.

"Is New Orleans' music scene coming back?" asks Bill Summers, 59, a percussionist and voodoo priest who's played with Herbie Hancock, Quincy Jones, Sarah Vaughan, Madonna and Sting. "Yeah. And no. Baby ... it's very sad."

Life was always tough for New Orleans' musicmakers: Decent pay was scarce, with musicians, desperate to make a buck, scrambling for whatever they could get.

The waters rushing in from Lake Ponchartrain obliterated already fragile support systems. Neighborhood-based Social Aid & Pleasure Clubs, once the backbone of New Orleans society, helping their dues-paying members with burial and hospital expenses, have been displaced. Eighty percent of the city flooded; more than 200,000 homes were destroyed in the process. Rents have close to doubled since the storm.

The upside to calamity, if there is one, may be artistic.

"Post-Katrina, everybody is getting in touch with their New Orleans roots," says singer-songwriter Paul Sanchez, co-founder of the country-rock band Cowboy Mouth. "We all lost more than we can ever articulate. And as artists, it's our job to articulate that loss."

There are, of course, programs created to help musicians and to "preserve" the legacy of New Orleans. There's the Musicians' Village, where native sons Harry Connick Jr. and Branford and Ellis Marsalis partnered with Habitat for Humanity to build 70 single-family houses in the Upper Ninth Ward. There's Sweet Home New Orleans, a collective of 14 not-for-profit agencies serving New Orleans musicians. And there's a grandiose, but so far stalled, $716 million proposal that involves restoring the Hyatt Regency Hotel and building a massive National Jazz Center and park.

But the hardest thing to preserve is something that can't be purchased: the feel of the city, that NOLA mojo, the likes of which can be found in Bullets, a crowded little Mid-City joint. Inside, trumpeter Kermit Ruffins and his band, the Barbecue Swingers, are jammed against the window.

In spirit, Bullets is as far from the tourist-laden French Quarter as you can get. Here, it's buckets of Miller Lite and chicken wings served alongside Ruffins' gritty, greasy swinging "trad jazz" — traditional jazz. A man scratches away on a washboard as band members sing in Creole and English, catcalling and ululating. Everybody, it seems, knows the words, and they sing along, loud and strong.

Troy "Trombone Shorty" Andrews grew up in the same neighborhood as Ruffins. At 21, Andrews is one of the lucky ones. His career is taking off: For the rest of the year, he's touring the country with his band.

When Katrina hit, Andrews was on break from touring with Lenny Kravitz. He fled with his family to Dallas, 10 crammed in his Volvo.

He didn't stay away for long. New Orleans grounds him. Specifically, he's fed by Faubourg Treme, reputed to be America's oldest black neighborhood, which nurtured the the Rebirth Brass Band and Louis Prima. The neighborhood that nurtured Ruffins and Andrews. Here, high-water marks along the wooden shotgun houses and shuttered nightclubs give mute testimony to the flood. Few residents returned, but today, under a highway overpass, against a backdrop of murals of long-gone jazz greats, a group of men gathers as it does every day, sitting on metal folding chairs, trying to reclaim a little bit of community. Most of them don't live here any longer.

"These," Andrews says, pointing at the men as he pulls up alongside them in his oversize SUV, "are the last that's left."

He rolls down the window. "Hey, Dad. Do you need anything? You hungry?" His father, James, smiles at him, shakes his head.

"New Orleans made me who I am," Andrews says. "I can't leave it."