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Reflections of an Authentic Jazz Life in Pre-Katrina New Orleans
Michael G. White
| Like most New Orleanians who fled Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, I thought that the evacuation would be nothing more than a soon forgotten inconvenience. We would return home after a couple of "vacation days," and everything would quickly be back to normal. But as I drove out of town it was hard to shake the feeling that this might be the "big one," the storm that would fill the bowl and drown a special culture. Later, the surrealism of watching so much death, suffering, and destruction in my own hometown—unfolding live on television over several weeks—made clear that the vacation would not end any time soon. It was turning into a nightmare. After endless days of attempting to learn the fate of family and friends and trying to adjust to displacement, the scope of personal loss became clearer. An aerial map on the Internet indicated that my house—located on the twice-breached London Avenue Canal—had not only been flooded but was stewing in more than eight feet of contaminated water; it would continue doing so for nearly three weeks. I tried not to speculate on the fate of my home's contents until the first drive back home six weeks after Hurricane Katrina. |
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Walking into my still-standing house for the first time felt like a science fiction movie: everything was smashed, shattered, and scattered amid a mass of foul-smelling, sodden, and mildewed ruins. This was when the reality of loss hit home. Though I had never set out to be a collector of anything, over the years I had amassed an immense archive of jazz and related music, and of Louisiana, New Orleans, African, and African American history and culture. All of a sudden, here it lay before my eyes—completely destroyed. Somewhere among the piles of debris were over four thousand books, five thousand cd recordings, one thousand lp and 78 rpm records, hundreds of films and documentaries on video, varied musical equipment, scores and scores of complete jazz music transcriptions, dozens of unrecorded original compositions, and thousands of photographs and periodicals. There were rare and vintage musical instruments, including a piano, African and Latin percussion instruments, several saxophones, string instruments, and more than fifty clarinets. There was musical memorabilia: banjo and bass strings, clarinet and saxophone reeds, brass band labels, and other items that many older musicians had discarded at jobs. Families and friends of legendary musicians had given me sheet music from classic recordings, instruments, and rare, prized artifacts such as a classic white clarinet mouthpiece belonging to Sidney Bechet and a trumpet mouthpiece from Louis Armstrong's great early rival, Jabbo Smith. There were also dozens of interviews that I had conducted with several older musicians relating their experiences and stories of the early days of jazz. Many years of my research, like all of the sheet music, had disintegrated into mush from having soaked in the toxic flood water. Unearthing the clarinets was especially hard. Many of them had been made between the late 1890s and 1930s. There was no hope of salvaging any of them. They were warped, discolored, rusty, moldy, their bodies swollen. Some of them had begun singing their beautiful melodies during the ragtime era and the early days of jazz. They were a part of musical history forever silenced in the flood waters of Katrina. |
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My archive, library, and collection were more than a privately hoarded stash of cultural treasures. Many of the materials were regularly used in teaching, research, writing, consulting, and performing. The vast collection of materials rivaled or exceeded similar holdings of many local libraries and was often used in the production of documentaries, museum exhibits, displays, and special concerts. The contents of my home reflected a life's work. They were the basis of future books, new song ideas, instruments to be donated—the foundation, in short, on which to build new knowledge of jazz and local culture. Their loss—and the tragedy that had befallen New Orleans and her people—was like a death for me. Nothing could ever be the same again.
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