Of all the recent recordings from musicians born-and-raised in New Orleans–and there are several notable ones–the one I’ve focused on lately is Dr. Michael White’s Blue Crescent (Basin Street Records). It’s an important marker in one man’s spiritual and musical rebirth since Katrina. Here’s my Blu Notes column in this month’s Jazziz magazine on White:
Back to life
by Larry Blumenfeld
NEW ORLEANS IS TWO PLACES NOW: one, loudly welcoming
tourists back; the other, a silent stretch of barren homes. There’s danger and
dislocation around many corners, yet it’s hard to feel more secure and
connected than while dancing through the streets behind a brass band in a
Sunday second line. It’s still too soon to fully grasp the effect of the floods
that followed Hurricane Katrina. And we’ve only just begun to hear real echoes
of the experience as channeled through music.
Dr. Michael White’s Blue Crescent (Basin Street) offers
careful musical consideration of questions that are at once highly personal and
broadly aesthetic: What did all this mean? How do we move forward without
forsaking — but, rather, by nurturing — what we once held dear? The album is
“not intended to be another trendy ‘Katrina CD’ or an escape from and cover-up
of reality,” writes the clarinetist and Xavier University professor in his
liner notes.
White has spent the nearly three years since the floods in
his own pained state of transition, shuttling between Houston, where he’d
relocated, and New Orleans, where he’d kept a trailer near his office at
Xavier. (He’s since moved back into his childhood home in the Carrollton
section of town.) He lost nearly all the contents of his one-story home,
including thousands of books and recordings; transcriptions of music from Jelly
Roll Morton, King Oliver, Sidney Bechet, and other jazz pioneers; vintage
clarinets dating from the 1880s to the 1930s; and photographs and memorabilia,
including used banjo strings and reeds tossed off by early 20th-century musical
heroes.
Yet the challenge at the heart of this new CD — how to keep
an endangered music alive while staying true to the present moment — has long
occupied White. Even before Katrina, he sensed a gradual fading away of the
musical tradition of brass-band players clad in white shirts, ties, and
black-banded caps, playing everything from hymns and marches to blues and jazz,
always with swinging rhythms, complex group improvisation, and specific
three-trumpet harmonies.
“There was something about that sound,” White told me last
year when I visited his Xavier office, recalling the moment high-school band
director Edwin Hampton first played him a 1950s recording of the Olympia Brass
Band. He peered over the jagged pile of books and CDs atop his desk — including
the red notebook in which, during the weeks following the hurricane, he’d
jotted down the names and whereabouts of colleagues — and shared more early epiphanies:
the first funeral he played with trumpeter Doc Paulin’s Brass Band, and the
recording he picked up on a whim, by clarinetist George Lewis, that turned out
to be his most profound discovery. More recently, over the phone, White
confessed that he hadn’t written much good music since the floods — until a
December residency at a local artists’ retreat, A Studio in the Woods. There,
the music flowed from him in torrents. “It was like I came back to life,” he
said.
The 12 original compositions on White’s new CD reflect the
range of emotions White sorted through in retreat: the title track’s wistful
reverie; the prideful confidence of “Majestic Strut”; the celebratory spirit of
“Crescent City Calypso”; and the ominous minor-key theme to “Dark Sunshine.”
White colors his traditional songs with a broad palette of influences. Some are
historically minded, as with the Spanish and French Caribbean dance passages of
“Ooh La La (Danse Créole),” while others are more experimental, such as the
South African harmonies during an ensemble section of that same song.
For Blue Crescent, White assembled longtime members of his
Original Liberty Jazz Band,including trumpeter Greg Stafford and trombonist
Lucien Barbarin, as well as New Orleans natives who don’t often perform with
him, such as trumpeter Nicholas Payton, who shines throughout. “I wanted to
foster what we have on the streets here every day,” White explained, “old
friends and new friends sharing their reality.” Such musical conversation turns
especially deep on “Katrina,” a dirge scored for jazz ensemble, and the album’s
only explicit evocation of tragedy. It’s not a
traditional dirge, not meant for a brass band. There’s no tuba anchoring the
music. The band includes both piano and banjo. There’s less of the traditional
ensemble playing and more individual lines of melody and improvisation, hints
of dance-band oriented traditional jazz. White meant this as an amalgam of the
musical styles he treasures as much as anything he lost in the storm. “Everybody
has their own Katrina story,” he said. “The idea was to let that happen
musically.”