JASON BERRY

A Post-K Education
In this excerpt from the new edition of Up From the Cradle of Jazz,
one jazz tradition speaks to another.

he history of
New Orleans in
the wrenching
aftermath of Hurricane Katrina
can be telegraphed in one
sentence. Politics failed, culture
prevailed.
Jason Berry uses this thought to
start Memory of the Flood, a new
chapter added to the reprinted Up
From the Cradle of Jazz, the history
of New Orleans R&B generation
written with Jonathan Foose
and the late Tad Jones and first
published in 1986. For this edition,
he has added a new introduction, a
chapter that moves swiftly through
the 80s and 90s, and Memory of
the Flood, which underscores the
lesson New Orleans always knew
but remembered after Katrina
that communities can only count on
themselves.
On the night of May 13, 2008,
Dr. Michael White unfurled a lyrical
clarinet solo on What a Friend
We Have in Jesus, backed by the
Hot 8 Brass Band, in the Jazz &
Heritage Foundations reception hall
on North Rampart Street. Wearing
dark slacks and a blue button down
shirt with white stripes, White cut a
professorial image in sharp contrast
to the guys seated behind him in
T-shirts emblazoned with insignia
of the Hot 8. Three young players
wore dreadlocks. Another sat in a
wheelchair.
The irony of appearances
was not lost on the three dozen
people drawn to a rare evening
of performance, laced with
commentary about music and
state of the culture. White had just
released a new CD, Blue Crescent.
Most of the songs were original
compositions to push the threshold
of an idiom many people consider
static, its boundaries set and closed
by the likes of Jelly Roll Morton and
Louis Armstrong.

22

NOVEMBER 2009

The Hot 8 had been steeped in

funk, and a hard-charging street
style long on rhythm and short on
melodic polish, a groove popular
with hip-hop fans. Since Baty Landis
and Lee Arnold had gotten them
to work with White, the Hot 8 was
developing a stronger sense of
melody, a reach back in time to a
style that all but bypassed them in
the 1980s as they moved through
public schools and street gigs in a
milieu where brass bands competed
with rap as the soundtrack of street
life. Jazz is a way of life and there
are many lessons that apply, White
began. The blues and hymn styles
played by the early brass bands
came about originally when jazz
was dance music.
White stood at a podium
behind a photograph of the late
Tom Dent, the poet and historian
who served as Jazz & Heritage
Foundation president in the 1990s.
New Orleans jazz was functional,
he continued. They played it

By Jason Berry

for picnics and

parades of the
social and pleasure
clubs. Jazz was
a voice of the
African-American
community
seeking freedom.
The musicians
seated behind
White had taken
traumatic hits
that held a mirror
to the citys
jagged social
divide. A large
oak-shouldered
tuba player
named Bennie
Pete founded the
Hot 8 in 1995.
In 1996 the
bands trumpeter
Jacob Johnson
was murdered
in a home robbery that netted
his killers $40. Trombonist Joe
Williams was shot dead by police
in 2004 when he failed to heed
orders to stop the car he was
driving, unarmed. NOPD claimed
it was stolen, a charge disputed
by Williams friends. The band
was still recovering from the
murder of Dinerral Shavers, in
early 2006, when trumpeter
Terrell Batiste (not directly related
to Alvin) was struck by a car in
an accident near Atlanta, which
led to the amputation of his legs
above the knee.
Batiste sat in a wheelchair
wearing shorts, holding a
trumpet. Seated around him
were Henry Cook on bass drum,
Samuel Cyrus on snare, Bennie
Pete gripping a large sousaphone,
trumpeter Greg Williams,
trombonist Gregory Veals, and
tenor sax man Wendell Stuart.
Today we have problems in
education, said White.

Heads nodded at the oblique

reference to turf wars in high
schools.
Jazz can have uplifting effects
on young people, White said
soothingly. Theres a positive
influence that comes with
participating in school bands,
learning the value of teamwork.
Its a lot easier to become a
member of a band than make it
to the Hornets.
Few public schools had solid
band programs before Katrina, and
apart from NOCCA there was scant
instruction on the fundamentals
or history of jazz in the combined
Recovery, Charter, and Orleans Parish
school districts. The environment
for at-risk youth in New Orleans
was better in 1913, when Louis
Armstrong was sent to the Colored
Waifs Home, than in 2008.
White introduced Bye and
Bye, one of the church hymns
popularized by the brass band
musicians in the parades of
early jazz. If youd conducted
a blindfold test on identifying
who was playing the song that
night, Whites swirling clarinet
lines might have registered with
people familiar with his sound.
Who would have recognized his
accompanists? In that post-Katrina
funeral parade for chef Austin
Leslie, the band sent out smoking
section riffs, repetitive rhythms
as they swaggered along in a
dead city. What a contrast with
the sweet rolling harmonies of a
church groove as they played with
White in a medium tempo melody,
Bennie Petes sousaphone purring
like a bullfrog in swamp bottom.
The Hot 8 sounded downright
beautiful.

This excerpt of Up From the

Cradle of Jazz is from the new
edition, published earlier this
year by University of Louisiana at
Lafayette Press.
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