Crawling from the wreckage
A year after Hurricane Katrina, half the population has yet to return to New Orleans. But in the mouldering decay, musicians are still trying to keep the city's cultural heart beating. Special report by Carl Wilkinson
Sunday August 13, 2006
The Observer
The music lives on ... a parader plays his horn in the Satchmo Summerfest Second Line Parade in New Orleans. Photograph: Mario Tama/Getty
In Dr Michael White's ruined house in the Gentilly district of New Orleans a cross hangs over where his bed used to be and a photocopied picture of local clarinettist George Lewis is tacked to the peeling wallpaper. Twelve months after Hurricane Katrina threw his life into turmoil, White stands amid rubble, a blank expression on his face, one hand massaging his scalp for comfort and the other clutching his car keys - his car has become a sort of home to him now. 'You see that look of conviction in his eyes?' he asks, nodding at the picture of Lewis. 'That's serious. Everything else was destroyed, but this was the only thing to survive other than the cross.'
White is a professor of African-American culture at Xavier University, as well as an acclaimed clarinettist himself, and he says he believes in God. 'But I also believe that there is something very spiritual about New Orleans and the New Orleans music tradition. When I see that picture it's almost a symbol of strength to keep you going. The spirit is very strong, it's meant to give me hope.'
Before Katrina hit the Gulf Coast on 29 August last year, overwhelming the city's inadequate and ill-maintained flood defences, White's brick bungalow beside the London Avenue Canal was a museum of jazz; a shrine to the great American artform to which New Orleans helped to give birth. His house contained thousands of books, many containing messages to White from their authors; on 7ft high home-made shelving units were thousands of CDs, tapes, records and videos, many of them rare and irreplaceable. In a small shed beside the house were shelves upon shelves of vintage clarinets - more than 50 of them, dating back to the 1890s - in their midnight blue velvet-lined cases; many had been played by some of the world's greatest musicians.
Today, the library is a pitiful papier mache mound that has to be clambered over in order to reach the room that was once White's office. Many of the CDs and records were dashed to pieces, others have been taken away for cleaning. The shelves of clarinets have become a morgue for rotten instruments, which sit mournfully, rusting in their coffin-like cases. 'It's very difficult. I wake every day in disbelief. I have nightmares, reliving the experience of just being inundated. I had so much stuff it would have been impossible to save everything, but I wish I had one more hour. I keep thinking about that imaginary hour. If I'd had that one extra hour - what I could have saved ...'
In the living room, sprayed with bleach to kill off the worst of the mould, there is an old sign left from a lecture White, now 51, gave in a New Orleans hotel. It reads: The Jazz Recital Has Been Moved to Arcadia. White looks at it a long time then steps outside to catch his breath.
Katrina claimed more than 1,800 lives, flooded 80 per cent of the city, displaced around half a million people and led to a disaster zone being declared which covered roughly the size of the United Kingdom. But New Orleans had problems even before the hurricane hit. Many saw the slow death of the local culture and music as inevitable and felt that the city had long since forgotten to care about its heritage. Big business ruled and developers hungrily eyed tracts of real estate.
At the street level, however, music was still the lifeblood of the city, because it provided a source of income and escape. 'Music was a way out, man,' says Juvenile, the biggest rapper to come out of a city that may have been built on jazz but now listens to hip hop. We are in his hotel suite on the 42nd floor of the Sheraton on Canal Street discussing his latest album, Reality Check, which includes a couple of angry Katrina-related songs. The Sports Channel is on at full blast in the background and we're tucking into a traditional New Orleans dish of spicy boiled crawfish and crabs. Juve has just finished a large, sweet smelling blunt and is in reflective mood. From here we can see the full extent of New Orleans. There are hundreds of splashes of blue - not swimming pools, but tarpaulins securing damaged roofs. He points at a dun-coloured block of housing: the Magnolia, one of the city's notorious projects in which he grew up.
'It was either sports or music. A very few get out other ways. It's unexplainable. It's like a trap, man. A lot of these people never left the city before this hurricane. The big thing that people say is, "They got us trapped." No job, no income, no place to stay. Trapped.'
Following the storm it would be hard to say that music is in rude health, even in its rawest form, but look hard enough and the spirit of what everyone here calls 'the real New Orleans' is still intact. 'I defy you to spend a day in this city without hearing live music,' says Ben Jaffe, whose parents founded the French Quarter jazz venue Preservation Hall in 1961. He now plays bass with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. 'You can't walk down the street without hearing live music.' He's right. Even with 50 per cent of the population absent, much of the city a ghost town where even the 24-hour diners close at lunchtime because they've run out of food or staff and neighbourhoods are mouldering and decaying, music is everywhere, be it hip hop, bounce, brass bands or traditional jazz.
On Canal Street outside the looted Footlocker at midnight we find Da Truth Brass Band - a scratch band of teenagers playing their hearts out for tips. Their instruments are battered and patched, their clothes the uniform of the street - baggy sportswear - but the music is raw, powerful and infectious. Passers-by stop to dance. The street swells with people; the air is close and humid.
Down on Frenchmen Street, a strip just outside the French Quarter packed with jazz bars such as Snug Harbour, Blue Nile and Spotted Cat, traditional New Orleans jazz can still be found. The street fulfils the role Bourbon Street inside the Quarter once played. Big names such as trumpeters Kermit Ruffins and Irvin Mayfield, pianist Allen Toussaint and singer Irma Thomas still play and command decent audiences, but it's not what it was. On some nights the street is eerily quiet where once you would have been hard pressed to move without fighting your way through revellers.
By contrast, Bourbon Street is now a tacky blur of frat-boys and strip bars that attract the tourists and their all-important dollars but has been leeched of its heritage beyond the architecture. While many visitors still flock here for its famously louche attitudes towards street drinking and partying, spending their evenings stumbling from one bar to the next clutching Hurricane cocktails and pretending to live out the Mardi Gras experience, this is no longer the real New Orleans. It's a theme park. The real New Orleans is elsewhere.
One of the main issues facing the city's musicians is housing. Before Katrina, there were around 3,000 professional musicians working in New Orleans. Today that is down to 1,000. With little housing available and what there is being let at vastly inflated prices, musicians are struggling to return. Ben Jaffe set up the New Orleans Musicians' Hurricane Relief Fund to help musicians put a roof over their heads and some money in their pockets. But it is not unusual for musicians to drive eight hours from Houston, Dallas, Austin, Atlanta - or wherever else they may be now based - to play gigs in New Orleans.
Jaffe's fund is just one of a number of organisations trying to get the city back on its feet. The Musicians' Clinic was founded in 1998 to provide healthcare for the city's musicians, most of whom live below the federal poverty level. Today it's a lifeline for many sick and displaced musicians. 'This is the birthplace of American music, and yet so many of our musicians are dying of preventative diseases and they're dying in poverty,' explains Bethany Bultman, a volunteer with the clinic who has been working flat out since Katrina, raising funds, finding musicians and organising help. 'These are people esteemed all over the world and yet as a city we're not taking care of them. We've had several musicians drop dead from stress-related heart disease or strokes. There was a 30-year-old bluesman playing long hours for tips in Jackson Square. He dropped dead. When you lose everything you've worked your whole life for ... well, it's hard.'
Like many in the city, Bultman is highly critical of the government's response to Katrina. 'I think we have a President who would love to make New Orleans a Republican city [it is currently a Democrat city within a Republican state], to take away the African-American population and replace it with golf courses and high-rise condos for people from Michigan and Wisconsin and turn this city into Las Vegas South. I see New Orleans as this amazing Caribbean island that got dry-docked here. I'm not that crazy about the French, but I wish they'd find a mistake in the Louisiana Purchase and buy us back.'
In the Upper Ninth Ward, one of the worst-hit areas of the city, volunteers are building homes on an empty lot. The streets, littered with debris, are eerily quiet, but on the eight-acre site a team of volunteers from across the US are busy hammering, sawing and breaking ground. Here they are building 75 new homes as part of a Musicians' Village venture organised by the charity Habitat for Humanity and supported by Harry Connick Jr and Branford Marsalis. The plan for the village was formulated before Katrina - many of the problems being addressed today are not new ones, just thrown into sharp relief by the storm - but its purpose is now more urgent than ever.
One of the first musicians to receive the keys to his new home in the Musicians' Village on 1 June (the official start of the hurricane season) was Fredy Omar. Originally from Honduras, Omar has lived in New Orleans for 13 years. He plays a combination of salsa, merengue, cha cha and Latin jazz, and has a large following in the city. 'I'm a New Orleanian and I love this city,' he told me in May, standing outside the foundations of what would become his new home. 'This village is a great opportunity for me. There is going to be a centre for music right across from my house and I'm going to have all these resources. Hopefully I can bring part of my cultural background to this community.'
Not everyone is so positive. At street level many in the city believe that the levees were blown up in order to flood the poor (black) areas, thus saving the rich (white) areas such as the French Quarter, to which visitors flock generating much of the city's $4bn tourist income. Such conspiracy theories are nowhere more powerfully felt than in the projects and poor black neighbourhoods where tourists never stray.
Local rapper 5th Ward Weebie took me to visit his 'hood. I had hoped to meet him in Houston the week before, but he had refused, stating pointedly that he was not from Houston and was not a refugee. He represents Nola - New Orleans, Louisiana.
En route we pull into a service station so Weebie can pick up a new cap. In the parking lot guys hustle, selling knock-off DVDs from the back of their cars. Inside, Weebie picks out a Nola cap with 'Katrina' embroidered on the side and gets his 'Weebie discount'. In the display cases around us, beside the baggy vests and bootleg Lacoste T-shirts, there are small portable weighing scales for drug dealers, handcuffs and lighters. We couldn't have come here before Katrina and even now, without Weebie in his new Jaguar and box fresh clothes, it would be dangerous. As we near Weebie's street a car full of kids fake a drive-by shooting on us, leaping from their car and laughing at our obvious fear before greeting an incredulous Weebie with elaborate handshakes.
On Dumaine Street outside Weebie's former home, a child plays with a toy gun while his 26-year-old father, Gu, smokes a spliff and tells me of his drug-selling activities. 'Shit, I ain't gonna evacuate,' he tells me when I ask about Katrina. 'When the hurricane hits, that's when we do our best business.' Crackheads from miles around come out of the woodwork to get a hit that will see them through the storm. This is street life, New Orleans style. 'Shit, you had to travel with two Glocks on you in this hood,' says Gu, aggressively, jabbing a finger at me and spitting in the gutter. 'One ain't gonna do shit.' It was only once the water started to rise that he headed for the Superdome. Everyone in the city has a Katrina story, but here the sheer anger at their treatment at the hands of the authorities, which for so long ignored the city's festering problems, is palpable. 'I was in the Superdome and all that shit you heard was true,' says Gu. 'They was giving us boiling water in there. Man, ice was like diamonds.'
Here on the street, the hurricane hasn't dampened the need for music. Katrina has focused Weebie's enthusiasm. Until recently he produced only good-time block party tracks - simple beats, simple lyrics. Today he feels politicised and has produced music such as his 'Da Katrina Song', which rails against the treatment many in the city received.
A couple of days after meeting Weebie, I drive uptown to see Hilton, a member of the secretive Hard Head Hunter Mardi Gras Indians. Unique to New Orleans, the Indians meld African American and Native American culture. Their dancing is frenetic and infectious as they move to a heavy, steady beat and sing, following their leader's calls. Their costumes are even more arresting. Each year, each member of a group must sew a new costume, from scratch. Costumes often cost thousands of dollars - a major investment when you consider these are truck drivers, policemen, former drug dealers, students - and are brightly coloured and covered in beads and feathers.
At Hilton's house we watch his 'masking' - the process of dressing and preparing. The costume is heavy and sweat bubbles up on his brow as he pulls on his horse hair wig and embroidered jacket. The following day the Hard Head Hunter Indians are having a secret parade. It will be 'the real New Orleans', he promises. We're given rudimentary directions and agree to see them there.
Getting a cab to the parade the following day is practically impossible. Our first driver, when asked to take us to the St Bernard Project in Gentilly where the parade begins, orders us out. 'I don't go to the projects. Get out of my fucking cab. Now.' The second driver teases us all the way. 'Well, I'll look out for you boys on the news later. Anyone I should inform when you get shot?'
Beside the ruined and barricaded project, a carnival atmosphere, barbecues and beer, is building. Over on the central reservation of St Bernard Avenue two young men sit on wild-looking ponies, eyeing the crowd, their baggy jeans and oversize vests oddly incongruous with their equestrian posture. We begin to march, through the derelict project then slowly up Paris Avenue, climbing towards the centre of town, which looms on the horizon, the great mushroom of the Superdome and the high-rise hotels. Around us are tatty shotgun houses ringed with tell-tale watermarks.
We're in a very different New Orleans now. Here the music is for the people, and it is raw, passionate and vital. Like any good tourist, I'm wearing a T-shirt that reads 'Nola' and several women come up to dance and compliment me on the sentiment. There's a sense of defiance and pride here; of celebration. As we climb away from the damaged shotgun houses towards the central business district the geography that was so crucial in dictating who survived and who suffered becomes clearer. At an underpass I remember from the news nine months earlier, where bodies had been floating by a barely visible stop sign, there is a cacophony of trumpets and tubas as the parade comes to a climax.
'One of the most magical things about New Orleans,' Dr White said to me, 'is that we like to transform life into other realities by making different or unusual blendings of things. Jazz exults both the collective and the individual at the same time. The essence of New Orleans culture for me is that we transform reality so that people are free here to develop their individual characteristics. We transform everything to give it new life and meaning. We transform food, music, humour, ways of walking, language. All of that is part of the folklore here.'
That evening, we run into Phil Frazier from the ReBirth Brass Band. He's wandering down the street, his tuba over his shoulder. It would be an odd sight anywhere else, but here it seems perfectly natural. The ReBirth in many ways are the sound of New Orleans now; they mix brass band music with the infectious rhythms and refrains of the local hip hop sound, bounce. It has made them famous to the point where they can no longer rehearse, Phil tells me. Word always gets out and the band is quickly swamped by fans keen to party.
Phil is on his way to a friend's birthday party where ReBirth is playing and he invites us along. In a ruined neighbourhood that looks like it has been bombed there is a small, corner bar with no windows. Everyone's here: young and old, black and white. The atmosphere is friendly and accepting. A couple of old guys sit on plastic chairs outside. Inside they're playing pounding bounce. A Juvenile track comes on, he's shouting 'Back tha ass up' and vast women are doing just that, their gold teeth glinting under the disco lights as they booty shake and drop to the floor in time to the music. Then the music's cut and in troop ReBirth with their trumpets, trombones and tuba. They're all a bit wobbly from the celebrations and launch into a brass-bounce crossover that is hardly their best work, but has the crowd screaming in delight.
Outside, with our ears ringing after the set, Phil is on a high. He's about to jump in his car and head on to the next gig. 'Man, no place like Nawlins!' he says raising his voice and sweeping his hands about at the silent ruined neighbourhood and corner bar where the party's still pounding away. 'Katrina didn't do shit to this city.'
· For more related interviews, audio and pictures see www.observer.co.uk/omm/neworleans. Musicians' charities: Habitat For Humanity (www.habitat-nola.org); New Orleans Musicians' Hurricane Relief Fund (www.nomhrf.org); Musicians' Clinic (www.savenolamusic.org)
