New Orleans: Playing a Jazz Chorus
By Samuel Charters
Marion Boyars 2006
ISBN 0714531316
227 pages

Music historian and author Samuel Charters has been writing and recording the blues and jazz since the 1950s. His vast knowledge of music and musicians is a big part of why his new book, New Orleans: Playing a Jazz Chorus, makes for such fascinating reading. Many other people have written (or are writing) a book about New Orleans in the wake of Katrina, but Charters brings something entirely new to the table. He lived in the city and worked with and recorded many of its musicians over 50 years ago — he remembers not a playground for the young and drunk, but a place where music truly was all that mattered. In returning after the hurricane, primarily to help his son and family who lost nearly everything in the storm, Charters is struck both by those sounds that are gone and those that persevere. His journey into the new music scene and interviews with musicians who cling to their city’s roots opens up an entirely new facet in Katrina literature. This is not about the musicians who made New Orleans great, but about the struggles of those who insist on seeing a future for the music. Louis Armstrong might be just a memory but, as Charters discovers, there are plenty of other hardworking performers who are doing all they can to keep music alive in New Orleans. It is that musical evolution that Charters most deeply explores and what makes this memoir stand out above many others I have recently read.

Charters opens with his drive south, in September 2005, to see what is left of the Gulf Coast. As he observes the devastation in Mississippi he ruminates on the potential loss of New Orleans. “What we suddenly understood, if we hadn’t known it before,” he writes, “was that some cities mean something to us. We don’t have to travel to see them, to walk along their streets, we only have to know they are there. Who would want to live in a world without Paris? Or London? Rio de Janeiro, Rome, or New York?” He knows New Orleans is certainly on this list, it has come to represent, he believes, “…the Dionysian side of our nature, the side that needs to know that there’s an easy comfort there, and a side that, just as much, needs the feeling of the exotic.” Clearly the author understands that we may not need to live there or even visit, but we need the reassurance of that place (those places) still waiting out there for us; promising they will always wait.

And now New Orleans was threatening to sink into the abyss; Charters was desperate to see what was left.

Because he is a music historian, it is that subject’s relics which draw him most deeply. Seeking out Jelly Roll Morton’s early home, on the corner of Frenchmen Street and North Robinson, he finds the house damaged but still standing, its historical plaque attached under a waving blue tarp. Morton’s house in Gulfport was in ruins but the New Orleans one was keeping his place in that city’s history alive. “…I’d always remembered this house,” writes Charters, “as a fixed point in the thoughts and dreams I had about Morton and his music.”

Not everything was gone from the Crescent City, and that was good. The concern, though, was not so much about the past but the present. Could the city’s modern musicians survive now, with so much gone and so little coming back? And in case readers think the loss of New Orleans could only mean a loss to the jazz community, Charters reminds us of British trumpeter Ken Colyer who made his way to the city in 1952. When he returned to England, he led a New Orleans-style band that often included guitarist Alexis Korner. Korner later formed his own band, which at one time or another included the likes of Mick Jagger, Charlie Watts and Jack Bruce — who later met a guy named Eric Clapton and formed a band called Cream. And that’s just one tiny example of rock and roll’s debt to New Orleans. So why does the city matter? Because music is born there, plain and simple.

In search of current musicians, Charters is thrilled to find Preservation Hall reopening at least for an evening (to host a book reading of all things). He also discovers a nearly endless supply of small crowded clubs all hosting musicians of varying talent, but overwhelming commitment. Although this looks good and promises hope for the future, Charters learns that without the big conventions, there is no reliable crowd to pay for good musicians. On the surface, it all looks positive, but the long haul is a decidedly grimmer picture. That truth might have been a dirty little secret for locals all along, but after the ripping from Katrina it no longer had any place to hide. “What the people crowded inside the Hall had thought of a celebration,” writes Charters, “was in reality a cry for help.” Did anyone notice other than the author though — did any of those momentary revelers take the time to think about the city’s future?

It is ultimately in an unlikely source, a small bar off Carrollton Avenue, that Charters finds real hope. Spontaneously stopping by one evening, he happens upon New Orleans drummer extraordinaire, Johnny Vidacovich playing in a hopping trio that has the crowd and Charters dazzled. Tracking Vidacovich down through friend and family connections, he finds a lifelong professional musician and New Orleans native who plays wherever and whenever he can. He has always been a drummer; there was never a moment in his life when music was not his passion and goal. “I don’t consider myself a jazz drummer,” he tells Charters. “Most people do. I consider myself a folk drummer. I consider what I play is folk music. What I play on the drums, that’s something that’s indigenous to this area. I don’t play like a jazz drummer from New York City or California or Chicago. I don’t even play like a drummer from St. Louis. It’s the music that you hear from everyone around here. Street beats. You hear the bluesy rock and roll street beats. That’s the folk music from around here. They don’t play street beats in any of those other places.”

Charters has discovered the new jazz, the jazz that belongs only to New Orleans. Vidacovich might be labeled “jazz musician” along with anyone from Norah Jones to Harry Connick Jr. outside the city, but on his home turf he knows he is something different. He is a New Orleans drummer, a musician of the city, and that is as far from standard jazz as anyone can be. This is not a slap in the face of tradition, however. In fact, to Vidacovich, it embraces tradition on a whole new level. “I don’t think tradition stops,” he says. “I think tradition is a time, and you can’t stop time, it moves forward. I think tradition is a living, moving thing, and it always is going forward. Tradition isn’t history. Let me clear up my definition of the word. History is one thing and it stops, and you just say, ‘Oh.’ Tradition can be a verb. It isn’t over yet. It hasn’t become history yet.”

In the end, Charters talks and listens to musicians of all kinds across the city. From brass bands, to Dixieland to gospel and folk, he finds musicians working at every possible venue in front of every potential crowd. They are all trying to make a living in the place they call home, in the place that fuels their creativity with its mix of history and tradition and endless musical challenge. They all know it is vitally important that they stay and play in this city not only for themselves but for the world. “We can never let the traditions of this music die,” Vidacovich tells Charters, “because so many beautiful kinds of music have been influenced by it. You know, it’s been the cause of other kinds of music being born, and it’s been an essential element in so many other places. The music has had a way of evolving through the times here, from the old time jazz and to blues music and to funk and to R&B and to modern jazz, and through all the evolutions of our music, it always has maintained the characteristic things that are just part of this place. That’s our tradition, and that’s what we have to save.”

By writing about so many different New Orleans musicians and types of music, Charters has certainly made a contribution to the task that lies ahead for all those committed to saving the city. He provides a wealth of information in his book about current music and artists, all of whom would appreciate new fans. His book is an excellent look at one man’s connection to music and a city and that city’s connection to music around the world. New Orleans: Playing a Jazz Chorus is a very compelling read and needs to be discovered by more people interested in both the city and the evolution of the New Orleans sound.