Hello!
I know others are going to (or have already) posted about our final meeting as a group that happened earlier this evening. As they often do, CA students impressed me with their thoughtfulness and kindness. This has been a great week, and I'm proud to be associated with this collection of students and adults.
On Wednesday I'd been talking with several students and adults about a thorny issue -- namely, "What if the best thing would be to rebuild elsewhere?" Forty-five minutes of transformative music that night provided the clearest answer I could ever hope to have.
Preservation Hall is a remarkably small venue, a building more than 200 years old that has had many lives as a tavern, art gallery and for the last forty years the home of New Orleans jazz. The scale and intimacy of the place are unlike anything I've experienced, although it is perhaps closest to the Iron Horse in Northampton, MA. Parkman Howe found out that ten dollars buys a chance to squeeze inside with whoever else has lined up outside. Given that it was the only activity offered, many students came without any sense of what they were getting themselves into. 39 of us saw and heard a wonderful set.
Words fail me to describe what followed -- while no one of the six musicians floored me with his individual virtuosity, their ability to weave in and out of each other's solos was perhaps the best I've ever heard. From blaring stomp to a quiet lament sung by the guitar player, each song was fantastic. In the midst of the music, a small white cat jumped through the gate that led to an inner courtyard and joined me and Mike Wirtz on a bench. Soon we realized it was worth standing to see the band -- we could see now that the crowd had shifted. The cat, happy to have gotten some scratches, went back into the courtyard.
Standing watching several generations of musicians entertain several generations of audience, the answer to our question became clear. Whatever rational arguments we might have mustered in favor of relocation paled in comparison to this original American art. New Orleans jazz arose from a mix of cultures, from boom and bust, from a strong sense of place. Several students said they were glad that the Hall was unchanged, that it hadn't been replaced by a shiny new club with state of the art amenities and a plaque that said something about the original. Transplanting Preservation Hall, or Broadmoor, or the Ninth Ward would diminish that sense of place. I could feel the potential loss throughout that set -- even three years later the stakes are high here.
Thanks for reading,
John Drew
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1 comment:
What an excellent commentary, John...I couldn't agree with you more. I'd been to New Orleans many times before Katrina and I had always felt it was the crown jewel of cultural heritage for the United States. You cannot simply rebuild such a prize anywhere...it took many decades and generations to make New Orleans the richly complex gumbo that it was, and to simply abandon it with the notion that it can be recreated elsewhere is to miss entirely its priceless value to our nation as a whole.
BTW, did you know that Preservation Hall's history has DIRECT TIES to Concord? I was amazed to learn just a few years ago that Concord resident Chuck Stevenson and some of his then college buddies actually created Preservation Hall back in the 50's (long before NOLA came to survive on tourist dollars) to provide a venue for local musicians who mostly worked the docks during the day. The space was originally a curio shop and Chuck and friends convinced the owner to rent them half the space at night, when they would move the merchandise aside to make room for the modest bandstand and floor space for the audience.
Chuck is very well connected with jazz musicians in the Boston area and still plays a great trumpet, and his son Matt, a relatively recent grad of CCHS, is a fantastic musician too.
Back in 1980 I made my first visit to Preservation Hall. I didn't sit on the floor, but actually stood along the wall right by the one door into the place. While the band of veteran musicians played on the stage, a steady stream of locals would pop in the front door simply to wave hello to the players before heading off into the French Quarter...it was clearly a nightly social ritual. At one point, a young kid of probably 18 or 19 popped in, paid his friendly respects and left. The guy next to me nudged me and said "mark my words, that kid is the next Louis Armstrong. His name is Wynton Marsalis."
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