In New Orleans: A Jazz Odyssey

By Thomas A. Sancton

The feeling hit me as soon as I turned the corner onto St. Peter Street, a pounding in the chest that was as familiar as the humid embrace of a New Orleans summer night. It grew stronger as I crossed Royal Street and saw the two battered music cases hanging over a wrought-iron gate. Brass letters on them spelled out the words PRESERVATION HALL. I heard a bass drum, a sprinkle of piano notes and the growl of a trumpet driving home a blues chorus.

A black man dressed incongruously in a cowboy hat and a loud Hawaiian shirt was standing near the entrance, listening to the sounds coming from within. It was George ("Kid Sheik") Colar, 74, a veteran trumpet player with a ready grin and an infectious laugh. Would he recognize me after so long? "Sheik!" The face turned, the eyes looked puzzled for an instant behind their black-rimmed glasses. Then that wonderful laugh shattered the silence.

"Say, man! Where you been all these years? I figured you was gone for good."

"Well, here I am," I replied, grateful to be remembered. "How have you guys been making out?"

"Same old thing, man," said Sheik over the drum-roll chuckle that always punctuated his words. "Same old thing."

The same old thing was traditional New Orleans jazz, and Sheik was one of maybe a dozen men who had been playing it since the century was young. While many famous players like King Joe Oliver and Louis Armstrong headed north in the 1920s, scores of other local musicians remained in the city, playing at dances, picnics, parades and funerals. Sheltered from the commercial pressures of big-time show business, their music remained what it was at the beginning, a pure and vital folk art that had evolved from 1,000 years of African and European culture and two centuries of American slavery. Historians have written volumes on what New Orleans jazz is, but none come closer to its essence than Kid Sheik with his simple definition: "It's a feeling. Just like when you get the spirit on you in church. You can't play this music unless you got the feeling to play it--and love it. Then you puts the feeling in the other people."

Old men like Sheik might have vanished into total obscurity if Preservation Hall had not opened its gates to the public in 1961. It began as a series of informal jam sessions in a French Quarter art gallery. The pickup sessions soon gave way to regular nightly concerts, and, under the management of Sandra and Allan Jaffe, a transplanted Pennsylvania couple, the hall eventually became a sort of New Orleans cultural landmark. It offered the musicians regular work, a wider audience and finally international recognition as purveyors of one of America's greatest art forms. Once the hall became established, the few active professionals were joined by dozens of other players who, unable to make a living, had hung up their instruments long before. Soon they were all playing together again as though the clock had been turned back. "A whole lot of us had given up," remembers Percy Humphrey, 77, a trumpet player who has since traveled around the world with a Preservation Hall touring band. "I never did think it could happen in my life, playing to crowds of 30,000 to 40,000 on our tours. But the good Lord answered my prayers."

As a boy of twelve, I wandered one summer night through the gates of the hall into a world of mystery and excitement. A frail, fine-featured clarinet player named George Lewis was playing his special number Burgundy Street Blues. It was a poignant, soaring chant of human suffering and triumph, played with a molten silver tone that no other man has ever equaled. That night I became a clarinet player in my heart.

Two months later, one of the musicians gave me a beat-up old horn, and I started to play for real. George Lewis was my idol and teacher. For the next few years, the world of those old men was the center of my life. I visited their homes, played jobs with them, marched long parades and funerals through the steamy downtown streets with writhing mobs trailing for blocks behind the brass band.

While off at school in New England, and later in Europe, I continued to play my horn and think about "the mens," as they called themselves collectively. Once in a while, some of them would come through on tour, and there would be short, happy reunions. Trumpeter Punch Miller nearly blew the roof off a Harvard concert hall one night, then slept on a couch in my dormitory with a stocking over his head to keep his hair in place. He woke at 6 a.m. and started playing scales on his horn, to the astonishment of bleary-eyed undergraduates.

When word came that this or that musician had died, it was like losing family. George Lewis, Punch, too many others had passed away. As I headed back to the hall, I wondered what was left of the world I had stumbled on 20 years earlier.

Physically, the place was unchanged. It was the same dilapidated little room with splintery floorboards, bare benches and a few kitchen chairs. Oil portraits of musicians hung slightly askew on the yellowed walls. Even the smell was the same--a humid, dusty odor tinged with stale beer, cigar smoke and sweat. All the props were in place, from the old upright piano to the rusting Coke machine in the carriageway, to the oversize electric fan near the corner where Bassist Papa John Joseph collapsed nearly 18 years ago, at the age of 91, after a rousing last chorus of The Saints.

Kid Thomas Valentine was standing near the door blowing his trumpet. While many of the other musicians had sadly declined, Kid Thomas, at 86, was still playing close to his old form. Trim and erect, he had the air of a country boy who had just hit town, which he did in 1915 after leaving the sugar-cane fields of Reserve, La. "There's always somebody trying to discourage you," he said in high-pitched staccato phrases that resembled his playing style. "But I kep'agoin'. You want to learn that horn? Keep agoin' and don't let nobody stop you but that man up there, you know what I'm talkin' about?"

There were other brief flashes of the old days. Percy Humphrey, just back from a tour of England and complaining of a sore lip, played the pure-toned, lyrical trumpet leads that he had learned from his music-teacher grandfather before World War I. His piano player, James Edward ("Sing") Miller, 69, enraptured the audience with his vocal on the gospel number Amen. "When I sing a hymn," he explained later, "it's coming from my heart, man. Jesus give me those words." He quickly added a technical afterthought: "And you can't sing cute, 'cause you got to get ugly to sing, man. Get all frowned up--ugly."

Over the next few days, I spent hours visiting other old friends, listening, remembering, and talking music. "When you playing," said Bassist Chester Zardis, 82, "and your feets is goin' like that, and you holdin' that time right there with that drummer--boy, you can do anything with your instrument. It's a wonderful thing." Saxophonist Harold Dejan, 73, smooth-talking, gray-mustached leader of the Olympia Brass Band, described the same sort of joy pulsing at the heart of New Orleans music. "When my drummer hit that bass drum out there on the street," he said, "it look like everybody's heart open up. Then everything's lovely."

But there was also a dark, poignant side to their talk, a mortal sense that their art was dying as their ranks dwindled away. Some said that the "youngsters" would keep the music going, meaning younger black and white musicians who have found that they can make a buck playing commercialized Dixieland for tourists. Others seemed to realize instinctively that their kind of music was the fading voice of a culture and an age that had long since passed.

"All the guys I used to like to play with, they gone," said Sing Miller wistfully, his eyes clouding up as he brooded over his own words. "There's somebody you worked with every night, and then you don't see 'em no more. Got to grab that casket and bury 'em in that hole. That's where the sad part come in at. I mean, them kind of things--it makes you think, man. Makes hair rise on your head." How long could their music last? "It ain't much longer than me," said Kid Sheik as we talked in the banana tree-lined courtyard of Preservation Hall. "But we can't stop. If we stop, we lost. We got to go on till they just carry us out." Then, with his drum-roll laugh turning bittersweet, he repeated a line from an old New Orleans song: "He rambled, till the butcher cut him down." Sitting there in the twilight, I knew I was still a clarinet player in my heart.

--By Thomas A. Sancton

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