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Dr. Michael White is haunted. Everywhere he goes he encounters spirits. White isn’t particularly superstitious, nor is he charismatic in either the born again or the voodoo sense. Nevertheless, he is a haunted man. That’s life for a 53-year-old traditional New Orleans jazz musician whose best friends were first generation jazz players mostly born before 1910.
Right now White is the primary force keeping traditional New Orleans jazz alive. His latest album, the outstanding Blue Crescent, is a dramatic example of the way traditional New Orleans jazz can stay true to its century-old roots while remaining a resonant, contemporary musical statement. Earlier this year, White received the nation’s highest honor in the folk and traditional arts—the 2008 NEA National Heritage Fellowship Award.
After a career perfecting his ability to play the traditional New Orleans jazz canon, White had a creative breakthrough four years ago during a stay at A Studio in the Woods in Algiers, where he discovered that he could write compelling original material in the traditional style. After losing everything in the wake of Katrina and falling into a deep depression last year, White returned to A Studio in the Woods where he was revisited by his muse, emerging with an album that will take its place in history alongside the city’s most memorable musical creations.
White traces his interest in music to the Carnival parades his mother took him to as a child. He was impressed with the big sound and colorful uniforms of the St. Augustine High School marching band. He later enrolled at St. Aug and began his musical career playing clarinet in the Marching 100 and the school concert band. He took private lessons and practiced at home along with the radio, playing along with the melodies to popular songs. But there was something else he knew he was looking for, something he couldn’t put his finger on. He began to find his direction “by accident,” he says, when a friend brought over a copy of Jazz Begins by the Young Tuxedo Jazz Band. White immediately learned several of the songs.
What White didn’t realize was that he was born to play this music. It wasn’t until he’d already started to play traditional music that his mother told White about his blood lineage to early jazz. Among White’s immediate ancestors were two brothers, Papa John and Willie Joseph, who played in some of the first jazz bands. Papa John was a friend and bandmate of Buddy Bolden’s who ran a barber shop down the block from Bolden’s house. Though they were related, White never knew the Joseph brothers, but he thinks he saw Papa John once at a family gathering. Willie died in a car accident three weeks before he was born, and Papa John died in 1965 on stage at Preservation Hall after performing “Saints.”
“A lot of things that have happened to me have been strange coincidences, often involving my family,” says White.
One of those strange coincidences involved another one of White’s mentors, Danny Barker. Barker, a musician and historian who did extensive research into Bolden’s life, certainly knew of Bolden’s relationship with Papa John Joseph, but he didn’t know White was a relative when the young student showed up for his class at Xavier University.
“Danny Barker used to teach African American music, which is actually the same class that I teach now,” White explains. “I was in the library one day. I looked up and there was Danny Barker standing in the door frame, holding his guitar. I looked down and I looked back up and he was gone, I thought it was a ghost or something, so I searched all over the library for him. Finally at the top of the last floor in the last room I looked in, that’s where he was. I walked right in and that was the first day of his class.”
White began to play in Barker’s Fairview Baptist church marching band, where he got a close look at some of the last old school jazz funerals and social club parades. “Every job was different,” says White. “The first funeral I played was just a pure ceremony with an organization. This was 1975, I remember as clear as day the looks on the faces of the members of the organization. Even though I’m black and from New Orleans, I’d never seen people who looked like that. They looked like terra cotta soldiers. The men had military uniforms in Napoleonic style, with an admiral’s hat and gold buttons, shoulder epaulettes and shiny swords. These were the old benevolent organizations, a tradition that was dying out. I’ve never seen anything like that since. The onlookers took on the solemnity of the ceremony. It wasn’t like nowadays where it’s an extension of Jazz Fest or something.”
Meanwhile, White tried unsuccessfully to play in the university’s jazz program, where he found the band director uninterested in clarinets and traditional jazz. He finally got a chance to play traditional jazz with Doc Paulin, who he met through Big Al Carson, who played tuba in Paulin’s band at the time.
“I was scared to death and kind of lost,” White says of his first gig with Paulin. “I knew several of the songs that Doc played because they were on the Young Tuxedo record. Doc would play a few bars of a song and the next thing you know, the drum kicked off the song. I didn’t know the title, the key, or the harmony. The songs that I knew I tried to play along with and the songs that I didn’t know, I tried to find some high notes that I could sustain at the end of choruses.”
It was while he was with Doc Paulin that White began to meet some of the older players who would become so influential on his career. One of the other members of the group was Eddie Richardson, who played with the Eureka Brass Band and made some of the earliest brass band recordings.
“The first thing I learned about this music is that it was nothing like what I’d heard before on Bourbon Street,” says White. Many of Paulin’s gigs were Uptown in the vicinity of the Bolden neighborhood around LaSalle and Washington, the area known as Shakespeare Park at the time. “A lot of the parades I played early in my career started or ended in the Bolden neighborhood,” he says. “When I was parading, I could see Bolden’s house. It was on First between Liberty and LaSalle. Papa John’s barber shop was there a long time and then one day it was just gone.”
While playing in Paulin’s band, White had what he called a “defining moment” when he bought a record by New Orleans jazz pioneer George Lewis.
“It was another one of those strange things that seem to happen,” he says. “I bought that record, came home put it on, and it was as if my life had been in darkness and all of a sudden a light came on. It was like a spiritual experience that defined for me everything that I felt inside about being from New Orleans—the food, the music, the spirit of the people, the climate—all of it was in the music. I remember listening to that record over and over and over again trying to play along with some of the songs.
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“That was really the beginning for me of seriously getting into New Orleans jazz. I wanted to know more about the music. I wanted to know more about the people who made the music. That’s when I started reading and collecting records and books and memorabilia, and then eventually going out and meeting musicians. In the early ’80s, I started a lot of these associations with more than three dozen musicians born between the 1890s and 1910. A lot of those musicians became my friends and mentors and eventually bandmates. I went on tours with them, and went to parties, then hospital visits and finally funerals.”
One particular song on the Lewis record, “Burgundy Street Blues,” held special appeal for White. He listened to it repeatedly, marveling in its structure and beauty, and learned it note for note. What he didn’t know at the time was that Papa Joe Joseph was on that record, another one of the unlikely coincidences that have ruled his life. “I had a relative who played on the record, which made it even more powerful for me when I found that out. That record became an in-road to the older musicians in a strange sort of way.”
At a Jackson Square job with Kid Thomas Valentine, Louis Nelson, and Emanuel Sayles—all of whom played with Lewis—the leader called “Burgundy Street Blues.” According to White, “I started playing it. I closed my eyes, I was scared to death but it was a spiritual thing again. After a few choruses it started raining.
Somebody said ‘Oh, you made the sky cry.’ We had to stop playing. Emanuel Sayles came over and he shook my hand. I didn’t realize what that meant because there were no younger black traditional players that were seriously getting into what the older guys were doing. The trumpet player Kid Sheik, who was also a popular traditional jazz figure, he said he was three blocks away, walking down the street, and he heard ‘Burgundy Street Blues’ and he came running to see who that was.
“Kid Sheik invited me to a jazz party. There were a lot of older musicians there and they asked me to play ‘Burgundy Street Blues.’ When I finished they made me play it again. Eventually they found out I was related to Papa John and they all knew him so that was even more of a link to that extended family of jazz.”
White went on to play with the Preservation Hall Band and organize his own groups, the Michael White Quartet, and the Original Liberty Jazz Band, through the 1980s, but his most important association during that decade was with Wynton Marsalis. White somehow convinced the iconoclastic Marsalis to refocus his musical attention on his New Orleans roots, an interest that led to Marsalis’ breakthrough album The Majesty of the Blues. White met Marsalis in 1985, just as Wynton’s band broke up after his brother Branford left to play with Sting. White had a premonition that he would meet Marsalis and convince him to play traditional jazz.
“I had a dream before we met. It was kind of prophetic, that he was going to play New Orleans jazz and I was going to have something to do with it,” White recalls. “In my conscious mind, I thought that was crazy because he was living in New York and he was playing bop and in interviews he said some very un-nice things about New Orleans jazz. So consciously, I knew that my dream was never going to happen. But after that first meeting, I kept crossing paths with Wynton, and I would tell him stories about King Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton, Sidney Bechet. He’d look at me like I was nuts. Then there was a party in New Orleans and he sat in with us and he really didn’t know the music and didn’t know what to do. So I gave him my card and told him, ‘Give me a call, I have a lot of records you can listen to and I can tell you a lot about the music.’ A year later, Marsalis called and White sent him a cross section of brass band music from the earliest days up to the Dirty Dozen and Rebirth. “He called me back a while later and said he had an idea for a recording that would use some of those New Orleans jazz influences.” He also asked White, Danny Barker, Teddy Riley and Freddie Lonzo to come to New York to play on the album.
“There were five songs on the CD and we recorded three of them—a dirge-like ballad called ‘The Death of Jazz,’ the part that had the sermon by Rev. Jeremiah Wright,” White recalls, laughing, “so I had my Jeremiah Wright experience back then because it was controversial when it came out. And then ‘Happy Feet Blues,’ a takeoff on the brass band style. That record changed some of the thinking on Wynton because it was the first time he tried to do traditional stuff, and the first time he employed that folk-like feeling, using growls and smears and the way he played the mute in his own playing. It put his career on another plateau. It was great for me, too, because I didn’t realize it at the time but my parts in there stand out. It was like my dream had come true. I can’t believe it I had this dream and here it is. It happened.”
White became a regular at Marsalis’ concerts and on special projects for Lincoln Center, working as musical director on programs based around Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet and one called Jazz in the ’20s.
“People called it a repertory style, but the notes were not copied. The clarinet parts were always improvised over chord changes,” he says. “I didn’t even have the notes that people were playing written down. I wanted to capture the spirit of the music. I knew it could be done if it was played like they did it as opposed to exactly how they did it. Where they improvised, we improvised.”
Marsalis’ desire to use the older approaches to write new compositions inspired White to move in a similar direction, but it took his first residence at Studio in the Woods for White to figure out how to accomplish that task. The result was Dancing in the Sky.
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“In my first residence, I realized it was a place where I could be removed from all of the distractions of everyday life,” he recalls. “No people, no radio, no cell phone, no TV, no computer, no noise. You could hear quiet and you could hear nature. Nature for me was an unexpected benefit. I learned that we’re designed to be in nature, to be out in the trees breathing fresh air, to be in touch with animals and water. In the evenings, I would get all kinds of music from the crickets, from different birds, owls. Sometimes I could hear a balance, like a call and response going back and forth. It even got to the point where I started playing with some of the birds. I would play my instrument and they would answer it, and I would try to get as close as I could to play the notes that they were singing. When I would play, certain animals would stop and they would look, and listen. They were part of the process and that was being in touch with nature.
“Studio in the Woods is right on the river. You grow up in New Orleans and you know the river, you see it a million times, but there you can be on the river and never see another soul, no buildings. You can look at the river and see the way it was 200 years ago. The river took on a different meaning for me, a way to travel to my inner spirit. At night if you just sit there you start to feel a certain kind of power, it’s humbling. You feel insignificant. The rippling of the water was rocking you to sleep; it put you into a meditative state. I discovered the right combination of elements for writing songs.”
When the 17th Street Canal failed, White’s Gentilly home was destroyed and along with it went one of the most important collections of early jazz memorabilia in the world—documents, books, records and instruments personally obtained from the original players themselves. White lost all of his music and felt like he was losing his mind.
“My Katrina experience has been really rough,” he says. “I’ve moved on, but I’m not over it yet. As time went on, it became worse, with displacement and illness in my family. My mother went from being independent to having an advanced case of dementia. I had to put her in a nursing home. She’s been in a bed for two years.”
White decided to apply for another residence at Studio in the Woods to see if he could recapture the spirit of Dancing in the Sky, but the results weren’t the same.
“By the time I got to Studio in the Woods, I had not had a break since Katrina, I was depressed and I was going through a lot of bad stuff,” he says. “I didn’t think I would be able to create anything at first. I was even more depressed because I thought I wouldn’t be able to do anything. I’d been putting Basin Street [Records] off for a few years. I thought maybe I’d re-record some of the stuff I’d done before. That’s how it was for the first couple of days.”
He tried finding inspiration by listening to a variety of music, from African and Caribbean records to gospel to Bob Dylan. He contemplated images of New Orleans after Katrina from books and magazines. He looked for a way past his writer’s block in the writings of Julia Cameron, an artist’s consultant whose self-help volumes include the popular creativity handbook The Artist’s Way.
“One of her suggestions,” White notes, “is that you should get up every day and write what she calls morning pages. You get up and write the first thing that comes to your mind. I tried to do it, but it didn’t work because when I got up in the morning, my brain was not working and I didn’t feel like writing. So I converted the idea into something that worked for me. When I would get up, instead of writing the first thing that came to my mind, I would play the first thing that came to my mind. Even if it didn’t make sense, I would play whatever I was feeling on my horn. And that led to songs. I would get up and start writing at seven in the morning and before I knew it, it was two o’clock, and then it was dark. After I finished, I had a wide range of stuff—36 songs in all.
“What came first was a series of songs that were in a minor mode and that were very, very sad. I had been listening to a lot of Mahalia Jackson. The song “The Troubles of the World,” that song is so sad, I started playing that and it seemed that a lot of the stuff that I wrote was kind of in that mode.”
Several of these compositions were combined in the centerpiece of Blue Crescent, “Katrina,” which begins with the sounds of the storm’s howling winds and proceeds through a solemn funeral march. White’s music encompasses a lot of joy along with the sorrow, from the carefree attitude of “Comme Ci, Comme Ca,” to the sheer abandon of his tribute to Doc Paulin, “King of the Second Line.”
“I don’t know where all the joy came from,” White admits. “At some point, I started to see how the range of emotions tells the story of the city from the early days to Katrina and beyond. So really it answers for me the question, ‘How do you play traditional New Orleans jazz today?’ How do you play traditional and contemporary music at the same time? There are a lot of answers to that; I don’t claim to have the only answer. Some people look at the young brass bands as a way of doing that. I wanted the dominant style to be traditional because I think it can take on other influences and also reflect contemporary life, emotions and events.”
For many years, White was the youngest member of all the bands he played in. Now he’s the keeper of the flame, and he finally understands what his old friends were trying to tell him all along. “I really feel that through Papa John and Buddy Bolden and the rest of them, there’s a connectedness,” he says. “A lot of older musicians feel that way. When they were dying, they would say stuff to me like, ‘It’s up to y’all now.’ And I’m thinking, ‘You’re dying, what are you thinking about music for?’ But I came to understand exactly what they meant because they realized this is a very important gift that needs to continue.
“It’s like the music regenerates itself. I didn’t understand it then, but I very much understand it now. I felt like I channeled the music on Blue Crescent more than composed it. It’s almost like this stuff came from somewhere else through me. It’s all of those people I saw and played with before. It’s all of those experiences I’ve had in life, through Katrina and into now. It’s like all of that converted into music. Even though the music is contemporary because it reflects what’s happening today, those people who I knew, they’re still alive in it somehow. Their spirit informs it.
“A lot of people I know over the years—musicians and teachers alike—think of this music as comic, simple, not really jazz, something just for tourists, something that had no meaning or feeling as a liturgy. But I came to see it from the parades and my work in the community as a source of tremendous pride and spirituality, an expression of a way of life that is on one plane black, on one plane New Orleans. On one plane American, and all very much universal.”
