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“I love OffBeat,” legendary record producer and executive Jerry Wexler rasped in heavy New Yorkese over the phone several years ago to OffBeat management. “But can’t cha do something about the small type?”
Wexler, who died from congestive heart failure on August 15 at the age of 91, was an OffBeat subscriber. He wasn’t afraid to suggest improvements to the magazine, just as he wasn’t afraid to take on the seminal soul artists he worked with, including some of New Orleans’ most important piano players.
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Wexler loved New Orleans music. He felt the city’s rhythms innately, and he relished the music and musical news that came out of the Crescent City. “Jerry was truly into the music itself,” says Allen Toussaint in an email. “He could have held his own intellectually in most areas of the corporate world, but he chose with his soul and helped mold quite a chunk of our musical journey.”
“His heart was in the music,” says Dr. John in a telephone interview from his home in New York. “He loved being with all the cats in the studio, and they got a big kick out of working with him and schoolin’ him in things he wasn’t familiar with but wanted to learn.”
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Allowing himself to be schooled” was one of the keys to Wexler’s success, and his immersion in the musical cultures of the South—be it in New Orleans, Memphis, Austin or Muscle Shoals—led to Wexler’s involvement in several New Orleans masterpieces, including the early Atlantic sides by Professor Longhair (recorded from 1949-1953 and compiled on New Orleans Piano), Dr. John’s Gumbo, Allen Toussaint’s Motion and Champion Jack Dupree’s masterwork Blues from the Gutter. Combine those records with Wexler’s astonishing body of work with Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, Duane Allman and Dusty Springfield (to name a few), and you can school yourself in the roots of southern music.
Wexler was particularly passionate about New Orleans music, and there was a simple reason why.
“It was Jerry’s love affair with the piano,” says Marcia Ball from her home in Austin. “He grew up in New York worshiping the piano. And the piano resides in New Orleans. More than anywhere else, New Orleans is the piano town.
“It is not a coincidence,” Ball says, “that Jerry was asked to deliver the eulogy at Professor Longhair’s funeral (in 1980).”
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Wexler’s eloquent eulogy, (captured on film in the late J. Stevenson Palfi’s Piano Players Rarely Ever Play Together) underscored Professor Longhair’s musical legacy. Wexler told mourners that officially the torch had been passed to Allen Toussaint, Dr. John, James Booker, Fats Domino and others who Longhair had inspired.
After Katrina, in December 2005, Wexler was worried that New Orleans was on the verge of extinction, and with it the city’s precious sounds. He said that the remaining disciples of the New Orleans piano sound forged by Professor Longhair were now only a handful, and that these gifted musicians are the true living links to the New Orleans piano sound, a sound that was and is an essential building block of the DNA of rhythm and blues, jazz and rock ’n’ roll.
After Katrina, Wexler was also worried about his own health. As he contemplated his mortality, he wondered about the future of the New Orleans musical tradition he loved. It was not a stretch to think that the city that gave birth to American music was on the brink of extinction.
“His heart was good about the music,” says Dr. John. “He believed in it.”
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“Jerry never stopped being a soul man,” says Ball.
After Katrina, I asked Wexler, a lifelong atheist, if he was thinking of changing his tune with regard to religion.
“Do you mean am I embracing God as I get older?” he asked, laughing into the telephone. “Let me put it this way. Allen Toussaint once said, ‘Jerry Wexler doesn’t love God, but God loves Jerry Wexler.’”
