The Panorama Jazz Band draws on many folk music traditions, from traditional jazz to klezmer and Carribean music. The concert will take place in the courtyard at The Historic New Orleans Collection at 533 Royal Street. Future performers include the Preservation Hall Hot 4 on April 16, Los Po-Boy-Citos on May 21, and Wanda Rouzan on June 18. Tickets are $10 for non-members; the price includes three drinks. Guests must be 21 or older.

It’s hard to write about Chilton and not impose your suppositions about motivations because he was notoriously private. He wasn’t reclusive; I last saw him before Christmas on Frenchmen Street when Alex McMurray and I ran into him, the three of us marveling at three Alexes in the same place at the same time. But as Bruce Eaton documents in Radio City, his entry in the 33 1/3 book series, Chilton was reluctant to participate, even in a book for a well-respected series on one of his great albums.

His reluctance let us fill in the blanks – likely as we would fill them in, not as he would. For years, I’ve thought that he was perhaps the perfect example of what the music business can make you. He’s best known for music he made at 16 as the hired voice of the Box Tops, a band that used little of his writing. With Big Star, he made remarkable music, but Stax Records had recently changed its distribution to Columbia, and problems between Stax and Columbia meant that their albums on the Stax-subsidiary Ardent got very poor distribution. He made records he wanted people to hear and no one heard them. After that, he made music that always had “fuck this business” as a subtext. As time has passed, I have come to suspect that reading; it’s too simple and too generic, based on how people would respond – how I might respond – rather than how he would. It’s very hard to write about Chilton and not speak personally.

But Chilton invited that sort of identification. Big Star’s not as revolutionary as its proponents claim, but it’s hard to think of a band that better reflected being young than it did. On all three albums, there’s an undercurrent of confusion and uncertainty, even in the optimistic songs, an undercurrent that would become the dominant thought on Sister Lovers. That spoke more clearly to me than the Beatles or countless singer/songwriters who seemed to have a far clearer handle on the world and their lives then I did then or now. Add to that the hard-to-find nature of Chilton’s recorded output and all the pieces were in place for Chilton to become a cult figure, the beloved of collectors and those who are certain that real music exists at the margins of the mainstream.

The L.A. Times‘ Ann Powers’ reflection on Chilton’s death illustrates this relationship with Chilton:

Somewhere in a trunk, I have a tattered souvenir from a Big Star store in Memphis, picked up on a pilgrimage to the South that I made when I was barely 21, when I set forth to find some mineral traces of the blues and early rock heritage I’d only read about in books.

What I found on that journey was Alex Chilton. I’d already come to love Big Star’s catalog, introduced to me via the mix tapes my friends and I made for each other as we built our own twisted history of Americana from what the band X once called “the unheard music.” Alex Chilton was a wandering, heretical patriarch of our new religion. Bands like the Replacements and R.E.M. found him inspirational. (Members of one such group, the Posies, would later play with a reformed Big Star.) College radio DJs turned Big Star’s catchy but unkempt songs into the hits they should have been the first time around. The band had been active in the 1970s, but they belonged to us, the kids fighting off the shadow of the Baby Boomers who’d been too dumb to realize how great it was.

We shook our messy hair to Big Star’s strutting rockers, like “In the Street” (the band’s best-known song, thanks to Cheap Trick’s version for “That 70s Show”), and “September Gurls,” party anthems that were like Led Zeppelin hits for the kids who got beaten up by real Zeppelin fans. And we slow danced to Chilton’s ballads, especially those from Big Star’s third album, “Sister Lovers,”  made after the band had basically fallen apart. That record remains one of the most lucid expressions of youthful sorrow in the annals of guitar pop, a perfect encapsulation of the pain of that worst, first heartbreak.

When Jon Dee Graham played the Ogden Museum of Southern Art recently, we connected when he warmed up before the doors opened with Big Star’s “13.” When he finished, I showed him photos of the lyrics to “13″ that someone had made into a series of illustrated posters and pasted up on a warehouse on Tchoupitoulas last August (one, “Would you be an outlaw for my love?” is weatherbeaten but still up, on a white wall on the lake side somewhere between Felicity and Race). He was blown away by the posters – the enigma they presented, and the reassurance that “13″ still speaks to people more than 30 years after its release and subsequent disappearance. It offers hope that there’s still a long possible shelf life for those toiling on the margins. When I let Graham know about Chilton’s death, he wrote, “Giants falling right and left; who can even pretend to the size of these immortal dead? Who WANTS to?”

It’s going to be hard to walk around SXSW and not measure bands with that yardstick in mind.

We’re getting closer and closer to the premiere of HBO’s new show Treme, centered around the lives of musicians in New Orleans. The newest trailer for the show, released yesterday, features Kermit Ruffins, Dr. John, members of Rebirth Brass Band, and more. Look for a preview of Treme in our upcoming April issue.

Washboard Rodeo plays the songs of classic Western Swing artists such as Bob Wills and Spade Cooley, and includes Neti Vaan and Matt Rhody on fiddles, Matt Johnson on guitar, James Walsh on acoustic bass, and of course Chaz on washboard and occasionally a snare drum.

For more information visit Washboard Chaz’ website or preview the songs here.

WTUL Record Fair Fall 2009

Over twenty vendors are booked this time, selling LPs, 45s, turntables, tapes and even (gasp) CDs. Confirmed vendors include Euclid Records of St. Louis, who recently announced a soon-to-be branch in New Orleans, Skully’z Recordz, Louisiana Music Factory, Jim Russell Records, Domino Sound Record Shack, and at least nine private sellers.

If you would like to be a vendor, WTUL is willing to expand the fair as much as possible with cheap table space to sell. To vendor, contact Hunter King at hunterking@inbox.com. The record fair has free admission and is open to the public. For more information go to WTUL’s Facebook event page.

Previous Arts Award Honorees include entertainers Julianna Margulies, Vanessa Williams, Matthew Modine, Gregory Hines, Brian Stokes Mitchell, Wynton Marsalis and Richard Thomas.

Donald Harrison

The program teaches vocals, brass, woodwind, rhythm, bass, guitar, percussion and piano to students in grades 7-12, and auditions are this Saturday, March 20, from noon-2 p.m. at Newman. Interested students should know the major scales and be able to play three songs. Owning an instrument is preferred.

Students interested in auditioning for New Jazz School must submit an application by Thursday to:

New Jazz School
1903 Jefferson Avenue
New Orleans LA 70115

or online here.  Call 896-6328 or write khebert@newmanschool.org for more information.