On the morning of May 6, the last day of the 2007 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, the musicians’ grapevine was burning with the news of clarinetist and educator Alvin Batiste’s death. Batiste was scheduled to play that day at the Jazz Tent in support of his new album, Marsalis Music Honors Alvin Batiste, and many of the musicians who’d known him over the years planned to be there to visit him. Now they were making plans to mourn him and celebrate his life.
“I got calls from a whole b...