If you dig music, dig a little deeper

The Jazz Foundation of America's Musicians Emergency Fund stepped up big time to help New Orleans musicians after Hurricane Katrina and its catastrophic flooding aftermath. And it is preparing to reach out to Texas jazz, blues and roots musicians affected by Hurricane Harvey.

The Jazz Foundation will help them rebuild, repairing homes, replacing belongings and treasured instruments and even replacing work.

Here's a link where you can join me and others in the music community in supporting this great effort.

Some background if you're unfamiliar. The Jazz Foundation brought over 1,000 musicians and their families back after Katrina by rehousing them, donating top-shelf instruments and creating paying gigs for hundreds. 

It also was there for hundreds affected by Superstorm Sandy. It also helped rebuild the homes of the musicians who lost everything in last year's devastating floods in Baton Rouge.

For 26 years, the Jazz Foundation has been keeping jazz and blues alive by helping the musicians who have played with everyone from Duke Ellington and Billie Holiday to Jimi Hendrix and The Rolling Stones. It assists in more than 5,000 cases a year nationwide.

A Must Read

John Swenson, my music writing collaborator for many years at UPI, is out with a gem. “New Atlantis: Musicians Battle for the Survival of New Orleans” (Oxford University Press) captures the determination of New Orleans’ stylistically varied music makers to survive after Hurricane Katrina and to help keep the city’s soul alive.

John has been writing almost exclusively about New Orleans and its musicians since the late 1990s, principally for Offbeat magazine, and has come to understand his adopted city well. (He splits his time between New York and the Crescent City.) As you dig into this book, you’ll fast appreciate the depth of his keen understanding of the city’s contemporary music scene (jazz, R&B, brass band, rock, and hip hop), as well as the music’s deep roots.

The city’s problems are far from solved post-Katrina (or as John repeatedly calls it, “the federal flood”) in August 2005. But through John’s insightful perspective and to-the-point writing, we get an appreciation of just how important music and its makers are to its continued rebirth.

There is more than just a cultural phenomenon at play here, in a city where music is so much more than mere entertainment. As John reflected in an interview with The Beachcomber: “New Orleans musicians treat music like a sacred trust, handed down from their ancestors. It’s different from the commercial pop world.”

It is so very different, and the United States, and indeed, the world, are so much richer because of it.

Hope amid New Orleans’ slower-than-slow recovery

Another glimmer of hope and positivity among turtle-slow efforts to bring New Orleans back from the ravages of Hurricane Katrina occurred in grand style on Thursday night, January 8.

It was the reopening of the Mahalia Jackson Theater of the Performing Arts in Armstrong Park. A $22 million renovation brought the theater back from the brink of ruin three years ago. The opening concert featured local musical fixtures (would anything else be appropriate?) including the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, Rebirth Brass Band, Irma Thomas, Freddy Omar, Marva Wright, Philip Manuel, Michael Ward and Ingrid Lucia.

One other appropriate touch… tickets were free but were required since seating was limited.

For reopening details, check out Michelle Krupa’s reporting in The Times-Picayune, The curtain rises at Mahalia Jackson Theater.

Since President-elect Barack Obama has made it clear that an essential ingredient in America’s recovery from the current economic travail is rebuilding the country’s infrastructure as a way to put people back to work, he ought to make sure a lot of that effort is committed to rebuilding New Orleans. In that way, Obama can fulfill the promise that W. made but soon forgot as his presidency spiraled and sputtered out of control in so many ways.