String Theory Media

Tears for the real music city

If this week's catastrophe called Katrina had happened to any other American city, I would be just as transfixed by the suffering, the devastation and the sorry federal response. But because one of its victims is dear New Orleans, I'm experiencing a fear and a grieving particular to that city's unique magic and its musical heritage. The half-submerged fair grounds and destroyed paddock leave me wondering if I'll ever see another Jazz Fest. Certainly the charming tumble-down neighborhoods surrounding the grounds will never be the same. The route we used to walk up Elysian Fields from the Quarter is a two-mile canal. I vividly recall sizing up the artfully decayed mansions and the massive trees there and thinking how fragile and ephemeral it all was. I was always conscious when I was in New Orleans that I might be seeing it for the last time, and now likely that sobering daydream has come true.

I live in a place called, aptly, Music City, but Nashville's title hinges more on its industrial infrastructure than its genes. Some talented artists did indeed grow up here, but the vast majority migrated here from elsewhere. By contrast, New Orleans is a musical net exporter. It would be enough to recognize that Louis Armstrong grew up there, nurtured in the city's musical bosom. But it goes so much deeper. Jelly Roll Morton, Mahalia Jackson, Professor Longhair, Dr. John, Sidney Bechet, the Marsalis clan, Alvin Batiste, the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, Pete Fountain, and dozens more. Born in New Orleans, where music flows like mother's milk, where it's in the walls and the streets and the clouds and the rain like no other place on earth. It's where American music's holiest marriage– Western classical sophistication and Afro-Caribbean syncopation -- took place. It's where the unadulterated blues, born of rank slave suffering became assimilated and decorated, flowering into jazz and blues music that articulates the human condition more concisely and to wider comprehension than any art form I have ever experienced.

I catalog the handful of places I've been able to experience and try to determine if they're safe. Word is Preservation Hall has survived the flood, though no one knows about looters, and the threat of fire remains high throughout the city. The Rock & Bowl, where I learned to zydeco to the pulsing sex-appeal of Rosie Ledet and the rustic joie-de-vivre of the late Boozoo Chavis, is in a flood zone. Tipitina's seems to be dry. But countless clubs – the small ones where careers develop and outsized epiphanies take place – are surely destroyed. And what of the record collections? The archives? The photos and the posters? How ravaged is the city's shared heritage? We won't know for a long time.

We know that Fats Domino got out by boat after enduring the flood at home, but his home, and thus his personal effects, were inundated. Most of the Neville family lost their homes. So did Allen Toussaint, quoted in a good piece in <a href="http://www.forbes.com/digitalentertainment/2005/09/02/katrina-hurricane-jazz-cx_tvr_0902jazz.html">Forbes</a> that details the city's musical woes.

I'll have more later. For now, I'm just praying for all the little-known musicians who make their living in New Orleans. I'm agonizing to see the very population that produces new generations of musicians and musical spirit – the poor blacks of the city – suffer so needlessly and so endlessly. I do believe the city has too much mojo for it to be ever extinguished, but the next time I feel the transporting beats that one can only hear in New Orleans, it will be in a changed and less joyous place.

Lessons Online

    A friend with long experience working for and around the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival (that king of festivals) has been put in charge of marketing a fascinating new business. WorkshopLive proposes to revolutionize on-line music lessons when it goes live this Fall. You wheel up to your computer with your guitar or trumpet or whatever and wend your way through personalized lessons with well-known players, accessed through a home page of your own construction. The company that’s raising money for this venture already has years and years experience running a national network of music camps and publishing instructional books. There, for a price, you can sit down face to face with Pat Metheny or Adian Legg (trust me that’s a very good thing) and get a sort of master class with no performance pressure. Transferring that experience to the broadband on-line universe is fraught with challenges. But they’re promising they’re breaking hours of in-house instructional video into about 10,000 lessons – little packets of ideas that one can try out, study and master. They’ve got most in-demand genres covered, and I can vouch for their marketing chief anyway. He loves his music. It’s clear talking to him that this whole venture is as much mission-driven as entrepreneurial.

     Music lessons need revolutionizing. There’s scarcely a more diffuse, random hodge-podge business in America. Make no mistake. There are thousands of really fantastic music teachers out there, working both freelance and in schools, even some of those guys who take teenagers into depressing closets at the local music mega-store and try to teach them to play like Flea in the Red Hot Chili Peppers. But it’s also clear that many of the people who claim to give music lessons, in every genre, are ineffective at best and, distressingly often, discouraging to the very impulse that brought the kid there in the first place. Most parents aren’t going to have any way to figure out who’s good and who’s bogus. Most people who take music lessons quit, and yet most people take that as a sign of how busy people get and not an indicator of poor pedagogy.
    Sure, pursuing music past those awkward years and into adulthood seems like an indulgence to some people. And no, it’s not everybody’s thing. But I’ve been convinced for years that a vast percentage of Americans would be happier and more fulfilled if they actually made music with others on a weekly basis. And how many of those folks narrowly missed their window of opportunity because of a lousy teacher, either overly dogmatic or overly indulgent, too square or too arrogantly hip, too poorly trained themselves or just too flaky to really nurture that frustrating, dynamic, hyper-stimulated being that is the modern teenager?

I’ve hunted for good data on the overall effectiveness of music lessons in  America, but I’ve not hit paydirt yet, should anyone care to point me in the right direction. In the meantime, I wish WorkshopLive well. They have a great shot at connecting folks with instruments and the buzz of each new increment of competence.