Professional Documents
Culture Documents
A Post-K Education
In this excerpt from the new edition of Up From the Cradle of Jazz,
one jazz tradition speaks to another.
he history of
New Orleans in
the wrenching
aftermath of Hurricane Katrina
can be telegraphed in one
sentence. Politics failed, culture
prevailed.
Jason Berry uses this thought to
start Memory of the Flood, a new
chapter added to the reprinted Up
From the Cradle of Jazz, the history
of New Orleans R&B generation
written with Jonathan Foose
and the late Tad Jones and first
published in 1986. For this edition,
he has added a new introduction, a
chapter that moves swiftly through
the 80s and 90s, and Memory of
the Flood, which underscores the
lesson New Orleans always knew
but remembered after Katrina
that communities can only count on
themselves.
On the night of May 13, 2008,
Dr. Michael White unfurled a lyrical
clarinet solo on What a Friend
We Have in Jesus, backed by the
Hot 8 Brass Band, in the Jazz &
Heritage Foundations reception hall
on North Rampart Street. Wearing
dark slacks and a blue button down
shirt with white stripes, White cut a
professorial image in sharp contrast
to the guys seated behind him in
T-shirts emblazoned with insignia
of the Hot 8. Three young players
wore dreadlocks. Another sat in a
wheelchair.
The irony of appearances
was not lost on the three dozen
people drawn to a rare evening
of performance, laced with
commentary about music and
state of the culture. White had just
released a new CD, Blue Crescent.
Most of the songs were original
compositions to push the threshold
of an idiom many people consider
static, its boundaries set and closed
by the likes of Jelly Roll Morton and
Louis Armstrong.
22
NOVEMBER 2009
By Jason Berry