The Preservation Hall 60th Anniversary Celebration, held in the sold-out orpheum Theater in New Orleans this past May, began with a song of mourning. “Take My Hand, Precious Lord” is one of the most recorded gospel songs in history, perhaps best known for the rendition performed by New Orleans’s own Mahalia Jackson at Martin Luther King Jr.’s funeral. Here, it was led by Ivan Neville, one of the night’s many guests, its solemn tone befitting a commemoration that had been so repeatedly deferred by various waves of Covid-19 that the anniversary it celebrated was in fact the 61st. Even then, the show barely went on. Nearly all of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, the hall’s elite touring ensemble, and several members of its staff had spent the week with bouts of Covid. This included Ben Jaffe, who is not only the band’s tuba player, bassist and leader but also Preservation Hall’s owner and creative director and the steward of nearly every other aspect of its present and future.
Jaffe’s mother, Sandra, was among the musical figures lost in the year-plus since the concert was first scheduled. She died in December, at age 83. That morning, Jaffe visited the Jewish cemetery where she was buried beside her husband, Allan. The elder Jaffes built Preservation Hall into an internationally known institution that, as the legend goes, all but single-handedly saved New Orleans jazz from extinction. This story was invoked even before the Orpheum curtain rose to the opening chords of Neville’s keyboard, revealing the P.H.J.B. frozen onstage.
“We are all so grateful that your parents, Allan and Sandra, decided to honeymoon in New Orleans, following some musician friends of ‘Larry’s Gallery’ at 726 St. Peter Street,” said Mark Romig, a New Orleans tourism official better known for his first-down calls as the announcer at Saints games. “The rest,” he went on, “is history.”
Indeed, what followed was a kind of primer on more than a century of New Orleans music, including the traditional jazz that made Preservation Hall famous, the call and response of the Mardi Gras Indians and the R.&B. soul of Irma Thomas, who, at 81, performed “You Can Have My Husband (But Please Don’t Mess With My Man),” a hit that predated the hall itself. Elvis Costello appeared, to pay tribute to Allen Toussaint; Big Freedia twerked. The Afro-Cuban hip-hop star Cimafunk rapped on top of a P.H.J.B. composition that grew out of the group’s exploration of New Orleans music’s Cuban roots. Despite his own recent recovery from Covid, the saxophonist Charlie Gabriel, who was 89 at the time and has become something of Preservation Hall’s presiding spirit, played and swayed throughout.
In the manner of bassists since the beginning of time, Ben Jaffe spent most of the night simultaneously in the background and at the center of all this action. Guest stars notwithstanding, he may have been the most recognizable figure on the stage, with his trademark owl glasses, disarrangement of tight curls and stiff gait, a result of a rare form of arthritis he has endured since he was a teenager. So iconic has his look become that this year’s Super Bowl halftime show used a Jaffe look-alike named Devon Taylor when it wanted to signify “New Orleans tuba player.”
Jaffe was trailed throughout the night by a camera crew gathering footage for a potential documentary about the anniversary. If there is one thing that Preservation Hall does better and with more commitment than playing music, it is telling its own story. I happened to be with Jaffe almost a year earlier when he was on the phone trying to secure funding for a different documentary. Projects like this seem to swirl around Jaffe, with money for them appearing to fall from the sky in chunks. “I learned from my father to always have 10 irons in the fire, and 10 balls in the air,” he told me that day, with a smile.
That may be an undercount of balls and irons. Under Jaffe’s relentless prodding and promotion, the organization he took over in 1993 has found itself in a moment of remarkable creative diversity. It has come to present multiple, sometimes contradictory faces to the world: local institution and world-famous touring act, tourist attraction and philanthropic powerhouse, musical innovator and provider of background music that signals “New Orleans” as clearly as the Eiffel Tower does Paris.
It is also a white-owned and white-run institution with a self-described mission to “preserve, protect and perpetuate” one of the nation’s greatest Black cultural legacies; a site of historic tolerance during the worst of the Civil Rights Era but also a place that critics, both inside and outside its walls, have long referred to as “Plantation Hall.” In short, a place where seemingly all the knotty questions of race and culture, creation and consumption, ownership and inclusion that face not only New Orleans but all of America are on blaring display.
Last year, amid the continuing tumult following George Floyd’s murder, Ben Jaffe brought up some of these issues unbidden. In our conversations, he spoke about Black Lives Matter and the questions about privilege and representation in the arts being asked by institutions like his across the country. He said he had grown increasingly uncomfortable with his role as the face of Preservation Hall. After Hurricane Katrina, in 2005, he said, he stepped into the spotlight out of necessity. “I knew I had the ability to drive people’s attention and awareness,” he told me. But more recently, he went on, he “became very aware and self-conscious that the attention was being directed toward me and I was being asked to do more and more that required my opinion and my voice.” He even suggested that he planned to step back from performing with the band: “Preservation Hall doesn’t need me as a musician anymore,” he said. “The worst thing in the world would be to have Ben Jaffe’s picture on the cover of a magazine and it be like ‘Ben Jaffe’s Preservation Hall Band.’”
Even so, 13 months later, it was indisputably still Ben Jaffe standing up on the Orpheum stage. And it was his rendition of Preservation Hall’s story, of its history and importance, being retold and celebrated. I had spent the intervening year talking to musicians, philanthropists, academics, community members and other observers in and out of the hall’s orbit and come to see that, for all there is worth celebrating, there is a more complicated version of its story: one in which six decades of white leadership have created a range of quiet but pointed divisions around issues of management, musician pay and even what kinds of music the band plays. Like jazz itself, Preservation Hall is a rich but thorny inheritance — for New Orleans, for Ben Jaffe and for the musicians who have been its lifeblood since the beginning.
Allan and Sandra Jaffe really did stop in New Orleans on their way back from Mexico City during their honeymoon — and, like quite a few visitors before and since, they never managed to leave. Allan, a graduate of Wharton, took a job at a local department store, but the couple soon fell in with a coterie of music lovers concerned about the waning presence of New Orleans jazz. A pair of them, Barbara Reid and Ken Mills, had for several years been putting on concerts featuring veteran musicians at a St. Peter Street gallery owned by an art dealer and entrepreneur named Larry Borenstein. In September 1961, glimpsing the potential for profit, or at least increased professionalism, Borenstein handed the keys to the more business-minded Jaffes. (It is to this date that the current hall, not quite historically, dates its anniversary.)
Half a century earlier, jazz grew out of New Orleans’s brothels, bars and street parades — one of the few permissible modes of Black public expression, if not the only one, in a time of institutionalized white supremacy. Its foundations (polyphony, syncopation, call and response, improvisation) reached further back, to Congo Square, the marketplace outside the French Quarter where enslaved people were allowed to gather on Sundays. There, they fused what the historian Joel Dinerstein calls “a new musical hybrid,” combining rhythms and dancing from Africa, Europe and the Caribbean. By the time the Jaffes arrived, though, the creative and commercial heart of jazz had been elsewhere for many years. Epochal musicians like Louis Armstrong and Sidney Bechet had long since been heading north or overseas, in search of more modern ears and more hospitable racial climes. New postwar styles like bebop dominated jazz clubs in New York and Chicago, while “New Orleans music” had increasingly come to mean the revolutionary rhythm and blues of artists like Fats Domino and Dave Bartholomew. The older jazz style was more likely to be found as nostalgic background music at white uptown parties and restaurants or rebranded as “Dixieland” at clubs like Bourbon Street’s Famous Door, where a promotional postcard featured an enslaved person reclining on a bale of cotton.
The Famous Door was the kind of place against which Preservation Hall, half a block away, defined itself. The Jaffes refused to sell alcohol and demanded attentive silence. Sandra was a legendary shusher, and a quick hook; if she judged that a visitor was drunk, rowdy or otherwise not inclined to properly appreciate the music, he was quickly redirected next door to Pat O’Brien’s bar, home of the hurricane cocktail. Onstage they put giants who had found themselves underemployed or out of music altogether: George Lewis, Punch Miller, Sweet Emma Barrett. Some had been present to hear jazz in its very earliest incarnations, like the bassist Papa John Joseph, who had played with Buddy Bolden himself. Joseph had spent the last several decades as a barber.
Both the Famous Door and Preservation Hall were, in their own ways, selling a notional New Orleans. The first evoked a familiar antebellum idyll; the other, a more modern fantasy of a place where a Creolized history, relative tolerance and shared passion for a sui generis Black culture provided safe harbor from the storm of racial strife swirling outside: a kind of South outside the South. The business of New Orleans has always been, to some extent, the business of fulfilling a fantasy of New Orleans. This dynamic had reached a new level of urgency by the 1960s, just in time for the birth of Preservation Hall. The historian J. Mark Souther has argued that as the other industries that had built New Orleans — shipping, banking, petroleum — declined, what was left was “culture”: food, architecture, music and so on, nearly all of it indebted to the city’s Black and Creole population.
“The resurrection of Dixieland jazz reveals the advance in the postwar years of the notion that responding to tourists’ expectations served New Orleans’ economic interests,” Souther writes in “New Orleans on Parade: Tourism and the Transformation of the Crescent City.” “What had started as a reinvigoration of a Black music genre by jazz enthusiasts gradually became a cash cow for tourism promoters.”
This is not to say that it couldn’t be both. By all accounts the bond between Allan Jaffe and the musicians he employed was genuine and deep. He played tuba in Harold Dejan’s Olympia Brass Band, one of the few white musicians to be granted that level of inclusion in the Black world of street parades, and he spent his days driving around town on his orange Vespa, seeking out old musicians. To these men (then, as now, they were all but exclusively male) he offered not only a stage and respectful audience but also, once he started the touring Preservation Hall Jazz Band, access to the most rarefied corners of white high culture: Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall. And he formed close friendships with them, often helping out with medical bills and other emergencies.
If in 2022 this reads as an inescapable example of what we now call white saviorship, it had clear benefits for both audiences and musicians. “You could say it was paternalistic, but Jaffe genuinely cared about these musicians, and in a way really loved them,” says Tom Sancton, whose memoir, “Song for My Fathers,” chronicles his teenage years learning clarinet at the Hall. “They were part of a broader family he had become a part of, and I think most of them felt that way about him — that it was not simply an employer-employee relationship. And I also think they were genuinely happy to have the work.”
And, of course, the reality of the times dictated the structure. It fell to a white man to create a place like Preservation Hall, Ben Jaffe says, for the obvious reason that, in 1961, “a Black man couldn’t do it.”
It was true, too, that Preservation Hall served as an unusual oasis of tolerance, even in the French Quarter, which was notoriously unfriendly to Black visitors. Dodie Smith-Simmons, who at 18 was among the Freedom Riders who traveled across the South challenging segregation, found a sort of second home at the hall, eventually working the door, selling merchandise and later becoming the touring band’s road manager. Once, she says, a passing drunk hurled a racial slur at her through the doorway, and Sandra Jaffe grabbed him by the tie and punched him.
For all that, the Jaffes preferred to operate on the premise that race didn’t exist. “My parents knew the consequences” of openly discussing the topic, Jaffe says. “They knew the potential repercussions for the musicians and for themselves. They were very much like: ‘We don’t exist. I don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s just happening.’ They wanted to be invisible.”
Still, complications had a way of poking through. What, for instance, to do about Pork Chops and Kidney Stew? Those were the stage names of two Black dancers, Oliver Anderson and Isaac Mason, who performed in loud plaid suits and wide grins at the Famous Door and other clubs on Bourbon Street. They were, by all accounts, pyrotechnically talented. “When I talk to guys who remember them, they’re like, ‘Oh, my God, they were the greatest of all time!’” Jaffe says. “It was athletic. It was amazing. But it was also a lot of the things we consider to be minstrelsy. Someone had to make that call: ‘This is where we draw the line.’” Whatever their gifts, Pork Chops and Kidney Stew were not welcome at Preservation Hall.
If, sometime in the past 61 years, you have been among the tens of thousands of visitors to line up on St. Peter Street and make it through Preservation Hall’s creaky iron gate, you know how much genuine power still resides there. Inside the gate is a narrow brick passageway, lined with old posters. At its end, you glimpse a courtyard walled by worn brick and shaded by banana trees. To the left, you are ushered into the simple room where music is played: wood floors, backless wood benches, a classic tableau of standup piano, drum kit and music stands. On the wall are moody Noel Rockmore portraits of long-gone musicians, hung perfectly askew. The light is amber, bordering on sepia. If it’s true that we eat with our eyes, Preservation Hall is proof that we listen with them too.
The elements at play in that room can almost seem too volatile. “Sometimes you see people and their tears just start flowing,” says the Preservation Hall Jazz Band drummer Walter Harris. He chokes up himself thinking about it. “They come over and ask you: ‘I’m feeling something. What am I feeling?’” To hear the trumpeter Wendell Brunious, a member of a century-old New Orleans musical family tree, close his first set back in the hall after its Covid shutdown with the Mardi Gras Indian anthem “Big Chief” was to feel that you were tapped into the deepest parts of America’s racial and musical history, awash in a wave of joy and mourning that stretched from the birth of the country straight through the lost Mardi Gras days of the pandemic. Never mind that Brunious has played that number for decades. Or that the room had been left by the Jaffes in its state of immaculate decay to create, or at least not dispel, the illusion that it was itself a birthplace of jazz. (Those sites, if New Orleans could summon the will and resources to preserve them, would be located outside the French Quarter.) Or that the gate is said to be intentionally left unoiled, the better to ensure its atmospheric creak.
Ben Jaffe grew up between the small village of the Quarter and the world stage, surrounded by musicians both legendary and journeyman. The Quarter may have still held traces of its bohemian past, but the Jaffes were anything but hip. “My father had two pairs of pants: a tan pair which was his day pair and a dark blue pair which were his dress-up, performance pants,” Jaffe says. “Once a year we would go to Sears to replace them.” They avoided gatherings outside the hall and built almost no social circle outside of its musicians. Though they began accumulating French Quarter real estate, they were mortally wary of any ostentation. The family did not own a car. Their apartment featured two televisions stacked atop each other, one with sound, the other with picture, both controlled by pliers.
Jaffe’s first love was football, which he played until the onset of a condition called ankylosing spondylitis, which, among other miseries, leads to the fusion of your vertebrae. Since he was 14, Jaffe has nearly always been in some level of pain. Nevertheless, Ben and his older brother each took up the physically demanding tuba. (Technically, it is a sousaphone, in the same way that technically a crawfish is a crayfish; neither is a word you are likely to hear on the streets of New Orleans.)
Of course, the tuba was also Allan Jaffe’s instrument. It is hard to have a conversation of more than five minutes with Ben without the subject of his father coming up. His stewardship of Preservation Hall is defined by a push-and-pull with his father’s legacy, reflecting a relationship that was both reverent and strained. The two clashed over Ben’s more flamboyant sense of style as well as his interest in more modern jazz, which might as well have been punk rock in the Jaffe household. “He was hard on the boys,” says Ben’s childhood best friend, Aaron Wolfson, who now sits on the board of the Preservation Hall Foundation. Allan once praised Wolfson’s drum-playing, calling him a natural musician. “I never got a compliment like that,” Ben later told him.
Ben was 16 when Allan died in 1987, at 51, of melanoma. Ben soon left for Oberlin College, where he studied bass. The plan was to move to New York after graduation, to pursue a music career there. Instead, as graduation approached, he found himself drawn home, alarmed by the state of Preservation Hall, which had been run by his mother and aunt since Allan’s death. Lines still formed nightly on St. Peter Street. The touring band had chugged along for decades, building an audience in every corner of the globe; there were actually now three lineups, traveling the world simultaneously. If New Orleans jazz once risked being forgotten, it was now, thanks in great part to the Jaffes, a venerated piece of high culture. But the cure also proved to be a kind of poison, or at least formaldehyde.
“I just knew, energetically, that something was wrong,” Jaffe says. “It was like, there was music going on everywhere in the city, and then we were this other thing. I blinked and the perception had changed to, ‘Oh, it’s a museum.’”
So Jaffe took over the family business. (Russell Jaffe, Ben’s older brother, took a different path, becoming a speech and language pathologist who now practices in St. Louis.) The day after graduation, he flew to Paris to play bass with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band and begin assuming leadership of the hall. If Preservation Hall’s own success had cut it off from the living stream of New Orleans culture, his aim was to bring it back.
It didn’t happen overnight. Clint Maedgen described the scene when he joined the band in 2004: “There would literally be people carried out by paramedics during our performances. We would stop a song and there would be loud squealing noises in the audience, and it would be the cranked-up hearing aids. And these people weren’t necessarily bringing their grandkids.”
Jaffe says his first 10 years at the helm were spent figuring out the basics of how to run a business. At the same time, he was beginning to address what he saw as the hall’s spiritual and artistic problems. These could be summed up by one title: “When the Saints Go Marching In.”
New Orleans’s most famous song probably began as a 19th-century hymn. It became an iconic anthem after Louis Armstrong recorded it in 1938, and it has been inextricably linked to Preservation Hall ever since Allan Jaffe hung a sign over the stage:
Traditional Request — $1
Others — $2
The Saints — $5
It was something of a gag, a way to point out the cliché “Saints” had become and to spare the band from having to play it five times a night. But audiences either missed the joke or took it as a challenge. Each night, they filled the tip jar — even when Jaffe raised the price to $10 and then $20.
Naturally the musicians appreciated that. But to Jaffe, “Saints” was emblematic of every “Nawlins” cliché that Preservation Hall risked becoming. As his parents did with Pork Chops and Kidney Stew, he considers it part of his job to protect performers from their own worst instincts. “There are certain things you do where you realize, ‘Oh, this is going to get a reaction.’ And one of those things is when you pull out the white handkerchief and start doing the Louis voice,” he says. The band stopped playing “Saints” to close its shows. At the hall, the sign came down.
There were other changes. The Ben Jaffe era at Preservation Hall took hold in earnest when he hired Maedgen to be the touring band’s saxophonist. Maedgen, whose persona suggests a melding of John Waters and Tom Waits, had been making a living as a deliveryman at a French Quarter restaurant while also hosting a free-for-all variety burlesque show called “The New Orleans Bingo! Show.” Jaffe decided to take the Bingo show on tour with Preservation Hall Jazz Band. The new direction was a step too far for some, with several longtime band members quitting, including Wendell Brunious, who told Vanity Fair: “They got clowns running out in the audience. What the hell is that all about? It’s almost a violation.” (Brunious has since returned.)
After Katrina, the hall emerged as a kind of house band for mainstream acts in search of New Orleans flavor. The band became a fixture at festivals like Bonnaroo and toured with My Morning Jacket, whose frontman, Jim James, went on to help produce “That’s It!,” the hall’s first-ever album of original music. With members of Arcade Fire, Jaffe organized a street parade through the French Quarter to commemorate David Bowie’s death; the band wore red shirts in what was a shocking departure from their customary white shirt and ties. To those who expressed outrage over these developments, Jaffe would retort that traditional jazz, and Preservation Hall in particular, had always intermingled with mainstream music. Over the stage at the hall itself, not far from where the “Saints” sign once hung, he placed a 1968 poster from the Fillmore in San Francisco, advertising the Preservation Hall Jazz Band opening for the Grateful Dead.
There’s a popular T-shirt slogan in New Orleans, coined by an artist who goes by the name Phlegm: “Everything You Love About New Orleans Is Because of Black People.” It’s a truism that implies another: that Black people have rarely reaped the appropriate reward for their contribution to the city’s culture.
When you speak to musicians and other people in the hall’s orbit, it is not long before you begin to hear pointed grumbling about the institution under Ben Jaffe. Some is about his creative direction; it is often said, not very kindly, that Jaffe’s real goal is to become a “rock star,” using the platform of the hall to get there. Other complaints go deeper. In 2010, the Grammy-winning trumpeter Nicholas Payton wrote a blog post after the death of his father, Walter Payton, a longtime Preservation Hall musician. Payton’s screed was colored by grief and what seemed like personal animus; he and Jaffe (whom Payton pointedly called by his childhood nickname, Benji) had known each other since elementary school. Nevertheless, it encapsulated many of the critiques one still hears: that Jaffe can be perceived as a disrespectful and imperious boss. That he puts the interests of himself and the hall above those of the men who play there. That he pays musicians too little while the hall grows rich. Such behavior was “endemic of those who have controlled things in the music industry since its inception,” Payton wrote. “From my vantage point, he’s nothing but a vile predator who sucks the life blood out of the artists whom he uses to help maintain his wealth and status. None of whom receive a fair percentage of the wages which they work so tirelessly to earn.”
Jaffe says he has been aware of such criticisms since the days he would overhear them whispered about his father. He considers much of it to be an inevitable condition of being the boss. “You learn to differentiate between someone’s frustration and anger, the need to criticize because that’s how they get attention, and something that’s real,” he says.
Still, the grumbling is widespread, even if few are willing to grumble on the record, whether out of genuine ambivalence about criticizing an institution they love or fear of losing their employment.
“It would be great if people could just be honest with Ben, but he might just haul off and fire you,” says Bradley Williams, who worked for four years at both the Preservation Hall Foundation and the hall itself, and was in a unique position to hear the complaints and concerns of its corps of musicians. “You might not have no gigs no more. Things might change for you.”
Williams was 26 when he came to work at the hall in 2016, a year after following a girlfriend to New Orleans from Baltimore. The son of a jazz percussionist, he’s still not sure how he made it through the job interview, he was so excited. At first, he worked the door at night, selling tickets and sometimes stepping inside to introduce the band. He noted how few staff members of color, aside from the musicians, the hall employed — and how even fewer were Black. Visitors noticed, too. “Black customers would come up to me and ask, ‘So, where are we all at?’” he says. The absence felt even starker when Williams moved over to become a program associate at the Preservation Hall Foundation, where he poured himself into educational programs at local schools and prisons. There, he was the sole Black employee.
Williams’s boss, the program director Ashley Shabankareh, who wrote the foundation’s founding documents, says she tried to call attention to the hall’s diversity issue for much of the 13 years she worked there. “It was a consistent conversation: ‘Uh, does anybody else find it weird that we’re an organization promoting Black culture and we’re an almost all-white staff?’” she says. Management’s response, says Shabankareh, who is of Middle Eastern descent, was either to say that they were simply hiring the most qualified people or to ignore the issue altogether. Until recently, the foundation’s board consisted of Ben and his wife, Jeanette, as well as two of Ben’s longtime friends, both also white, though it has since added several members of color. Williams says he was discouraged from talking to donors about his educational programs at the many fund-raising events the foundation held. “I was often told: ‘That’s not what they’re here for. They want to have a good time,’” he says. This became an ongoing concern: the sense that the foundation cared less about the programs he was committed to and more about throwing a perpetual party for rich white donors — even as its fund-raising marketing centered entirely on images of Black men.
“If the kids are important, if the music is what’s important, if supporting musicians is what’s important, then that’s what we should be focused on,” he says.
Branden Lewis joined the Preservation Hall Jazz Band as its trumpet player in 2016. Only four years earlier, he was busking on a street in the French Quarter. Lewis, 33, grew up in Los Angeles, but his grandfather was the saxophonist for the New Orleans R.&B. band Li’l Millet and His Creoles, the kind of lineage that goes a long way with Ben Jaffe. Lewis has emerged as a charismatic frontman with a lyrical style. He says Jaffe has been a father figure to him, but he has also found himself frustrated by many aspects of his time at Preservation Hall. He, too, wonders about the lack of Black leadership, for instance. And he bristles at the hall’s liberal use of the word “collective” to describe the musicians who play in its various bands, when in fact creative decision-making is tightly controlled by Jaffe and his small management team. The musicians are all freelancers, paid by the gig and without benefits. “If there was some sort of profit-sharing, or a democratic process behind the artistic direction, yeah, I could agree it was a collective,” Lewis says. “Until then, we’re just a very unique group of hired guns.”
Like many, Lewis also wonders about the hall’s pay structure. Rank-and-file musicians at the hall make $200 for four sets per night, with the band leader making $240. Even Preservation Hall Jazz Band members are gig workers, paid $270 when they play the hall and between $550 and $800 per show on the road. These fees are at the top of the market for local music clubs, though it’s debatable how much that should be a cause for celebration. (“Are we going by a minimum wage?” Lewis asks. “Is that where the bar is?”) According to the Music and Culture Coalition of New Orleans, an advocacy group, musicians’ pay has stayed roughly the same since the 1980s, while rent in the city has nearly doubled. Whether the creators of the culture that defines New Orleans can afford to actually live in New Orleans has become a matter of acute local anxiety. When the pandemic hit in 2020, the foundation’s focus shifted to providing relief, in the form of stipends, to its corps of 60 out-of-work musicians. For many, if not all, of the recipients, the payments were a vital lifeline. “Without it, things would have been different for me,” says Will Smith, who received about $1,000 per month. “That could easily be some guy’s rent, or even their mortgage and a car note.” Still, it is striking that in 2020 alone the hall brought in nearly $3 million in Covid-related donations and distributed just over $1 million in grant and emergency-relief payments that year and the next. At least some of the remainder, Jaffe says, is meant to be a bulwark against whatever the next calamity may be.
Early in the pandemic, the hall was one of 20 music organizations selected by Spotify to receive matching Covid relief grants from a pool of $10 million. In April 2020, both Williams and Shabankareh were told they would have to take furloughs. That June, Paul McCartney and Dave Grohl were among the guests to participate in a live-streamed fund-raiser that raised more than $300,000. Neither Williams nor Shabankareh have heard from Preservation Hall since, even as the foundation’s educational programs have restarted. Williams believes his outspokenness and willingness to challenge Jaffe, especially on issues of race and equity, contributed to the end of his time at the hall.
Jaffe praises the work of both former employees but says the layoffs were a necessary response to the foundation’s new emergency focus. As for the question of the hall’s low number of Black employees, he insists that the organization is committed to diversity but that the goal is easier stated than accomplished. “We, and every other business I know in New Orleans, struggles to find qualified people,” he says. “We’re not New York. Our bench isn’t five people deep. We don’t even have a bench.”
Williams, like others, was surprised to hear that Jaffe had raised the issue of Black Lives Matter. He remembers a staff retreat, held in Mississippi, in August 2017. This was not long after two Black men had been killed by Louisiana law enforcement in separate incidents. At the retreat, Williams brought up the idea of addressing the events with the hall’s corps of overwhelmingly Black musicians. “I told Ben, ‘The musicians are probably thinking about this,’” he says. “This is real to them.”
Jaffe’s answer, Williams says, was to hold one hand above the other, denoting two different levels. “That’s happening down here,” he said, waving the lower hand. “We’re up here. We live above that stuff.”
Jaffe told me he was likely referring to “the power of music” to say more than words, adding, “Bradley wouldn’t be privy to the private conversations I had with musicians at that time.” Still, it’s hard not to hear in the story an echo of Allan and Sandra Jaffe’s wish that Preservation Hall exist somehow beyond race.
In 1978, the concert impresario George Wein was summoned to a meeting held in New Orleans’s St. Bernard housing project. Wein, who died in 2021, was, like the Jaffes, a Jewish Northeasterner besotted with New Orleans culture. In 1970, he founded the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. Eight years later, Jazz Fest had grown from a small local affair to a major, and profitable, tourist attraction. Now he had been called to the projects by a group calling itself the Afrikan American Jazz Festival Coalition. The meeting, as he describes it in his memoirs, grew quickly tense. A man in a dashiki laid out the group’s position: Black talent, Black art and Black labor were at the center of Jazz Fest’s popularity. Going forward, there would need to be more Black voices at every level of the festival’s management and decision-making. “We were saying, ‘You’re not gonna have a major event, and make money off of Black culture, and not include Black people in the decision-making process,’” one activist, Kalamu ya Salaam, said, according to the anthropologist Helen A. Regis.
One of the festival’s first Black board members, Marion Greenup, reflected that it marked the moment that Jazz Fest’s organizers, well-meaning as they may have been, began to realize the event couldn’t be “simply a celebration that didn’t have more lasting effects for the community.” By the next year, Jazz Fest included an area called Koindu that was not only devoted to Black arts but autonomously controlled by Black programmers. Jazz Fest still receives no shortage of local criticism and complaint, but Congo Square, as the section was eventually renamed, has become a vital piece of each year’s event.
Preservation Hall is both like and unlike Jazz Fest. On the one hand, it is a privately held French Quarter music venue and a privately held touring band (the P.H.J.B., which is technically a different company). On the other, it presents itself (and fund-raises) as something closer to a public trust. Which of these you happen to focus on — or which the hall prefers to emphasize at any given time — tends to determine how you view Preservation Hall, and Jaffe’s role and responsibilities as its steward.
On the issue of musicians’ wages, Jaffe speaks like the small-business owner that he partly is, pointing out the economics of a venue that can accommodate fewer than 100 people at a time (though it often seems as if more are crammed in there), doesn’t sell booze and has been subject to a Job’s catalog of external challenges. “It’s always been my mission to find creative ways to create financial stability for the hall, to keep pulling rabbits out of my hat,” he says. “For 25 years, it’s been: ‘Here’s another rabbit. Here’s another rabbit. Oh, Katrina? Here’s three rabbits.’ Should musicians be paid more? Yes. The number should be higher. But I don’t know where it would come from.”
By and large, the musicians — even those who have strong critiques of the hall in other areas — seem to see the situation through a similar lens, if with a more fatalistic bent. Sure, they would like to make more, they say, but such is the lot of their profession. And the hall is better than most. “Some places on Bourbon Street, you get $5 a set,” says Don Vappie, a member of the American Banjo Museum Hall of Fame who clashed frequently with Jaffe during his nearly 20-year-long tenure with the hall and eventually departed over their differences. “Some places you get nothing but tips.”
New Orleans musicians are accustomed to piecing together a patchwork of gigs high and low, says the P.H.J.B.’s pianist, Kyle Roussel, who, among other things, plays Sunday mornings alongside the renowned drummer Herlin Riley at the tiny Greater New Home Missionary Baptist Church, in the Lower Ninth Ward. Even world-class musicians may find themselves playing one night at the 2,100-seat Mahalia Jackson Theater, the next on a platform by baggage claim at Louis Armstrong Airport. So, is it possible to make a living as a member of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band? “Yes,” Roussel says. He also says he doesn’t know anyone who actually does.
Jaffe points to the Preservation Hall Foundation’s Legacy Program, which provides monthly stipends and other support to musicians who performed with the hall for 10 years or longer and are now older than 60. The Legacy stipends range from $500 to $4,000 a month. Roderick Paulin, an occasional Preservation Hall musician who last year formed the advocacy group the Musician’s Council on Fair Wages, says this is above and beyond the standards of most clubs. “I don’t know any other musical organization that is doing something like that,” Paulin says. “What it does, mentally and physically, is let these musicians know they’re not forgotten. I think it’s totally awesome.” Jaffe says the foundation’s recently rebooted educational programs also provide support for musicians, who are paid to play at schools or participate as mentors. They also play at foundation fund-raising events. As of September, the foundation had hired 52 musicians this year for almost 900 hours of paid work.
Asked about musicians’ wages, Jaffe quickly grows impatient. “I’ve never heard a musician anywhere talk about how well they’re treated,” he says. “You go anywhere and the musicians ‘don’t get paid enough’; they’re ‘not admired enough’; they’re ‘not respected enough.’”
The idea of giving Preservation Hall’s musicians a more traditional salary, he insisted, is “against the grain of the way that musicians in New Orleans interact with the music community.” Most of the hall’s musicians, he said, wouldn’t want to be salaried employees.
In the end, though, it is clear that the issue for Jaffe is not merely one of dollars and cents. “When musicians play at Preservation Hall they have difficulty even understanding it: ‘Oh, my God, people aren’t bumping into me. They’re not spilling their drinks and talking over me,’” he says. “It’s the unique place where the audience is doing what musicians always argue they don’t do, which is sit and listen to them. I don’t know how to turn that regard into compensation. Because the regard is the compensation.”
It is fair to wonder what Preservation Hall would be if its underlying reality was closer to the other vision — the one celebrated in documentaries and extolled in fund-raising materials. What if Jaffe were committed to a structural evolution as radical as the creative one he has pursued with such success and determination? There is a blueprint in place for the entire Preservation Hall operation to be taken under the foundation’s wing, thus becoming a nonprofit and theoretically removing one obstacle to change. But the goal of that complicated transaction, which Jaffe says will be completed in the next two to five years, is to ensure that the hall outlives him and his family, not necessarily to rock the boat. “The best-case scenario is that nobody even notices the transition,” he says.
What if instead of the Legacy program — essentially a formalized version of the ad hoc aid that Allan Jaffe once provided his musicians — the hall took the more direct route of providing things like health insurance and retirement plans? What if it operated more like a true collective? What different collaborations might emerge from a more diverse set of decision makers? (“Foo Fighters are awesome, My Morning Jacket is awesome,” Lewis told me. “I love the scene we’re in, but there’s just different scenes you could be aligning yourself with. Younger. Blacker.”) What further threads of the New Orleans musical tapestry might the group choose to tease out, and to what exhilarating results? It is no dishonor to what Allan and Sandra Jaffe built to suggest that an institution born in the 1960s South might require rethinking in 2022.
As Bradley Williams says: “I truly believe Ben loves music. I believe he loves the hall. But, I’m sorry: If I had a business and people called it Plantation anything, we would be having some meetings to figure out how to make people feel better about where they work. Even if it was my dad’s place. Especially if it was my dad’s place.”
The Preservation Hall Jazz Band spent much of the summer on tour, opening for Josh Groban, with Jaffe remaining on bass and tuba. In November, he claims, the deferred plan for him to step back from his onstage role will take effect, with the veteran hall musician Kerry Lewis taking up the regular bass and tuba duties. To a man, his bandmates express amusement at the notion that the change will mean Jaffe’s relinquishing creative control. “I just know we’d be getting text messages from Ben as we’re walking onstage,” Maedgen told me.
Jaffe smiled wryly. “You don’t have to always be physically present to inspire.”
Jaffe also says he is in search of somebody to groom as a successor, though thus far the process seems to be rather a holistic one. “People who know me know my eyes are always open,” he says. “My finger is on the pulse. I’ve got eyes and ears in communities that you’d see and be like, ‘That’s a community?’ That’s who I am. I’m always looking, you know? Without, like, actively looking.”
On one topic, Jaffe has remained adamant. For now, he insists, there’s nobody else with the blend of skill, talent, knowledge and history to run the hall. “I have the best understanding of what it is and how it operates — not just as a business, but philosophically and spiritually.” He saw what happened when his father’s tenure at Preservation Hall ended prematurely. “We carry a lot of weight on our shoulders,” he says. “For one family to carry as much weight as the Jaffes carry for this community is huge. It’s completely disproportionate. The knowledge I have is a blueprint and a model for how to operate, not to replicate, but how to evolve. I’m going to keep pulling rabbits out of my hat. That’s how much I believe in this thing.”
At the 60th-anniversary show, there were congratulatory citations sent from the mayor of New Orleans and the governor of Louisiana. The musical-culture wars of the hall’s past seemed to have been suspended, if not forgotten. The older musicians who make up the Preservation Hall Legacy Band — with some 190 years’ hall experience among them — played an incandescent set, and then several members stuck around to play with Big Freedia and Nathaniel Rateliff.
Ben Jaffe took center stage only once, to speak about his parents and about the extended family gathered onstage and in the audience. He invoked something he said Cornel West once told him about race in New Orleans: “No place has it right, but make no mistake, New Orleans is way ahead of everyone else.” It’s a line he uses frequently, and while it may seem an absurd thing to say about a place where 32 percent of Black households live in poverty and 71 percent in so-called liquid-asset poverty, where the median household income of Black families is $40,000 lower than that of white families, where fully 99 percent of juveniles in the city’s youth jail are Black and where the Police Department and sheriff’s office have a recent history of civil rights violations so egregious that they’ve each spent much of the past decade governed by a federal consent decree, it was the kind of night that made you understand how one might believe it anyway.
“Well,” Jaffe said, with a somewhat rueful smile, as the evening wound down, “I guess there’s only one way to end a Preservation Hall anniversary show.” Everybody retook the stage for a rendition of “When the Saints Go Marching In.” The crowd went mad.
Brett Martin is a writer in New Orleans and the author of “Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution.”
Source: Music - nytimes.com
