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    5 Minutes That Will Make You Love New Orleans Jazz

    Many cities have rich jazz histories, but none goes back as far as New Orleans. We asked Wendell Pierce, Courtney Bryan and others what song they would play to get a friend to join the party.Over the past few months, The New York Times has asked experts to answer the question, What would you play a friend to make them fall in love with jazz? We’ve covered lots of artists, instruments and musical styles — but this time we’re tackling a whole city.The United States is full of cities with their own rich jazz histories, but none goes back as far as New Orleans. And the music remains very much a part of life there. To really discover the beauty of New Orleans jazz, the in-person experience is key. This is a participatory, effervescent music. But unless you’re about to book a trip, why not take five minutes to read and listen, and see if you get hooked?Jazz’s roots can be traced back to Congo Square, a plaza in central New Orleans that had been a gathering place for Native Americans before the arrival of Europeans. In the antebellum era, enslaved Africans often gathered there to play music and dance, using whatever instruments they had — bamboula drums, horns, bells, banjos — and carrying their cultural traditions forward. After emancipation, the country blues being played on plantations across the South blended with the music played by New Orleans society orchestras and other African diasporic styles blowing in from the Caribbean, creating the polyphonic improvised sound we now know as early jazz.In the 100-plus years since then, New Orleans has remained something of a cultural anomaly in the United States: rooted in its own traditions, and fortified against broader commercial trends. Music has been its strongest fortifier. Marching bands are heard at funerals and second-line parades on most weekends. On Mardi Gras and St. Joseph’s Day, culture-bearers in resplendent, feathery regalia march and perform in honor of the Native Americans who once sheltered fugitives fleeing slavery. And music is simply a way of life: Unless a storm is brewing, you won’t find a single night in New Orleans without multiple bands playing somewhere.While brass bands and traditional jazz lie at the core of this city’s traditions — and no conversation about them can ever go on too long without a mention (or three) of Louis Armstrong — New Orleans has also fostered greatness across the musical spectrum: from Black classical composers to post-bop royalty to avant-garde experimentalists. The songs below are just the tip of the iceberg. Find a playlist at the bottom of the article, and be sure to leave your own favorites in the comments.Wendell Pierce, actor“West End Blues” by Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five“West End Blues” embodies the complexity of this music — which is what New Orleans is all about. It’s the American aesthetic of freedom within form: complex ideas that are also displayed in simple ways. We have technical proficiency, but at the same time uninhibited creative expression. The track starts off with one of the most famous clarion calls in music, one of the most famous licks in the world: Louis Armstrong, exhibiting pure genius and virtuosity, all alone for 12 seconds. Like a spiritual epiphany, this explosion of improvisation embodies the innate humanity of the music and foreshadows the brilliance of bebop yet to come. And then the band comes in and he goes into this simple, beautiful, languid, soulful encapsulation of what it’s like, for someone who’s never been to the West End of New Orleans, to sit out by Lake Pontchartrain on a Sunday afternoon. This is the “West End Blues.”Within the first 30 seconds of the song it gives you the best of what America can be, and what New Orleans is: that cacophony of all kinds of things, so many different influences becoming this one rich, complex dish. E pluribus unum. We are in America in New Orleans, but we are the northernmost Caribbean city, influenced by the French and the African, Germans and Native Americans. And it is the epitome of what America is supposed to be. That’s why jazz is the great American artistic form. A multitude of complexities, broken down into something so universally understood. (Listen on YouTube)◆ ◆ ◆Ned Sublette, author and musician“Bouncing Around” by Piron’s New Orleans OrchestraI always go back to “Bouncing Around,” by A.J. Piron’s New Orleans Orchestra, a working New Orleans band, recorded 100 years ago in New York City. It’s jazz at an early stage: this is still the era of everyone-at-once polyphony. Every bit of the musical space is full of theme, counter-theme and rhythm, but we don’t have soloists yet. It’s clearly music for dancing, or at least for bouncing around. That word keeps coming back in New Orleans: bounce. I like the translated Spanish title, seen in parentheses on the 78: “Brincando Locamente” — bouncing madly. (Listen on YouTube)◆ ◆ ◆Melissa A. Weber (a.k.a. Soul Sister), D.J. and scholar“Right Foot” by Rebirth Brass BandA special characteristic of New Orleans jazz is its function as dance music. It invites audience members to not spectate, but participate. In the New Orleans brass band jazz tradition, the pioneering Rebirth Brass Band has specialized in making people dance since the group formed 40 years ago, while its founding members were teenagers. In 2008, they rerecorded their original song “Put Your Right Foot Forward,” first released in the mid-1980s as a 45 on the local SYLA label. It’s a classic that other brass bands have added to their repertoires, whether on the stage or in the second-line streets. (Listen on YouTube)◆ ◆ ◆Adonis Rose, drummer and bandleader“New Orleans” by Leroy JonesIt is very difficult to find songs that have the ability to transport the listener to a place or time, but I believe that “New Orleans,” written by Hoagy Carmichael, comes close. Although Carmichael was not a New Orleanian, the song melody and lyrics speak to the character and romanticism of the Crescent City. New Orleans is warm, culturally rich, diverse, charming and romantic. All of which is represented in this timeless classic.The song was not widely recorded, but there are a few versions of it that I really enjoy listening to. My favorite version is from the New Orleans jazz legend and trumpeter Leroy Jones, from his 1994 release “Mo’ Cream From the Crop.” This version of “New Orleans” is an original arrangement done by Leroy, and captures the beauty, intensity, creativeness, spontaneity and groove of what New Orleans is. Leroy interprets the song with deep passion and connection to the city. (Listen on YouTube)◆ ◆ ◆Charlie Gabriel, saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist“Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans” by Louis ArmstrongThe words of this song tell you about the weather in the city, and the city itself. It just explains to you that New Orleans is such a beautiful place to be, especially with its culture. You have to come to New Orleans to really enjoy it — and this song explains why you should. When Pops, Louis Armstrong, does the song, he tells it in such a way that you can almost feel the words. I’ve been playing in New Orleans since I was 11 or 12 years old. What happens is, you bring that along with you: the feeling of the city, the personality, the city itself, the faces. You carry that within your music. (Listen on YouTube)◆ ◆ ◆Giovanni Russonello, Times jazz critic“None of My Jelly Roll” by Sweet Emma BarrettThe self-taught pianist and vocalist Emma Barrett was born in 1897 and came of age performing in the speakeasies and early “jass” orchestras that birthed the genre. It wasn’t uncommon for women to hold piano duties in these early New Orleans bands — but it took a particular kind of grace and confidence to endure the condescension (and worse) that was routinely directed their way. Maybe that attitude is what earned her the name “Sweet Emma.” Maybe it just looked good on a chalkboard outside the club. Her less well-known, more descriptive nickname was “The Bell Gal,” because of the bells that she wore on her red garters; they would jangle in time as she patted her foot and roughed up the keys. On “None of My Jelly Roll,” from a 1963 recording, Barrett sings an old blues lyric full of playful double entendre and shows off her rolling barroom piano style. This approach — developed from ragtime and Caribbean dance music; replicating the work of a full brass band in just two hands — would evolve through later legends like Professor Longhair, James Booker and Dr. John, and remains a calling card for Crescent City pianists today. (Listen on YouTube)◆ ◆ ◆Courtney Bryan, composer and pianist“River Niger” by the Improvisational Arts QuintetThe legendary musician, educator and patriarch Sir Edward (Kidd) Jordan (1935-2023) lived by improvisation, and his music reverberated with sounds of freedom throughout his 87 years. In 1975, Jordan formed the Improvisational Arts Quintet with like-minded creative musicians from Louisiana and Mississippi. Jordan composed “River Niger,” inspired by a trip to West Africa, and recorded it with I.A.Q. on an album series produced by Kalamu ya Salaam: “The New New Orleans Music: New Music Jazz” (Rounder Records, 1988). “River Niger” has an infectious and captivating energy, rooted on a rhythmic B-flat minor ostinato, yet open in form with each soloist leading us on a journey throughout the recording.Jordan taught his students “River Niger,” and regardless of level, beginner or advanced, each student had an important role — whether playing the pentatonic scale according to his conduction or taking solo or collective free improvisations. Listen to “River Niger” and you might levitate. (Listen on YouTube)◆ ◆ ◆P.J. Morton, musician“On the Sunny Side of the Street” by Louis ArmstrongThe melody of “On the Sunny Side of the Street” always immediately makes me smile, and the way the other horns are dancing in this version — recorded in 1956 for the Decca label, with Armstrong backed by a 10-piece band — always reminds me of home. And of course, Louis Armstrong is so important to the story of New Orleans and to the world. (Listen on YouTube)◆ ◆ ◆Tarriona (Tank) Ball, vocalist and bandleader“Groove City” by Chocolate MilkThis song is so nostalgic for me! It gives me all the feels, and really makes me feel so lucky to be from such a unique place as New Orleans. It also makes me think of my dad for some reason! Maybe when I was a small child he would play the record, but it makes me feel close to home and even closer to him.Chocolate Milk is a band from New Orleans that was active in the 1970s and early 1980s. “Groove City” was released in 1977 and I’ve been hooked since I heard it. The moment it comes on all I see is family barbecues, being on the lake in New Orleans, and just freedom. It talks about how you can forget your cares; it reminds you to not worry about your clothes and that “all you gotta do is let down your hair and be free,/No special pattern to follow, be what you wanna be.”I remember being in Amsterdam for my birthday, listening to this song nonstop, and I felt so close to home and my family though I was so far away. That’s why I would share this song with others — because it’s almost as if the lyrics tell a story of where you can go to have a really special time here. (Listen on YouTube)◆ ◆ ◆Marcus J. Moore, jazz writer“Guinnevere” by Chief Xian aTunde AdjuahI’m always taken by the unbridled force of Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah. I’ve seen plenty of his shows over the past decade; each time, he sizes up the microphone with his custom fluegelhorn, then attacks it with blistering chords, cutting through bar chatter and forks scraping porcelain plates. And he doesn’t mind challenging the audience: During one of his shows at the Blue Note last year, he made everyone get up from their seats — a rarity for that venue — and didn’t let us sit down until we danced and sang his lyrics back to him. It was done lovingly; his tapestry of Black music elicits a strong sense of community. When I think of his recorded work, I jump to the song “Guinnevere,” the almost 11-minute epic from his 2020 live album, “Axiom,” also performed at the Blue Note, but right at the start of the pandemic. It reimagines a Miles Davis song of the same name with quickened percussion and ascendant wails, brightening the “Bitches Brew”-era cut into a vigorous funk groove akin to the genre-bending compositions that epitomized jazz between the late ’60s and early ’70s. Adjuah’s intensity is palpable throughout, from the brief interplay with the percussionist Weedie Braimah shortly after the four-minute mark to the subtle, fluttering notes he plays near the end. At a time when the world didn’t know what to make of the air, Adjuah flipped uncertainty into something gorgeous. (Listen on YouTube)◆ ◆ ◆ More

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    How BayouWear Came to Represent New Orleans Style

    The colorful prints of BayouWear, born at a New Orleans jazz festival, reflect the city itself.It all started with a poster.In 1975, while in graduate school at Tulane University, Bud Brimberg had to come up with a project for a business class. His idea: have an artist in New Orleans create a poster as merchandise for a local music festival.That event, now known as the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, has become one of the city’s cultural staples. This year’s Jazz Fest, held over seven days in April and May, featured hundreds of performers across 14 stages. According to organizers, about 460,000 people (including staff and vendors) attended.Since 1975, each Jazz Fest has been commemorated with an artist-designed poster. Mr. Brimberg, 73, still oversees their production. And since 1981, he has also made printed Hawaiian shirts sold at the festival. After introducing the shirts, which also feature a unique motif each year, Mr. Brimberg started to offer other pieces, including shorts and dresses.The clothes, called BayouWear, have turned into a sort of unofficial uniform for Jazz Fest attendees and performers like Irma Thomas, a soul singer and a festival fixture known for taking the stage in a custom dress featuring the latest print.Bud Brimberg, who started selling printed clothes at Jazz Fest in 1981, wearing a jacket with BayouWear’s alligator print from 1999.Emily Kask for The New York Times“Whenever someone wears the clothing, the festival, along with the culture that created it, lives on,” said Quint Davis, the producer of Jazz Fest, who has helped plan the event since it began in 1970.Lisa Alexis, the director of the Office of Cultural Economy in New Orleans, said the BayouWear clothes have also come to represent the city itself. “Everyone looks forward to the design each year,” she said. “It just seems to give a very comprehensive representation and feel of our New Orleans culture.”On a Friday at this year’s festival, Ann Patteson, 78, from New Orleans, said she was wearing one of the 18 BayouWear shirts in her collection. For her, the shirts represent just about every Jazz Fest she has attended.Austin Hajna, a 36-year-old physician assistant from Washington, D.C., was one of dozens of people browsing the shirts ($59), shorts ($39), dresses ($59) and sleeveless tops ($49) at a tent selling BayouWear. Many pieces featured the 2023 print — an architectural motif inspired by buildings in the French Quarter — and there were lots of clothes from past festivals.Mr. Hajna, who had a drink in his hand, was wearing a blue shirt covered with green streetcars and turquoise palm trees, the 2015 print. He said it was one of two BayouWear shirts he owns, adding that he planned to buy a third that day, “right after a sip of this vodka.”Austin Hajna, center, wore a shirt with the 2015 BayouWear print while shopping at the brand’s merchandise tent at the festival.Emily Kask for The New York TimesFrom left, Zach Meredith in a shirt featuring BayouWear’s red beans and rice print from 1998; Paige Nelson Stypinski, in an alligator print; and Tyler Stypinski, in the architectural print introduced in 2023.Emily Kask for The New York TimesBen DeMarais, who attended Jazz Fest with his son this year, wore a shirt with BayouWear’s 2013 print featuring iris flowers and brass instruments.Emily Kask for The New York TimesJamel Banks at the festival’s BayouWear tent, wearing a shirt with the Pucci-inspired print from 2019.Emily Kask for The New York TimesJamel Banks, a 38-year-old engineer from Houston, was in line behind Mr. Hajna. His shirt featured a colorful Pucci-inspired print of a dancing man that was introduced in 2019. The shirts, he said, “feel very father-ish — but a cool dad.”“I’m ready for the matching shorts now,” Mr. Banks added, “and something for my girlfriend.”Though clothes with past BayouWear prints are still sold, certain designs are harder to find. Original samples and stock of the 2001 print — plates of sugar-dusted beignets next to mugs of cafe au lait — were destroyed during Hurricane Katrina, Mr. Brimberg said.BayouWear garments are made entirely of rayon, which Mr. Brimberg said he chose because it dries fast, hangs loose and displays colors more vividly than other fabrics. “The gradations were missing in cotton,” he said, zooming in on a photo of the 2003 print (a jumble of crawfish) to show how the color of the crustaceans faded from a deep orange into a pale coral.Mr. Brimberg — who grew up in Brooklyn and has the mannerisms, and accent, of Larry David — comes up with ideas for BayouWear prints himself before finding artists to help bring them to life. He said his references over the years have included pointillist and Cubist art, the brand Marimekko and the French glassmaker Lalique.The ideas for the prints themselves, he said, typically strike at random, often while he is roaming around New Orleans. The first print, in 1981, was inspired by a palm-tree-dotted shirt on a man playing an upright piano in that year’s Jazz Fest poster.Kathy Schorr, a textile artist in New Orleans who helped make BayouWear’s 2023 architectural print, said she loves how fluid the designs are. “You can’t tell what it is until you’re right up on it,” Ms. Schorr said. “They just look like a beautiful pattern from a distance.”The buttons on many BayouWear shirts are no less thoughtfully designed than the prints. To match certain motifs, Mr. Brimberg has had buttons custom made to look like tiny drums (for a percussion-themed print from 2016), guitar picks (for a print from 2006) and water-meter covers (for this year’s architectural print).For garments featuring this year’s architectural print, Mr. Brimberg had buttons made to recall water-meter covers. Emily Kask for The New York TimesThe 2015 streetcar print.Emily Kask for The New York TimesFor shirts featuring a yellow-eyed alligators from 1999, Mr. Brimberg had buttons made to look like the reptiles’ teeth. “I went down to the voodoo museum and bought some alligator teeth,” he recalled. “Then I took them to my dentist, since they were kind of ugly, and asked if he could do some cosmetic dentistry to polish them up. And I had that cast as a button.”At the opening day of this year’s Jazz Fest, Kayla Biskupovich, 26, from New Orleans, was wearing an alligator-print shirt over a dress covered in watermelon slices, the print from 2014. “This dress was my mom’s, she bought it the year this pattern came out,” said Ms. Biskupovich, who graduated recently from Louisiana State University.For a better fit, she tied knots at the dress’s back to tighten it. “I didn’t want to cut it, because that would be sacrilegious,” Ms. Biskupovich said.“I also wanted to wear the gators,” she added as she held out one of her shirt’s triangular white buttons. “Look at the teeth! Could you die?!” More

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    Huey ‘Piano’ Smith, New Orleans Rock ’n’ Roll Cornerstone, Dies at 89

    With songs like “Don’t You Just Know It,” “Rocking Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu” and “Sea Cruise,” he put a firm backbeat behind joyful nonsense.Huey “Piano” Smith, whose two-fisted keyboard style and rambunctious songs propelled the sound of New Orleans R&B into the pop Top 10 in the late 1950s, died on Feb. 13 at his home in Baton Rouge. He was 89.His daughter Acquelyn Donsereaux confirmed his death.Mr. Smith wrote songs that became cornerstones of New Orleans R&B and rock ’n’ roll perennials, notably “Rocking Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu,” “Don’t You Just Know It” and “Sea Cruise.”As a pianist and bandleader, Mr. Smith was known for strong left-hand bass lines, splashy right hand and forceful backbeat. He didn’t take center stage; his band, the Clowns, was fronted by a group of dancing lead vocalists, among them Bobby Marchan, who often performed wearing women’s clothes.Mr. Smith’s lyrics were full of droll wordplay and irresistible nonsense-syllable choruses. “I use slangs and things like that,” he was quoted as saying in John Wirt’s biography, “Huey ‘Piano’ Smith and the Rockin’ Pneumonia Blues” (2014), “When you put the music with words and things together, the songs just make themselves. And after you listen at it, it says something its own self, that you hadn’t planned.”Mr. Smith’s songs have been covered by Aerosmith, the Grateful Dead, Johnny Rivers, Patti LaBelle, Deep Purple and many others. But he struggled to collect royalties through more than a decade of lawsuits, and in the 1990s he filed for bankruptcy. His song “Sea Cruise” was handed over by his label to a white singer, Frankie Ford, whose voice was overdubbed atop the backing track recorded by Mr. Smith and his band.A publicity photo of Mr. Smith from early in his career. He and his group, the Clowns, had a national hit in 1957 with “Rocking Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu.”Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesHuey Pierce Smith was born on Jan. 26, 1934, in New Orleans, the son of Arthur Smith, a roofer and sugar cane cutter, and Carrie Victoria (Scott) Smith, who worked at a laundry. He taught himself to play boogie-woogie piano, strongly influenced by the New Orleans master Professor Longhair, and by his teens he was performing regularly at the Dew Drop Café, a top Black club in what was still a segregated city. He formed a duo with Eddie Lee Jones, who performed and recorded as Guitar Slim and who gave him the “Piano” moniker. He also backed Lloyd Price and other New Orleans performers onstage.Mr. Smith also became a regular session player at J&M, the recording studio owned by Cosimo Matassa, where the sound of classic New Orleans R&B was forged. His piano opens the Smiley Lewis hit “I Hear You Knocking,” and he was also heard on recordings by Earl King, Little Richard and many others.He formed the Clowns in 1957 and had a nationwide hit that year with “Rocking Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu” (later versions often rendered it as “Rockin’”), which reached No. 5 on Billboard’s rhythm-and-blues chart and No. 52 on the pop chart. A medical-minded follow-up, “Tu-Ber-Cu-Lucas and the Sinus Blues,” didn’t fare as well.With his new career as a bandleader thriving, Mr. Smith married Doretha Ford in 1957. They had five children before they divorced in the mid-1960s.Mr. Smith and the Clowns reached the pop Top 10 in 1958 with the wry “Don’t You Just Know It.” The title was a phrase often used by the band’s bus driver, Rudy Ray Moore, who would go on to a career as a bawdy comedian and the star of the “Dolemite” movies.That same year, Mr. Smith recorded “Sea Cruise.” Johnny Vincent, the owner of his label, Ace Records, was a partner in a distribution company, Record Sales Inc., with Johnny Caronna. The day after Mr. Smith recorded the music for “Sea Cruise,” planning to have the Clowns add vocals, Mr. Caronna claimed the song for a teenage singer he was managing, Frank Guzzo, professionally known as Frankie Ford.According to Mr. Wirt’s biography, Mr. Smith was told, “Johnny Vincent agreed that if you can sell a million on this record, Frankie can sell 10 million” — and, he later recalled, “It hurt me to my heart when he told me he was taking that.”Mr. Vincent, who died in 2000, also claimed co-writing credits on many songs Mr. Smith wrote and recorded for Ace, including his hits, although he later relinquished those credits. Mr. Smith moved to Imperial Records as the 1950s ended, but he returned to Ace to record a rollicking holiday album, “’Twas the Night Before Christmas,” on which he declaimed the title poem over a jaunty horn section.With the British Invasion of the 1960s, guitar-driven rock supplanted piano-centered New Orleans R&B on the pop charts. Mr. Smith continued to record on the Pitter Pat and Instant labels through the late 1960s, under his own name and others, and he had some regional hits. He also wrote and produced songs for other performers, notably Skip Easterling, who had a hit across the South in 1970 with Mr. Smith’s funk reworking of the Muddy Waters standard “Hoochie Coochie Man.”Mr. Smith married Margrette Riley in 1971. She survives him, along with his children Ms. Donsereaux, Sherilyn Smith, Huerilyn Smith, Hugh Smith, Katherine Smith, Tanisha Smith, Tyra Smith and Glenda Bold; his stepson, James L. Riley Jr.; 18 grandchildren; and 47 great-grandchildren.Barely able to make a living from his music in the early 1970s, Mr. Smith turned to other work. He started a gardening business, Smith’s Dependable Gardening Service. He also became a Jehovah’s Witness and gave up drinking and smoking.Meanwhile, the value of his old songs was increasing. In 1972, Johnny Rivers’s remake of “Rocking Pneumonia” reached No. 6 on the pop chart. Dr. John included a medley of Mr. Smith’s songs on his album “Dr. John’s Gumbo,” and Ace Records rereleased Mr. Smith’s songs on compilation albums. Mr. Smith performed occasionally as the 1970s ended. At the New Orleans club Tipitina’s and the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival in 1979 and 1981, he reunited with singers from the Clowns’ peak years. At the 1981 festival, his musicians included the Meters’ rhythm section: George Porter on bass and Zigaboo Modeliste on drums.Mr. Smith moved to Baton Rouge in 1980 and stopped performing soon after that. His catalog continued to be heard — in cover versions, on movie soundtracks, in commercials and in reissues — but bad deals deprived him of much of his royalty income.In a series of lawsuits from 1988 to 2000, Artists Rights Enforcement Corporation — a company Mr. Smith had engaged in 1982 to help collect back royalties and then fired in 1984 — demanded and won a 50 percent share of Mr. Smith’s ongoing royalty income from four of his biggest songs, including “Rocking Pneumonia.”Mr. Smith declared bankruptcy in 1997; by then, he had pawned his piano. When full rights to the four songs were sold for $1 million to the publisher Cotillion Music in 2000, Mr. Smith remained entitled to foreign royalties but netted less than $100,000 to escape bankruptcy.The Rhythm & Blues Foundation gave Mr. Smith its $15,000 Pioneer Award in 2000, and he gave his last major performance at the foundation’s gala. He was inaugurated into the Louisiana Blues Hall of Fame in 2001.Mac Rebennack, the New Orleans pianist, guitarist and singer who recorded as Dr. John, received vital early songwriting guidance from Mr. Smith, according to Mr. Wirt’s biography. “Anyone who can talk can write a song,” he recalled being told. “So whatever you got to say, play good music and say it. You just put it where you need to say it.”Mr. Smith, Mr. Rebennack said, also advised, “If you don’t have a song that’s got some kind of simple melody people can hum, sing with and roll with, it’s like, what do you got?” More

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    36 Hours in New Orleans: Things to Do and See

    8 a.m.
    Grab a biscuit Uptown
    The six-mile commercial corridor of Magazine Street is a glorious mish-mash of retail shops, art galleries and good places to eat, with surprises on nearly every block. For breakfast Uptown, stop in for a flaky cheddar-and-chive biscuit ($4.75) at La Boulangerie, a New Orleans take on a classic French bakery with a happy thrum on Saturday mornings. Take it to go and stroll along Magazine Street, taking notes on places you might want to hit up when they open later in the day: Magpie, is a standout vintage clothing and jewelry store, and Sisters in Christ, which sells records and books, is well attuned to the city’s D.I.Y. arts underground. Shawarma On The Go, inside a Jetgo gas station, is notable for its Lebanese iced tea with pine nuts. Crunchy, cold, aromatic and savory-sweet, the drink is a local spin on a traditional Lebanese drink called jallab. More

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    At Praise Fest in New Orleans, Spreading the Gospel Through Song and Community

    In a city facing wide-ranging challenges, the gospel music you hear at Praise Fest can be a balm for the collective spirit.On the final day of the 13th annual Praise Fest, the free gospel music festival that started after Hurricane Katrina to bring locals back to New Orleans, the skies above Bayou St. John turned gray. Then, around 2 on an afternoon in October, an eerily familiar sight appeared: torrential rainfall.Pools of water pocked the bayou grass as festivalgoers scrambled to their cars. Attendance for Praise Fest, the first one held in person since the pandemic began, was modest (though organizers said it was about what they expected) — the conditions may not have helped. Bishop Ryan Warner, president and chief executive of Versatile Entertainment, which runs Praise Fest, clomped around the grounds in his rain boots, directing traffic. The rain would pass, he insisted, and the festival would continue. That was the New Orleans way.Anchored by the sound of organs, pianos, tambourines, drums and melodic voices preaching the word of God, gospel music is a fixture in Black Christian churches across the United States, especially in the South. In a city facing so many challenges — whether hurricanes or housing insecurity — it can be a necessary balm for the collective spirit.“There’s so much craziness happening in the world today,” said Cordell Chambliss, a local pianist and retired music teacher. It was about 24 hours before the storm, and Mr. Chambliss sat on a bench wearing black sunglasses and a backward hat with the strap emblazoned with “Aloha.” “Gospel music is the good news,” he said. “And we need to spread the good news.”This article is part of Our City, a series focused on how people around the United States use public and shared spaces to build community.Once the sky had cleared up, about an hour after the rain began, Bishop Warner, 47, a laid-back man with a smooth voice, climbed atop the stage and, with a microphone in hand, declared that the festivities would carry on. “I will never question the Lord,” he said. The two dozen or so who remained dragged their chairs away from the massive tents and up to the stage where, they believed, God’s presence was clear.“God has been good to me,” Angela Lindsey, 60, said the day before. Ms. Lindsey, a New Orleans native, sat on her lawn chair behind the vendors hawking discount jewelry along the slow-moving bayou water, where ducks and birds cooled off. She sang gospel in church with her sisters growing up and moved to Mississippi after Katrina.Ms. Lindsey makes frequent trips home to help take care of her son, who sustained a brain injury in a car accident, and to attend Praise Fest. Most of her family remains in New Orleans, which proved difficult when she came down with colon cancer. When one of her sisters died, Ms. Lindsey was unable to attend the funeral because of emergency surgery. Still, she remains grateful.“I never was alone,” Ms. Lindsey said, over the sound of soaring vocals. She found comfort during her sickness in memories of singing with her sisters, and something else: “God was always there.”Ms. Lindsey and the rest in attendance were treated to a variety of different acts, from traditional gospel choirs to gospel-influenced R&B and hip-hop.“New Orleans, this is truly a gospel gumbo,” said Josh Kagler, who performed alongside Tyrone Jefferson. “Gospel music in the city of New Orleans is foundation. It’s family,” he said.Here are clips from some of the most memorable performances from the festival.Joanna Hale-McGillJoanna Hale-McGill, 38, was the first to take the stage after the rain. At the start of her set, a rainbow painted the sky. Ms. Hale-McGill, who hails from Meraux, just outside New Orleans, is an independent artist who blends hip-hop and gospel. A highlight was her performance of the 2008 song “God in Me” by the gospel duo Mary Mary featuring Kierra “Kiki” Sheard. Ms. Hale-McGill danced around the stage and flailed her arms in the air as she sang.“You’re so fly, you’re so high,Everybody around you trying to figure out why.You’re so cool, you win all the time,Everywhere you go, man, you get a lot of shine.”“The lyrics to the song describe me perfectly. I’m known around town as the girl that sparkles everywhere she goes,” Ms. Hale-McGill said in an interview later.Tyrone JeffersonMr. Jefferson, 49, performed alongside his choir from the Abundant Life Tabernacle in New Orleans, as did Mr. Kagler, 36, the choir director. As Mr. Jefferson got the crowd going with his vocals, Mr. Kagler shook his head and stomped his feet and waved his arms until his bright pink Yankees hat fell of his head. Among Mr. Jefferson’s performances, his rendition of Ricky Dillard’s “Search Me Lord” was memorable.“Sometimes we can be so stubborn, if you will, as it relates to us thinking we know everything,” Mr. Jefferson said in a later interview. “The song simply says, ‘Lord, you search me. Lord, you know whether I’m right or wrong.’”Mr. Jefferson also performed an original song, “Trouble in My Way,” a rousing track meant to be a reminder of Jesus’ healing abilities.“The beat brings you to church. It brings you right to church on a Sunday morning. Hand-clapping, foot-stomping,” he said. “We on a thousand, as we say here in New Orleans.”Arthur Clayton IV and Anointed for PurposeArthur Clayton IV, 45, hails from Marrero, La., fewer than 10 miles outside New Orleans. Alongside his choir, Anointed for Purpose, Mr. Clayton took delight in performing his friend VaShawn Mitchell’s song “Big.” When his choir sang the words, “There’s nothing my God cannot do,” Mr. Clayton followed with, “He’s a keeper, yes, he is.”“That reminds me of how we all were kept during that moment of Covid,” Mr. Clayton said in an interview. “Even after Covid, here in New Orleans we went through a hurricane, and we were kept in that moment.”Eric Waddell and the Abundant Life SingersMr. Waddell, 49, came from Baltimore with his choir, the Abundant Life Singers. He attended Praise Fest despite the death of his father fewer than two weeks earlier at age 91. His father had been in a gospel group, and when Mr. Waddell was a child, his father “put me on the chair and said ‘sing!’” Mr. Waddell said performing at Praise Fest was a way to honor his father. “He would’ve said, ‘Boy, you go and sing,’” Mr. Waddell said.Mr. Waddell brought some attendees to their feet with his moving original track “He Won’t Change.” The lyrics to his song “Yes, I Know Jesus” also resonated with a city that has worked through its share of obstacles.“Yes, I know JesusYes, I know JesusYes, I know Jesus for myself.Woke me up this morning,I saw a brand-new dawning.Feeds me when I’m hungry,Comforts me when I’m lonely.”Zacardi CortezThe sky was black by the time Zacardi Cortez, 37, the festival’s closing act, took center stage. Mr. Cortez, whose 2012 album “The Introduction” placed No. 2 on the Billboard magazine top gospel albums chart, shone under the stage’s bright lights. One of the songs he performed, an original called “Praise You,” was a funk tune inspired by two of his idols, Prince and James Brown. His set took a turn on “You’ve Been Good to Me,” a slow, tender tribute to his faith.Mr. Cortez wrote the song not long after spending time in jail. “God just had to deal with me. He had to sit me down for a little while and show me some things. And a lot of great things were birthed out of that,” Mr. Cortez said. “I’m so glad that I got to a place where I’ll never have to go through those situations again, because God has changed some things, turned some things around.”Bishop Warner, the organizer, watched from the side as Mr. Cortez closed the festival. Praise Fest had been a success, he said, attracting about 2,000 people. The goal every year is to bring New Orleans a little hope, no matter how dire the circumstances. That’s the meaning of gospel music, and it’s a special ingredient that keeps spirits up.“Let’s say in a couple years, we’re going to have another event like this,” Bishop Warner said, referring to Katrina, which killed more than 1,800 people. “Man, you got to live life to the fullest, or you’ll be caught in this, thinking you was going to try to get out, and you die in the process.“You got to keep moving.” More

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    Onstage, It’s Finally Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas Again

    The Rockettes are high-kicking their way through the Christmas Spectacular at Radio City Music Hall. The Sugarplum Fairy, after an unsought interregnum, is presiding over the Land of Sweets at the New York City Ballet. All around the country, choirs are singing hallelujahs in Handel’s “Messiah” and Scrooges are learning to replace bahs with blessings.After two years of Christmastime washouts — there was 2020, when live performance was still impossible in many places, and then last winter, when the Omicron wave stopped many productions — arts-lovers and arts institutions say that they are determined that this will be their first fully staged holiday in three years.“It feels absolutely like the first Christmas post-Covid — there are more tourists in town, Times Square feels very alive again, people are venturing out in a way that I haven’t witnessed since 2019, and sales are more robust across the board,” said Eva Price, a Broadway producer whose musical last year, “Jagged Little Pill,” permanently closed as Omicron bore down, but whose new musical, “& Juliet,” is thriving as this year’s holidays near.Performances of holiday fare, including “The Nutcracker,” Handel’s “Messiah” and, here, “A Christmas Carol,” have become treasured rituals for many families.Cooper Neill for The New York TimesFor arts lovers and arts presenters, late December looms large. Performances of “The Nutcracker,” “A Christmas Carol” and “Messiah” are cherished holiday traditions for many families. Those events are also vital sources of revenue for the organizations that present them. And on Broadway, year-end is when houses are fullest and grosses are highest.“‘A Christmas Carol’ is the lifeblood of our institution,” said Kevin Moriarty, the artistic director of Dallas Theater Center, which first staged an adaptation of the Dickens classic in 1969, and had been doing so annually since 1979 until the pandemic. Most seasons, the play is the theater’s top seller.Last year, Moriarty’s effort to bring the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future back onstage — still with mask and vaccine requirements for the audience — faltered when Omicron hit, and the final 11 days of the run were canceled. “It just felt like the knockout blow we hadn’t seen coming — it felt like things will never get back to normal,” Moriarty said.Handel’s “Messiah” was back at Trinity Church Wall Street in Manhattan. Calla Kessler for The New York TimesDallas was one of many arts institutions wounded by Omicron. The Center Theater Group of Los Angeles canceled 22 of 40 scheduled performances of “A Christmas Carol,” losing about $1.5 million. On Broadway, grosses dropped 57 percent from Thanksgiving week to Christmas week, when 128 performances were canceled. Radio City Music Hall ended its run of the “Christmas Spectacular” with the Rockettes more than a week before Christmas. And the New York City Ballet canceled 17 of 47 scheduled performances of “George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker,” costing it about $5 million.“The virus just made it impossible to go on,” said Katherine E. Brown, the executive director of the New York City Ballet, where “The Nutcracker” has been a tradition since 1954. “It was more than a little depressing, and there were lots of disappointed people, onstage and off.”This year: so far, so good. “It’s going really well,” Brown said. “I don’t want to tempt the fates by saying that too loudly, but it’s actually back to prepandemic levels, and even slightly higher. It feels like we’re really back, and the energy in the houses is just phenomenal.”Of course there are still viruses in the air this year: public health officials are warning of a “tripledemic” of the coronavirus, influenza and respiratory syncytial virus, known as R.S.V. Covid cases and hospitalizations have risen nationally since Thanksgiving, and New York’s mayor, Eric Adams, donned a face mask on Tuesday as he urged New Yorkers to take precautions. One new Broadway play, “The Collaboration,” had to cancel several performances this week, including its opening night, after someone in the company tested positive for the coronavirus.But with Christmas just days away, there have yet to be the wholesale closings that marred last year. And now most people over six months old can be vaccinated, and there is a new bivalent vaccine, lowering both risk and anxiety.“We learned a lot from last year: there are more understudies in place, there is more crew coverage, and we have contingency plans that feel more spelled out,” Price said. Brown agreed, saying, “Through the school of hard knocks, we’re better at managing through it.”“George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker” is being staged once again by New York City Ballet, which had to cut its run short last winter because of Omicron. Sterling Hyltin danced the Sugarplum Fairy in a performance last month. Erin BaianoThe upheaval last winter upended many holiday plans.Mike Rhone, a quality assurance engineer in Santa Clara, Calif., had tickets to the Broadway musicals “Hadestown,” “Flying Over Sunset” and “Caroline, or Change,” and planned to propose to his partner in front of the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree.Instead he proposed at home, on the couch. But they’ll try again this year, with tickets to “Kimberly Akimbo,” “Ohio State Murders,” “Merrily We Roll Along” and the Rockettes. “We’ll definitely get that photo in front of the Rockefeller Center tree,” Rhone said, “just as married people instead of newly-engaged.”Shannon Buster, a civil engineer from Kansas City, Mo., had tickets last year to several Broadway shows and a set of hard-to-score restaurant reservations. “The night before we left, we watched handsome David Muir deliver dire news about Omicron surging, Broadway shows closing, restaurants closing, and we canceled,” she said. This year, she was determined to make the trip happen: “I swear by all that is holy that even an outbreak of rabid, flesh-eating bacteria will not keep me from it.” Last weekend, she and her husband made the delayed trip, trying out some new restaurants and seeing “Death of a Salesman” and “A Strange Loop.”For performers, this year is a welcome relief.Scott Mello, a tenor, has been singing Handel’s “Messiah” at Trinity Church Wall Street each Christmas season since 2015. Last year he found himself singing the “Messiah” at home, in the shower, but it wasn’t the same. “It didn’t feel like Christmas,” he said. This year, he added, “feels like an unveiling.”Ashley Hod, a soloist with New York City Ballet, has been part of its “Nutcracker” for much of her life — she performed in it as a child, when she was studying at the ballet’s school, and joined the cast as an apprentice in 2012; since then she has performed most of the women’s roles. Last year she rehearsed for two months to get ready to go on as the Sugarplum Fairy, but the show was canceled before her turn arrived.“It was devastating,” she said.This year, she’s on as a soloist, and thrilled. “We all have a new appreciation for it,” she said. “Everyone feels really lucky to be back.”On Broadway, things are looking up: Thanksgiving week was the top-grossing week since theaters reopened. And there are other signs of seasonal spending: Jefferson Mays’s virtuosic one-man version of “A Christmas Carol,” which he performed without an audience for streaming when the pandemic made in-person performances impossible, finally made it to Broadway, and is selling strongly as Christmas approaches.Beyond Broadway, things are better too. In New Orleans on Tuesday night, Christmas Without Tears returned — it’s a rambunctious and star-studded annual variety show hosted by the performers Harry Shearer and Judith Owen to raise money for charity (this year, Innocence Project New Orleans).Some “Messiah” fans seemed to be in the Christmas spirit. Calla Kessler for The New York Times“The audience was so primed, ready, and wanting the show,” Owen said. “It was like they’d waited two years for this.”But there are also reasons for sobriety: Broadway’s overall grosses this season are still about 13 percent below what they were in 2019, and this fall a number of shows, struggling to find audiences, have been forced to close. Around the country, many performing arts organizations have been unable to bring audiences back at prepandemic levels.Not everyone is rushing back. Erich Meager, a visual artist in Palm Springs, had booked 10 shows over six nights last December. Then the Rockettes closed, then “Jagged Little Pill,” then two more. “Each morning we would wake up and see what shows were canceled and search for replacements, a less than ideal theater experience,” he said. “This year we are staying close to home for the holidays, but next year we’ll be back.”But many patrons are ready to celebrate.“There have been so many virtual performances, but it’s not really the same thing,” said Luciana Sikula, a Manhattan fashion industry worker who had been attending a performance of “Messiah” annually at Trinity Church Wall Street until the pandemic, and finally got to experience it again in person again this month.Jeffrey Carter, a music professor from St. Louis who had booked and canceled five trips to New York since the pandemic began, finally made it this week; he checked out the new Museum of Broadway as well as an exhibit at the Grolier Club, caught the Oratorio Society of New York’s “Messiah” at Carnegie Hall, and saw “A Man of No Importance,” “A Strange Loop” and “Little Shop of Horrors.” “I’m packing in N.Y.C. at Christmastime in four days and four nights,” he said, “and I’m catching up — in person — with people I love.” More

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    He Inherited a New Orleans Jazz Institution. What Does He Owe?

    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. Left to right: Revell Andrews, a drummer, with his cousin Revon Andrews, the Preservation Hall Jazz Band’s trombonist, and Jaffe.L. Kasimu Harris for The New York Times“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.Ben Jaffe with his parents, Allan and Sandra Jaffe, about 1975From Ben JaffeAllan 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.”The Preservation Hall Jazz Band, about 1970Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesIt 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 and a hall patron, about 1995.From Ben JaffeBen 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 — $5It 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.Trumpter Branden Lewis (center) with trombonist Revon Andrews (right) of the PHJB touring band.L. Kasimu Harris for The New York TimesThere’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. Kyle Roussel, the pianist in PHJB touring and recording band.L. Kasimu Harris for The New York Times“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. Jaffe with Arcade Fire at the Krewe du Kanaval celebration in New Orleans in 2020.Erika Goldring/Getty ImagesIn 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.”“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,” says Jaffe.L. Kasimu Harris for The New York TimesThe 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.“You don’t have to always be physically present to inspire,” says Jaffe.L. Kasimu Harris for The New York TimesBrett Martin is a writer in New Orleans and the author of “Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution.” More

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    ‘Katrina Babies’ Review: Hearing From Survivors

    Edward Buckles Jr.’s intimate documentary sheds light on the experiences of Black children when Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans.Who gets to use the notion of “resilience”? Survivors? Mental health professionals? People who want to celebrate it but also move on from whatever required that fortitude in the first place?The director Edward Buckles Jr. makes a telling point of these tensions in his first film, the revealing documentary “Katrina Babies,” which features Black people who were children —— some toddlers, others in their early teens — in 2005, when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. “Since the storm, it seems like everybody just moved on,” Buckles Jr. says. “In America, especially during disasters, Black children are not even a thought.”The director, who is also credited as a writer, knows the subject from his own experience. When he was 13, he and his family evacuated the city before the storm arrived and the levees broke.“Katrina Babies” is deeply personal and thoughtfully political. The filmmaker recounts the pleasures of cousinhood and family before the hurricane. He and his subjects also tussle with the economic and racial inequities that were exposed and exacerbated by the disaster.Buckles Jr.’s cousins — whom he celebrates with evocative mixed-media animation (by Antoni Sendra) and, later, with compassionate interviews — did not get out at the time. And when they did leave, they did not return. So, if you detect in Buckles Jr. a layer of survivor’s guilt, you might be right.But “Katrina Babies” is also the intimate undertaking of a native son creating a space to heal. If the grief (and relief) expressed in the interviews is any measure, Buckles Jr. knows how to listen to people whose experiences may be harrowingly similar but are not identical to his own. He pulls off this dance of self-awareness and empathy with impressive humility.Katrina BabiesNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 19 minutes. Watch on HBO platforms. More