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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

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    ‘Five Days at Memorial’ Tells the Harrowing Story of a Deadly Choice

    A new scripted series on Apple TV+ dramatizes the crisis faced by a New Orleans hospital after Hurricane Katrina, as the waters and the death toll rose.It was tense and sweaty on the set of “Five Days at Memorial,” the new Apple TV+ limited series about systemic and personal failure at a New Orleans hospital in the days after Hurricane Katrina. The cast, emotionally invested and physically drained, was wiped out.It was time to play some Mafia.The freewheeling, ice-breaking role-playing game, which also goes by the name Werewolf, is a favorite of Cornelius Smith Jr., who plays the distraught Dr. Bryant King in “Memorial.” He brings it out whenever bonding is in order, and to hear the “Memorial” cast tell it, they would have wilted if they hadn’t come together when the cameras stopped rolling.“It was really extraordinary because here we were telling this story that is not all smiles — it’s a very deep story, a very troubling story, a very heavy story,” Smith said in a video interview from Washington, D.C., where he was playing Frederick Douglass in the musical “American Prophet.” “So it was nice to be able to counter that with a very joyous relationship and spending quality time with castmates and really developing a bond off-camera.”The eight-episode “Five Days at Memorial,” premiering Friday, can indeed be tough sledding. Based on the 2013 book by Sheri Fink, which was adapted from her Pulitzer-winning investigative article for ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine, it tells the story of Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans, where 45 bodies were found in Katrina’s aftermath, in September 2005. (Sold in 2006, the hospital is now Ochsner Baptist Medical Center).“We didn’t want to dictate how people should feel about this story,” said Carlton Cuse (left, with Jessica B. Hill and Cornelius Smith Jr.), a creator of the series. “We didn’t want to take a side.”Sophie Giraud/Apple TV+The hospital had been flooded, its power and generators knocked out. Chaos reigned. Several health providers on the scene raised concerns that patients had been given lethal injections during the evacuation process.Both book and series depict the Memorial crisis as a series of impossible decisions, made by flawed individuals under unimaginable pressure, and complete systemic breakdown. In this sense, it’s a microcosm of Katrina, which had a death toll of more than 1,800 people.In a video interview, Fink, who was also a producer on the series, pointed out that the hospital had a 101-page bioterrorism plan. This was, after all, the post-9/11 era. But there was no emergency plan in place for evacuating over water.“I really hope that people watch the series and engage in thinking hard about the consequences of a failure to invest in preparedness for rare, but potentially catastrophic and very foreseeable circumstances,” Fink said in a video call. “A hurricane and a flood in New Orleans were very foreseeable.”Indeed, the levels of failure involved in the Memorial disaster, and Katrina in general, were staggering.“When you have this kind of systemic failure, it’s also a mechanical failure,” said John Ridley, who created the series with Carlton Cuse (“Lost,” “Bates Motel”). “It’s an electronic failure. And it’s a human failure. You’ve got to look at how humans interact in the systems we build.”In the hurricane’s immediate aftermath, hospital administrators did the equivalent of a victory lap and heaved a sigh of relief. Meanwhile, the levees, which had begun failing almost immediately, got progressively worse. Then the severe floods came. (Readers unfamiliar with what happened next may want to stop reading now.)The show depicts several Memorial staff members, including Dr. Anna Pou (played by Vera Farmiga), making plans to provide “comfort” for patients who they have determined would be difficult to evacuate, in the form of injections. Someone, you keep thinking, has to pay for this. But nobody does. (Pou, along with the nurses Cheri Landry and Lori Budo, played by Sharron Matthews and Sarah Allen, were later arrested on multiple counts of principal to second-degree murder but were never indicted by a grand jury.)“There was incompetence on every level of leadership,” Farmiga said of the failures at Memorial Medical Center. But she also defended her character’s commitment to help.Russ Martin/Apple TV+Viewers are likely to feel outrage at some of the events depicted. The series creators, however, argue that thirsting for revenge is pointless. To them, it was an impossible situation, with no clear-cut villains.“We didn’t want to dictate how people should feel about this story — we didn’t want to take a side,” Cuse said in a video interview. “I’m curious to see where people come out about all of this and what kinds of different opinions people have about how things went down.”One character who definitely has an opinion is King. He takes a look around and determines that something is rotten at Memorial. He seethes at the idea of lethal injections.He is also among a handful of Black doctors at the hospital — and the only one on duty during the crisis. He can see that most of the people affected by the breakdown are Black, as are most of the people seeking help who are turned away. King is acutely aware of this, even as it unfolds.“I like to say race is another character in the series,” Smith said. “It’s there whether you want to acknowledge it or not. It plays a role in how we all perceive things in life.”“They’re in New Orleans,” he added. “It’s a predominantly African American community. And what he experiences is clearly, to him, outlined by race. That’s what he’s seeing.”Farmiga acknowledged that human failure was rampant. “There was incompetence on every level of leadership,” she said in a video call. But she also defended Pou’s commitment to help. The surgeon reported for hurricane duty despite being told that other doctors could look after her patients.“She was motivated by humanitarian aid,” Farmiga said. “She chose to face those intolerable conditions. That takes an extraordinary amount of courage.”Much of the series was shot in an enormous, custom-made water tank, just outside Toronto, as a way to recreate the flooding at the hospital. Sophie Giraud/Apple TV+“Five Days at Memorial” was initially optioned to be a movie by the producer Scott Rudin, and then by the producer Ryan Murphy, who planned to use it for his “American Crime Story” anthology series. When Murphy scrapped those plans, Cuse came calling, won Fink over and approached Ridley to be his partner.Fink liked the idea of making “Memorial” into a limited series, with the time and commitment to present a detailed and balanced adaptation.“It just seemed like a great way to tell this story, because if it were done in a movie, there wouldn’t be enough time to bring out all of the nuance,” she said. “It is a long and detailed book, a work of journalism that took many years.” (Fink, who was a staff reporter at ProPublica when her article was published, is now a domestic correspondent for The New York Times.)Cuse is well aware of the parallels to a more recent health crisis. He remembers his partner, Ridley, reminding him of the adage that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme. And so “Five Days of Memorial” went into production amid the global health crisis of Covid-19, a crisis for which many argue the United States was ill prepared.“Instead of the question of who’s going to get on a helicopter to evacuate, we’re dealing with who gets a respirator or who gets a vaccine or who gets a monoclonal antibody,” Cuse said.Some of “Memorial” was shot in New Orleans, but much of it was shot in a custom-made, four-million-gallon water tank just outside Toronto. Cast and crew had to quarantine upon entering Canada from the United States because of the pandemic. It was a stressful process, and a prelude to a stressful shoot.They knew, however, that unlike the characters they portrayed, they would return to their ordered lives when their work was done — that they were ultimately playing make believe. And they knew they needed to get it right.“I felt an enormous sense of responsibility to the people of New Orleans, to the survivors,” Farmiga said. “It’s their heartache. It’s their trauma. It’s their story.” More

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    Irma Thomas, a Soul Queen Far Beyond New Orleans

    As she turns 81, the singer whose intimacy matches her grandeur is the subject of a PBS documentary, “Irma: My Life in Music.”The singer Irma Thomas has long been known as the Soul Queen of New Orleans, a title that feels both richly deserved and far too provincial. Her songs never topped the Billboard pop chart, but they did climb it. And even today, they’re covered by bar bands and in blues jams across the country.Still, if the title suggests a mix of regality and relatability, it makes decent sense. Irma Thomas is, first and foremost, a straight shooter. You feel it in conversation, where she’s neither unduly humble nor conceited. And you can hear it in her singing, which achieves the grandeur often expected from R&B singers in the early 1960s, but has always retained a special kind of intimacy; she often sounds a bit like a more plain-spoken Etta James.“Straight From the Heart,” from her breakthrough 1964 album, “Wish Someone Would Care,” is a demand for sincerity that might be a manifesto, and a standout in a catalog studded with gems. As is made clear in “Irma: My Life in Music,” a documentary debuting on PBS stations across the country this month, Thomas has treated baring her soul as serious work for the past six decades. And she has her rules, rooted in faith and practice: Gospel doesn’t belong in an R&B set. One ought to take requests, she said in a recent interview, to be sure an audience “won’t leave disappointed.”It’s the same attitude that made Thomas an indispensable musical partner for the famed producer and songwriter Allen Toussaint: “He knew he could depend on me,” she said.Thomas, who turns 81 on Friday, began singing professionally in her teens, while already raising four children, and by the mid-1960s her career was taking off. A stint in Los Angeles in the late ’60s and ’70s resulted in frustration — as did watching the Rolling Stones score a smash hit off “Time Is on My Side” after they’d heard her version. But she returned home in the mid-70s to a hero’s welcome, and has been a fixture at nearly every New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival since it began more than half a century ago.More recently, she’s found a new generation of fans through Netflix’s “Black Mirror,” where her haunting doo-wop hit, “Anyone Who Knows What Love Is (Will Understand),” frequently cameos. In a phone conversation this month from her home in New Orleans East, Thomas was amicable and down-to-earth as ever — “You ask the questions, and I’ll answer ’em,” she said as we began — as she talked about growing up and thriving in New Orleans, and revealed which of her many songs she treasures the most. These are edited excerpts from the interview.Thomas said she got her start singing in church, and noted, “I’m in the choir at church even now.”Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesWhen did you begin to realize that you really had a passion and a talent?Well, singing was something I did all the time. I mean, I can’t remember when I wasn’t singing. From a wee child, even living in Greensburg, La., I sang “The Tennessee Waltz” for my elementary schoolteacher’s play, “Cinderella.” I thought everybody did it. I didn’t think it was anything unusual.We did a lot of singing, keeping each other company or entertaining each other on the front porch during the week, when we weren’t working in the field. That was in the country. Then when I came to the city, we used to play and sing in the complex where we were. There were several kids who were playing music in school, and on weekends they would be playing music and we were singing whatever the most recent record that was out at the time. To me, I didn’t have such a big deal of a voice. Everybody around me was, you know, musically inclined to sing or play whatever instrument they were playing.You didn’t feel like you got a special response when you sang?Well, they applauded — they didn’t boo me! [Laughs]Your love for singing actually cost you work early in life, correct?I enjoyed singing for pleasure, so I was singing to keep myself company when it got me fired the first time, working the 11-to-7 shift. The second time I got fired for singing on the job, I was supposed to be waiting tables. So rather than waiting tables — or, in between waiting tables — I would get up and sing with the band that was playing at the club.How did your relationship with Allen Toussaint take shape? Was it clear immediately that you two had a special connection?It grew over time. There was just no hardships involved whenever I was working with him. He would have me sing a lot of his demos for people that he was writing songs for. I was a quick learner. When he wanted something done, he knew he could depend on me to sing it the way he wanted it sung. I never knew who he was presenting these songs to, I was just doing the demos for him.But you also made some special records together.Oh yeah, of course. He was one who wrote songs specifically for the artists: He knew my vocal ability and he would write a song that he knew would fit. And there was never a song he wrote that I turned down.One thing we haven’t talked about yet is your relationship to gospel music.I grew up in the church, so naturally I would be singing gospel music. Every Sunday when I’m not working, I still sing in church. I’m in the choir at church even now. Most of us grew up in the church, and a lot of us got our influences in the church. So it would be a natural progression to sing and to be a part of the gospel scene, whenever you could.After Katrina, Quint Davis decided that he would like for me to do a tribute to Mahalia Jackson, which I started doing. And I’m still doing the gospel set at JazzFest every year. I do a gospel set, then I do an R&B set. That’s just the natural thing to do. [Laughs]“He knew my vocal ability and he would write a song that he knew would fit,” Thomas said of working with the famed producer Allen Toussaint. “And there was never a song he wrote that I turned down.”Camille Lenain for The New York TimesHow big was Mahalia Jackson’s influence on you?I grew up listening to Mahalia Jackson’s music as a child. My parents had some of her records, back when it was 78s, and then in New Orleans we had radio stations that had gospel programming during the day. But we heard all kinds of music locally on the radio back then, because the radio stations were owned by local producers and owners. So they played a lot of local music as well as a lot of national music.So people who are my age, who grew up here in New Orleans, we had the best of both worlds because we were hearing it all. And then we didn’t have to fight to have a local record played. Nowadays, you’re lucky to hear your record once a year, because it’s not owned by local people. It’s, you know, ClearChannel or something like that, and they couldn’t care less. When you hear one hour, that’s what you’re going to hear all day long. So you don’t get a chance to call in and request what you would like to hear.Hurricane Ida had a big impact on New Orleans. It was nothing like Katrina, but the city appears to still be struggling in the wake of it.Yeah, because now supplies are hard to come by, because of the problems with shipping replenishing them. And so many people lost the roofs on their houses, so you have to wait in line, I guess. But New Orleans is a city that, you know, we’re resilient. We don’t run away. We stay here, and we snap back and move on.I’m sure almost everyone who interviews you must ask about “Time Is on My Side.” But could you talk about why you gave up playing it for a while in the middle of your career?Well you know, after a while, when you sing something that you know you’ve recorded, and you did the first national version of it, and when you’re singing, somebody tells you: “Oh, you’re doing a Rolling Stones song,” I got tired of explaining that I did it before the Rolling Stones. After a while that gets to be old. And so I stopped doing it, because I got tired of explaining that. They didn’t do their homework, they made assumptions. And so at some point you get tired of repeating yourself. Even now, I don’t do it as much as I do others. I sing it, but a lot of times it’s requested before I think about doing it, because I have so many other songs I can do.I have a large enough repertoire that by choice I can either do all of my own material or I can do a few cover songs that I like. And by taking requests, it makes it simpler, because then you are doing what your audience wants to hear. And I’ll put it this way: Most folks leave satisfied that they’ve heard their favorite song.In fact, “Anyone Who Knows What Love Is” — I recorded that back in 1964. I was at a show on the East Coast somewhere, and somebody in the audience asked me to play “Anyone Who Knows What Love Is.” I said, “Wow, I haven’t heard that request in a long time.” I sang it for them, and then when I got through, I asked them: “What album did you get that from?” They said, “We didn’t get it off an album. We heard it on ‘Black Mirror.’” You never know where you’re going to get a request from, or where they heard the song. And so I prepare — I put as much of my own material in my iPad, lyrically, so in case someone asks for it, I’ll do my best to do it for them.Is there one song that you consider nearest to your heart?The only one that I could say I’m closest to would be the one that got me my first big hit, which was “Wish Someone Would Care.” It became No. 17 in the nation, and if it hadn’t been for the British Invasion, it might have gone a little higher in the charts. There were some personal things going on in my life and I wrote the song because of those things. So that would be the closest to me. More

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    Rosa Lee Hawkins, Youngest Member of the Dixie Cups, Dies at 76

    The singing group’s debut single, “Chapel of Love,” rose to the top of the charts in 1964, displacing the Beatles’ “Love Me Do.”Rosa Lee Hawkins, the youngest member of the musical trio the Dixie Cups, whose hit single “Chapel of Love” reached No. 1 on the Billboard 100 in 1964, died on Tuesday in Tampa, Fla. She was 76.The cause was internal bleeding resulting from complications during surgery at Tampa General Hospital, said her sister Barbara Ann Hawkins, who was also a member of the group, along with Joan Marie Johnson, who died in 2016 at 72.The Dixie Cups epitomized the harmonizing sound of the 1960s girl group. “Chapel of Love,” their debut single and most well-known song, quickly replaced the Beatles’ “Love Me Do” as No. 1 on the Billboard charts in 1964. It was later heard on the soundtrack of Stanley Kubrick’s 1987 Vietnam War film, “Full Metal Jacket.”Rosa Lee Hawkins was born on Oct. 23, 1945, in New Orleans to Hartzell Hawkins, a self-employed carpenter, and Lucille (Merette) Hawkins, a state worker who registered voters.While in high school in 1963, Barbara brought Rosa along to sing with her and Joan Marie in a high school talent show. The trio initially called themselves the Meltones, only to discover later that the name had already been taken. Since they were from the land of Dixie, and “cups are cute,” Barbara said in an interview, they came up with the name Dixie Cups (playing on the name of the popular paper cup).Joan later discovered that the Hawkins sisters were actually her cousins.While they did not win the talent show, a talent scout in the audience, impressed by their rich harmonies, invited the group, along with other Louisiana musicians, to perform for Red Bird Records. The Dixie Cups sang “Iko Iko,” a song that was traditionally sung during Mardi Gras and that was a favorite of the Hawkins sisters’ grandmother. They signed a recording contract soon after.The Dixie Cups received two Gold Records, for “Chapel of Love” and another hit, “People Say.” They were inducted into the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame in 2007.The group recorded a total of four albums, their last in 2011. Ms. Johnson, ill with sickle-cell anemia and weary from touring, left the group and was replaced by a number of singers through the years. The Hawkins sisters remained, though, and kept singing just as they did in high school, with harmonies as vibrant as ever.“When the audience smiled and applauded, it made her happy because she knew she put a smile on their faces, if only for that time,” Barbara said of her younger sister.In addition to Barbara, Ms. Hawkins is survived by another sister, Shirley; a son, Eric Blanc; and two grandchildren. More

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    Sandra Jaffe, Who Helped Preserve Jazz at Preservation Hall, Dies at 83

    With her husband, she opened a club in New Orleans in 1961 to showcase traditional jazz. Defying changes in musical fashion, it has been open ever since.In 1961, Sandra and Allan Jaffe stopped in New Orleans on their way home to Philadelphia from an extended honeymoon in Mexico. They heard music playing all around them in the French Quarter and stepped into an art gallery on St. Peter Street where a combo was playing traditional jazz.The Jaffes, then in their 20s, were transformed by what they heard. They came back a few days later to hear the combo again. The gallery’s owner, Larry Borenstein, told them that he was moving his business next door and offered to rent the couple the modest space (31 by 20 feet) for $400 a month.“We didn’t even think twice about it,” Mrs. Jaffe told the alumni magazine of Harcum College, from which she graduated, in 2011. “‘Of course,’ we said, and that was the beginning of Preservation Hall. We never left New Orleans.”Preservation Hall — which serves no alcohol, has no air-conditioning and seats 50 or so on six benches — has celebrated jazz for 60 years in a city widely regarded as its birthplace. It defied segregation laws in the early 1960s. It survived Mr. Jaffe’s death in 1987, and it survived Hurricane Katrina. The coronavirus pandemic shut it down, but it reopened triumphantly in June.And it has nurtured musicians, some of whom played with Louis Armstrong (like the guitarist Johnny St. Cyr) and even (like the bassist Papa John Joseph) with the cornetist Buddy Bolden, said by many jazz historians to have been the music’s first significant practitioner. Many of them had been largely forgotten amid the growing dominance of rock ’n’ roll and other more modern forms of music.“There is no question that Preservation Hall saved New Orleans jazz,” George Wein, the impresario who produced the Newport Jazz Festival and the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, told Vanity Fair in 2011. “When it became an institution in New Orleans, everybody who went down there went to the hall. They paid a dollar to go hear people like George Lewis or Sweet Emma Barrett and made them national figures.”Mrs. Jaffe with the impresario George Wein at the 2010 Newport Folk Festival. “There is no question,” Mr. Wein once said, “that Preservation Hall saved New Orleans jazz.”Douglas Mason/Getty ImagesMrs. Jaffe died on Monday in a hospital in New Orleans. She was 83.Her son Ben, the creative director of Preservation Hall, confirmed the death.The Jaffes played different roles at Preservation Hall. Allan Jaffe, who played the helicon, a brass instrument, was the link to the musicians and sent them out on the road as the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. Mrs. Jaffe, who shared management duties with her husband, was usually stationed at the hall’s front gate, basket on her lap, collecting money from the patrons.“That’s how she was remembered by many: as the first to interact with people,” Ben Jaffe said in an interview. “She was also the de facto bouncer and security; she’d have to step in when people were being inappropriate or espousing racist language. My mother would bite first, then assess the situation.”Preservation Hall was integrated at a time when there were still Jim Crow laws that banned the mixing of races. Mrs. Jaffe was once arrested there, along with Kid Thomas Valentine’s band, for flouting the ban on integration.“The judge banged his gavel and said, ‘In New Orleans, we don’t like to mix our coffee and cream,’” Ben Jaffe said, recalling what his parents had told him. “She burst out laughing and said, ‘That’s funny — the most popular thing in New Orleans is café au lait.’”Mrs. Jaffe watched and listened as the trombonist Freddie Lonzo sang when Preservation Hall reopened in June after the Covid lockdown.Chris Granger/The Times-Picayune/The Advocate/Associated PressSandra Smolen was born in Philadelphia on March 10, 1938. Her parents were Jewish immigrants from Ukraine. Her father, Jacob, held various jobs, including running a gas station and a taproom; her mother, Lena (Kaplan) Smolen, was a homemaker.Sandra studied journalism and public relations at Harcum, in Bryn Mawr., Pa., and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1958. She worked for an advertising agency for two years and married her husband on Christmas Day 1960. After honeymooning in Mexico, they headed to New Orleans, where one of his fraternity brothers lived; Mr. Jaffe had gotten to know the city during his military service.After their first musical encounter at the art gallery, the Jaffes decided they would stay three more days, until the combo that had entranced them was to appear again. “Our parents were expecting us back in Philadelphia any day,” she told the Harcum magazine, “but we had to stay a little longer.”After making the rental deal for the gallery, the Jaffes joined with other fans of its jam sessions to form the New Orleans Society for the Preservation of Traditional Jazz to book musicians; several months later, the couple opened the hall. For the first year or so, they kept the jobs they had found in New Orleans, Mrs. Jaffe at a typesetting business and Mr. Jaffe at a department store.They did not charge admission at first. Instead, patrons dropped money in a basket that Mrs. Jaffe passed around; she would shake it if someone appeared unwilling to contribute. Eventually, they began charging $1 (today, tickets cost $25 to $50).Mrs. Jaffe was usually stationed at Preservation Hall’s front gate with a basket, collecting money from the patrons.via Jaffe FamilyBusiness was propelled early on by a laudatory two-and-a-half-minute piece about Preservation Hall — which featured Mr. Jaffe but not Mrs. Jaffe — on NBC’s “Huntley-Brinkley Report.”Mr. Jaffe started sending musicians on tour in 1963, and various versions of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band have been playing around the world and recording ever since. The band members have included the pianist Sweet Emma Barrett, the brothers Willie and Percy Humphrey (who played clarinet and trumpet) and the husband and wife Billie and De De Pierce (she played piano and sang, he played trumpet and cornet). Ben Jaffe currently plays sousaphone in the band.“I took the band on tour for many years,” Resa Lambert, one of Mrs. Jaffe’s sisters, who worked at the Hall for many years, said in an interview. “I was a roadie. For seven men. It was great.”In addition to her son Ben and her sister, Mrs. Jaffe is survived by another son, Russell; four grandchildren; and another sister, Brenda Epstein.The Preservation Hall Jazz Band received the National Medal of Arts from President George W. Bush in 2006. The ensemble was cited for “displaying the unbreakable spirit of New Orleans and sharing the joy of New Orleans jazz with us all.”Mrs. Jaffe, who accepted the award with her son Ben, remained involved in the Hall until recently, although she no longer had a hands-on role.“She would call every day asking questions about ticket sales and touring,” Ben Jaffe said. “She always felt engaged and always was engaged, even when she wasn’t physically there.” Until recently, he said, she would grab a broom and sweep the sidewalk in front. More

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    Bennie Pete, Bandleader Who Kept the Beat After Katrina, Dies at 45

    A tuba player and the leader of the Hot 8, one of New Orleans’s high-profile brass bands, he brought music to his fellow citizens in the difficult days after the storm.Bennie Pete, a New Orleans tuba player who co-founded and led the Hot 8, one of the city’s high-profile brass bands, and dedicated himself to preserving the musical traditions of the Big Easy after Hurricane Katrina, died on Sept. 6 at a hospital there. He was 45.His wife, Lameka Segura-Pete, said the cause was complications of sarcoidosis, an inflammatory disease, and Covid-19.The soul of New Orleans is rooted in music. Second-line parades march for hours down its streets, with brass bands followed by dancers holding feathered parasols and sipping drinks. New Orleans honors its dead with jazz funerals that strut through town, celebrating life through a musical sacrament with the city.Born and raised in the Upper Ninth Ward, Mr. Pete embraced this heritage. He started playing the tuba at 10 and joined a marching band in middle school. At 18, he helped bring together two brass bands, the Looney Tunes and the High Steppers, into the Hot 8.The Hot 8 began playing for tips on Bourbon Street and in Jackson Square, in the heart of the French Quarter. They performed outside a housing project in the Central City neighborhood, where people sat down with bags of crawfish and bottles of Abita beer to listen. Mr. Pete once found himself leading a jazz funeral for a dog.“He was a popular dog for one of the popular musicians,” he told Esquire magazine in 2014, “and they threw a big second-line parade through the streets for him. They’d make a reason to party.”By 2000, the Hot 8 had established itself as part of a vanguard of young brass bands that were upholding the jazz and funk traditions of New Orleans yet playing with a contemporary sound. The Hot 8’s repertoire included songs by the Specials and Marvin Gaye, and the band incorporated rap and hip-hop into its style. The musicians led second lines on Sundays for social aid and pleasure clubs; crowds formed at night to watch them play in bars in the Treme neighborhood.After Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, the preservation of New Orleans’s musical heritage became a matter of serious concern. Countless musicians were displaced and evacuated, and longstanding jazz and blues clubs were left in ruin. Mr. Pete and a few bandmates ended up in Atlanta.Two months later, the Hot 8 regrouped to lead the first jazz funeral in New Orleans after the storm. The band played with donated instruments, and members of the procession wore salvaged pieces of finery. The parade, which honored a celebrated chef, Austin Leslie, started at Pampy’s Creole Kitchen in the Seventh Ward before ambling to the former site of Chez Helene, where a sign greeted the marchers: “We won’t bow down. Save our soul.”“Bennie wanted to play for these people to give them that New Orleans love that was missing,” his wife said of his activities after Katrina. “He and the band got busy spreading the culture around.”Maria ZbaskaAs despair weighed on the city, the Hot 8 began performing at evacuation shelters and emergency medical centers. They drove around in a van, stopping to jam for crowds until little second lines formed, before heading to another part of town. It wasn’t long before they became local heroes.“Bennie wanted to play for these people to give them that New Orleans love that was missing,” his wife said. “He and the band got busy spreading the culture around.”When Spike Lee learned of the Hot 8, he decided to feature them in his 2006 documentary about New Orleans, “When the Levees Broke,” which brought them national attention. They were signed to a British record label; they toured with Lauryn Hill and performed with Mos Def. They appeared on the HBO show “Treme” and recorded with the gospel group the Blind Boys of Alabama.But even as music returned to New Orleans after the storm, the Hot 8 endured more misfortune. Their snare drummer, Dinerral Shavers, was shot dead in his car in December 2006. It was only the latest in a series of tragedies for the band.In 1996, the trumpet player Jacob Johnson was shot in the head at his home. In 2004, the trombonist Joseph Williams was killed in an encounter with the police. And just after Katrina, the trumpeter Terrell Batiste lost his legs in a road accident.Mr. Shavers’s murder especially rattled Mr. Pete.“I wanted to move,” he told OffBeat magazine. “I was tired of New Orleans. I felt like I would be the one next.”Ultimately, Mr. Pete resolved to stay, and the Hot 8 recorded an album to honor their fallen bandmates.The Hot 8 Brass Band in 2017. From left: Christopher Cotton, Tyrus Chapman, Anthony Brooks, Harry Cook, Mr. Pete, Larry Brown, Alvarez Huntley and Andrew Calhoun.Melissa FargoReleased in 2012, “The Life & Times Of …” was nominated for a Grammy Award as best regional roots music album. The group released “Tombstone,” a sister album also based on the theme of remembrance, the next year. The Hot 8 was also featured on a 2015 compilation album, “New Orleans Brass Bands: Through the Streets of the City,” on the Smithsonian’s Folkways label.“Everything kind of worked,” Mr. Pete told Esquire. “Yeah, we are the Hot 8 who went through these things, but we’re still here, and this is who we are after the storm.”Bennie Gerald Pete Jr. was born on July 10, 1976. His father was a maintenance worker in the Garden District. His mother, Terry (Thomas) Pete, was a homemaker.As a boy, Bennie attended a Baptist church in the Seventh Ward where his maternal grandfather was pastor, and he danced in the aisles as he sang gospel music. He graduated from Alcée Fortier High School in 1994.In addition to his wife, Mr. Pete is survived by three sons, Brannon, Brennon and Bennie III; two stepdaughters, La’Shae Joseph and Laila Trask; and two sisters, Yvete and Terneisha Pete.Over the last decade, the Hot 8 began touring regularly in Europe; in New Orleans, the band performed on the vaunted stages of Tipitina’s and the annual Jazz & Heritage Festival.Mr. Pete suffered a seizure in 2014 and was diagnosed with sarcoidosis. In 2018, he underwent surgery for prostate cancer. During the lockdown, his health deteriorated and he lost 100 pounds. When the Hot 8 recently resumed their Sunday residency at the Howlin’ Wolf, Mr. Pete didn’t join them onstage.In the days after his death, brass bands in New Orleans mourned him with music. They led second lines through Treme, Central City and the Garden District. The soulful notes of “Just a Closer Walk With Thee,” a hymn played to send off the dead, echoed into the night. More

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    A Pandemic, Then a Hurricane, Brings New Orleans Musicians ‘to Their Knees’

    When Hurricane Ida swept through New Orleans late last month, it took a piece of history with it. The Karnofsky Tailor Shop and Residence, a decrepit red brick building that had served as a kind of second home for Louis Armstrong during his boyhood in the early 1900s, was reduced to rubble.At the Little Gem Saloon next door, where some of the first jazz gigs were played, a three-story-tall mural paying homage to the pioneering cornetist Buddy Bolden was also ruined.Most of the city’s active music venues fared far better, suffering minor roof and water damage. But the storm was only the latest in a series of blows to the people and places that make up the jazz scene, in a city that stakes its identity on live music.“We’ve been without work for over 18 months now,” Big Sam Williams, a trombonist and bandleader, said in a phone interview from his home in the Gentilly neighborhood. “It’s a struggle and we’re just barely making it.”Doug Trager, who manages the Maple Leaf Bar in the Carrollton neighborhood, said that after 446 days of shutdown because of Covid-19, “we were just getting going” again before Ida hit. Now that the storm has created another setback, he said, “we’ll just try to keep waiting it out.”The Little Gem Saloon days after the storm.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesLittle Gem Saloon and the Karnofsky Shop sit on the same block.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesIt has now been a year and a half since the pandemic first prompted a citywide moratorium on indoor performances. On Aug. 16, the city imposed a mandate requiring all patrons at bars and clubs to be vaccinated or recently tested for Covid-19, seeming to open the door to a new phase of reopening.But as the Delta variant surged, the city’s two major jazz festivals, the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival and French Quarter Fest, both already pushed back from their usual springtime schedule, were called off. That meant that, for the second year in a row, musicians would have to do without the most active period of their work year, when hordes of tourists arrive for the festivals and spillover gigs at clubs often provide enough work for area performers to pay the rent for months.A week and a half after the storm, many in the city’s live-music business say they will not be resting easy, even after things come back online.In interviews, local advocates said that zoning laws had long made small venue operators’ lives difficult, and that neighborhood clubs have run into needless red tape during the pandemic as the city has sometimes enforced strict permitting regulations around outdoor entertainment.“They’re counting on the continued presence of the culture bearers and the musicians, and they’re mistaken this time,” said Ashlye Keaton, a co-founder of the Ella Project, which provides legal assistance to and agitates on behalf of New Orleans artists. “The storm, coupled with Covid, has brought musicians to their knees.”While some venues have survived since March 2020 with substantial help from federal grants, including the $16 billion Shuttered Venue Operators Grant program, other small and vulnerable clubs, particularly those nestled in the city’s working-class neighborhoods, often lacked the capacity or the wherewithal to apply. Many have held on largely thanks to fund-raisers and whatever performances they can safely pull off without raising the hackles of regulators and neighbors.In a statement, a spokeswoman for Mayor LaToya Cantrell said the city will continue to enforce permitting for outdoor live entertainment events on a temporary basis, pointing out that the mayor had lifted its usual cap on those permits during the pandemic.“The Department of Safety & Permits fully supports and is actively working with partners in the City Council to enact legislation which balances the desire for outdoor entertainment, supports local artists and venues as well as preserves the quality of life for the neighbors and residents of each community,” the statement says.Preservation Hall, the 60-year-old landmark in the well-protected French Quarter, appeared to have sustained minimal damage in Hurricane Ida.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesTipitina’s, a concert hall uptown, will require some repairs to its roof.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesMany of the city’s active venues were spared serious damage in the storm.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesPreservation Hall, the 60-year-old landmark in the well-protected French Quarter, appeared to have sustained minimal damage in Hurricane Ida, and is slated to reopen once power is restored. Tipitina’s, a concert hall uptown, located closer to the water, will require some repairs to its roof.The New Orleans Jazz Market, a stately performance center in Central City, appears to have held up well, but it was forced to significantly postpone its programming nonetheless — just days after what was supposed to have been a triumphant reopening for its fall 2021 season.“This is very reminiscent of Hurricane Katrina, and what we went through during that time, and I know a lot of New Orleans musicians are displaced,” said the drummer Adonis Rose, the artistic director of the Jazz Market and leader of its resident big band, the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra. He called the storm a “tragedy, when we were just starting to see some glimmer of hope.”The New Orleans Jazz Market held up well, but it was forced to significantly postpone its programming after the hurricane.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesKermit Ruffins, a trumpeter who runs Kermit’s Tremé Mother-in-Law Lounge, turned his club into a community gathering space during the pandemic.L. Kasimu Harris for The New York TimesKermit Ruffins, a renowned trumpeter who runs Kermit’s Tremé Mother-in-Law Lounge, said in an interview on Monday that the electricity had just come back on at the popular neighborhood club, and he planned to get the place ready to rock.During the pandemic, Ruffins’s club served as a gathering spot and a kind of improvised community cafeteria. He moved concerts outside to the club’s patio, and cooked free meals of red beans and rice for residents of the surrounding Tremé neighborhood, and for musicians who were out of work.“I figured if I cooked for myself, I’d cook for the neighborhood,” Ruffins said.Howie Kaplan, the proprietor of the Howlin’ Wolf, a venue in downtown New Orleans, also began providing meals and other services to musicians in the early days of the pandemic. The program was subsumed into the New Orleans Musicians’ Clinic earlier this year; he restarted it at the Howlin’ Wolf last month, in response to Hurricane Ida.“We’ve got a James Beard Award-winning chef on the grill right now, making these fantastic steaks that came from who knows where,” Kaplan said in a phone interview, adding that restaurants had come to donate food that they wouldn’t be able to prepare because of the power outage.Shortly after Hurricane Ida passed over the city, Jordan Hirsch — the editor of the online resource A Closer Walk, which provides detailed information on New Orleans’s heritage sites — set out to determine how the city’s most vulnerable music landmarks had held up.The program providing meals returned to the Howlin’ Wolf after Hurricane Ida.Jillian Marie PhotographyWhen he got to the Karnofsky shop, on South Rampart Street downtown, he saw that the building had become wreckage and the Bolden mural nearby had crumbled. But other equally old jazz landmarks along the block, the former Eagle Saloon and the Iroquois Theater, had miraculously pulled through. All four structures are on the national historic register; it’s safe to say that no single block in the United States today houses more early jazz history.A Cleveland-based developer, GBX Group, recently bought out most of the addresses on the street, and plans to rebuild it into a center of commerce that will also trumpet its role in jazz history. After the storm, GBX hired workers to collect the Karnofsky shop’s bricks, said its C.E.O., Drew Sparacia, hoping to at least partially rebuild the structure using the original materials.But Hirsch asked why the city had not done more to demand that the owners of these historic places, which to the outside observer appear to be mostly abandoned, keep them protected from the elements.“Tropical storms and hurricanes were sort of a constant threat for those buildings,” Hirsch said. “People have been sounding that alarm for 30 years.”Some other sites that made it through Hurricane Ida remain deeply endangered, according to preservationists. John McCusker, a jazz historian and photojournalist who has worked to preserve historic buildings in the city, said that Bolden’s former home in Central City and the old Dew Drop Inn — a midcentury music venue, hotel and community hub — were both in states of relative disrepair.McCusker lamented that the sites’ landlords hadn’t been compelled to restore and preserve the buildings.“We have this wealth of these buildings connected to the birth of this music, and the mechanisms of government have just proven maladroit at protecting them with the same vigor that they would enforce an inappropriate shutter in the French Quarter,” he said. More