Leroy's Art Blog

I returned from New Orleans this past Monday evening, in time for my last painting class on Tuesday morning and a Tuesday afternoon stint with the Committee of 70, a watchdog group overseeing the Clinton-Obama primary election in Philadelphia.  Fortunately a Tuesday scheduled luncheon with the Congreso de los Latinos, a group that I've also been volunteering with, was postponed until tomorrow.

This trip to NOLA played tricks on my head.  I was there for the QuarterFest, a weekend of free outdoor jazz at sites around the French Quarter in advance of the more famous - and very pricy - Jazz and Heritage Festival that features all the big fancy names at the State Fair Grounds.  The free music was a bit spotty, but some of it very good.  My major "find" came while attending a curious Colloquium (their terminology) on the History of Storyville, sponsored by the National Park Service.  Storyville is the original redlight district of NOLA that is considered the birthplace of jazz, and it has apparently become the niche subject of a whole group of historians who argue happily about the identity of various madams and the degree of segregation that was practiced there and who played what kind of music in which bordello.  In a welcome break between speakers, they gave the stage to Jim Hession.  He was a pianist who has spent years studying the early styles and creators of jazz piano.  People like Jelly Roll Morton, Willie the Lion Smith, Eubie Blake and ...      Jim turned out to be the best stride pianist I've ever heard, so I spent a lot of time in the club where he plays (Fritzels, in the 700 block of Bourbon St.).  Then the group he plays with won the Battle of the Bands on Sunday, so I am not alone in thinking he is really special.

So:  Go to youtube.com and type JIM HESSION in the search bar.  He has posted tons of his stride piano work there - and be sure to listen long enough to enjoy some of the transitions and key changes he puts in all the stuff he plays.  

DO IT NOW - You can always come back to this blog later.  That's Jim Hession, at youtube.

Officially, I was in NOLA as part of a Unitarian work group to help build houses in the decimated 9th ward with Habitat for Humanity.  Being retired, I could take extra days to enjoy the city before the group arrived.  The other advantage going there on my own is that I was less tied to the Group Activities Schedule.  The women who organized the trip were good at organizing things, and boy, did they ever ORGANIZE!  Maybe it has to be that way with a group of some two dozen people, but I do prefer more freedom when I am just knocking around.   But we did get quite a bit done on two very solid and attractive, if basic, houses.  Roofing, siding, painting, mostly, as well as clearing trash and brush out of a large vacant lot.  It felt so fantastic to be engaged in real physical activity, tiring activity, after all these gloomy cold months in which I've been focused too much on my own health and in dealing with the side effects of medications.

I took lots of pictures, and will try to figure out how to put them on something like Flickr and link to them in a future post - soon to follow, hopefully.

The 9th ward is unsettling.  The devastation is still overwhelming, with empty houses boarded up or decaying.  Across the street from where we were building there was a huge project of some twenty or so big buildings that is empty and forlorn, in the process of being bulldozed.  Really, the boarded up houses in the area are the more hopeful ones, as it indicates that people plan to come back to them.  If they can get FEMA or insurance money to assist the gutting, cleanup and rebuilding.  The houses that aren't boarded up are doomed for destruction.  Then there are the sections near the levees that broke, where there are no houses at all, just the blocks that the houses used to stand on, or the front steps up to nothing.  And then there are the spooky big red Xs on the houses, now faded, to indicate how many dead people or animals were found there on the initial inspection.

In spite of all that decimation, there are houses here and there in the process of reconstruction, looking like flowers in the middle of a sea of mud.  The local people we talked to are determined to rebuild, resettle, and create a community again.  The problem is getting the money to do it, and the need for JOBS.  Across the street from us an 80 year old guy was coming in from 50 miles away every chance he got to rebuild his house, with help from his family and friends when possible.

The thing that weirded me out on this trip was the nature of the segregation I encountered.  Here is NOLA, whose contribution to the USA and the world is jazz, the unique American music, cobbled together from the black and mixed cultural experience.  And yet....

The Storyville Colloquium was 99% white, both presenters and audience.  I talked to the guy who set it up and he was aware of that racial mix, doesn't like it, but doesn't know how to change it.  

The people at the QuarterFest, admittedly mostly tourist, were 95% white.  Why?  This is black music we were here for, or at least for the music that traces its heritage back to it.  Is this more white co-opting of black contributions, or are blacks just not interested in history, or is the style and language used so distinct that it does not cross the black-white boundary?  Were there no posters for the QuarterFest in black areas or in black newspapers?  Do black newspapers exist in NOLA?

Then there was Habitat itself.  The Habitat volunteers are mostly young, lots of school and church youth groups.  And, almost exclusively white.  Their assistance is clearly very welcome and highly appreciated, especially by the local black people who are working to rebuild their communities.  But where are black volunteer groups from outside NO?  Is there a black equivalent of Habitat somewhere that I never heard of?  Where are MIXED groups of white kids and black kids working together to create something worthwhile?

I do think these are general issues, not just New Orleans issues.  But I think the catastrophe of Katrina ripped the cover off of a whole range of culture-related issues that have been so ingrained in our way of living and seeing that we were blind to their existence.  

In fairness, I did attend a photography exhibition/discussion by Chandra McCormick, Exec. Dir. of L9 Center for the Arts, a dynamic black woman photographer building a center for black artists and training for young photographers in the 9th ward.  And for sure, both performers and audience in the great jazz clubs along Frenchman St, just outside the French Quarter, are a wonderful mix of black and white, tourist and local.  Shared pleasures and creation does exist across color lines.  Thank god!  And, of COURSE.

To end this monologue:  I woke up in the middle of the night thinking about the need for an homage to Grant Wood's iconic painting American Gothic.  In my homage the figure is a black couple in front of a 9th ward shotgun house and the black man is wearing work gloves and holding construction tools instead of a pitchfork, and the sky is broken and gray instead of sunny and bright.  If only I had the ability and talent, I would work off that image to create paintings with the kind of intensity and variety that Jasper Johns brought to the American flag.