For displaced musicians, road is home
BATON ROUGE, La. -- George Porter Jr., a New Orleans musician and original member of the legendary funk group the Meters, was not supposed to be here last Friday night. He was scheduled to play a gig at a shiny downtown New Orleans nightclub. But like so many other New Orleans musicians, Porter, 57, watched his city and his schedule become swamped by Hurricane Katrina's floodwaters. And that's why he was onstage in a smoky Baton Rouge college bar in new clothes purchased that day at
''Hey," shouted a man in the crowd, ''play something for the refugees."
''I think we'd rather be called survivors," Porter answered.
The crowd, a mixture of displaced New Orleanians and Baton Rouge residents, cheered. Chelsea's Cafe, located in a strip mall not far from Interstate 10, was rocking. And while that excited club owner David Remmetter -- who has never had a better chance to attract top New Orleans talent -- the trend troubles those keeping watch over the city's now-scattered culture.
New Orleans's music -- from Porter's funk to Wynton Marsalis's jazz -- has always traveled. But in the two weeks since Katrina hit Louisiana, flooding the city and closing it indefinitely to visitors and residents, local musicians have hit the road like never before.
They are living in New York and Memphis, Minneapolis and Austin, Texas. They are in shelters. Some are missing. In Houston, some 53 musicians have banded together as NOAH -- for New Orleans and Houston -- to get gigs. And in Memphis, Carson Lamm, a local drummer and guitarist, said he has helped 35 displaced musicians get jobs at clubs around town, including at several Beale Street bars. ''It's very therapeutic for these guys," Lamm said. ''As soon as they picked up their instruments and started playing, they got to forget what happened to them."
David Freedman, general manager of WWOZ, a listener-supported radio station known for playing jazz in New Orleans, is happy that at least some musicians -- who lost instruments, homes, and loved ones in Katrina's raging waters -- are finding work.
But he worries what will happen if it takes weeks or months for the city to reopen. ''Some of them," he lamented, ''will not come back." Others will want to, Freedman said, but he wonders to what they will return.
''Will they have a place to come back to? Will they have a house to come back to? Will they have jobs to come back to? The scene is changing," he said. ''And if it changes for too long, it will never come back."
Porter evacuated the day before Katrina made landfall; he left with his family, the treasured electric bass he has played for 30 years, and not much else. He moved in with a cousin in Donaldsonville, La., about 65 miles west of New Orleans, and said he believes his studio back home may have survived the storm. Others did not get off so lucky.
Clint Maedgen, a singer with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band and one of New Orleans's most creative young musicians, lost everything, he said, when the floodwaters swallowed his lakefront home: his saxophone, keyboards, and guitar. ''I put two pairs of clothes in my car. And that's it, man," said Maedgen, who evacuated to Houston and is now staying with friends in New York.
Kevin Harris, who plays tenor saxophone in the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, lost a prized instrument, too: his Selmer sax. His band was on tour when the storm hit, and he didn't have a chance to save it from his home. But that wasn't the worst thing. ''James Harris, my father, is still missing," he said.
As he spoke, Kevin Harris stood backstage at Sogo Live, a sprawling club near the Argosy Casino in the heart of an otherwise quiet downtown Baton Rouge. The Dirty Dozen had just finished a set, and the crowd, clad mostly in striped golf shirts and baseball caps, could not get enough.
This was a far cry from New Orleans, where Harris grew up playing all night in tiny clubs without air conditioning, places so hot and old that you could almost feel the paint peeling off the walls. This is the New Orleans many local musicians have captured in song and the one Maedgen says he will return to as soon as it is possible.
He will have help. Musicians across the country are raising money for the singers, guitarists, and tuba players displaced by the storm. WWOZ's website -- www.wwoz.org -- has become a clearinghouse for information for those looking for one another. And the New Orleans Musician's Clinic, once dedicated to providing healthcare for musicians, is changing to meet new challenges. The clinic, with the help of the Jazz Foundation of America, hopes to outfit New Orleans musicians with instruments and have a few playing in shelters, for money, by Thursday.
''The middle-income musicians . . . they were part of the evacuation," said Bethany Bultman, one of the clinic's founders. ''But the evacuation of the poor people has been like this huge gill net that has sucked up all the street musicians, the brass band musicians, the Mardi Gras Indians, the gospel singers. And they're scattered in shelters all across the country."
Bultman hopes to track them down, though finding them does not necessarily mean they will return. Coming back to New Orleans may be ''inevitable" for Maedgen. ''I'll be back there," he said. ''I still got my voice." But others are already moving on.
Harris declared himself last weekend to be ''a Baton Rougian or whatever they call it," saying he had no plans to live in New Orleans again until he could reside above sea level.
Porter plans to return. ''I'm coming back down to New Orleans," he said. ''I'm definitely coming back." But for now, he's looking for a new place set up shop, a place he can call home for a while, maybe longer.
He is looking for a home in Boston.
