The Times, November, 2005
What’s the correct emotional response to news that a Category 4 storm is heading toward a city of unique and global cultural consequence? It’s impossible to conceive of a jazz or American music enthusiast anywhere who didn’t experience a kernel of panic as the story of breached levees and catastrophic floods began to emerge. Until August 29 2005, Buddy Bolden’s 1902 clarion call cornet tone - the very first note in a century of jazz and a sound so diamond clear it was said to carry out of New Orleans and across the Louisiana state line - could still just about be heard. Its continued echo wasn’t just down to the way it remains lodged in jazz’s musical DNA, shaping the breaths of jazz trumpeters from Beijing to Brussels. It was absolutely at its most concentrated and valuable in New Orleans, where it continued to simmer in a racial, cultural, architectural stew that hadn’t left the heat in hundreds of years. New Orleans was America’s Vienna.
And then as witness-reports and pictures filtered out - of bloated bodies floating past houses; people, who had had little before, left with nothing; packed hospitals without power or water - it seemed almost obscene, a guilty spoilt indulgence, to be worrying about the romance of streets once trodden by a young Louis Armstrong.
According to Bob Hurwitz, president of Nonesuch Records, there is no correct emotional response to Katrina.
“We’re talking about an important American city that has been wiped out, and that’s so profound because it’s never happened before. Four hundred thousand people were displaced and many of them, perhaps most, will not come back. But how can you help thinking of the architecture, and the nightlife, and the food and literary scene? They’re the signposts of New Orleans.”
Hurwitz’s own response was an interesting one. What do you do when something vital is threatened, and it’s not in your power to rescue it? You record it. “Nobody knew - nobody knows,” he says, “how any of this is going to turn out. So we said, ‘Let’s make a record of what still stands the day after Katrina.’”
Our New Orleans is a record, in the literal sense - an album of New Orleans music in its myriad forms, recorded quickly in a series of ad hoc sessions in the weeks following the storm. The musicians’ links to the city were more important than their celebrity; and the resulting logistical complications of putting the record together (in some instances merely locating or verifying the existence of musicians) proved very difficult. But the album’s finished, it features Dr John, Randy Newman, Buckwheat Zydeco, Allen Toussaint, The Dirty Dozen Brass Band and many other artists whose music was formed directly in that special New Orleans stew. All proceeds from sales will go to Habitat for Humanity. It’s a moving record, largely in the collective power of the choice of material... Feet Don’t Fail Me Now (Dirty Dozen Brass Band), A World I Never Made (Dr John), Irma Thomas’s recording of Bessie Smith’s Backwater Blues (about the breached levees of the 1927 flood).
The music will survive (although perhaps locked in a kind of stasis) without the city, because that’s what music does. But can New Orleans survive without the musicians? The importance of culture to New Orleans’ economy can’t be overestimated. Point Two in Lieutenant Governor of Louisiana Mitchell J Landrieu’s official “Rebirth” plan is to “make Louisiana’s Cultural Economy the engine of economic and social rebirth”. (Point One is focussed on New Orleans as a tourist destination, which kind of hangs on Point Two.) But there’s absolutely nothing to suggest the practitioners of this culture - the street level performers who keep that stew bubbling - are keen to return. I spoke to Mac Rebennack (Dr John) and Stanley Dural (Buckwheat Zydeco) about the unfolding situation, and leant that amongst every tier of musician there’s a hot streak of anger and hurt that is dramatically at odds with the studied laid-back bonhomie associated with the New Orleans music scene. As the developers start to gather around the entrails of a once-vibrant city, Rebennack says it’s hard to trust the assurances of authorities, already so discredited by the way they mismanaged the crisis, that the city’s reconstruction won’t be tainted by the same kind of ethnic discrimination that characterised the rescue efforts:
“It’s all there to be bought. I mean a lot of very suspicious, cold-blooded things went down in the whole deal. There’s a lot of unanswered questions. And until those questions get answered I don’t think anybody’s going to be feeling too confident about any chunk of this.”
Even if the residents could afford to return, Stanley Dural doubts they’re going to want to, at least without a radical reconsideration of the city’s flood defences. “If our government can go to all these other countries,” he says, “and take care of them, why can’t they look after one city? They’ve got to make sure this can’t happen ever again, that the people can be safe. If they can’t do that, not too many people are going to be moving back to New Orleans.”
The really interesting thing about New Orleans’s culture is that, despite all the musical archaeology and the appropriation by the advertising industry of its more cabaret tendencies, it hadn’t done with developing. Finished shortly before the hurricane struck, Nik Cohn’s new book, Triksta, is the story of a man seeking the excitement of a truly living, breathing music that reflects its society. Ironically, he finds it in New Orleans hip hop - in particular, a local, Creole-infused form called “bounce”. His book is published on November 17, and already it’s an elegy to a lost world - scattered across Louisiana’s neighbouring states.
And that’s precisely the issue now for New Orleans. The city’s culture was a big historical ethnic accident... a certain meeting of native America, Europe and Africa under certain circumstances. Where you get planning - especially planning aimed at kick-starting commerce - you get Disneyfication, and in this instance the danger of a corporate redefinition of what New Orleans culture is and isn’t. Let’s all of us hope that the planners listen to the former residents, the musicians and writers and artists when they decide what it is. Because - an excellent, exciting and moving album though Our New Orleans is - nobody would want another snapshot of New Orleans musical life, recorded perhaps in another hundred years, to sound exactly the same as this one. Linton Chiswick
A few weeks after this feature ran in the Times, I was struggling to make a new piece of software work on my Mac, and contacted the developers for support. They asked for a sample file. I grabbed one at random, and it happened to be a draft of this feature. Clearly, I'd chosen the wrong file to send to this particular techie. He had a lot to say on the subject and - although I don't think he'd grasped that my own brief, here, had been to give the musicians a voice - a lot of it was interesting (I've left out the section in which he tries to fix a non-functioning applet):
By the way, I was born in New Orleans, graduated from high school there and went to graduate school at Tulane (all many, many years ago). I spent 30 years in government and worked extensively with the National Governors' Association, especially in State-Federal liaison areas.I understand the bitterness of some of the musicians about the way those trapped in New Orleans were treated. But it was not an ethnic or social class issue. I like the mayor of New Orleans, who inherited an utterly corrupt and incompetent city administration. He made some serious errors of judgement in rapidly moving circumstances. But he shouldn't be the fall person. FEMA was in disarray after being moved to the Department of Homeland Security. But FEMA (even its former semi-competent head) wasn't the real problem either. Few people realize that FEMA is a relatively small agency that doesn't itself have response capabilities. FEMA is a planning and coordination agency. The resources available to it include many federal agencies and non-governmental groups such as the Red Cross. Congress funds FEMA to make grants to state and local governments to develop emergency response plans for all kinds of contingencies, from earthquakes to hurricanes. Millions of dollars had been provided to Louisiana and New Orleans to develop emergency response plans, and they existed.
Louisiana's Governor Blanco is the single person most responsible for the management fiascos in the days following Katrina. Not only wasn't the Louisiana emergency response plan followed. It was misapplied time after time to make the situation worse.
Example: FEMA does not itself stock emergency response supplies such as food and water. It coordinates with the Red Cross and others to do that. By Tuesday, the day after the hurricane, the Red Cross had many truckloads of supplies positioned to enter New Orleans and provide assistance to people at the SuperDome and the Convention Center. They were not allowed to enter the city, on the specific orders of the Louisiana Homeland Security agency. The Red Cross kept begging for permission to enter, and continued being denied for days. Meanwhile, thousands of people were suffering for lack of food and water. Utterly stupid mismanagement, not by FEMA, but by the state.
Example: The federal government is prohibited by law from entering a state except in a case of insurrection. Only if a state's Governor makes specific, formal requests to the President can troops be sent in, for example, to assist in an emergency response. Nor can the President federalize National Guard units for such a purpose without specific request by a Governor. The procedures for making requests were clearly spelled out in the Louisiana emergency response plans, and had supposedly been used in training exercises. But Governor Blanco did not make any such requests until late Wednesday afternoon following the hurricane. In the interim, Governor Blanco had thousands of state National Guard troops available to send to New Orleans. Only a handful were sent there. To top it all, the governor refused to turn over coordination lead to the federal government, insisting that Louisiana remain in control of response activities.
The mayor made some errors of judgment that could have gotten thousands more people out of New Orleans. But most of the blame for the plight of thousands of people after the hurricane struck lies with the governor, not the federal government. The reason, in my opinion, was simple incompetence, not ethnic or socioeconomic bias.
Yes, it was a very real tragedy. There are continuing consequences. For example, the medical care system in New Orleans and other impacted areas was devastated. The LSU and Tulane medical schools are almost out of operation. Charity Hospital in New Orleans will have to be demolished, with no available substitute. Many businesses have moved out of New Orleans, and many will not return. Baton Rouge has become the largest city in Louisiana, and that may be permanent.
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