TROMBONE SHORTY SAVES THE DAY
Notes from New Orleans and the Jazz & Heritage Festival

Arms outstretched, horn dangling from one hand, the costume discarded, his youth unmasked, Troy ..Trombone Shorty.. Andrews leans back in the waves of cheers. In this tent of surprised revival, the mass stands to roar for him. As the crowd breathes a rest, Shorty introduces each member of his band, name by name. When he gets to himself, a skinny boy from the Treme in jeans and a t-shirt, barely old enough to drink, he says, ..And I..am Wynton Marsalis!..
We collapse our exhausted bodies in wonder-laughs. Something new just happened.

*

Well what then? When the details are squat and blown about, what comes up in the sifting? If you..ve lived off of memories and return to their spawning ground, knowing full well that place nearly lost its life and lies wrecked and twisted, what..s to find? Would I even know my way around or would I point vaguely at corners and realize they..d never be mine again, only gaps in the recall? And the girl? I knew only that I..ve strolled into New Orleans before with handfuls of expectations and been mistaken, so I..d take none with me this time.

*

I came down to New Orleans to see Kimberly Van Wagner, the city, and the Jazz Fest, in that order. Kim and I went to the festival together when last I lived here. That was 7 years ago. Now she lives there after the flood, arriving New Year..s Eve 2005, and so there we are together. Of course, times have a way of changing.
The protean and fleeting drifted always in the river down there and then people saw dolphins swimming in the now spoiled lake after the flood. So no matter what happens, I think a changeling will carry the next city in any form that swamp takes.
But there is still in everything that roll-stepping, still the elevated highways, still the hugging vegetable heat. I never once forgot that it was 2006, but I did have these slipstream sensations of longer times. This city of chance and ghosts carries..always did..its early origins and recent bloodshed in the soupy air; you never have to search them out. These things are not strictly, or bindingly of the past..they are the character and spine. What that structure is missing now are black people, the black people who made that city that city. From the minute I hit the ground, their absence was as striking as their presence was before the flood. Can there be marching bands with no parades to lead? I wondered beforehand. I know I saw that old route..s shape, and listen still for the footsteps.
.

Call to John Ringo [paraphrased so to speak],
I fly into Baton Rouge Thursday night, get back to the city by midnight, 12:30. Nothing..s open. Nothing, man. The streets feel empty, but I..m not sure if it..s late or hot or something else. Go down to the Marigny, nothing open, drive up St. Charles, end up at Igor..s on St. Charles, yeah, that shit hole. Yeah, last place you..d think, people all wrecked, I..m havin like a burger, that place. That..s where I watched Clinton talk about Lewinsky, and then I picked you up in Tom..s hatchback, night I got back from Germany. Remember? No, I didn..t go there, that..s all vampires, crackheads. Oh, they did fix it up, huh? Yeah I heard that. Anyway, that..s like the only joint open, Igor..s. Nowhere was open, man, nofuckingwhere.
Where? Ol.. girl lives in Mid City, so we could walk to the fairgrounds. Yeah, yeah, General Taylor, right off Carrollton. Yeah, we took the bridge over Bayou St. John..you know that little bridge? You know Danny swam that bayou a couple years ago? Yeah, Sampson told me. Completely. Yeah, she..s right like two blocks from where Tom lived. Uh-huh.
We get there: there..s a line, Ringo, line..s like two blocks long. Looked like New York or some shit. All these---oh, check it: all these older white folks, same people as always there, you know, but this year, this year they..ve decided to all wear straw hats. Yeah! Like those Indian Jones hats, but straw, fucking safari hats, man. All of em, a sea of ..em, Ringo, probably 2 out of every 3rd white person over 30, rocking the straw hat like a memo went out or something. I don..t know, you believe that? And they..re waiting in line, even the ones holding tickets. Me and Kim, you know us, we without saying anything, nor breaking stride as we turned onto the street, went ahead and walked all the way past those poor fuckers and through the security check, and then to the ticket booth. We got in, floated through all of that straw and pale, probably about 25 minutes. Yeah, I..m telling you.
And you know last time I went me and Danny got all blazed up and rode in a purple bus that Kermit Ruffins rented for his whole family, rolled through the back gate, and they gave us artists passes and food and everything and these people are in line? What?! Plus the tickets are $40. I don..t even want to think about that, but think of all the money they..re getting? Right? And the place was packed that Friday. Yeah, for a Friday, it seemed tight to me, more through the day. They need that cash, too.
So you know how you walk across that little gulley after the entrance? Jazz tent is right there, remember? We sit down in there, Loyola University Jazz Bland plays this clean, sincere ..Do You Know What It Means..?.. and they do it really well and clean, all these kids. Young student kid in y..know a black jazz cap---saxophonist: think of what his experience is like. Think about how his understanding is, taking the communion in the ruins, you know? Man...
We went to the Gospel tent; they got a guy with a hook for a hand emceeing the thing. Kim goes and gets us some beers and the hook man cheers on the crowd, waves and points. The Gospel Singers of Boutte, man, like 5 big dudes, singing like Wilson Pickett and right away they make me cry, shadow on my back door and all. Someday we..ll be past this, overcome, the perseverance epiphany, how long things go on. The hard road, y..know? Hard road, Ringo, never goes away.

Listen, I gotta get on the train, I..ll call you back. Alright. Peace.

FRIDAY AFTERNOON: Fairgrounds

Jeremy Sampson is one of my great friends. We..ve known each other since we were 12, roamed the same big suburban houses and woods outside of Pittsburgh, drove back and forth to New Orleans maybe 12 times together during our weird times at Tulane. Now we..re here to see what happened, meeting up as planned at the fairgrounds. Like a lot of other former residents, we both spent the hurricane in what felt like the worst solitude: screaming and sobbing in front of CNN, twisted with rage, unable to speak to anyone except other helpless exiles. It was like a month of family funerals, all on television. Kim and I meet up with him and Art Hawk, another cat from Pittsburgh, and catch up in the expanding heat. Then we locate some more people from the old days, pass things around, and head towards the big crowd.

Recording Artist Stays True
The crowd around the Acura stage was swollen and red, the first day sunburns taking shape and the nominal climax approaching. We made our way with our friends for a ways along a concrete path, then got separated and took a spot pretty far from the stage.
Before the spokesman for a generation came out, another spokesman took the microphone to address us. What fair orator would open the way for the celebrated bard/troubadour? What message might reach us and give context to the day and the portent of our presence? Why, it was (I think) Mitch Bainwol, head of the Recording Industry Association of America. Mitch was overjoyed, proud of the audience, the artists, and the industry. He mentioned the Grammys at least 3 times. He made some note on the power of music to heal and bind. He failed to mention the painful lack of an established recording industry presence in the city prior to the storm, a cause for the exile to Lincoln Center and other wayward posts for so many NO musicians and of the poverty of many who remained. But anyway, weren't we all fortunate, he beamed, to have this time together.... in New Orleans...with the Grammy winner...Bob...Dylan?
If you've paid any attention to Dylan over the last few years, you're not alone. His book did very well (he wrote a really good book, in my opinion) and PBS let him tell his story with Martin Scorsese ala Ken Burns. The thrust of Dylan's argument in this recent activity is that, hey, he's a song n' dance man, a rock n roller/blues singer, and he did whatever he did for his own reasons, following in a long tradition (Elvis + Woody Guthrie + Blind Lemon Jefferson), and don't try to use him! Dylan made clear: When he sang, "A bullet from the back of a bush took Medgar Evers.. blood," that wasn't political, topical, or anything you might think it is. It was something going on inside Dylan, mysterious and unconcerned.
After a lot of thinking, I'd come to terms with his point. If he's bitter about misinterpretation, if he thinks his art deserves more the pigeonholes, if he wants control over his meaning, well, any artist deserves as much. If these goals manifest as mumbled honky-tonkin.., wearing oversized hats, and doing lingerie ads, who are we to judge?
I've seen Dylan maybe 10 times. A few of those nights, he changed they way I thought about music. Other nights, I felt sorta ripped off or at least a little embarrassed, so I knew it could go either way with Dylan. What I hoped, what I naively suspected, was that Dylan, flame-bearer of tradition and self-proclaimed champion of crossroads balladeers, the Dylan who owes debts to Mississippi or Storyville with his current incarnation as roadster/flaneur/barrelhouse piano player, that he would lend us a little defiance in defense of this decimated land. Stubbornly adolescent, I believed Dylan might make a statement, however muted and buried in the set list, about what went wrong and keeps going wrong, that for at least a song, a moment, he might say, "Hell, this ain't right and I can say my peace here, on America's wounded new frontier, what do I have to lose?"
How stupid of me! What a bunch of suckers we all are. Will we ever stop with the juvenile faith shit? Bob Dylan is not here for us, he is here for him (and I guess the ghost of Willie McTell), and the sooner we get over stuff like history and present-day suffering, the better. No, actually, he could care less if we do. While I hate to hate, it seemed like this to me: Dylan came out after the RAA president, looked at the crowd, and maybe
beyond us to the few trees that remain standing in City Park, and maybe to the sky over the filthy, backwashed lake, and he sneered and said, "Ehhhhh, let's play that boogie woogie version of ..She Belongs to Me..." He proceeded to make it clear with a grunted hour from side A of Bringing it All Back Home and similar tracks: Bob Dylan's in a bar band now and to him this might as well be Toledo, 1997. Great, another careless old white man come to disappoint New Orleans. What's up, Bob Dylan? See you around, I guess...eh, maybe not.

Grand Hustle
After tossing a lot of slurred insults at Dylan, I told Kim it was time to make our way out of this crowd. We still had 8 beers left in the 12 pack ($36) and I cradled the torn-open box as we tiptoed through blankets and chairs. We paused once and a guy asked me if he could buy a beer. I didn't say anything and he offered up a 5 dollar bill. Then he pulled out another 5-er and said, "How about 2?" I smiled and pulled out the cans, took $10, and we went on our way.
Maybe 20 yards farther out in the crowd, a middle-aged woman stopped us.
"I'll give you $20 for 2 beers," she said. I looked at Kim.
"Tell you what, baby, I'll give you 2 for 15." No, the woman insisted on the $20. I gave her two beers and a kiss on the cheek and we moved on. We hadn't made an effort and by the time we got away from fucking Bob Dylan, we'd made back $30 and still had 4 beers. "I mean, we don't even have to try around here," I told Kim, "people just think we're hustling."

A Stranger and a Friend
My dad took me to see Dr. John when I was about 15 and I've always liked the good doctor, but thought he was sort of, I don't know, a money guy or a dilettante. Mostly cause he was never in New Orleans but always on tour, so it felt like he was more of a showman, a translator of Fess, Booker, etc., rather than a continuation of them. I saw him at one of the Tipitina's piano nights back in like '99 where he was great and at an Arts festival in Pittsburgh where he went through the motions and appeared strung out. But I found this benefit CD a couple of months ago, "Our New Orleans," with a song called "Stranger and a Friend," and remembered that Dr. John writes some really good, unique songs. Not only that, but he was one of the few to contribute a track (not sure if he wrote it) that wasn't a romantic compliment, but more of a mood description: "I'm spinning like a top/I'm lost in a world/ I..ve never made... After Dylan, we..re ready for something a little, uh, closer, and the Night Tripper brings the funk and the Rampart Street shuffle and played his junkie ass off. From here on out, I think, I'm going to root for Dr. John. At least he gives a damn.

Confusion in Exit
Towards the end of Dr. John, as evening creeps up, we take the first exit in the fence and end up in Gentilly, opposite side from where we want to be. Our ups and downs are unclear, and soon we..re lost in this vacant neighborhood, almost every home storm-parched and deserted. The sky is pinkish gray and the siding and roofs turn pastels, pale greens and blues, and soon Kim and I begin wandering up short driveways, under carports, aimless and boozed out. I think I..m looking for a place to piss, but I..m so wiped out and confused, I get it into my head that we can lie down in one of these deserted homes, fall asleep under the flood line, wait for night to come all the way in. There..s room, isn..t there? Who would mind? Quiet now, I think, everything quiet and empty. I..m leaning on Kim hard, not really caring what happens. Not an unfamiliar feeling down here, at least not before. Several times we stop and look around, hold each other, not sad, but alone and weary. Up and down the streets and driveways we drift, until finally we orient ourselves enough to find Esplanade. We stumble through a church parking lot as a barbeque comes to a close in the gardener..s garage, then make our way across the little bridge over the Bayou. We..re home in a minute, but it seems like miles, and we topple into bed.

SATURDAY afternoon

1983 LTD Drives Across America..s Wane
St Bernard Parish looks like miles and miles of those box homes they..d build before testing an atomic bomb in Nevada, the ones full of cadavers for radiation measurements, windows for vaporizing. The highways and strip mall signs hang scorched: ..Ay ess hoes..: Payless Shoes. Billboards announce specials and sales that happened 9 months ago. One Time Only! Everything is sanded off, stunted, abandoned while still new. In a nation where ruins and decay are scorned and exorcised before they can rust, we pass through miles of new housing plans that now appear ancient.
These are not the homes of the poor blacks, but of the lower- and middle-middle class. This could be anywhere in America with an SUV in the driveway, backyard swings and barbeques, home decorating. Developments with names, like Pleasant Pines or Steeplechase Manor. Nothing moving. In fact, many a middle class black or white or Latino or Asian family was blown out of here and nothing..s being done, and this neglect, this desertion by the nation could happen to you or you or you. Only once do we see a construction crew on the road, but they look like a family of Hispanic migrants removing fallen trees, certainly not governmental, and you see how easy the picture is: the entire disaster plays out as a poor black tragedy, so that the rest of America has only the decision, ..Do I or don..t I give a shit about poor black folk?.. As long as we..re told it..s a sliver of the oppressed that suffered, the tumor seems benign.
We stop for gas as we..re suddenly very low, finding a station near Lake Ponchatrain where a few cars sit under the pavilion, men silently clutching pumps. I join them while Kim goes inside to pay.
In this island of shade, hungry men and machines suck fuel from the ground near a polluted lake, amid cul-de-sac ruins. I pump and think, ..Is this the end of...? Or the beginning?.. Everybody looks ghostly or have we just seen ghosts? An 18-wheeler floats through the heat waves.
Kim comes back out and we drive into the housing plan behind the station, looking for a house that belonged to a friend of a friend. Scattered construction vehicles and materials line the street and a group of men stand in one driveway with scowls and hammers. A few houses down, an older couple goes about raking or mowing, who knows? We u-turn and exit the plan.
I figure we..ve seen what we..ve come out here to see, and then realize that we haven..t even hit the Lower Ninth or Lakeview.
Can I write about what I saw in Lakeview and the Ninth Ward, around the 17th street levee? Am I up to that? Cars wedged in trees, the blackened, twisted shape of the blocks, of any life, what do I have of them now? A closet stands with no house around it, sleeves of a man..s collection of suits blowing in the breeze. He lived here and got dressed here and now..?
Physics suspended leaves even recent memories unclear, hard to separate from nightmare visions. A hell like none I..ve ever driven through, that part of New Orleans sucks away words and recall. I could say nuclear disaster, I could talk about the evidence of biblical winds, and the way it all begs for vultures and screaming. But I couldn..t breathe then, and can hardly picture it all now. Perhaps later on down the line, I..ll have the images, the words.

SATURDAY NIGHT: Frenchman Street

We stand in the side bar of Café Brasil on Frenchman Street as thunder and lightning roll in and the rain breaks open. That long bar with the Caribbean languor and high ceilings, past adventures lurking in the corner shadows. Power flickers off then on several times as wet people push into the half-empty room. In one darkness, I look at Kim looking at me in the room length mirror behind the bar. We are not who we were, but resemble who I..d wished to be all these hand-wringing days of the last seven years. No, not a resemblance: we are, she and I, just she and I and no before or anything, better than a dream, standing straight up at that bar. I cannot stop watching. The lights flash on and off and again and the room crowds up, the rain unrelenting, and I keep my eyes on that mirror.

SUNDAY AFTERNOON: Fairgrounds

We Won..t Lie Down on Nobody..s Ground
In the middle ground between stages, we meet up with a gang of Mardi Gras Indians, maybe 8 of them in purple and white dress. I thought of the feathers in closets immediately after the hurricane. Now we catch onto the tail of their march and follow a bit until stepping aside to watch them get down. What I forgot was how mean those motherfuckers look. They hunt all day, no smiling, much younger than you think until you remember they..re braves. A few minutes into this stoppage, another tribe comes up from behind, simmering for a showdown. The first tribe moves on without looking back. Many a passerby gets confused in the crossing. The Indians cut their own line through the crowd.
A ferocious fight will bring back the people, and the Mardi Gras Indians carry that ferocity. New Orleans will not grovel, come back or not.
Our connection to the free beer in the hospitality room inside the track..s clubhouse felt a little too shaky, so we left her eating a beef patty in the lobby. Many people sat inside the clubhouse, taking refuge from the growing heat and listening to scholars.

No Alien
After milling around with some friends, we noticed an audience leaving the jazz tent, a signal that a set had closed. We walked in and took seats in the third row. The jazz tent always feels a little grander, more spacious than the rest, though I don..t know if it..s any bigger than the gospel tent. The white roof peak looks higher and the stage sits central and raised. Long concrete channels run between the seats. I remember the Heath Brothers reunited, Wynton Marsalis playing Love Supreme, the tent overfilled during a Dave Brubeck set. I..ve enjoyed some true revelations in there, and I..ve also spent a day counting golf shirts. The jazz tent crowd sits studious for most performances, might clap in time under a photo of Ellington exiting the fair grounds with Ella Fitzgerald.
Only after we sit down do we look at the sign on the stage for the next act: yeah! Troy ..Trombone Shorty.. Andrews is up. This is some good luck, as Trombone Shorty was always a sort of shared muse between me and John Ringo and Flavius Josephus. We..d call FJ ..Trombone Honky.. and request songs by that moniker on WWOZ. I know I saw Trombone Shorty in Jackson Square and that whenever I listen to OZ online, the older DJ..s joke about Shorty calling himself ..Troy Andrews.. these days, like goofy uncles teasing the bright kid for his big britches. Shit, Ringo and I talk about Trombone Shorty..s name change fairly often, now that I think about it. This is a fortuitous hand written sign.
(Always in the same script, are the signs at jazz fest written out by the same person? Is there someone who sits down before the festival and writes down who..s at the Fais Do Do stage at 3:00pm on the 1st Sunday? And then she writes out who..s singing Gospel on the last Friday night, in the same script? Huh.)
Some dudes, can..t tell if they..re artists or not, straggle onto the stage, set things up, tune. After a minute or two, Kim and I notice that these guys seem to be the musicians. And these guys are teenagers, most of them white. The drummer, the guitarist, looks like they got a sax player, maybe two keyboards, guy dressed like Jadakiss on bass, a DJ, we..re counting them off, y..know? The oldest guy on stage is obviously a roadie. ..Damn,.. we agree, ..Trombone Shorty..s got a bunch of kids with him... I point out that the drummer (later seen to be around 15 and wearing braces) reminded me of my friend, AJ Sacher, who played drums down there once upon a time. In fact, the whole band looks like musicians we used to know, kids who drove the sweat up the basement walls on Friday nights uptown or anywhere you..d let ..em play to drink. We start to get keyed up about this potential.
After messing around awhile, the band begins with 30 or 40 seconds of what sounds to be traditional or Dixieland jazz licks. ..I wonder...,.. I think. Then they take off into a machine gun funk, the guitar player steps up big immediately, and a New Orleans house party sound builds, threatens to break open. We..re screaming our laughter in jags at this point. And then, in what was described on OZ the next day as like ..An alien landed,.. the music made a sweeping ascent like the intro to a Jay Z album and Troy ..Trombone Shorty.. Andrews steps onto the stage. People begin to applaud as he comes fully into view: dipped in fashion, the white sports coat and jeans, sunglasses ala Kanye. He looks like a kid still, but Trombone Shorty has a new confidence, a national style. He falls in and they blast off, the horn pulling the crew together in that tight way that New Orleans funk gets, but this time with more swoops, bolder, led by a trombone. We get up and begin to dance, the first ones. We laugh at each other as we whirl. People fall in with us and Trombone Shorty passes ..Caravan.. through P-Funk. When they get to solos, there are some sound issues, but a few things become obvious: that guitar player is a bad motherfucker and the drummer never even blinks when Bill Summers joins them onstage. After awhile the crowd of dancers fills up half the pathway and security patiently redirects us. Kim and I go to the left of the stage where there..s space to dance. We dance the hell out of that place, we dance and dance and keep yelling at Trombone Shorty. He gets so hip-hop he..s comparing himself to James Brown and making the sax player break dance. Steve Turre sits in. When they get to the St. James Infirmary it becomes Archie Shepp..s Attica, the ..never find a sweet man like me.. lyric looming, proven. We yell the words at each other and the front rows stand and scream along. At one point, all these graybeards and baldheads jump up and down in time like a Wu-tang crowd. I keep dancing, refuse the weight of 3 days on my northern, office-bound body. Trombone Shorty does Ellington like Ray Charles like Fela and he shakes the jazz tent like I..ve never seen it shook.
We pass for an hour or so into relief and return, enveloped in a talent..s vacuum and with glances at the next day. Not one man nor one woman, but a will must save New Orleans, a defiant, unafraid will. That will comes from those living there, tied by blood and hand to those gone and yet to return, and today a trombone player from the Treme brings that will into being. Who knows what will happen to this kid? But Trombone Shorty is so young that his best days lie in a future New Orleans, his prime sits out there. He has no choice of headshaking like older, wearier people do. This is his home, he..s not afraid of its eternal risk. Everyone feels that push.
We empty out of there when it..s all done, not quick to give up that side area.

SUNDAY EVENING: Midcity

Around midnight we walk down the bayou looking for a sandwich. The streets on either side of the water are dark, lined with vacant, high houses. There..s a rise in the street and a gas station actually open. I feel we..re very alone but walk past whatever..s out there, the simple scare of the dark. Halfway out, we pass one big boat of a house. A balcony wraps around the second floor and several windows shine with lamplight. It..s a long, clapboard ship, surrounded by a couple palms and a bamboo fence, browns and greens growing up its sides. I feel something..s going on in there, that for some reason this house found a way to float. When we get to the sandwich joint, it..s closed, so we turn around and pass that same house again, its windows still lit, a busy ark in the middle of the night

I guess that..s what I hope for, that New Orleans can survive like that house in the darkness--open, old and aglow, a home to its people, fierce and stubborn, but buoyant and big enough to push on through these strange new waters. New Orleans always got away with non-change, of staying close to its mutant roots, surviving on the weirdness that used to be all over America in various forms. People came from all around to taste it, lose themselves for a weekend, and this only increased as the rest of the world became blander and lined with outlet malls and blocky border fences. But like it or not, nature and government have forced change on New Orleans, exposed the roots and weirdness to harsher light and the laws of evolution will run their course. What I hope..what I think we have to hope..is that the city is stronger than the gluttons and devils who molest it and slice it up, continue on profiting in waste. This might be a naïve hope, but it..s opposite..giving in and letting this place slip away, become muted and blank..there..s nothing in that. And when you see Trombone Shorty and the Mardi Gras Indians and see yourself in a familiar room with your long lost girl, you wonder who..s being naïve here? There are signs if you adjust your eyes, and some of them you can..t walk away from, because that path is short and dark and the air is stale.
We have to hope for New Orleans, watch it, and work for it, because the alternatives are unspeakable.