The Preservation Hall Jazz Band embraces Kuumbwa
Ben Jaffe’s life has changed a lot since the last time he came to Santa Cruz. The son of Allan and Sandra Jaffe, the founders of Preservation Hall in the French Quarter of New Orleans, he’s long since adapted to a life filled to the brim with music and touring. But like other denizens of the Big Easy, he’s lived two lives. One ended in 2005 when Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast. The other began the morning after she left, leaving New Orleans flooded and broken in its path. While he’s still an eloquent advocate for his city’s musical history and a talented composer, arranger and musical director, every sentence he speaks is tinged with memories of Katrina. “It’s weird, for a lot of people Katrina has come and gone,” he says on the phone from New York where the Preservation Hall Jazz Band (PHJB) is performing at Town Hall as part of the JVC Jazz Festival. “We have to relive it every day. We all have to do something that is hurricane related every single day. It’s relentless and there is no way to get away from it.” Jaffe isn’t alone in his suffering. Even now, two years later, four of his band mates are still reconstructing their homes and living in adjacent states. PHJB trumpeter John Brunious was flooded out of his home, lived through several disastrous days at the infamous New Orleans Convention Center and eventually decamped to Alabama, alone and without his trumpet, suffering from dehydration. While his band members were scattered to the winds, Jaffe and his wife Susan rode the storm in the Crescent City. “We were really very fortunate,” he says. “The flood waters stopped two blocks from our home but we had to deal with the same things that every one else had to, like a damaged roof or dealing with the fridge not being on for two months, but we were lucky. For months after the storm, the streets were lined with refrigerators, it’s a haunting image to think of, even now.” As surreal as that vision is, it was nothing compared to meeting President Bush at the White House after his band was honored with the 2006 National Medal of the Arts. Still smarting over the treatment that his city received following the storm, Jaffe says he had to rehearse not only what he’d say in the presence of the secret service, but exorcise what he wanted to say. “I knew it wasn’t an opportunity to rant,” he says. “Sitting in the Oval Office for those 20 minutes you realize how removed you can be from the entire world. Everything smells like roses in there. It was one of the weirdest experiences in my life and it wasn’t a good weird.” Regardless of his feelings about the administration, Jaffe was deeply moved by receiving the award. It represented a culmination of 45 years of work by his parents, his fellow musicians and the legions of people who made Preservation Hall the cultural icon that it is. When it came time to shake hands with the president, Jaffe says, “I looked him in the eyes and said that it was an honor to receive this award. It wasn’t a thank you.” As the photographers clicked away, Bush took time to ask the musicians in the band how the disaster recovery effort was going. At this point, the rehearsals paid off. “I said it’s not a good situation because the culture that produced the band is in danger of disappearing and that we still needed help very badly,” he says. Taking care of Preservation Hall has played a paramount role on Jaffe’s journey back from the storm. Turning over the bass chair to his mentor Walter Payton, Jaffe threw himself into rebuilding the damaged French Quarter institution and piecing together the aural and documented history of his parents’ great experiment in cultural preservation. Shaken by the winds, the Hall was a mess of old receipts, memorabilia and documents, all tossed by Katrina. Amongst the wreckage, he found the band’s earliest master tapes in a water damaged tape vault. They rode out the storm three inches above the water line. Gathering these materials, Jaffe began to piece together a massive box set whose contents represent five decades of New Orleans’ musical history. “It’s the most heartfelt project,” he says. “It’s the closest I’ve ever come to representing what Preservation Hall was, is and will be. I wanted to allow others to see and experience the same material I found. Additional inspiration for the box set’s contents and packaging came from his post-Katrina experiences, like living without electricity for weeks at a time or depending on Polaroid photos to document the madness surrounding the reconstruction. “Once you see it [the box set] you can really understand what the project meant to me,” Jafee continues. “What I created hopefully echoes the experience of being in the Hall and discovering all the things I discovered in my lifetime. Because after the hurricane, we didn’t loose Preservation Hall, but we lost much of our history.” While Jaffe and his troupe have forever been changed by the experiences of August 2005, their pride in their city is undiminished. “Right now,” Jaffe says with conviction, “New Orleans has got enough stuff going on, even with the loss, that we are still the best scene in the world.” The Preservation Hall Jazz Band will play at the Kuumbwa at 7 & 9 p.m. on Monday, July 2nd, at 320-2 Cedar St. in Santa Cruz. For more information call 427-2227 or visit www.kuumbwajazz.org. Tickets are $28/advance; $31/general.
Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites
|
