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The Frailness of Our Music Wynton Marsalis called it "America's Soul Kitchen." It's the Crescent City, the birthplace of jazz--and of George Lewis, who was born in 1900 with a clarinet in his hands and jazz in his soul. In teens he was playing with the bands that gathered and shifted and re-formed like the music itself. There is something mysterious about the kind of talent that not only makes it possible to play a musical instrument, but to play it well enough and with the instinctive fluidity that makes jazz possible. It's in people like George Lewis that we can see clearly the vivid proof that some gifts are innate. It's hard to talk about whatever the process is that lets people reach deep into themselves and pull out the music that makes us all stop and listen. We call it the "creativity" or "talent" or maybe "genetics." But who can explain the mystery? It's not just training, though it always helps to have a good teacher. It's not just genetics, though that may be more of it than anything else. It may not even be opportunity, though that's some of it. Imagine a young boy hearing a clarinet for the first time and reaching for it, knowing that it has to be in his hands. Imagine the rapid learning, the imitation and experimentation, and the immersion in music that must have happened to anyone that held a clarinet in the French quarter in 1917. Being born black and poor in New Orleans has lately been a death sentence. Hurricane Katrina showed us what happens to people who lack the resources to get out of a storm's path. The 9th ward, largely an impoverished neighborhood and mostly black, is still cordoned off‹residents sneak in just to see their devastated homes. Debris and toxins remain the disorder of the day. But being born black and poor in New Orleans was never an easy thing. In those early years the legacy of slavery wasn't history, it was living reality. Blacks born in 1900 (like George Lewis) had parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles who were slaves, who lived through the Civil War and emerged into precarious freedom. What did freedom mean then and there? Work as sharecroppers, as day laborers for a low wage. All the pain and the joy of it somehow coalesced into songs, spirituals and the blues, and jazz. Working as a jazz musician didn't pay much back then, but it was good for the soul, necessary for the spirit, if you were George Lewis. He was a tall, skinny fellow with arms and legs like sticks. Like the poet says, 110 pounds. He found regular gigs in the French Quarter and lived there, on "Bur-GUN-dy Street" as they say it, but despite this modest professional success he needed other work to survive. How that frail-looking, lightweight guy even found work as a stevedore is a mystery in itself. But he did, and in 1944 was loading or unloading a ship when a big crate crashed down on him and crushed his chest. He was taken off home to Bur-GUN-dy Street. No Medicaid or Medicare then, no, he was like 45 million Americans today with no health insurance and no savings to pay for good medical care. They thought he'd never play again, thought the cool silver notes of his clarinet would be silenced forever. It's not quite like the poet said, bad teeth and 13 years of silence. Poems are true but not necessarily factual. Imagine the horror of his friends as they carried him home, saw the injury. How could he draw breath? But somehow he survived. He did not die. When he did die it was much later, in 1968. There was a traditional New Orleans funeral, with a jazz band mournfully playing "Just a Closer Walk With Thee" on the way to the cemetery, and then on the way back breaking into a rendition of "When the Saints go Marching In" that made the second line dance in the streets‹a joyous, startling outbreak of exuberance that somehow lies beneath all the pathos of the blues. This is what happens in New Orleans. The first line is the jazz band that marches the coffin to the graveyard. The second line is the mourners and the little kids who follow after any parade, who are more interested in the music than in the deceased, who somehow over the years have come to remind people that the music goes on in new hands. But in 1944, as he lay in bed in Bur-GUN-dy Street, it seemed he would die, and then when it seemed he would live it still seemed he might die, not from the injury but from the silence. It's good to have friends when things go wrong. We need people who can stand by us, be with us‹be who they are and be there. It's not whether they can fix what's wrong but whether they can be present with us in our deepest pain. It's possible to imagine that musician friends might not be able to visit a musician so severely injured he couldn't play again. Or maybe they could visit, but they wouldn't play‹wouldn't want to remind him of what he had lost. Maybe they would visit but not even talk of music, wouldn't discuss their current gigs or what was happening with someone's band or whether so-and-so was going to get that recording contract. Friends, out of fear of causing him pain, might have silenced themselves, distorted themselves‹perhaps, really, because it was less painful for them if they stayed on safe subjects, if they sheltered themselves from his tears, and from their own fear of such a terrible loss. But George Lewis had friends who were not afraid to be themselves in the face of his loss. He had friends who had confidence in him and in his spirit; friends who were willing to stand by him and yet be fully themselves. So they didn't avoid the shop talk and the gossip and the latest news on Bur-GUN-dy Street. No. Banjo player Lawrence Marrero and string bass player Alcide Pavageau brought their instruments to his bedside, and they played. Perhaps he wept. His friends played, and played. And George Lewis asked for his clarinet, and they hitched him up in bed and put it in his hands. He drew in what air he could and he played those first unlikely notes. Perhaps he wept. Now they call it "Burgundy Street Blues," his signature tune. It was first recorded while he played in bed, with Lawrence on the banjo and Alcide on bass. Just a few years after that he was back in the swing, playing again with Bunk Johnson's band with Lawrence and Alcide. When Bunk retired George became the band's leader, and they toured the US, Europe and Japan‹Japan, where "George Lewis" became a household name. Today there are more than 30 George Lewis albums available, and a number of them can be downloaded from the Internet. It was after George Lewis died in '68 that young clarinetist Michael White stumbled across one of those albums, and he was transfixed. Now he's Dr. Michael White, a professor of music and cultural history at Xavier University. A very fine jazz clarinetist, he's produced an album called "A Song for George Lewis." It carries on the style and tradition, the pure sound, the ensemble harmonies that George Lewis made famous.. Michael White lost all his papers and most of his instruments in Hurricane Katrina, but his Original Liberty Jazz Band played on New Year's Eve in New Orleans, as it has for many years. The Preservation Hall Jazz Band played, too. The spirit lives. But it's not all celebration. It's defiance, too‹defiance of the forces of nature, that brought the hurricane to New Orleans; and defiance of the slow clean-up and the dispersal of human beings that is largely the work of human hands. We must remember the frailness of our music. It doesn't require severe injury to silence us, or terrible loss: these are quite effective. But sometimes we are silenced by much smaller things: the press of daily life; focus on career or just making a living; criticism at a time when we're particularly fragile; or simply the absence of supportive friends. Still the music lies within each of us. If we are fortunate there will be friends who come to our bedside and call it out of us again. But sometimes well-meaning people try to fix us, or change us, or direct us, and we can lose ourselves again in the clamor and demands of others who seem to know what's best. When that happens, think of George Lewis and his clarinet. Those liquid notes, that pure tone, are not the clubbed-together, patchwork creation of other people. They are straight from the soul, from the center of a unique being who walked this earth for a little while and left us something of himself. And that's the way we can be, too. Each of us can find the music within us: who we are and what we bring to the world. Each of us can be whole, healed, authentic. Remember the frailness of all our music, and guard it, protect it, cherish it, nourish it. Because that music, unique for each of us, is truly what we bring to the world.
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