[Dixielandjazz] Songs For The Big Easy

[Steve barbone]

This Song Goes Out to You, Big Easy

By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN - September 7, 2005 - NY Times

When Nick Spitzer heard the order for everyone to evacuate New Orleans two
Sundays ago, he left his wife and children long enough to drive to his radio
studio in the city's French Quarter. There he grabbed several family
snapshots, his Rolodex and the master recording of the next episode of his
weekly show, "American Routes." Then, on impulse, he reached for a copy of
the Fats Domino song "Walking to New Orleans."

As he headed back home, Mr. Spitzer saw the exodus. From the black
neighborhoods of the Ninth Ward, all the way across Elysian Fields Avenue,
and from the unimproved fringes of the French Quarter, people were pushing
laundry carts and lugging suitcases, trudging toward the Superdome. Mr.
Spitzer had a passing thought of Pompeii.

Audio Clips:
Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans by Louis Armstrong
Louisiana 1927 by Randy Newman
Change Is Gonna Come by Sam Cooke
Walking to New Orleans by Fats Domino

By the time he was driving his family from New Orleans toward a friend's
house in the Cajun country safely west of the city, Mr. Spitzer was already
choosing songs from the pile of CD's in his Nissan, trying to make sense of
the inconceivable. He played "The Rivers of Babylon" by the Melodians, with
its Old Testament resonance, and he played Louis Armstrong asking, "Do you
know what it means to miss New Orleans?"

What it has meant to Mr. Spitzer is the necessity to bear witness to his
city's suffering and resilience through the art of radio. For hundreds of
thousands of listeners of about 225 public radio stations and XM Satellite
Radio, Mr. Spitzer and "American Routes" have served since 1997 as the voice
of New Orleans, right down to the theme music by Professor Longhair. Now,
working with a patchwork staff from a borrowed studio in Lafayette, La., Mr.
Spitzer is assembling this weekend's show, titled "After the Storm." (In the
New York area, the show is scheduled to be broadcast on Sunday at 5 p.m. on
WFUV-FM, 90.7. A list of other stations is at www.americanroutes.org.) "I
wanted it to be music of reflection and solace and also hope," Mr. Spitzer
said in a telephone interview on Sunday, "an attempt to put some balm on
this."

A native New Yorker, Mr. Spitzer, 54, has lived in New Orleans or Cajun
country for 30 years, combining his training as a folklorist with his
genre-jumping taste in music to develop "American Routes." In a typical
week's show, he will explore a particular theme through songs and oral
histories he has gathered.

This weekend's show, while typical in form, was to reflect epochal times.
Having left New Orleans on the assumption that he would be able to return in
three or four days, Mr. Spitzer, along with the rest of the city's displaced
residents, has watched and been forced to reckon with the spectacle of
flood, fire, rescue, rampage and death.

"This is a natural and cultural disaster," he said. "Maybe America's biggest
cultural disaster - in the sense of the loss of New Orleans's cultural
stuff, the loss of the communities there that interact and the lack of will
to move as quickly as if these houses being flooded were on the coast of
Kennebunkport. And even for those of us who got out, there's this grinding
uncertainty of whether we'll ever get back and ever live the same again."

Separated from his library of music and interviews, Mr. Spitzer was welcomed
by KRVS, a public radio station in Lafayette that broadcasts in English,
Creole and Cajun French. He hired a local cultural historian who is also the
host of a show on KRVS, Ryan Brasseau, to find music and research previous
natural disasters, from the devastating Mississippi River flood of 1927 to
Hurricane Betsy in 1965. One of Mr. Spitzer's assistant producers, Jason
Rhein, who had fled to relatives in Natchez, Miss., drove down to Lafayette.
For his oral-history segment, Mr. Spitzer interviewed Dave Spizale, the
station manager of KRVS, who described piloting his boat into New Orleans as
part of a rescue flotilla of private vessels.

The most significant work, though, involved Mr. Spitzer's memory and
aesthetic. For historical sweep, he chose "Louisiana 1927" by Randy Newman,
and "When the Levee Breaks," by Memphis Minnie. For outrage, he selected
Stevie Wonder's "Higher Ground" and Sam Cooke's "Change Is Gonna Come." For
perseverance, he used the Fats Domino song he had grabbed on his way out of
the Quarter.

And for that mixture of mourning and pluck characteristic of New Orleans's
jazz funerals, he turned to the Dirty Dozen Brass Band for "The Lost Souls
(of Southern Louisiana)" and to the Louis Armstrong elegy he had listened to
in the car during his escape.

"There's a line in there that basically says, there's someone I miss even
more than I miss New Orleans," Mr. Spitzer said, "meaning that New Orleans
is more than the city, the region, the place. It's the personal relations.
In another context, it could be schmaltzy. But when I hear that line now,
the way it mingles the individual and the cultural, I just start to cry."