[Dixielandjazz] Sending CDs and other Jazz items to New Orleans

[Audrey Van Dyke]

Some of the people from our local jazz club in Washington, DC were 
down in New Orleans for French Quarter Festival.  We met pianists who 
no longer have a piano, cornetists who are playing waterlogged 
instruments with sticky valves, collectors who have only memories of 
all their music memorabilia.  One musician mentioned that a 
particulary touching thing a friend did for him, hearing he had lost 
everything in Katrina, sent him duplicates of a few of his favorite 
Jack Teagarden and Bob Crosby Bobcat CDs.  It had not occurred to us 
that along with houses and cars, the musicians also lost all their 
jazz CDs and books, although it seems pretty obvious.

We're going to do a CD drive, and ask members of our club to pull out 
some CDs from their shelves to send down to New Orleans.  Sue Fischer, 
from our DJML, works with the music collection at the Mint in NO, is a 
musician herself (the last Mississippi Rag mentioned that she was 
awarded  a scholarship to the next Adult Jazz Camp), knows lots and 
lots of musicians down there, and has a list of all the trad jazz 
musicians in NO, with what they lost in Kartina.  She has graciously 
agreed to be our distribution point, and get the CD's to the musicians 
who have none.

If anyone else wants to participate, Sue's email address is 
loerchen2 at aol.com  Since she posts to the list occasionally, I know 
she won't mind me giving out her email address. I'll leave it  to her 
to provide her address to anyone who wants it.  Also, neither Sue, nor 
our club wants to claim any sort of ownership of this project.  If you 
want to send down a few CDs but would prefer to do it through somebody 
you know in NO, that's great!  

I'll pass along a few of the guidelines (to take or leave, as you like)
we're tossing around for our club, most of them suggestions of a 
former NO musician who called a few of his friends to find out what 
would be most useful.  We're only asking for commercially issued CDs, 
not those made on personal computers.  We're only sending out CDs, not 
cassettes.  The one exception, since people down there have lost their 
own music histories, is cassettes of the current NO musicians 
playing.  Also, we are  only gathering and mailing out historic, 
classic jazz CDs, as opposed to contemporary bands, however much loved 
our favorite hometown or festival band might be. Finally, we're only 
going to ask for CDs in our newsletter, but we are privately 
contacting those in our club who collect jazz books and old jazz mags 
to ask if they have duplicates of any of the good stuff.  For example, 
one of our members had three copies of They All Played Ragtime, and 
two copies of Really the Blues, and is making the extras available.  
Another collector had duplicates of several issues of the Record 
Changer.  Sue passes along that the homes of some of our musician 
friends are pretty bare, and a few CDs and jazz books would be very 
welcomed.

There was a neat sign on Bourbon Street during the festival - 
"Rebuilding New Orleans one note at a time." 

Audrey Van Dyke

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