[Dixielandjazz] The New Orleans Gig Scene

[Steve Barbone]

The Katrina Effect, Measured in Gigs

NY TIMES By ANDREW PARK - August 5, 2007

ON a recent sultry afternoon here, Tipitina¹s ‹ arguably the most famous
musical haunt in a city famous for its music ‹ is eerily quiet. This
ramshackle, two-story yellow joint at the corner of Napoleon and
Tchoupitoulas won¹t start jumping until after dark, when Ivan Neville and
his band, Dumpstaphunk, take center stage.

But upstairs, past balconies smelling of stale beer and cigarettes, past
walls plastered with yellowed concert posters, musicians are working. Some
edit concert fliers, tweak Web sites or research overseas jazz festivals;
others get legal advice or mix audio and video; others simply chatter about
who has found gigs and who is still struggling.

Since late 2005, just a few months after Hurricane Katrina tore through this
city, more than 1,000 New Orleans musicians have become members of
Tipitina¹s three cooperative music offices. ³I go in sometimes and all I¹m
doing is checking my e-mails,² says Margie Perez, an effervescent blues
singer.

For Ms. Perez and others trying to rebuild fragile livelihoods as artists,
grass-roots efforts like the co-ops have been a boon, helping them to
replace lost or damaged instruments and sound equipment, arranging and
subsidizing gigs and providing transportation, health care and housing. The
Tipitina¹s Foundation, the club¹s charitable arm, has distributed about $1.5
million in aid; in all, Tipitina¹s and other nonprofit groups have marshaled
tens of millions of dollars in relief from around the world to help bolster
the music business here.

But it remains to be seen how long a loose-knit band of charities can stand
in for coordinated economic development in one of New Orleans¹s most
important business sectors. Although New Orleans is one of the country¹s
most culturally distinct cities, a large-scale recording industry never took
root here, even before Katrina. Yet the informal music sector, the kind
visitors find in clubs and bars, and large-scale musical events like Jazz
Fest, is a mainstay of the city¹s tourism business.

In fact, local authorities say, music and cuisine are the twin pillars of
the tourism industry here; the leisure and hospitality businesses account
for almost 63,000 jobs in the city and for about 35 percent of the sales
taxes. Both of those figures are larger than those of any other business
sector, including the energy industry.

Still, nearly two years after Katrina, there are fewer restaurants and bars
offering live music, and the ones that do are paying less, musicians say. As
the reality of the slow recovery has set in, fewer locals feel that they can
afford cover charges or even tips, so clubs that used to have live music
four or five nights a week have cut back to two or three.

Conventions, typically a strong source of music gigs, are running at 70
percent of 2004 levels, but leisure travel remains far below pre-Katrina
levels, according to the New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau. Over
all, visitors generated $2.9 billion in spending in 2006, down from $4.9
billion in 2004, according to the bureau. About 3.7 million people visited
the city in 2006, compared with more than 10 million in 2004.

Compounding the music scene¹s slow revival is the challenge of tracking
musicians ‹ who are typically paid in cash and often hold down other jobs ‹
in order to get them financial support. Habitat for Humanity, which is
building what it describes as a ³musicians¹ village² in the Ninth Ward,
initially struggled to find creditworthy applicants ‹ just one instance of
relief for artists failing to meet its mark.

³It¹s kind of like the Heisenberg uncertainty principle,² says Roland von
Kurnatowski, who owns Tipitina¹s with his wife, Mary. ³New Orleans musicians
are unique and if you try to mess with what makes them unique too much, it¹s
not a good thing. What they need is revenue opportunities.²

Economic development leaders for the city and the state of Louisiana praise
the efforts of Tipitina¹s at a time when governmental resources are
strained. ³With the demise of the venues and the lack of tourism, we¹ve got
to find a way to get people back to work,² says Lynn Ourso, executive
director of the Louisiana Music Commission. ³They¹re putting these musicians
to work on computers, showing how they can globally transmit and distribute
‹ they¹re teaching job skills.²

MR. KURNATOWSKI, 56, is an unlikely anchor of the local music business. A
New Orleans native and Tulane graduate, he says he had never heard of
Tipitina¹s until he was asked to invest in the club in 1995. By then it was
a beloved venue known for rollicking performances by locals like Dr. John
and the Meters as well as touring acts like James Brown and Widespread
Panic, but it had a spotty financial history. It was started by friends of
the influential New Orleans pianist Professor Longhair as a place for him to
play late in his career, but struggled under novice management and closed
for a year in the mid-1980s.

Mr. Kurnatowski, a real estate investor who owns about 35 apartment
complexes in the Gulf Coast region, had begun marketing storage units in a
converted hotel as rehearsal space and thought that having a connection with
Tipitina¹s might lure musicians into renting. But the deteriorating club,
facing new competition from the House of Blues, needed a new sound system
and air-conditioning system. Mr. Kurnatowski agreed to make an equity
investment; within a year he bought it outright for about $500,000.

He soon realized that he had neither the expertise nor the time to run
Tipitina¹s properly ‹ especially because he was a morning person. ³It¹s a
different routine,² he says. ³It¹s working nights, and it just wasn¹t very
practical.² 

Intrigued by the club¹s history and its intense following, he couldn¹t bring
himself to sell it. He also says that his other real estate investments gave
him enough financial breathing room to think creatively about what to do
with Tipitina¹s. So, in 1997, he and his wife formed the Tipitina¹s
Foundation, which would begin to use the club, still for-profit, to serve
the nonprofit mission of helping musicians. The move provided a rationale
for holding on to Tipitina¹s, even if it only broke even, and marked a
return to the club¹s early purpose of supporting the local music scene.

Its projects included an internship program for children wanting to get into
the music business and a fund-raiser to buy instruments for local school
bands. The first of its co-ops, a collaboration between the foundation and
the city, opened in 2003. (Branches in Shreveport and Alexandria, La.,
opened later.) 

The foundation could have easily fallen victim to Katrina¹s devastation.
Many of the city¹s cultural organizations suffered extensive damage to
facilities and had to cut their payrolls. Tipitina¹s suffered only limited
wind damage, and the foundation¹s services were in demand. Many musicians
lived in devastated neighborhoods like Gentilly and the Ninth Ward; those in
other parts of town still lost instruments, amplifiers and CD collections to
the flooding. Bands were scattered around the country, and some meager
savings accounts were obliterated.

After Katrina struck in August 2005, Mr. Kurnatowski and the executive
director, Bill Taylor, decided to try to reconstitute the foundation¹s work.
By late October, they had reopened the club and the co-op, both of which
quickly became hubs of activity for musicians returning to town. A legal
clinic that provided musicians with free help with contracts, copyright
issues and licensing agreements became a popular service.

³Even if they lost everything, they still had their intellectual property,²
says Ashlye M. Keaton, a lawyer who runs the clinic. ³You could see the look
in people¹s eyes: ŒThis is all I have, this is my career, and I¹m going to
do everything I can to protect it.¹ ²

For his part, Mr. Kurnatowski pledged to plow all profits from Tipitina¹s,
which scaled back its staff and eliminated guaranteed payouts to musicians,
into the foundation. The club has cut its number of shows to four nights a
week from six, but has seen total attendance and bar sales stay steady. Even
so, Mr. Kurnatowski says, Tipitina¹s operates on razor-thin margins: he says
the club earned about $40,000 last year on revenue of about $500,000.

Other organizations also tried to put some financial muscle behind the local
music business. The New Orleans Musicians Clinic paid musicians to play at
the airport and offered $100 guarantees to musicians who could find gigs for
themselves elsewhere. The Jazz Foundation of America also subsidized
performances. The New Orleans Musician¹s Relief Fund, a charity started by
the former dB¹s bassist Jeff Beninato, offered a temporary apartment to
musicians. Renew Our Music, another relief fund, gave financial grants to
musicians, while funds from Gibson Guitar and MusiCares, a charitable
organization affiliated with the Recording Academy, helped buy scores of new
instruments.

For artists dependent on support, such backing was invaluable.

Margie Perez, a former travel agent, had arrived in New Orleans just eight
months before the storm. She returned to town in January 2006 to discover
that her apartment in the Broadmoor neighborhood had been badly flooded.
Determined to stay, she found other housing ‹ for twice what she paid
pre-Katrina ‹ went to work cleaning damaged houses and started visiting the
Tipitina¹s co-op. She picked up work in different bands and this last spring
was invited to sing with the pianist and producer Allen Toussaint at Jazz
Fest. 

Ms. Perez, 42, also has a part-time job at a clothing boutique and is
training to be a tour guide; the music business here is still too anemic for
her to depend on it for her livelihood. ³You just get into as many projects
as you can,² Ms. Perez says. ³I¹m in, like, five different bands and that¹s
kind of the case with a lot of musicians in town.²

Indeed, even as crowds come back, littering Bourbon Street with beer cans
and daiquiri cups, musicians say they¹re not seeing their incomes rebound.
Wil Kennedy, a guitarist and singer who plays for passers-by in Jackson
Square, says the situation is still ³as bad as it was after 9/11,² with his
tips down as much as 75 percent from the peak period before 9/11. In the
clubs, guarantees of a minimum payout are now less common; many clubs offer
musicians just the take at the door or a percentage of drink sales.

³They¹ve kind of gotten used to getting the music cheap when people were so
desperate they¹d play for a sandwich and a $20 bill,² says Kim Foreman,
secretary and treasurer of a local branch of the American Federation of
Musicians, which has lost about 120 of its 800 dues-paying members. Poverty
keeps many musicians living with substandard housing and health care, Mr.
Foreman says. 

Katrina left as many as half of the city¹s roughly 5,000 working musicians
marooned elsewhere, says Jordan Hirsch, executive director of Sweet Home New
Orleans, an organization that provides financial support to musicians.

³A lot of people in Texas and Georgia and around the country want to be
back, feel that their best economic opportunities are here, but just can¹t
get from A to B,² Mr. Hirsch says.

Others are scared off by the rampant crime and lack of basic services here,
despite an economic need to be back in the Big Easy¹s cultural stew. ³Right
now, New Orleans is not fit for my family,² says the Hot 8 Brass Band
trombonist Jerome Jones, who has relocated to Houston with his wife and four
of his five children. Mr. Jones, whose bandmate Dinerral Shavers was
murdered here last December, says he plans to commute to New Orleans for
gigs and band business.

IT¹S an article of faith among New Orleanians that the music scene is an
indelible part of the city¹s appeal. But the city and state historically
haven¹t recognized the role that musicians and other creative workers play
in driving tourism and improving the quality of life, advocates say. As a
result, they say, the city and state have underinvested in the cultural
sector of the economy.

³People don¹t think of artists as a category of workers,² says Maria-Rosario
Jackson, director of the Urban Institute¹s Culture, Creativity, and
Communities Program, which found that the city¹s infrastructure for
³cultural vitality² even before Katrina rated in the bottom half of the
country¹s metropolitan areas.

Figuring how ³to translate that authenticity to economic development has
been the challenge for all these years,² says Scott Aiges, who headed the
city¹s music office before Katrina and is now director of marketing and
communications for the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival and Foundation,
which owns Jazz Fest.

Just weeks before the storm, Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu unveiled a new strategy
for developing what was described as the ³cultural economy.² Since then, the
state has pushed through tax breaks for arts districts, musical and
theatrical productions and sound recordings and made sure that events like
Mardi Gras and Jazz Fest, which provide work for many musicians, survived.

But a separate individual tax break for artistic earnings failed in the
State Legislature because of concerns that it wasn¹t fair to other working
people, and other large-scale attempts have languished because of a lack of
financing. In May 2006, the Bring New Orleans Back Commission, which was
formed by Mayor C. Ray Nagin, recommended plowing $648 million into the
cultural sector to create jobs, rebuild damaged facilities and open a
national jazz center. But those ideas were shelved with the rest of the
commission¹s work, and subsequent, scaled-back proposals still await
financing. 

New Orleans ³needs some anchors around which the economy can begin to
rebuild, and arts and culture are an obvious one,² says Holly Sidford, a
principal at AEA Consulting in New York, which developed the recommendations
for the commission¹s cultural subcommittee at the request of the trumpeter
Wynton Marsalis. ³But without investment, really deliberate and coherent
investment, that won¹t happen.²

Ernest Collins, the city¹s executive director for arts and entertainment,
says of the commission¹s recommendations, which Mr. Nagin endorsed: ³That
was a very large price tag. And needless to say, we don¹t have that money.²

Leaders of nonprofit groups and organizations like Tipitina¹s say they are
resigned to filling the void left by the public and private sectors as long
as they can. Mr. Aiges, whose group owns Jazz Fest, is using receipts from
the event to add new festivals, build an Internet-based system that will
allow musicians to connect with talent coordinators and potential licensees,
and put on a networking event for musicians during next year¹s festival.
Sweet Home New Orleans is compiling the first database of local musicians,
which should help it to distribute relief faster and more effectively, and
hopes to get part-time work for them in other businesses.

Next month, the Tipitina¹s Foundation will release a new CD honoring Fats
Domino, with proceeds from it earmarked for resurrecting his music
publishing company and opening a co-op near the singer¹s home in the Lower
Ninth Ward. 

But musicians say they wonder if New Orleans will ever nurture their careers
the way it once did. The Hot 8 Brass Band, which was featured prominently in
Spike Lee¹s documentary film ³When the Levees Broke,² is concentrating on
touring elsewhere in the United States and abroad ‹ even if that might mean
missing Mardi Gras ‹ so it can play for outsiders. Outsiders, say band
members, seem to value them more than their hometown.

³They make you feel how valuable you are to New Orleans,² says Raymond
Williams, a trumpeter for the band. ³I feel like maybe the city should treat
musicians in the same way.²