Missing melodies

Published : May 06, 2011 00:00 IST

New Orleans and its music are yet to recover from the havoc wreaked in 2005 by Hurricane Katrina and a year ago by the BP oil spill.

in New Orleans

SPIRIT, soul, essence, heart these are just a few words people in New Orleans use to describe what music means to their city.

Craig Klein had a choice save his marriage or play the trombone in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina wreaked havoc. The musician decided to stay and belt out melodies in the city devastated by the storm in 2005.

The divorce came as a result of the storm, said Klein, before an evening gig at Palm Court Jazz one of the first restaurants to open for business after Katrina.

Klein, 50, returned from a road trip to a destroyed house, but his wife and four children had escaped to safety. Klein's family left in one of the largest mass migrations in recent American history. More than 100,000 people are still missing from the city, which had a pre-Katrina population of more than 455,000 people.

Scores of musicians went to find jobs in different parts of the United States. Many of their regular bars and bistros had no electricity and no tourists for months. There was no work, said Klein.

Almost six years on, the city and its music are yet to recover. A lot of good musicians leftwe're doing the best we can, said David Boeddinghaus, who has been playing the piano for 40 years.

Louisiana State's $9 billion tourism industry, which relies almost entirely on New Orleans, suffered a severe setback. The slump disrupted the livelihood of everyone in the hospitality business, from restaurant owners to musicians. Their struggle was captured in the popular HBO show Treme, named after a New Orleans neighbourhood. The lead character, Antoine Batiste, happens to be a divorced trombonist trying to make a living after Katrina.

A massive campaign was launched by the city government to woo tourists back after Katrina, and another advertisement campaign came five years later after the BP oil spill that hit the American Gulf Coast one of the world's worst environmental disasters.

We thought if we could get the music back it would help, said Klein, describing how musicians banded together and gutted houses. This was a long process of hauling out all the soaked furniture and memorabilia. Many charitable organisations also helped by inviting musicians to play and buying them new instruments. But the present music scene, saddled with the economic recession, is nowhere close to the old times.

The State of the New Orleans Music Community Report, released last year by Sweet Home New Orleans, a non-profit organisation, found 50 per cent fewer gigs in the city since Hurricane Katrina and said earnings from music were down by 43 per cent.

Kat Dobson from Sweet Home said that the new wave of tourists spent less for live music partly because the free music trend had got stronger. Fewer tourists and the city's reduced population have also contributed to a decline in the music audience.

Kat Dobson said that time would probably be the best healer, but her group organises monthly workshops to help educate musicians on how to negotiate contracts and promote themselves. The musicians in the city don't focus on regular music industry practices, she said. Spreading that kind of knowledge will help.

SLICES OF NEW ORLEANS

The Brad Pitt houses, constructed after Katrina, are a much talked about addition to the city. Ariel Segura, a high school graduate, sat on the bonnet of her car in front of one such house, which her grandmother got for free from the Hollywood actor.

Very expensive, only a handful of these houses have been constructed. Some dwellings have a mechanism to detach themselves from their bases and float if there is a flood.

Brad was standing right there when he visited, said Ariel Segura, pointing to the balcony of the next-door house. She drolly insisted that her elderly granny really does not know that their benefactor is a celebrity.

Despite the continuing recovery, an air of melancholy lingers over the city. Local people say that it still feels odd locating places without familiar landmarks like an old tree or an ice-cream parlour that was never rebuilt.

But a great deal of reconstruction activity and new opportunities in the service industry have resulted in an increase in jobs, leading to Louisiana's unemployment rate being lower than the national average in the recession years.

New Orleans, often described as the most unique city in the U.S., was bought by Thomas Jefferson from Napoleon in the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, one of the largest land deals, for $15 million (equivalent to $217 billion now). The city, which was also ruled by the Spanish for a period in the 18th century, wears this European legacy on its sleeve.

Every year thousands of tourists walk down the tree-trimmed lanes of the Garden District famous for its elegant houses of architectural styles ranging from Greek Revival to Victorian and Italianate.

Sitting on the site of a former sugar plantation, these large houses are now mostly occupied by wealthy white people, explained Moon Landrieu, who was the mayor of New Orleans in the 1970s. His son is the present mayor.

Not far away is the Lower Ninth Ward, an African-American neighbourhood, which was badly hit by the hurricane. Vacant spots in what used to be a line of houses look like gaps in a set of teeth. Other low-income neighbourhoods look similarly grungy and abandoned.

The 80-year-old former mayor said that the poor had not had the wherewithal to build back after Hurricane Katrina, but multi-billion-dollar investments by the government and the private sector had led to some improvements, especially in providing better schools.

We're still struggling with the poor people, he said. It will never be quite the city it was, but in many ways it will be a more modern city and a better city.

The hurricane in August 2005, one of the deadliest and costliest, was caused by a series of levee breaches. The George Bush administration faced harsh criticism for the mismanagement of relief efforts after the disaster, which claimed more than 1,300 lives and left thousands of residents stranded for days without food, water and shelter.

POVERTY AMONG BLACKS

The storm also exposed the rampant poverty among blacks, who comprised 67 per cent of the population. Many of them could not afford transportation to evacuate. A global audience watched floating bodies and a looting spree on the streets of the richest country in the world. At a benefit concert, controversial singer Kanye West said President Bush doesn't care about black people.

While white residents have returned to New Orleans, many poor people have stayed away. The 2010 Census shows that post-Katrina the percentage of blacks has declined to 60 per cent, while the number of white residents has gone up from 28 to 33 per cent.

Louisiana, nestled in America's Deep South, saw a massive slave rebellion in 1811 and had segregation-enforcing Jim Crow laws until the 1960s. A study by John Paul DeWitt of CensusScope.org and the University of Michigan, released in March, showed that the U.S. remained a highly segregated country. The survey showed that the 10 most segregated cities were not confined to the south but included the ultra-diverse Los Angeles and New York

The rebuilding phase in New Orleans has seen racial tensions surface as white localities have tried to keep out blacks. St. Bernard Parish, a neighbourhood devastated by Katrina, required homeowners to rent only to blood relatives unless they obtained a special permit.

A federal court ruled that the requirement of the majority white parish, at the south-eastern edge of the city, violated the Fair Housing Act. U.S. District Judge Helen G. Berrigan described the rule as having camouflaged racial expressions.

The judge also ruled against the parish's attempt to stop the construction of mixed-income apartments, which were more likely to be occupied by the black community. Judge Berrigan pointed out that the parish's moratorium on multi-family housing units were similar to its blood relative ordinance.

Before New Orleans could recover from Hurricane Katrina, the city was hit by the BP oil spill on April 20, 2010, after the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded, 80 kilometres off the Louisiana coast, killing 11 workers.

Business last summer was the slowest since Katrina, according to Margie Perez, a 45-year-old singer, who moved to New Orleans to get serious about her music. She lost everything to Katrina and currently gets paid less for performances. But leaving the musical sanctuary of New Orleans is not an option for her.

There is no other place where we can do what we are doing here, she said. I want to help bring the city back to its glory.

OIL SPILL

New Orleans was not physically affected by the oil spill, but public perception kept tourists away. The livelihood of many fishermen and shrimpers was wrecked as marine life disappeared under a thick slick of oil. More than 180 million gallons of oil oozed into the Gulf of Mexico over three months before the well was capped.

The seafood industry, with a strong base in New Orleans, came to a standstill after shrimp and oyster beds were closed by the government. Many areas opened up within a few months, but a recent study showed that 71 per cent of the consumers still believed that Gulf seafood was not safe.

To dispel fears, the U.S. military has made an effort to reintroduce Louisiana seafood as the primary seafood it will use. But seafood harvesters are worried about the long-term consequences of the spill on marine life.

We don't know what the environmental impact is going to be, said Al Sunseri, head of P&J Oyster Co., the oldest oyster processing company in the U.S., which has lost 50 per cent of its customers.

A billion-dollar study is being conducted on potential future risks, according to Mike Utlser, the chief operating officer of BP's Gulf Coast Restoration Organisation, based in New Orleans. Describing it as the largest peace-time response effort ever assembled to an event, Ulster said that 90 per cent of the clean-up process was over. It made us hugely humble, he said, adding that many aspects of how the oil industry operated were going to change because of the spill.

One year later, globs of oil still appear near the coastal zones, but scientists say these are no longer of practical concern. The vast majority of the oil is gonedissolved into the ocean, said Donald Boesch, head of the University of Maryland Centre for Environmental Science.

I don't see any evidence of large reservoirs of oil coming in, said Boesch, who was also one of the scientists appointed by President Barack Obama to study the spill.

Even as BP rolls out an ad campaign saying that the beaches are clean and folks are back on their feet, many residents are angry. There is no reason why they shouldn't be on their knees begging for forgiveness, said Perez. Instead, it's you take what you're given.

A large percentage of people, who suffered losses, are still waiting to receive compensation. Besides the billions in clean-up costs, BP has paid $20 billion for individual and business claims as well as losses incurred by local and State governments.

Since August, 170,000 people and businesses have been paid over $3.5 billion, according to Ken Feinberg, who was appointed by the Obama administration to oversee the disbursement of the compensation.

We may not be helping as many people as swiftly as they would like, but we are there to help distribute this money, he said, noting that the main reason for claims being denied was lack of documentation that clearly tied the losses with the spill.

ARMSTRONG SPIRIT

Margie Perez believes that death and tragedy is woven into the fabric of New Orleans. Three years after Katrina came Hurricane Gustav, described by the then mayor as the storm of the century; this led to one of the largest evacuations in Louisiana's history. But the city hides its heartbreak from the millions of tourists who roam the quaint French Quarter, soaking in jazz music, and enjoy the freedom to sip alcohol openly on the streets.

Making a living as a musician is not easy here, Margie Perez admits, but there is more camaraderie than competition among the artists. If you work hard, you'll make it, she said.

The sixth anniversary of Katrina, this year, will coincide with the 10th year of the American Jazz Festival in New Orleans to celebrate the native legend, Louis Armstrong, turning 110.

Klein remarked that diversity had been one positive outcome of so many of New Orleans' musicians travelling out and playing with artists from all over the country before coming back.

It led, he said, to a cross-pollination of music that would have never happened before.

Betwa Sharma is a New York-based journalist.
Sign in to Unlock member-only benefits!
  • Bookmark stories to read later.
  • Comment on stories to start conversations.
  • Subscribe to our newsletters.
  • Get notified about discounts and offers to our products.
Sign in

Comments

Comments have to be in English, and in full sentences. They cannot be abusive or personal. Please abide to our community guidelines for posting your comment