For every resident of New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina changed everything. But for clarinetist Michael White, the floods destroyed 30 years of collecting when they swept over his personal library of materials related to the city’s musical and cultural heritage. The water reduced photographs, documents, recordings, and musical instruments to piles of rot and mold.
The 51-year-old musician and educator at Xavier University talked with American Libraries Editor-in-Chief Leonard Kniffel in March about his devastating losses and his efforts at preserving the culture of his native town. White’s own jazz stylings can be heard on his albums Dancing in the Sky, Jazz from the Soul of New Orleans, Shake It and Bake It, A Song for George Lewis, New Year’s Eve Live at the Village Vanguard, A Tribute to Johnny Dobbs, and Crescent City Serenade.
American Libraries: Tell us about your commitment to the preservation of New Orleans music and history.
Michael White: I was very fortunate when I was younger to discover this music and along the way to have some very special apprenticeships. One was as a musician in the bands in the street parade tradition, which I played almost exclusively for about four years in the community for funerals, club parades, church parades, and other types of events. There I learned quite a lot about the music, and I had a chance to play with some older, very experienced brass band players. Eventually I joined the musicians union, and I had many years of performing with an older generation of musicians that most people in any art form would never get exposed to. I had the chance to play with over three-dozen musicians who were born between the late 1890s and 1910.
Those musicians were active performers—recording, touring, playing regularly—and many of them were very well known by the traditional jazz community throughout the world. Many of these musicians became close personal friends of mine. They knew a lot of my relatives, and through them I came to a much deeper understanding of the importance of the music, of what it was about and the need to try to perpetuate a path in that musical tradition. It was through them that I was inspired to try to write more and start lecturing about the music, and it led to quite a lot of things—putting together programs, becoming involved in documentary production. I had, over the years, learned as much as I could about the music from the older musicians, but also from the literature and recordings and personal experiences.
So through that combination of things, I was able to develop a unique perspective on the music from both the inside and outside, and I use that as the basis of just about everything I do. I try to work on cultural preservation by putting together specialized concerts of music that, frankly, is not played much in New Orleans these days. There is a myth about what New Orleans jazz is, and then there’s reality. The more classic music is much more difficult to play and is much rarer—for example, the music of King Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton, some of the early Hot Five and Seven recordings of Louis Armstrong. That music is rarely heard today and very rarely played by New Orleanians, so I put together special concerts for that music and we played in different places in New Orleans, but also in places like Lincoln Center and elsewhere. I’ve also been doing a lot of writing, a lot of interviews, a couple of dozen essays about different aspects of the music.
American Libraries: Talk about your collecting.
Michael White: I had a very extensive library of over 4,000 books, the majority of which were on different aspects of jazz—just about every biography of a New Orleans musician that existed. Because there were many jazz histories—and related music, ragtime, gospel, blues—I started to put together and collect rare books about New Orleans and Louisiana history. Along with that, I collected around 5,000 CDs, again, most of them very rare, including versions of the earliest recordings of African Americans, which go back to like 1892. I also had most of the early jazz records—classic blues, Bessie Smith, and quite a lot of country blues, prison songs, Louisiana folk music, too.
American Libraries: Can you tell us what happened to your collection?
Michael White: All of that stuff was destroyed in the hurricane. Along with that, I had over 300 video films, some of them very rare, some of them live concert performances.
American Libraries: Where was all of this material?
Michael White: All of this was in my home, which had an office space with five entire rooms of material, which included all of the books, the CDs. I had about 700 LP recordings. I had several dozen 78s. Along with that collection, I had thousands of photographs, some of them very rare. Some were donated to me by the families of musicians; some had never been published in books. I was hoping to eventually publish some of those in a book of my own. I had interviews with musicians that I conducted—some where I just took notes, others there I had actual tapes. Some I had discs of interviews with musicians; many of those musicians are gone.
For an example, an interview of Chester Zardis, a bassist who was born in 1900, who told me about playing with legendary musician Buddy Petit, who was never recorded and was mythical in the music business. He also had the experience of being put into the same boys’ home that Louis Armstrong was, and he provided a different perspective on that experience. He talked about the early days of jazz, what slap-style bass was about. He told me who were the best bands and the best musicians and what some of these “cutting” competitions were like. You rarely see those kinds of things, of people that actually played on the wagons that were tied together for advertising, and then you had two bands that competed to see if they could outplay each other and, of course, that would draw a large crowd and advertise whichever band or business was on the side of the wagon. But that was a common occurrence in New Orleans. Very rarely have musicians that participated in those things ever actually spoken about it. So I had that kind of stuff.
American Libraries: Is this material impossible to replace?
Michael White: Most of it, the interviews and tapes. Chester Zardis and the others have been dead a number of years. I had photographs, some in performance, of me with Kid Thomas Valentine, who was the oldest musician I played with. He was born in 1896. I had some tapes of concerts with some of these musicians. Along with that, I also had sheet music. I had a lot of transcriptions of music for these special concerts. I had complete band transcriptions of music of King Oliver—maybe 20 or 30 songs—Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong. We had concerts of Buddy Bolden, music that we put together, Johnny Boggs, Sidney Bechet. I had a lot of stuff. Some of those were personally commissioned transcriptions, some of them I did myself; some of them were bought. I also had been writing, because one of the ways I look at cultural preservation and the preservation of New Orleans jazz is to look at it as not only a historical music, but as a living art.
I had been composing new music using the principles of New Orleans jazz as a basis for creativity, and also my own personal experiences, and making fusions of musics. Like, for example, Caribbean music, or even Jewish klezmer music, or African music and folk music, or even Louisiana zydeco music, using that with New Orleans jazz. And while I had written a lot of the music, those concepts are very new, and it’s kind of hard to teach those concepts to musicians. So I had a lot of those musical scores and things in the can, waiting for my next opportunity to pull them out. Some I did record, like on my latest CD [Dancing in the Sky], it's mainly original compositions. I think 10 out of 12 songs are original pieces that explore what I look at as a new approach to playing traditional jazz.
So all of those things are gone—all of my band pieces and thoughts of all my own music, all that’s gone. In addition, I had a lot of music memorabilia. I collected things like instruments, and I had basic music equipment. I had a piano and amplifiers, microphones, those types of things. But I also had a collection of vintage instruments, vintage clarinets that came from the 1890s to the early 1930s. And I lost more than 50 of those. I saved about 10, but I lost 50. I took what I could take. I had a few rare instruments—saxophone, banjo, guitar. And I had a collection of African and Caribbean instruments. So I lost all of that.
In addition, I had started collecting off of jobs and donations, artifacts from musicians. Like the guy I mentioned, Chester Zardis—I had several of his bass strings. When we would be on a job, on the rare occasion of him breaking a string, he’d throw it down, and I’d pick it up, roll it up, and label it and put it in a bag. So I had collected bass strings from musicians like Chester Zardis or Frank Fields, who played on many of the early rhythm and blues records, but he played traditional music, too. Frank Fields was the bassist on most of the Fats Domino recordings, Little Richard, Chuck Berry. He played on many historic records. I had banjo strings from people like Father Al Lewis, Narvin Kimball, who just died, 97 years old. He was the oldest founding member of the Preservation Hall band. I toured with him for many years, so I had some of his banjo strings. And I had banjo strings from the legendary Danny Walker and Emanuel Sayles. These were all important musicians with varying degrees of historical significance.
But on a larger scale, I also had a few instruments that had belonged to people. I had a clarinet that belonged to Paul Barnes. Paul Barnes played and recorded with King Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton. I had a mouthpiece and ligature that belonged to Sidney Bechet. There are some pictures of Sidney Bechet with a white mouthpiece, very classic, and I have that white mouthpiece, which was given to me by Bob Wilbur, who was his student. I also had a trumpet mouthpiece of Jabbo Smith. Jabbo Smith was not from New Orleans, but he was a trumpet player that was the main competitor to Louis Armstrong in the 1920s. I had a reed and autograph from Barney Bigard, the clarinetist who played in Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five and Hot Seven for many years and who also played for Duke Ellington during his most important early period, main clarinet soloist.
American Libraries: When you were finally able to get back in the house, was there anything that you could salvage?
Michael White: I lived alone in the Gentilly section of New Orleans, on Pratt Drive along the London Canal. And it was a half a block from one of the breaches in that canal. I had close to nine feet of water in my house for almost three weeks. The water lines are up that high, but what the water didn’t take care of, the mildew and mold did. So when I first got into the house, everything was covered with mold and mildew in different degrees. Some of it had grown to have different shapes and sizes and configurations and colors. In a very eerie sort of way, some of the colors were hauntingly beautiful—grays, blacks, white, green, yellow, sunny yellow. I remember all these kinds of configurations of mold. Because of what was in the water—there must have been oil and different kinds of chemicals—there was a terrible smell. But everything had been soaked. Many of the photographs disintegrated, along with many of the things that were written in ink or even typed. Many of the paper things had stuck together, so it was in total ruin.
American Libraries: It’s heartbreaking to see photographs of the aftermath.
Michael White: It gives me the chills just to look at them. I rarely look at these pictures and I rarely go to the house.
American Libraries: What was your collection worth, monetarily?
Michael White: If I had to put a value on the whole collection, I've kind of estimated it to be about half a million dollars. It’s 30 years of collecting things and some of them very rare. There was a clarinetist named Raymond Burke, who was very well known. He played the old Albert System clarinet and he was also a collector of instruments and junk. When he died, I ended up getting about 20 clarinets that belonged to him, in addition to the fact that when he was living I had bought a couple of instruments from him. But I had clarinets, mouthpieces like that, and one I had bought from Harold Battiste, a legend of New Orleans music. He’s a saxophonist and teacher at the University of New Orleans. He was a record producer. He was legendary in the modern jazz movement in New Orleans. He produced records in California, and he was actually the musical director for Sonny and Cher back in the day. I bought a clarinet from him. I used to have instruments from people of significance in the music business. I had a lot of stuff, a lot of autographs, and different things, but. . .
American Libraries: Thousands of librarians are coming to New Orleans this summer, the first major conference to return since Katrina. Can you comment on the importance of libraries and archives and what librarians can do to help this city?
Michael White: A lot of my interest in jazz was sparked by our public library. It started when I first became introduced to the music and the musicians. I was fascinated by the sound of New Orleans jazz, of the authentic music. It didn’t sound like anything else I’d heard. It didn’t sound like the more commercial imitations of it. It didn’t sound like any other style of music. Something about it was so real and pure and human and genuine and individual, so soulful. I wanted to know more about these people who made this music. And I was right here in New Orleans, and I started to look up books in the library.
At Xavier University’s library there was a section at the time, back in the 1970s, called the Black Collection Room, and it had a lot about jazz and the history of jazz and blues and stuff in it. And that’s where I used to hang out instead of the cafeteria or somewhere. I used to sit in that room sometimes for hours reading those books. And I found rare manuscripts that were donated to the library, for example, from old benevolent societies that were handwritten in French. Through those kinds of things I had an idea of how the benevolent societies of New Orleans were structured. These were the main organizations that sponsored the jazz funerals and club parades, so that was a very important thing. It gave me a different perspective on what I was actually seeing when I was participating in these events. I got to see quite a lot of pictures of musicians and things like that, which was important.
Then when I went to graduate school at Tulane University, I was working on a master’s and then a Ph.D. in Spanish, but I spent quite a lot of time at the William Ransom Hogan jazz archive at Tulane. There I heard for the first time a lot of old classic recordings, rare recordings. I got to read quite a lot about the musicians. They had a series of taped interviews, and I had relatives that go back to the earliest generation of jazz musicians. Well, they had interviews of some of my relatives! And I was able to actually hear them speak—people who died before I was born—to listen to their words and what they thought about things, get their opinions. All of that helped to form my perspective of the music.
American Libraries: That inspired you to become your own archivist and collector?
Michael White: Quite a lot. And then one of the things is that I found out later that there were quite a lot of omissions, for example, in the local public library. One of the things that I was working on putting together—and I’ll start up again—is just trying to collect materials for the study of New Orleans culture. There’s quite a lot that you could do there and you could say that my own home archive would have been a model for that in terms of books, recordings, and other materials.
American Libraries: Are you getting support from anybody?
Michael White: Officially, no. That was a personal venue. However, here at Xavier we have an archive in the library and they frequently get donations from people. And there’s a lot of material there and the archivist, Lester Sullivan, is very interested in New Orleans culture and he’s collecting a lot of materials that are related to that. So I think libraries and the state research center have helped me out a lot. From the University of New Orleans over the years I’ve gotten materials and learned a lot from different places before I really started collecting on my own.
American Libraries: There’s no insurance or anything that’s going to help you recover from this?
Michael White: I did have insurance. But like most people, I didn’t have enough to cover everything I had—nowhere near. One of the things that happens is you spend so much time collecting; I spent most of my time playing music or performing or writing or researching or something else. So you don’t really realize how much stuff you’ve amassed over the years. I certainly didn’t. I started this thing where I had people looking for me and then eventually I started myself on Ebay, which is how I got maybe 50% of my vintage instruments. And you don’t realize over the years the value of all the stuff you have. I just started building. I bought this house about nine years ago, and it wasn’t my intention to get all of this stuff, it just kind of happened. You look back and you say, “I wish I had more insurance, blah blah.” But, you know, you just don’t think about that ahead of time.
American Libraries: The readers of American Libraries magazine are, of course, librarians, about 65,000 of them. Is there anything that we haven’t asked you and we haven’t talked about that you’d like them to know specifically, especially the ones who are coming down to New Orleans?
Michael White: Yes, that I have a quartet and a 1960s band and a brass band and CDs for sale, and I'll be appearing at the conference on Saturday June 24 at 1:30 on a program about New Orleans music with author Tom Sancton! [Laughing.] No, but seriously, New Orleans has one of the most unique cultures in America, and the documentation of it deserves special attention. Collections specifically targeted to New Orleans and Louisiana culture would be good to see available to the public, not closed off in some archives, but something that would be more available. I think, for example, that the public library in New Orleans, while they have done the best they could, my library at home was about five times better. And that shouldn’t be. I would like to see at least the public libraries of New Orleans, each branch, have adequate material for the study of our own local culture that’s readily available to the general public. We don’t have that. If there’s something you can do to facilitate that, it would be a good thing.