Dr. Michael White
Photo by Michael G. Stewart
Bio
Although he grew up in the jazz-saturated environment of New Orleans and several of his relatives played with early jazz greats King Oliver and Kid Ory, Dr. Michael White's primary musical influence as a youth was his aunt, who played classical clarinet. White played clarinet in the noted St. Augustine's School Marching Band, but at the end of his college days he joined the Fairview Baptist Church Brass Band led by NEA Jazz Master Danny Barker, a banjoist and elder statesman of New Orleans traditional jazz. White also played with Doc Paulin's Brass Band, marching in funeral parades and exploring historical recordings of such band leaders as Johnny Dodds, Sidney Bechet, and George Lewis. During this period he had the opportunity to play alongside more than three dozen traditional jazz musicians born between 1890 and 1910. Although they had grown up within blocks of one another, Michael White and Wynton Marsalis had not met until the 1980s, when White sparked Marsalis’ interest in the music of the traditional jazz elders of New Orleans. This resulted in the seminal recording Majesty of the Blues, on which White is featured, and which marks Marsalis' turn toward appreciation and performance of the traditional repertoire of New Orleans jazz. Since then, White has served as a resident artist with the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra and has been named as a Keller Endowed Chair in the Humanities at Xavier University, where he taught Spanish for more than 20 years. He also performed with a number of musical ensembles, including the Young Tuxedo Brass Band and his own Original Liberty Jazz Band. In 2005, his home was flooded in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and he lost a huge collection of historical documents, recordings, and musical instruments. While living first in his car, being displaced in Houston, and then in a FEMA trailer, White gradually put his musical and personal life back together. He continues to teach and perform, commenting: "...[O]ne of the lessons that I learned, and I try to teach this to my students, is that one of the values of listening to jazz, especially New Orleans jazz, is not just for the danceable nature and the great music that it is, but also because of the lessons that it teaches and that can be used today. And one of those great lessons is that you have to improvise. You have to be able to take what comes and make something good happen with it." White recently released his first post Katrina recording of mainly original compositions entitled Blue Crescent.
Interview by Mary Eckstein for the NEA
NEA: Congratulations on your award. What was your reaction when you heard the news?
Dr. Michael White: I was very excited and surprised. I felt like it was a great honor.
NEA: Can you tell me a little bit about your earliest memories playing the clarinet and really getting interested in jazz?
Dr. Michael White: I started playing the clarinet when I was 13 years old. My aunt used to play the clarinet around the house and I liked the sound of the instrument. There was a very popular high school band in the area, St. Augusta High School Band, and I wanted to be in the band, so when I got to high school, my mother arranged for me to have private lessons. I took lessons for three and a half years with the band's director, Edwin Hampton. That's how I got started on the clarinet. The jazz part came later.
NEA: Tell me about that.
Dr. Michael White: When I finished high school, I didn't major in music. I majored in Spanish, but I kept playing. I guess I was looking for a sense of direction musically and I stumbled onto jazz by listening to some recordings and things like that. I found out that in New Orleans jazz the clarinet was a very prominent instrument, and that's how I got into it. I started listening to traditional jazz and starting going to things like JazzFest down here. I met an older brass band musician, Ernest "Doc" Paulin and eventually became a member of his brass band. I played in street parades, for social clubs, and in church parades and jazz funerals. I did that for about four years, then I joined the Musicians' Union and had a long association with several dozen musicians who were born between the late 1890s and 1910. I played with a lot of them for many years, and that's what pushed me in the direction of early jazz in a serious way.
NEA: Can you speak to the importance of jazz to New Orleans?
Dr. Michael White: You know, jazz is widely considered around the world to be this country's only truly original artistic contribution. And, of course, it started in New Orleans. Jazz is part of a way of life of New Orleans. It's an expression of the spirits and the soul and the feelings of the people here. But it also has universal implications -- it's sort of like the New Orleans social, spiritual, and cultural language that describes our version of the universal human experience.
NEA: I know that you personally were affected by Katrina. What were the effects of Katrina on jazz in New Orleans?
Dr. Michael White: Even before Katrina, the more authentic forms of traditional jazz music were really in sort of a decline. But Katrina, I think, has threatened the existence of some of the traditions that we've had for a long time like the social club parades and Mardi Gras brass band activities. It also cut out a lot of work for jazz musicians. Several musicians have since migrated to other cities and reestablished themselves there. But jazz is so much a part of New Orleans that it's not going to completely disappear.
One thing that I'm excited about is that Katrina has created some new opportunities for musicians who hadn't played together before. I think there's a higher consciousness among the musicians here that we have something really special, and we're forging new relationships in an effort to try to deal with our jazz heritage. For example, I've been working with one of the younger brass bands for the last couple of years, the Hot 8. We've been working on their learning about the history of jazz and brass bands and the traditional repertoire and the older functions and things like that. That's been an exciting thing. I think that there is still quite a lot of vibrancy and spirituality here and that the family traditions, the neighborhood and extended family traditions, and the music and culture will survive. We're in a period of transition now, though, so it's possible that anything could happen.
NEA: And by transition, how would you describe that?
Dr. Michael White: Most people are still seriously dealing with the after-effects of Katrina nearly three years later, still trying to get their homes together, dealing with family illnesses, financial issues, insurance companies, assistance with housing. With all of that going on, it's very difficult. But, of course, music is a reflection of life and a way of life, so it's just quite possible that music will start to reflect the experience of contemporary life with the Katrina and post-Katrina situation. And it already has. My most recent CD, "Blue Crescent," my first post-Katrina CD, was really influenced by the Katrina experience.
NEA: Can you tell me a little bit about the process of playing jazz? I know there's a lot of improvisation, so can you talk about your own personal process of playing?
Dr. Michael White: Playing, to me, is like speaking -- it's a form of communication. It's exciting, because you never quite know what's going to happen. You have a sketch or a framework of the music, you know what key it's in, you know the harmonic structure. But when the interactions between the instruments are completely improvised, that's when magic can happen. You have to kind of be open and receptive to creating on the spot along with the other instruments, and that's very exciting. It usually can create some exciting musical moments. It's a feeling like magic.
NEA: Could you elaborate on how tradition and creativity play off of each other in your music?
Dr. Michael White: I've been very fortunate in that I've been able to find a way to be innovative and traditional at the same time. The tradition of music is based on a combination of things. One is a set of musical principles that can be used for creation today and the other is kind of a standard repertoire of traditional jazz -- songs, hymns, marches, blues, folk songs, rags, and other types of music that were dance music when jazz started. You can both find and create new songs using the musical principles, but you can also be creative in playing standard or established songs. You can do that in a variety of ways. I certainly try, when we play the older songs, to never play the same thing twice the same way. I try to be innovative and creative based on being in and of the moment. I look for new and different ways to be expressive, whether we're playing something that I just wrote or something that goes back 100 years like a march like "Panama." I try to find new and creative ways to express the emotions of what that song allows while using the general guidelines of the New Orleans jazz style.
NEA: It really sounds like you're inspired by incorporating a wide range of styles into your playing and composing.
Dr. Michael White: I enjoy playing and writing songs using all of the different influences I mentioned -- blues, hymns, rags, marches, folk songs. I've used all of those. I play those kinds of songs all the time and I've used all of them in composition, too. One of the things that makes New Orleans jazz unique is the use of rags and marches and music of the church and jazz style hymns. I like to play hymns because we can play them either slow or fast, and they can be very exciting. A lot of the older, standard hymns have harmonies that lend themselves very easily to New Orleans jazz, to collective improvisational playing and the types of rhythms that are involved in New Orleans. I've also started working in recent years with the idea that New Orleans jazz is a flexible music that can blend with other ethnic folk songs. In some of my recent compositions and recordings, I've been mixing and blending the traditional jazz style with influences from the Caribbean and Latin America, the Mediterranean, South Africa, and other places.
NEA: What makes for an excellent traditional jazz musician in terms of technical expertise as well as authenticity?
Dr. Michael White: To make a good New Orleans jazz musician, you need to have a good knowledge of your instrument and how to play the instrument. But you also need to go beyond the technical side of music to make the instrument become a vehicle for your own expression. You need to have a unique and personalized sound and expression that has a New Orleans voice. You have to be able to let your life and your emotions as well as the life and emotions and history of New Orleans become part of the music. It's like all of that comes to life. And you have to keep in mind certain aspects of rhythm that are really dance music, even if it's not before a dance type audience -- you want to make people dance, because there's always that feeling of interaction between the music and the dances in life. I also think a good jazz musician, for traditional New Orleans jazz, has to be able to interact with other musicians and help to create a magic that goes beyond one's own playing into something spiritual.
NEA: It seems that for you the preservation of the traditional music is also the necessary basis for innovation.
Dr. Michael White: One of the things that I also witnessed and participated in was the last years of the generation of older musicians who were contemporaries of Louis Armstrong and Sidney Bechet. They were the last major wave of authentic, traditional musicians. They have passed on that tradition to some people in the younger generations. Nowadays, though, we don't have those older guys and older bands where you can hear a variety of people on every instrument playing in the authentic manner. So it's very difficult for younger people to really get to hear and feel what authentic, traditional jazz feels like. We don't have the variety of bands that they used to that would play the style. I think there are a lot of creative things going on in New Orleans, but not too much in terms of the authentic, traditional style. So that's what I'm trying to do, preserve the authentic, the traditional both in terms of playing the repertoire rarely heard these days of musicians like Jelly Roll Morton, Sidney Bechet, Johnny Dodds, and so on. And the revival style as well, which has had a great impact and influence on the rest of the world, the music of Bunk Johnson and George Lewis, which came to prominence in the 1940s. But I'm also trying to keep the music alive by using personal experience and life, to add those to the musical genre. I think that I'm on the cusp of a new style or a new approach or another major wave of how traditional New Orleans jazz will be played.
NEA: You mentioned your work with Hot 8. What advice you have for young musicians who want to carry on either traditional jazz or other styles of jazz?
Dr. Michael White: All of the real lessons of learning jazz are in the recordings and in history. I think one of the most important things is to listen to recordings of the greatest musicians in any genre. I always tell people to try to listen to what elements they have in common and how they differ, which helps define the general guidelines of these styles. You want to start out having influences with the eventual goal to try to find and develop your own musical persona. But it's very important to listen to those recordings of the masters in each style because that tells you what the guidelines are. It can be very confusing today, and you get lost in the mainstream jazz guidelines and approaches in playing. But if you want to become an individual and stand out from the crowd, you start out really listening to the great people that played the music and then try to develop your own style from there. But you also have practice regularly. You should make regular practice and regular listening a part of your daily routine.
NEA: What compels you to continue carrying on the musical traditions? What has kept you playing all these years?
Dr. Michael White: I'm a descendent of first generation jazz musicians, but it wasn't like a choice or a desire or anything like that. It's part of my being, part of my spirit. Playing music is a natural thing. It's as natural for me as eating and breathing. It's something that I do not for fun or by choice or certainly not by profession. It's just part of life, and it's a way of communicating with others. It's a way of staying in touch in a sense with my ancestral heritage and history. It's a way of bonding and sharing with people, not just in New Orleans, but around the world. And, really for me it's a very spiritual thing. It's a way of honoring the Creator. It's a way of worship almost. There is a certain Judean power that comes with the music when it's played correctly, and it has the ability to go beyond words and communicate and transmit feelings and emotions that make people feel good about themselves, make people want to dance, make people want to come together, make people happy to be alive. I think there's a certain beauty in that, and I feel lucky and fortunate to have been a part of it.