Group Races to Save the Cradles of Jazz

ALGIERS, La. —  In a wooden cottage across the Mississippi River from New Orleans, Annie Avery peered outside -- which wasn’t hard to do, since the front door was missing -- and scowled at the sky.

“Looks like rain,” she said.

This was not idle conversation, but practical observation. Because if it rained out there, it was going to rain in here, right through the holes in the roof. The thin walls were made of planks patched with cardboard and etched with rambling tunnels left by termites. The yard was littered with trash: a muddy doll, a blackened kettle, a faded fedora pocked with almost as many holes as the roof.

In this hovel, Avery, the director of an African American heritage program, hears a beautiful song. The sound is big and brassy, syncopated and swinging, and it made New Orleans the cradle of jazz. Avery believes the sound is the soul of New Orleans, her beloved hometown. And she is out to save it, one dilapidated building at a time.

In a campaign long on ambition and short on funding, music aficionados and historians have targeted for preservation nearly 2,000 New Orleans-area buildings connected to the birth of jazz -- from the childhood homes of its pioneers to the mammoth halls where they performed.

By poring over old phone books and dusty property records, through word of mouth and even the stubs of timeworn rent checks, researchers and historians have identified more than 600 homes and 1,300 performance halls linked to the early days of jazz, said Jack Stewart, a New Orleans resident who owns a home restoration company and is a jazz historian leading the project. Many more buildings are expected to be identified in coming months.

“We haven’t even scratched the surface,” he said.

There is the old men’s gymnasium on the campus of Tulane University, now used by an ROTC program, where Joe “King” Oliver thrilled the first generation of jazz fans before triumphantly marching on to Chicago.

There is the shotgun-style house off Jackson Avenue where cab driver Johnny Dodds lived as a boy, taught himself clarinet and created an emotional, bluesy style later adapted by Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw.

And there is this house in Algiers -- long abandoned, 15 feet wide and 35 feet long, tucked into a forgotten corner of the New Orleans area. Almost 90 years ago, Henry “Red” Allen, a trumpet prodigy who torched a dizzying and innovative path through the jazz world for five decades before dying in 1967, was born here.

On this afternoon, a stray, pregnant dog strolled down the middle of the narrow street. Three men stood on the corner, sipping silently from tall beer cans sleeved in brown paper bags. On an abandoned lot next door, several cars rested on weed-covered blocks, their tires removed, mostly likely for good.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” said Avery of the nonprofit Preservation Resource Center, which promotes the protection of New Orleans-area neighborhoods and architecture.

She stepped onto the porch gingerly, partly because of a bad knee, but also because sections of the floor bowed under the slightest weight.

Contractors buzzed around, some on ladders assessing the home’s tired crossbeams, some on their knees working on its gnarled floor.

“Give me a few months,” she said. “You won’t recognize the place.”

The Allen house is the second project undertaken by the preservation center, following an effort that resulted in the purchase and refurbishment of the boyhood home of trombonist Edward “Kid” Ory, a member of one of the first African American jazz bands to record professionally.

The group recently bought the Allen home for $6,000 from a government agency that had slated it for demolition, Avery said. Like most of the properties targeted for preservation, the Allen home will not be taken off the real estate rolls after it’s fixed up. It will be sold on the open market, probably for between $90,000 and $100,000, Avery said.

Working with the New Orleans Jazz Commission, an advisory arm of the National Park Service, the Preservation Resource Center plans to mark the Allen home with a plaque explaining the musician’s influence on jazz. Organizers hope for dozens of similar plaques, which would be used to lead visitors on a tour of jazz history.

The group’s board also is trying to devise a contract that will require buyers of the refurbished properties to meet certain standards of upkeep, maintain plaques for visitors and consult with the preservationists before reselling.

The resource center hopes to cobble together money for its program through a combination of government grants, bank loans and donations. Any profit earned from the Allen house would go toward buying future properties the organization wants to preserve.

If the Ory project is any measure, however, the group will be lucky to see a profit once it finishes paying for a complete overhaul. Avery estimates that the Preservation Resource Center lost $56,000 fixing up the Ory home, despite buying it for $3,000 from a private owner and selling it to two New Orleans men for $99,000.

Even though most of the properties targeted by the program are in better shape than the Ory and Allen houses, people behind the project say they are struggling to finance a long-term strategy for preservation.

In many cases, they are already too late. Among the significant New Orleans buildings that have been lost to time and development are the boyhood home of Louis Armstrong, the region’s most famous and influential jazz musician. Armstrong’s home on Jane Alley is now part of the parking lot of a government building where people go to pay parking tickets.

“If we don’t do something, the memories, the history, the spirits that are in these places will be gone forever,” Avery said. “Everybody says there is no money, but it’s out there somewhere. It has to be.”

Organizers think the program may eventually increase property values in poor neighborhoods, but they also believe much of the program’s lasting value may lie elsewhere.

New Orleans is a bacchanalian pleasure zone, something that is most evident during its annual Carnival season, which ends with the celebration of Mardi Gras. Many longtime residents believe these two agendas -- preservation and partying -- are often at odds, competing for time, energy and money.

“A lot of people in the tourism industry have become aware of how important cultural history can be,” said Steve Teeter, curator of the jazz collection at the Louisiana State Museum.

Avery also sees the program as a way of bringing together generations of African Americans, who account for more than two-thirds of New Orleans’ 475,000 or so residents. That majority status can be linked directly to the turn of the century -- when brass orchestras and marching bands were starting to give way to more exploratory jazz, and when New Orleans and surrounding communities like Algiers were a cosmopolitan, cultural capital for Southern blacks.

With that history comes responsibility, Avery said. And she believes younger generations in the area -- particularly young jazz musicians -- have forgotten those roots.

“It’s easy to forget who came before you,” she said. “Musicians go out today and might earn a thousand bucks for a gig. These guys back then, men like Red Allen, they made two or three bucks. Musicians today can play anywhere they want. Back then, musicians couldn’t play a lot of white clubs. Today, they can walk right through the front door for a gig. Back then, they had to walk through the back door.”

Avery, a grandmother of seven, will not say how old she is. Old enough, she says, that when she was a girl, the school erected a dark screen on the bus, so the white kids wouldn’t have to look at her each morning.

Now she lives in New Orleans’ historic Seventh Ward, which served as an early laboratory of jazz when Creole musicians, many of them classically trained in Europe, began playing with African Americans, some of them freed slaves. That is an example, many here believe, of how the histories of jazz and New Orleans’ black communities are intertwined.

“I thank God that we’ve come so far,” Avery said. “But people paid a hard price to get here. We must remember that.”