American Routes Shortcuts: Dr. Michael White

Published January 27, 2023 at 4:00 AM CST

Dr. Michael White is the beloved New Orleans clarinetist leading the Original Liberty Jazz Band. He's also a composer, musicologist, jazz historian, and professor at Xavier University. He's a leading authority and culture bearer of traditional jazz. He's performed globally, is heard on over 50 recordings, received the NEA National Heritage Fellowship. Although Michael has ancestors in traditional jazz, he started in classical music. He later joined the famed St. Augustine High School Marching 100, but it wasn't until his late teens that Michael first heard New Orleans jazz played live at the Jazz and Heritage Festival. He went on to play with Ernest “Doc” Paulin’s brass band, 1975, at a church parade, and in social club parades and jazz funerals. Then, with Danny Barker's Fairview Baptist Church marching band. He later worked with the Young Tuxedo Brass to Wynton Marsalis's band, among many. We'll hear some of that music and more from Dr. Michael White and the Original Liberty Jazz Band.

Nick Spitzer: You know, when I was listening to you, I was thinking about because there's so many hymns in New Orleans traditional jazz, we're always hearing about the sweet by and by, or what may happen, you know, walk through the streets of the city, and imagine the- that it's a holy place. There's a lot of faith in New Orleans traditional jazz. Through the hymns part of the repertoire.

Dr. Michael White: Yeah, well, hymns are a very important part of early New Orleans jazz for several reasons. One of the first jazz musicians, Charles “Buddy” Bolden, who lived in Uptown New Orleans–you know, one thing we have a lot of in New Orleans are churches and ballrooms, so Charles “Buddy” Bolden wasn't exactly a church goer, but he was a church listener. So he would listen to the beautiful music coming out of Baptist and Sanctified churches in his neighborhood, and he tried to figure out a way to make popular music and dance music exciting like that, to have all the emotion of Black church singing. So he adapted the church singing style to horns using effects like bent tones and vibrato and growls and all those emotional effects, and that was one of the things that made jazz.

NS: Yeah, well, let me ask you: what kind of religious or church experience did you grow up with? Was there jazz involved? Gospel music? What is it that got you with the spirit?

DMW: Oh, not at all. I grew up Catholic in New Orleans, and in those days, there wasn't much spirit.

NS: Ah, yeah, yeah.

DMW: But that's a sin. I'm going to pay for that.

NS: Like a good Catholic you're already confessing it. Feeling guilty right off the jump.

DMW: I first started listening to hymns and things; my grandmother used to like Mahalia Jackson, and she used to play Mahalia Jackson records. So, that's where I first started hearing, you know, like Black gospel music from New Orleans, but when I got into the brass bands and started playing social club parades and jazz funerals and church parades, that changed my whole life and whole world.

NS: How about getting into that, what leads you to the music, whether it was sacred or secular as far as brass band jazz and traditional jazz?

DMW: Well, I think it was a spiritual thing, you know? I didn't hear a lot of traditional New Orleans jazz coming up. I wasn't in the neighborhoods where they had the parades. I didn't know about musicians, but I found out eventually that I'm related to musicians that go back to the very beginning of jazz. First generation musicians that made significant contributions to the early development of the music and were active on the scene from Buddy Bolden's time on, and in fact the first recorded hymns were done by Sam Morgan’s Jazz Band in 1927; they recorded three hymns in the up-tempo jazz style. And one of the leading players on there was a saxophonist named Earl Fouche who was a relative on my mother's side.

NS: What is it that gets you to become somebody who is going to play the music, and of course, you also teach it to- at Xavier.

DMW: Well, I mean, it's the spirit, and when I first heard traditional music, it was like a spirit that just kind of took me over. And it was a beautiful thing. I felt a sense of joy. I felt a sense of pride, of bonding and unity with the community. I mean, it was like I found a place in the world where I could contribute something, and I would get immense joy out of it, out of the music.

NS: What’s up there, Dr. White?

DMW: One of the roots of early New Orleans jazz was the march. Marches are the hardest type of song that you have to play because they have many parts to them. They have changes of volume, changes of the harmonic structure of the song, you know, they might have a beginning and interlude, all kinds of things and rules. You know, you have to do this here, this there. In New Orleans, they threw away the sheet music that everyone else was reading and improvised the way they played marches. This music can take something as difficult as a march and find a way to free it up, loosen it up, and make it fun and personal and individual. So that's what we like to do with marches, and this next song is an old march. It was written way back in 1911, but it became a jazz classic. It is entitled “Panama.”

[music]

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