Michael White

Michael White is a native of New Orleans, the birthplace of jazz. He had family ties to early exponents of that music but took his early inspiration from an aunt who played classical clarinet at home. He took private lessons for 3½ years and played in the band at St. Augusta High School.

While he was in college, studying Spanish, White began listening to recordings of historic jazz and attending performances. He joined the brass band led by Ernest “Doc” Paulin and played in funerals and parades and for social clubs. About four years later, he joined the musicians’ union and went on to play with a number of musicians born in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

While teaching college Spanish for more than twenty years, White remained active musically, becoming a highly respected performer, music educator, bandleader, composer and historian. Hurricane Katrina inundated his home in the Gentilly district of New Orleans, near the London Avenue Canal, destroying his collection of documents, records and artifacts such as a clarinet mouthpiece used by the great musician Sidney Bechet. Though he acknowledges the storm’s impact, White told an interviewer, “Jazz is so much a part of New Orleans that it’s not going to completely disappear. One thing 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.” In the storm’s wake, he began working with a young brass band, the Hot 8, teaching its members the music’s history and its traditional repertoire.

Music, of course, is a living art form that reflects the life of a culture, and White said New Orleans had begun to deal musically with the hurricane’s impact. Blue Crescent, his first post-Katrina CD, he said, “was really influenced by the Katrina experience.” While preserving the past, he said, “I’m also trying to keep the music alive by using personal experience and life to add these 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.”