One of the most curious facts in Al Kennedy’s Chord Changes On The Chalkboard: How Public School Teachers Shaped Jazz and the Music of New Orleans (The Scarecrow Press, Inc.) is that the Orleans Parish School Board once banned jazz from the public schools of New Orleans.

As Kennedy writes, “In 1922 a reporter noted that at the previous evening’s meeting, the Orleans Parish School Board, after discussing the societal threats posed by ‘jazz dancing and jazz music,’ passed a motion ‘forever banishing jazz from the schools.’ According to the newspaper account, ‘the snappy strains of jazz were held to have no place within the portals of Orleans Schools.’”

One of Kennedy’s main theses is that the public schools, despite the School Board’s outrageous proclamations, nurtured the music of New Orleans: “Many accomplished musicians had to spend their days working as plasterers, mechanics, or carpenters, but those musicians who were trained as teachers enjoyed the security of employment while teaching music to thousands of students. Permanent and secure employment served to anchor the musicians in New Orleans, thereby keeping the jazz talent within the community. Over the years, talented gospel singers, rhythm and blues musicians, symphony musicians, opera singers, church organists, and members of recording studio bands have taught in the public schools.”

In Chord Changes, the reader is introduced to many of these noble educators, from Arthur P. Williams, the principal of Abijah Fisk School (located on Perdido Street in the middle of “black Storyville” and attended by Buddy Bolden and Louis Armstrong, who told a biographer that “right amongst all this vice—I still went to Fisk School, right in the heart of it all”) to William Joseph Nickerson (who gave piano lessons to Jelly Roll Morton and Manuel Manetta), to Professor Valmore Victor (whose students included “Sing” Miller, Ellis Marsalis and Earl Turbinton) and Clyde Kerr, Sr., who “supposedly” charged a dollar for a one-hour private music lesson. Actually, Kennedy writes, “It was not uncommon for the lesson to stretch into five hours, and the student was rarely asked for money. On weekends, Kerr and his daughter would make the rounds of junk stores and secondhand shops, searching for broken instruments. In the evenings, with the kitchen table piled high with dented and broken horns, Kerr would take out his soldering iron and patiently fill holes, repair cracks, and smooth out dents. The completed trumpets, trombones, or clarinets would be ready for students the following Monday.”

Yvonne Busch, born in the Ninth Ward and raised in Tremé, attended the Piney Woods Country Life School in Piney Woods, Mississippi, where she became a member of the institute’s touring 45-piece all girl marching band, the International Sweethearts of Rhythm. When Busch entered Southern University in 1947, she was the only female in the school’s all-male jazz band. After graduation, she became band director at Booker T. Washington Senior High, a daunting task. “Under her leadership,” Kennedy notes, “apathetic students suddenly had a change of heart and even cut classes to spend more time practicing.” These students included saxophonist James Rivers (“Miss Busch taught me to be a serious player”) and James “Sugarboy” Crawford, who founded the Cha-Paka-Shawees with fellow Booker T. students Edgar “Big Boy” Myles and Irving Banister. At Joseph S. Clark Senior High, Busch tutored two of the greatest drummers in New Orleans rhythm and blues history: Joseph “Smokey” Johnson (the longtime drummer in Fats Domino’s band) and John Boudreaux (who provided the beats on Ernie K-Doe’s “Mother-In-Law” and Chris Kenner’s “Land of a Thousand Dances”). The legendary jazz drummer James Black was another pupil molded by Miss Busch’s firm hand, declaring “Instead of just being a drummer, now I’m a musician.” In 1955, Ellis Marsalis spent a semester as Busch’s student teacher.

Marsalis’ teaching career is highlighted in an exhaustive chapter on the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts, “the first publicly funded school in New Orleans to offer jazz as an integral part of the curriculum.” The school was the brainchild of educator Shirley Trusty Corey and musician Alvin Batiste, who began a tenure in 1972 as the New Orleans public schools’ jazz-artist-in-residence. In 1974, NOCCA became a reality with 137 high school sophomores in the first class. Dr. Bert Braud, former Blue Room pianist, headed the music faculty, and Ellis Marsalis, on the recommendation of Batiste, was hired as the school’s first jazz instructor.

In 1980, Harry Connick, Jr., applied to NOCCA but was turned down because he attended private school. Threatened with a lawsuit from his father, District Attorney Harry Connick, the school board voted to change NOCCA’s policy and accept all Louisiana students. Other notable NOCCA graduates from the school’s first decade included Wynton Marsalis, Branford Marsalis, Delfeayo Marsalis, Donald Harrison, Jr., Terence Blanchard and Chris Severin.

Another student, percussionist Jonathan Bloom, earned $32.50 every Friday and Saturday accompanying his teacher Ellis Marsalis at Lu and Charlie’s jazz club. Today, Bloom is the Jazz Outreach coordinator for the New Orleans public schools and has a network of over 200 musicians available to interact with students. The late trumpeter Doc Cheatham, a confidante of Louis Armstrong, was among those enlisted to impart their knowledge to a new generation of New Orleans musicians, including young Christian Scott, the recipient of a Cheatham trumpet mouthpiece.

Joe Torregano, known to music fans as a jazz clarinetist, is the current band director at Gregory Junior High. Torregano hails former Warren Easton Senior High student Pete Fountain as “like a second father to me,” but soberly realizes that his students know Fountain only as “that bald man who appears on the race track commercials.”

One of the book’s most poignant paragraphs concerns a West Bank practice session with Torregano’s marching band. A hurricane had threatened the previous week’s practice, there are student insurance issues and the band members’ t-shirts have been delayed by flooding in Plaquemines Parish.

“With a weary smile, Torregano, who has appeared in jazz documentaries and performed before U.S. presidents, blows his whistle and says, ‘Don’t play so loud. You’re going to run out of gas before the song is over.’ It’s another day in the history of music in New Orleans.”