The year is 1954, and New Orleanians from every walk of life have gathered for the funeral of the great trumpeter Oscar “Papa” Celestine. The air is thick with the solemn sound of a traditional dirge, blaring from scores of tubas, trombones and clarinets. And a young boy watches as his mother approaches a slight-framed man in a Eureka Brass Band cap.
“Aren’t you George Lewis?”
“Yes Ma’am, I am.”
It’s the story that begins Tom Sancton’s 2006 memoir, Song For My Fathers, a coming-of-age tale that chronicles Sancton’s childhood and his apprenticeship at the feet of some of New Orleans’ greatest musicians. And it’s the beginning of a brand new stage show based on the book, premiering this Monday at Tulane University’s Dixon Hall at 8 p.m. The show coincides with the release of a new paperback edition of Song for My Fathers, featuring a brand new epilogue about Sancton’s return to post-Katrina New Orleans after many years working in Paris for Time Magazine.
“It’s really an interweaving of music, spoken memory, and multimedia effects, with some dramatization,” says Sancton. The show, also called Song For My Fathers, will feature projected photographs, readings from the book, and performances by the Preservation Hall Jazz Band.The band will represent the original Preservation Hall musicians with whom Sancton played in his youth.
He grew up in the latter days of the Jim Crow era, when Louisiana was still an officially segregated state. For a middle-class white kid, the world of the “Mens” – the circle of black musicians who peopled Preservation Hall in the early years – was something totally new. “The book really takes place in and around the Hall,” Sancton says. “It’s a celebration of jazz culture and of the city.”
In the director’s seat is Ron Rona, head of publicity for the Hall and Ronnie Numbers in New Orleans Bingo! Show. “I’ve known Tommy since I started working at the hall five years ago,” Rona says. “It was a natural fit. One of my favorite things about watching shows there is that the musicians become storytellers. Tom is really great at that, talking about the history of the song, who he first played it with – because he played with everybody, all the original cats. We really wanted to recreate that vibe.”
“It’s not a stage a stage production in a Hello, Dolly sense,” Rona says, laughing. “It’s a reading, with a hell of a lot more.”
Onstage, Sancton will read excerpts from his book while the band illuminates select passages with music. “The band is occasionally playing softly under my speaking, like when I’m talking about the process by which George Lewis created ‘Burgundy Street Blues,’ he says. “At another point we’re working with a young man who’s going to play me. He’s going to have a pantomime lesson with Charlie Gabriel from the Preservation Hall band.”
When I talk to Rona that same day, he mentions this as well. “There’s a chance that a young clarinet player will be showing up, but they don’t grow on trees anymore,” he says. In both interviews, I mention casually that I play the clarinet. I don’t expect anything to come of it.
The next morning I get a call from Rona: “Tommy and I had a crazy idea.” And that’s how I was recruited for the role of “Young Tommy.”
A few days later, I meet Sancton at Preservation Hall for a rehearsal. The scene recreates his first lesson with George Lewis, the clarinetist who was his mentor and his first music teacher. Sancton (sitting in for Charlie Gabriel) and I trade snatches of “Corrine, Corrina,” one of the very first tunes Lewis ever taught him. It’s rather humbling. Here I am learning from Tom, pretending to be Tom learning from George Lewis. It’s quite a role to fill.
It reminds of something Sancton had told me when I first sat down with him: “Sometimes I’ve caught myself wondering, is this a fraud? I’m a middle class white guy, went to an elite college and worked for a big magazine. Do I deserve this role? Can I fulfill it? People are there paying money to hear me play traditional New Orleans jazz. It’s a big responsibility. I’ve thought about that, and I think it is legitimate. To some extent, I’m a successor of the old guys, those of us who actually knew them and learned from them are really direct successors. And we’re trying to pass on a culture and a style of music.”
Listening to Sancton play, I feel like I’m hearing an old jazz record coming to life, and I’m not the only one. At Lewis’ wake in 1968, the trumpeter Percy Humphrey said of him, “George Lewis’ll never die as long as that boy is alive.”
Sancton was surprised at and touched by the positive reaction to his book. “I think people here, in the wake of Katrina, saw it rightly as a celebration of something that was important about New Orleans culture, something we ought to hold on to, in spite of the hit the city took.”
Song For My Fathers premieres this Monday, April 19 at Tulane University’s Dixon Hall. It is free and open to the public.
