Danny Barker's protégés kept trad jazz alive

Hogan Jazz Archive at Tulane University

By Katy Reckdahl, New Orleans Advocate

Without Danny Barker, today’s New Orleans soundtrack would sound dramatically different.

In 1970, Barker, a seasoned jazz musician who had played in New York with jazz greats like Cab Calloway, Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Benny Carter and Jelly Roll Morton, came home to start a youth band that is credited with almost single-handedly reviving traditional New Orleans jazz.

For his group, the Fairview Baptist Church Christian Band, Barker recruited New Orleans teenagers who — like teens across America — had turned their attention to rock ’n’ roll and R&B. Over the next few decades, he convinced dozens of young people that brass band music was both cool and worth preserving.

Now, 44 years later, Barker is considered a savior of one of the city’s most prized traditions, and the Fairview band is seen as an essential part of the city’s jazz history, having created a strong core of young players to carry on the tradition.

Fairview’s original members went on to form the Hurricane and Dirty Dozen brass bands, which inspired the Rebirth, New Birth, Lil Rascals, Soul Rebels, Hot 8 and more.

Other original members, now in their 50s and early 60s, lead their own jazz ensembles. Altogether, the group’s alumni command key stages at every New Orleans music festival.

Later this week, Barker’s students and admirers will host a forum and two concerts to raise money for the first Danny Barker Festival, which will kick off in January, on what would have been his 105th birthday.

The event will give Barker’s students a chance to emphasize that traditional jazz would have withered without their mentor and that the city’s vaunted second-line parades would have few bands blowing along with them.

“Brass bands were run by a bunch of old men, and they were dying and no one was trying to keep that tradition going,” said Fairview member Harry Sterling, the longtime guitarist for Big Al Carson, another Fairview alumnus. “So if Danny Barker hadn’t kept the tradition alive, there would be no Hot 8. No Algiers Brass Band or Soul Rebels. No Pinettes.”

Barker filled out his band’s ranks with church members, cousins, musicians’ kin and children from his 7th Ward neighborhood, including trumpeter Leroy Jones, then 12, who began hosting weekly rehearsals at his family’s garage on St. Denis Street, a few blocks from Barker’s house.

At its peak, the band had 30 members who would sometimes split up into three different bands to play three different gigs, Jones said.

“We can measure Danny Barker’s gift by the musicians that came out of that band,” said Fred Johnson, who was spurred by Barker’s traditional funeral procession to help form the Black Men of Labor, a social aid and pleasure club that makes a point of hiring traditional brass bands for its annual parades.

Even young musicians who weren’t formally Barker’s students were influenced by him. Trumpeter Kermit Ruffins recalled Barker driving his big Pontiac “real slow” through the streets of Treme and stopping to talk about music with him.

Rebirth snare drummer Derrick Tabb formed his Roots of Music marching band program partly because he saw the effect of Barker’s Fairview band. He has fond memories of Barker pulling over, especially if he saw young musicians at work. “He was always willing to teach, show or just have a laugh with you,” Tabb recalled.

Rescued from the water

After floodwaters deluged Barker’s Sere Street home in 2005, friends retrieved dozens of sodden boxes and gave them to the curators of the Hogan Jazz Archive at Tulane University, who were able to salvage much of it: signature hats and shoes, letters, receipts, news clippings and countless longhand and typewritten manuscripts, edited and re-edited.

The collection’s contents reflect the Barker that his colleagues and students describe: a natural musician and writer. He published his own memoir, “A Life in Jazz,” and a book about African-American musicians called “Bourbon Street Black.”

His handwritten notes are everywhere: The back of a church bulletin or a scrap from an envelope might include a set list for an upcoming Fairview event and random to-do reminders — to get a strap for Puppy (one of the group’s drummers), return a contract for Saturday, buy cat food and check on the lawn mower.

Barker kept a pen handy and scraps of paper in his pockets and on the dashboard of his green 1972 Pontiac so that he could always scratch out a quick thought, said Jerry Barbarin Anderson, now 50, who was 6 years old when the band began and often tagged along with Barker after the Fairview rehearsals he attended with his grandfather, Charles Barbarin Sr., and teenage uncles, Lucien Barbarin and Charles Barbarin Jr.

Barker had grown up in the one of the city’s best-known musical families, the Barbarins, and he spent all his life watching musicians in clubs and the brass bands who ruled the streets, with names like Superior, Imperial and Olympia.

He described the bands to Peggy Scott LaBorde in a WYES-TV interview that’s also part of the Hogan archive: “All these bands were jazz bands: six, seven men without a piano, see, and you could move all over with it, and they had this raunchy, laid-back rhythm that they played. Not in no hurry, they weren’t infuriated to go nowhere. This was get-down music, see.”

Several decades later, that scene was in the hands of elderly men. Or so Barker observed in 1965, after moving back home with his wife, vocalist Blue Lu Barker, whose mother was ailing. They’d been gone for decades. In 1930, the couple had moved from New Orleans to New York, where Barker played banjo and guitar on stages all across the city.

Barker continued performing until his death; he had a standing gig at the Palm Court Jazz Café in the French Quarter. He also became an assistant curator of the New Orleans Jazz Museum, whose instruments and recordings are now part of the jazz collection at the Old U.S. Mint. After work, as he stepped outside the museum, he worried that the music he performed soon would live on only in historical exhibits.

In a handwritten essay in the Hogan Archive titled “The Fairview New Orleans Jazz Institute,” Barker described the band’s beginnings. “I had been wondering about the plight of New Orleans jazz, considered old and out of date — passé,” he wrote.

Part of the problem, he continued, was that the city’s brass-band musicians “rarely encouraged youngsters to join their ranks playing the street music, one of the most captivating, exciting scenes” for the “eyes, ears, feet — the heart.”

He formed the Fairview band with the Rev. Andrew Darby to “revive the interest” in jazz for musically inclined young people, he wrote.

Barker hadn’t set out to create a legacy for himself, said trumpeter Gregg Stafford, who was 17 when he joined Fairview. “But he knew he had to do something to keep the music going. He told me, ‘If you don’t teach the next generation and make them aware of their history and the history of their culture, it will be lost and someone else will be claiming it.’ ”

Jazz lessons

The first non-cousin recruited to the band was Leroy Jones, a diligent student who practiced every day in his garage in the 7th Ward. One afternoon, said Jones, now 56, a big Pontiac parked at the end of his driveway and out walked “the hippest old man” he’d ever seen. Barker introduced himself and asked if Jones wanted to be part of a band. Soon, Jones’ garage was part of jazz lore.

“It was exciting,” Jones recalled. “When we didn’t have rehearsal, I’d do my homework and practice for four or five hours. We’d get together and jam, and Blue Lu would fix us little snacks.”

The whole concept seemed so fresh and new, Jones said, noting that while Doc Paulin had some of his young sons playing in his band, a band made up entirely of teenagers was unheard of.

Barker decided that the idea of reading music might seem too intimidating to some children. So there was no sheet music at Fairview practices, said trombonist Lucien Barbarin, 58, who started out on snare drum with the Fairview. Barker kept it simple: He would teach them melodies by playing songs on the banjo or guitar or spinning records of Tuxedo or Olympia brass bands.

“Then we would follow by ear,” Barbarin said. Most would play the melody, and those who could improvise would provide harmonies and riffs beyond that.

First, they learned church hymns: “Down by the Riverside,” “A Closer Walk With Thee,” “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” Then they learned more secular classics, including Paul Barbarin’s “Second-Line” and “Bourbon Street Parade,” written by Barker’s uncle.

Barker also taught stage presence.

Sterling remembers his lessons: “Be the best musician you can possibly be. Always be on time. Learn to be a sideman before you become a leader. Dress well. Always look good. Be kind to people all the time. Kill them with kindness, and they’ll respect you.”

In his way, Barker groomed the teenagers as they moved toward manhood. He also counseled them and kept them from delinquency.

He recruited Eddie Boh Paris to play sousaphone after Paris walked in front of him at a corner store and a shoplifted Hubig pie fell out of his waistband. Paris was unwilling at first, but Barker kept him in the band by threatening to tell his mother about what he’d witnessed.

The drummer Anderson, once a young hothead, remembers Barker working to cool him off: “If I got angry, he’d say, ‘Go practice.’ ”

For him, the lessons went far beyond the history and the art form. “I found what jazz can offer for musicians and people who love music: peace of mind,” he said. If not for Barker, he believes he would likely be in prison or in the grave. “Danny saved me,” he said.

Once the Fairview band hit the streets, it grew exponentially, Stafford said. Barker would tell inquiring parents when the band rehearsed and they’d drop off their children at Jones’ garage in ever larger numbers.

As they gigged, Barker also taught his charges how to read an audience. At an early event, Lucien Barbarin recalled asking Barker why people in the crowd didn’t seem to be enjoying themselves. Barker assured him that the crowd just needed to loosen up. “Wait until they get a couple of drinks in them,” he said. “They’ll listen, and they’ll think you’re great.”

Branching out

The Fairview band was a hit locally, and it played prestigious gigs at places like the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. Within a few years, however, Barker began to hear complaints from fellow musicians that his popular children’s band was taking their jobs.

While Barker continued to work with younger children for years to come, he decided to cut the older kids loose rather than fight the musicians’ union. In 1974, Barker helped Jones establish the Hurricane Brass Band, dubbed as such because they “came up the street and blew like a storm,” Jones said.

Soon, Stafford would begin playing in Barker’s band, Danny Barker & the Jazz Hounds, which he did for about 15 years before Barker, in failing health, asked Stafford to carry on the name through his own band, Gregg Stafford & the Jazz Hounds.

But for most of the original band members, the break had come earlier, in 1974, when Stafford remembers Barker handing Jones a stack of business cards that said “Hurricane Brass Band” on them and saying, “You’re on your own now.”

They may have been on their own, they say, but they were following a track set for them by Barker, who kept New Orleans jazz young and swinging.

Uncle Lionel moves onto his next gig

For some 30 years or more, Lionel Ferbos had been introduced to audiences as New Orleans' oldest jazz musician. Someone else will have to assume that title now since Uncle Lionel has crossed over.

Ferbos celebrated his 103rd birthday this month at the Palm Court Jazz Cafe where he was a regular and played trumpet at every Jazz & Heritage Festival event until last year.

Like most working musicians, he held down another job, running a sheet metal business as a master tinsmith to raise a family.

He took up the trumpet despite childhood asthma. Ten years younger than Louis Armstrong, he outlived Satchmo by 40 years.

Ferbos played Traditional Jazz, a genre that went in and out of fashion during his lifetime.

Irvin Mayfield said of Ferbos and his contemporaries: "There's a certain way that they play melodies - it's a different beat, a different rhythm. When you listen to King Oliver or Jelly Roll Morton, you hear it."

"That's one of the lost things that we won't be able to hear in person again," Mayfield added.


Corpus Christi Catholic Church in the 7th Ward was packed on Saturday for the funeral mass. The Treme jazz band came strolling up St. Bernard Avenue to meet the procession going to the cemetery. Everyone was smiling because though the occasion was sad, Ferbos had seen it all - several wars, recessions, civil rights, integration, Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans' rebirth.

He was going to meet his maker.


The band played, "A Closer Walk with Thee," a New Orleans standard the musician had probably played a thousand times.

Ferbos lived an exceptionally long life, but he was not alone, even in his final performance.

Lionel's chariot

Jazz artist Donald Harrison joins Tulane staff

By Alison Fensterstock, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune 

Music students at Tulane University will, this coming fall, be treated to a special opportunity to learn from one of New Orleans’ pre-eminent cultural figures. The renowned jazz saxophonist, composer, music educator and Congo Nation Big Chief Donald Harrison Jr. will join the music department for the 2013-14 school year as jazz artist in residence, teaching six master classes to young studio musicians each semester, as well as theory and improvisation classes.

Harrison is a graduate of the prestigious Berklee College of Music, and a co-founder of the Tipitina’s internship program, where he worked with now well-known artists, including trumpeter Christian Scott and Troy "Trombone Shorty" Andrews. As a musician, he is noted for an innovative style that fuses modern jazz with funk, R&B and traditional New Orleans street sounds, particularly the Mardi Gras Indian tradition in which his family is steeped.

“His personality, his status as an educator, his investment in training young musicians…” said Tulane Center for the Gulf South director Joel Dinerstein, “we’re very happy.”

Music department assistant professor Matt Sakakeeny, whose book on the New Orleans brass band tradition (“Instruments of Power: Brass Bands in the Streets of New Orleans”) is forthcoming from Duke University Press in fall 2013, sees Harrison’s hire as part of an increased effort, on Tulane’s part, to engage with and promote its city’s culture. In part, Sakakeeny said, that focus is a direct response to the demand of students who choose Tulane because of strong interest in the culture as well as in the school.

“Enrollment in music is way up, in jazz studies and across the board,” he said. “As a faculty, we’re struggling to accommodate the huge interest.” Sakakeeny's own undergraduate class on the history of New Orleans music is capped at 45 students; because every semester it fills up, with a long wait-list. He recently was asked to add another section.

“It’s a response to the students who’ve come here post-Katrina, who are much more engaged with the city. The student interest in local music and culture is so high that we’re struggling to meet it,” he said. “It’s very exciting.”

Another recent addition to Tulane jazz studies is Adam Benjamin, a Grammy-nominated pianist recognized as a Rising Star in Jazz by DownBeat magazine for six straight years. He moved to New Orleans after a stint at Cal Arts this year to become a professor of practice at Tulane. He joins the pianist Jesse McBride, who came to Tulane as a visiting professor in 2007.

Benjamin and Harrison will work with McBride and other accomplished local musicians who are instructors at Tulane, including Detroit Brooks, Delfeayo Marsalis, Leah Chase, guitarist John Dobry, electric jazz bassist Jim Markway and sax player Allen Dejan. They teach both Tulane music students and children attending the brand-new Trombone Shorty Music Academy, housed on campus through a partnership with the Center for the Gulf South (which itself offers a freshly minted, regionally focused major, in Musical Cultures of the Gulf South.) College-level music students at Tulane also can assist with the middle- and high school Academy pupils to fulfill the service learning requirement in the liberal arts degree program.

“A lot of what we’re trying to do,” in terms of attention to regional culture and the New Orleans community, Sakakeeny said, “you can see through the Trombone Shorty Academy. Underscoring the significance of local music, outreach into the community, and working with this world famous jazz musician who’s a very accomplished culture bearer. It’s win-win.”

© 2013 NOLA.com. All rights reserved.

Yoshio and Keiko Toyama 'heart to heart through jazz'

Sheila Stroup, The Times-Picayune  

I never dreamed a thing like this could happen." -- Yoshio Toyama

In the band room at Landry-Walker High School, I watched the latest chapter in Yoshio and Keiko Toyama’s story unfold. Once again, they had come from Japan with shiny instruments for young New Orleans musicians.

“Eight hundred instruments since 1994,” Toyama said, smiling with his customary exuberance.

It was the day before Satchmo Summerfest, and the beautiful space was standing-room only. The Orange Crush Marching Band was on one side, and the audience sat facing them. It included members of the Swing Dolphins, a middle-school swing band from Kesennuma, Japan; and visitors from the Wonderful World Jazz Foundation, who make their pilgrimage to New Orleans from Tokyo with the Toyamas every August.

“I’d like to welcome you to Landry-Walker High School,” Wilbert Rawlins said. “This is now the new band room I am privileged to work out of.” He paused to let a translator repeat his words in Japanese.

The Toyamas’ past visits have been to the O. Perry Walker band room, but this year, the two West Bank schools merged, and all the students attend the new school on L.B. Landry Street. Rawlins, who was the band director at Walker, has had a decade-long relationship with the Japanese couple.

“In 2003, when I first met you, we didn’t have anything,” he told them. “Now, we can pass down instruments to junior high students.”

In the band room, the program began with a few rousing numbers from the high school band, but toned down a bit for an indoor audience. “I’d like to give you the full flavor of the marching band, but I’m afraid I’d blow you out of your seats,” Rawlins said, making the audience laugh.

Saving kids through music

It was an afternoon of music and of words, spoken in both English and Japanese. Rawlins and Toyama talked about how they’ve become more than friends through the years, and how their idea of a musical exchange between New Orleans and Japan evolved.

“We still have to deal with the outside world, but in here, we can save the kids,” Rawlins said.

That’s what binds the two men together: Saving New Orleans kids through music.

That afternoon, Toyama told how he and Keiko had come to New Orleans 45 years ago to study traditional jazz, and how they always wanted to give back for the priceless gifts they received here. And he told how, in 2003, the Wonderful World Jazz Foundation brought 39 instruments to Rawlins and his band at Carver High School.

“When I met Wilbert Rawlins, I thought he looked almost exactly like someone who taught Satchmo,” he said.

I smiled, remembering that day. That was the first time I heard Toyama play the music of Louis Armstrong and sing in that gravelly Satchmo voice. That was the day I learned about his devotion to “Pops.”

“The Japanese people want to thank the United States, New Orleans and Satchmo for giving the world such wonderful music called jazz,” he had said, handing over trumpets, trombones and saxophones.

When Rawlins spoke to the people gathered in the Landry-Walker band room, he explained how stunned he was by the 2011 tsunami, and how he and other New Orleans musicians had organized a benefit jam session and raised $2,700 as a small repayment for everything the people of Japan had given them.

A musical exchange

He told them about the idea he and his friend "Yoshi" had talked about for years: taking young New Orleans musicians to Japan and bringing young Japanese musicians to New Orleans.

Part one happened last October when members of Walker’s The Chosen Ones brass band and interns from Tipitina’s Foundation performed on a 10-day concert tour in Japan, and part two happened just last week when the Swing Dolphins came to New Orleans to perform at Satchmo Summerfest and Tipitina's, and to explore Louisiana.

“Without the Tipitina’s Foundation, this couldn’t have happened,” Rawlins told the crowd.

After the tsunami, Tipitina’s Foundation founders Roland and Mary von Kurnatowski found out about the Swing Dolphins through Toyama. The young band members had lost their homes, their rehearsal room and their horns. So the foundation sent Toyama $11,000 in yen to buy new instruments for the children.

Tipitina’s Foundation also co-sponsored last year’s concert tour in Japan with the Japan Foundation, and it joined with the Japan Foundation and the Tomodachi Initiative to bring the Swing Dolphins here.

After Rawlins spoke, Yoshio Toyama and the Dixie Saints perfomed the perfect song for the festivities: “Wonderful World.” They followed it up with “Hello Dolly” and the rollicking Mardi Gras favorite, “Second Line,” which got the Swing Dolphins and the Orange Crush up and dancing.

Sharing gumbo, photos

The party ended with the Swing Dolphins and Landry-Walker band members sitting down together to eat gumbo, red beans and rice, jambalaya and bread pudding. But the girls all seemed more interested in sharing cell phone photos than eating.

“Ooh, you look like a baby doll,” a member of the Orange Crush exclaimed. “Is that your mama? Is that your boyfriend?”

 

Rawlins looked around at the international gathering and marveled. "All this is like a dream to me," he said. 

As I watched a table of girls talking, making hand gestures and laughing, I realized that this whole exchange started with just two people -- three, if you include Louis Armstrong. It really began with a young boy in Japan watching American movies back in the 1950s and falling in love with the music of “Pops.”

“I saw a lot of jazz movies, like ‘The Glenn Miller Story’ and ‘The Five Pennies,’ with Louis in them,” Toyama told me.

He bought a trumpet in junior high and taught himself to play it, and by high school he knew that jazz was in his future. When he and Keiko were in college, they saw the Preservation Hall Band perform in Japan, and they were hooked.

“The band manager, Allan Jaffe, suggested that if we liked jazz so much we should come to New Orleans,” Toyama said.

Later that year, when Armstrong was doing concerts in Japan, Toyama went backstage and knocked on his dressing room door. He was surprised to hear that unmistakable voice say “Come in.”

“I saw his trumpet on the table and said, ‘May I see it?’ and Louis smiled,” Toyama said.

He took the smile to mean “yes,” and he picked up the horn and played it.

“That is something I’ll never forget,” he said.

Giving something back to New Orleans

After he and Keiko graduated, they married, moved to the French Quarter and started working as musicians and studying with the masters at Preservation Hall. They returned home six years later to play traditional jazz, and they’ve always been grateful for their time here.

“When we were very young, the musicians of New Orleans taught us and took care of us and loved us,” Keiko told me, “so we always thought we must give something back.”

During a visit for Mardi Gras in 1994, the Toyamas were dismayed to see that high school marching bands no longer had the gleaming instruments they remembered, and they were sad to learn that young people had guns. That was when they came up with the Wonderful World Jazz Foundation.

“It was to say, ‘Not guns, but horns,’” Toyama said. “Louis Armstrong shot a pistol when he was 11 or 12 and that’s how he got his trumpet. It was kind of symbolic to think about Satchmo’s life and put horns in children’s hands.”

The Toyamas’ foundation has done a wonderful world of good. After Hurricane Katrina, the couple gathered professional quality instruments for New Orleans musicians who had lost theirs in the storm, and they staged a series of benefit concerts that raised more than $80,000 to help keep New Orleans music alive.

And after the tsunami, they made light of their personal troubles while trying to bring back the music in their own country.

“We cannot use toilet, bath, can’t wash clothes . . .and house is slope. We already got used to living in it,” Toyama emailed, attaching a video of Keiko rolling across the slanted floor in an office chair.

When Toyama heard about the Swing Dolphins, he knew he had to help them. In another email, he left me with an unforgettable image of a young girl who wanted to play music so bad “she just kept practicing without her trombone. Just moving hand in slide position.”

With the money from Tipitina’s, the Toyamas got the instruments to the Swing Dolphins, and a few weeks later they traveled 350 miles in terrible weather to see the band put on a concert in front of a shelter.

After the concert I received another email from Toyama: “We were so worried outdoor concert may suffer rain, but it was the most clear and beautiful day, just like the smiles on the faces of all the dolphins,” he wrote.

Last Monday, after the Toyamas and members of the Wonderful World Jazz Foundation had left New Orleans and gone on to the Louis Armstrong House in Queens, New York, Toyama called to say that before he left, the Swing Dolphins told him they were having so much fun they didn’t want to go home.

“I think they will never forget this for the rest of their lives,” he said. “It’s nice for Japan and U.S. to have this heart to heart through jazz, and I’m glad we were able to be part of it.”

When I asked him what it was like seeing the Swing Dolphins perform in New Orleans, he was quiet for a moment.

“It was touching. It was just too much,” he said, in a shaky voice. “We came a long way over the years, but I never dreamed a thing like this could happen. It was like magic, like Satchmo was playing tricks on us.”

Contact Sheila Stroup at sstroup@bellsouth.net.

© 2013 NOLA.com. All rights reserved.

Hot time at Satchmo Summerfest

Meschiya Lake and the Little Big Horns

Last week was one the hottest festivals of the year, to my mind, both in terms of music and weather.

Even as I look forward every year to Satchmo, the first week in August, I have a secret dread because I know the temperature will be sweltering. The event takes place at the Old U.S. Mint, which has been refurbished as a museum. It has a shady side and a sunny side. Obviously, people have gathered under the shade of oak trees until this year when a tent was put up on the French Market side. Still, that blocked some of the minimal breeze.

The lineup is fabulous, assuming you are a fan of traditional jazz, so it is worth sweating while taking periodic breaks to look at old coins and scales inside the museum in order to prevent swooning. Of course, there are always show-offs who swing dance just to prove they are naturally cool and can can't be stopped by a little heat and humidity.

Meschiya Lake, backed up by the Little Big Horns, crooned tunes from the 1930s and '40s before air conditioning was even invented. "Be sure to hydrate," she said. "In between alcoholic beverages."

There were long lines for icy cocktails as well as fruit ice teas and freshly squeezed lemonaide.

Allen Toussaint came out looking like a prince in a beaded white jacket and bowing to the crowds, even those of us hovering outside the wrought iron fence. He proceeded to play the R&B music for which he is famous.

Though not a fan of big oil companies, I will give a special shout-out to Chevron, which helped underwrite this marginally profitable event and even paid for unlimited free pedicabs all weekend - helping both festival-goers and pedicab cyclists.

Young N.O. musicians to tour Japan

 By Sheila Stroup, The Times-Picayune 

At the reception for Yoshio Toyama and his wife, Keiko, I couldn’t stop smiling. Last Thursday, the band room at O. Perry Walker High School in Algiers was alive with the sounds of O. Perry Walker’s The Chosen Ones brass band and Yoshio’s jazz band, Yoshio Toyama and the Dixie Saints. What a joyful noise they made.

EnlargeRusty Costanza, The Times-PicayuneRUSTY COSTANZA / THE TIMES-PICAYUNE Yoshio Toyama, left, performs with the O. Perry Walker Chosen Ones Brass Band at O. Perry Walker High School in Algiers, Louisiana, Thursday, August 2, 2012. Thanks to a partnership with the Tipitina's Foundation, several band members and Tipitina's Foundation musicians, the O. Perry Walker Chosen Ones Brass Band will travel to Japan to perform.Satchmo of Japan Joshio Toyama gallery (9 photos)

The Chosen Ones, dressed spectacularly in light blue seersucker suits, white shirts and navy-blue polka-dotted ties, wowed us when they sang and played “Bourbon Street Parade” and “Talking Loud.” And when Toyama performed “What a Wonderful World” in that Louis Armstrong voice of his, it brought tears to my eyes.

“This is a never-ending story,” Keiko said, when we talked after a rousing second-line that ended their joint performance.

“A wonderful never-ending story,” I told her.

The reception was to celebrate the next chapter in the story, made possible by the generous support of Tipitina’s Foundation and the Japan Foundation: In October, 16 young New Orleans musicians will travel to Japan for a 10-day concert tour, where they will play with young Japanese musicians.

Eight of the 16 are part of Tipitina’s Internship Program, who will be accompanied by their artistic director Donald Harrison Jr. The other eight are members of The Chosen Ones, who will go with O. Perry Walker band director Wilbert Rawlins.

Trumpeter Justin Walker, 15, an incoming freshman, sees the trip as an unbelievable opportunity.

“I’m trying to learn some Japanese before we go,” he told me.

He joined The Chosen Ones at the beginning of the summer, and gives credit for the band’s success to Rawlins.

“I love him,” he said. “I tell him, ‘My lip is tired,’ and he says, ‘Tired? There’s no such thing as tired. It’s that push, that drive that makes you good.’”

During the reception Rawlins talked about what the trip will mean to his students.

“I’m very, very excited, thinking about this opportunity for our children to see Japan,” he said. “We’re from a little bitty place on this Earth where God put us, and they will learn there is no ceiling on this room. There’s a big world out there.”

Toyama calls the trip “an exchange of hearts.” It was his dream to have a “children’s jazz exchange,” sending young musicians who had gone through Hurricane Katrina to play with young musicians who had gone through the tsunami. He is also making plans to bring young Japanese musicians to New Orleans next year.

“It’s like a miracle,” he told me when we talked after the reception. “We started in 2003, and we did not dream of this.”

In 2003, during their trip to New Orleans to celebrate Louis Armstrong’s birthday, the Toyamas met Rawlins at Carver High School in the 9th Ward, where he was the band director. They came to present his marching band with 39 instruments -- everything from tubas to trumpets -- donated by the Wonderful World of Jazz Foundation they started in 1994.

That day, Rawlins and Toyama became instant friends with the same vision: Saving kids through music.

I was there that August day when Toyama told the Carver band members, "The Japanese people want to thank the United States, New Orleans and Satchmo for giving the world such wonderful music called jazz."

I will always remember how surprised I was to hear him sing in that gravelly voice that has earned him the nickname “the Japanese Satchmo.”

Toyama discovered New Orleans jazz as a high school student taking trumpet lessons. His love affair with Louis Armstrong and traditional New Orleans jazz began when he and Keiko were college students and heard the Preservation Hall Jazz Band play in Japan. After they graduated and married, they moved to the Crescent City to learn from the masters. They lived in a rundown apartment above a restaurant on Bourbon Street and had a glorious time.

“The window was broken, and at night you could hear the music coming from Preservation Hall,” Toyama told me.

They stayed for five years, practicing, playing, and sometimes sitting in with their mentors at Preservation Hall. They went back to Toyko in 1973 and have been playing New Orleans jazz there ever since.

The Wonderful World of Jazz Foundation grew out of a return trip the Toyamas made to celebrate Mardi Gras 20 years later. They were dismayed to see high school bands marching with old battered horns held together with duct tape, and they were sad to learn that many teenagers had guns.

They decided to put new musical instruments in students’ hands instead. After all, Louis Armstrong received his trumpet after getting in trouble for shooting a gun.

“I was thinking, ‘When they get a trumpet, they might be like Louis Armstrong,’” Toyama said.

Since then, the Toyamas, their band and members of the foundation have come back to New Orleans year after year and have brought nearly 800 instruments to schoolchildren from the people of Japan. And Toyama and his band have become a highlight of the annual Satchmo SummerFest in the French Quarter.

Hurricane Katrina sent them into high gear. In the months following the storm, Toyama and his band held fund-raisers and raised more than $80,000 to help professional musicians get their lives back. They also collected professional-quality musical instruments donated by Japanese musicians.

"It was easy to get help because all the Japanese people worry about the musicians in New Orleans," Toyama told me.

After the earthquake and tsunami devastated Japan last year, it was time for New Orleans to give back. During the reception in the band room, Toyama told the crowd about the first responders.

“O. Perry Walker had the first charity concert in New Orleans for Japan,” he said. “He (Rawlins) was the first one to call me.”

Then Roland and Mary von Kurnatowski, founders of Tipitina’s Foundation, got in touch with him. He told them about the Swing Dolphins, a youth swing band from

Kesennuma, a town in northeast Japan that had been decimated by the tsunami. The Dolphins had lost their homes, their instruments and their rehearsal room, and he was trying to get them new instruments. They were hoping to do a concert in April outside a gym that was being used as a shelter.

The Tipitina’s Foundation sent $11,000, converted to yen, to Toyama’s tsunami fund, and he and his friends in Japan took care of the rest.

On April 24, outside the shelter, the Swing Dolphins had their first post-tsunami concert, and the Toyamas drove 350 miles to be there.

“They made their comeback,” Toyama told us. “That cute little band is making sweet music again. They will come and play and say ‘Thank you, New Orleans’ next year.”

During their trip to Japan, the New Orleans musicians will play with the Swing Dolphins, as well as other young musicians. They will also take part in the 32nd Satchmo Festival and will play at Tokyo Disneyland.

“You will see Mickey and Minnie Mouse speaking Japanese,” Toyama told the band, making everyone smile.

In the middle of The Dixie Saints performance, he led the rest of us in singing a song that Louis Armstrong used to sing: the magic song from Cinderella.

“Salagagoola mechicka boola bibbidi-bobbidi-boo,” he crooned in his raspy voice, while we laughed and tried to repeat the words. They were the perfect lyrics for the diverse and appreciative group gathered in that room: In that magical moment, we all spoke the same language. 

Sheila Stroup's column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday in Living. Contact her at sstroup@timespicayune.com or 985.898.4831.

© 2012 NOLA.com. All rights reserved.

Second-line parade held for Lionel Batiste

Photo: Matthew Hinton, Times-Picayune

A second-line parade honoring 'Uncle' Lionel Batiste drew hundreds to Rampart Street and Elysian Fields Avenue late Friday afternoon. Batiste, bass drummer for the Treme Brass Band, died July 8.

The start of the march at the Candlelight Lounge in the Treme was delayed for half an hour because of a thunderstorm violent enough to draw a warning from the National Weather Service. After the storm passed, however, the afternoon heat had been broken, and Batiste's friends and fans gathered.

A viewing for "Uncle" Lionel Batiste is scheduled for Thursday, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Charbonnet Funeral Home, 1615 St. Philip St. 

Batiste's funeral is set for Friday at the Mahalia Jackson Theater for the Performing Arts, 805 N. Rampart St., in Armstrong Park, where viewing will be from 9 to 11 a.m., with the funeral at 11 a.m., followed by a jazz funeral procession from Mahalia Jackson to the Mount Olivet Cemetery, 4100 Norman Mayer Blvd.

An "Uncle" Lionel Memorial Fund has been established to help the family with medical and funeral expenses at Treme2012.com as well as any Liberty Bank and Trust Branch at LibertyBank.net). Donations also can be sent to: "Uncle" Lionel Memorial Fund, c/o Liberty Bank and Trust, P.O. Box 60131, New Orleans, LA 70160-0131.

© 2012 NOLA.com. All rights reserved