Special services help artists help New Orleans economy

In post-Katrina New Orleans, creativity is working two ways.

The artists and their art are keeping the critically wounded city’s  cultural soul alight and its economic heart beating. In grateful return and wise stewardship, city cultural institutions have created a network of services supporting artists, their work and thus the community that depends on them. 

As I wrote last week, in the bleak aftermath of the 2005 hurricane that nearly destroyed its hometown, the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival became the banner around which the entire traumatized and scattered population could rally. But the festival, whose 40th-anniversary celebration resumes today with a second long, packed weekend of great music and food, had even more to offer than reassurance, pride and pay: It had a foundation, formed at the same time as the festival itself and dedicated to helping musicians find employment, housing and insurance.

With storm-devastated musicians and artists in need of every basic, including safe homes and health care, the Jazz & Heritage Foundation and other New Orleans philanthropic organizations began throwing out extra lifelines to the community. 

 ”Our initial focus was, can we bring back Jazz Fest?” said Don Marshall, Jazz & Heritage Foundation executive director. “Spiritually, for everyone in this city, it had a tremendous impact” to have the 2006 festival go forward only eight months after Katrina hit. 

Don Marshall

But with much of the city destroyed by flooding, festival musicians and employees had evacuated and were scattered throughout the rest of the U.S.  To help them return, the foundations and social-welfare organizations got together to try to figure out what to do about housing, Marshall recalled.  Livable dwellings were few and prices were steep - people needed safe places to rent at affordable rates. 

With the help of ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), a newly formed group called Sweet Home New Orleans and other associations, housing and transportation services developed. The Jazz & Heritage Foundation tripled its music-education program to provide musicians with paying gigs as instructors and give the children of New Orleans a boost in spirits and skills.

The fact that creative organizations were the ones helping artists and the city itself come back from disaster doesn’t surprise Mary Len Costa, interim director and CEO of the Arts Council of New Orleans. “It has been the people in the creative industries who wanted to come back, to savor what was here,” she said. In the absence of government assistance, Costa added, the Sweet Home New Orleans’  Renew Our Music aid program, Tipitina’s Foundation and others stepped up.  

The arts council helped with grants,  free legal services from volunteer lawyers and an Art in Public Places program that commissioned artists to create neighborhood-specific works, rallying residents and covering up blight. Costa saw collaborations arise as artists whose equipment and supplies had been destroyed pooled resources to get each other back on their feet.

The art itself helped.

“I was calling it therapy,” trumpet-player and devoted barbecue chef Kermit Ruffins said of his music, with a laugh. After his family home was wrecked and he and his relatives (”We didn’t lose anybody, thank God”) evacuated to Texas for a while, Ruffins came back, was able to rent a place and began playing anywhere he could for tips and “to make everybody feel good.”

Kermit Ruffins

The New Orleans native, who has played professionally for 24  years and now leads his own band called the Barbecue Swingers, credits the Jazz Fest with motivating and employing musicians. When the festival came back, musicians saw the city stirring again and decided to return home, Ruffins said. Now there are 20 or 30 bands to hear, even on a Monday night, and “the list is getting bigger and bigger every day.”   

It wasn’t just musicians who benefited from these efforts, Marshall noted: Though less catered-to before Katrina, visual artists began to be served with opportunities such as the 2008 Prospect.1New Orleans, a huge biennial art show organized by Dan Cameron, visual arts director of the New Orleans Contemporary Art Center,.  and sponsored by noted national arts supporter Toby Devan Lewis.

“I really shone an international spotlight on New Orleans visual arts,” Marshall said.

Most of the early-stage artist-assistance efforts were volunteer and have  since turned into fully staffed programs. But whatever the needs they address, from education and jobs to human services, they all help create economic development for New Orleans.

Economic development “kind of goes hand-in-hand with what we’re doing,” Marshall explained.

By helping individual artists get on with their lives and careers, the Jazz & Heritage Foundation ensures that the city will continue to be home to the music that draws so many visitors. To that end, the foundation has created programs such as Talent Exchange, a musician database that also provides booking and licensing information for venues, and Sync Up, a sort of New Orleans jazz version of the pop-music conference and trade show South by Southwest. It has also established no fewer than five new festivals since Katrina, celebrating blues and barbecue, gospel and gumbo, Latino culture and zydeco, while creating income for musicians, craftspeople and food specialists.  

Combining its housing, insurance and music-education programs with an array of community-partnership grants to individual artists, organizations and schools, the foundation has made the whole Jazz & Heritage organization much more than the keeper of New Orleans’ cultural flame, Marshall said.

Though Jazz Fest is always “in the hearts of everyone here” and continues to be “one of those monumental events that just changes everyone’s lives,” the practical effect of the love people feel for it is a huge impact on tourism, hotel nights, restaurant and shop sales, he said. Creativity still has a long way to go in the public’s valuation, he added, but the fact is, “we’re paying money into the economy.”

And all that jazz….

Some moments from the opening weekend of the 40th annual New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, which continues Thursday through Sunday in a city that, four and a half years ago, was under water and nearly dead. Creativity – it saves and invests. 

Americans for the Arts has a great plan – now let’s expand it

Americans for the Arts has posted a new strategic plan. Based on the results of an ”environmental scan” – or survey of the organization’s constituents and stakeholders - it identifies issues of concern to artists, arts organizations and arts service groups that must shape how and for what results AFTA needs to work.

The top concern is money. No surprise there – finding or earning sufficient bucks has always been the arts’ worst chronic problem and now that the economy has gone deep south, money is everyone’s biggest worry, whether artist or Philistine. But AFTA’s new plan also codifies trends that have been changing the arts sector for at least a decade: the arts’ rising public reputation as an educational, economic and community-revitalization force; the move toward better business practices and leadership in the arts sector; the arts industry’s newfound political clout (based on its proved community impact) and its willingness and ability to use that clout; and the crucial interrelated needs to keep the arts thriving and further heighten public awareness of their value.

The arts – which have always been controversial in a nation founded by people who largely thought them either sinful or trivial - serve as a kind of canary in the coal mine of American social politics. Are we well off, relaxed, feeling indulgent about our liberties and other people’s welfare? We support the arts. Are we frightened, financially pinched, seeking control over a world full of random threats? We punish and suppress the arts. Their fate reveals the American Zeitgeist at any given moment.

Except for now. For the first time in a long time, maybe ever, the U.S. is in desperate circumstances and people aren’t using the arts as a whipping boy or a Salem witch on whom to vent their misplaced, panicky vengeance. Instead, communities across the country are turning to the arts as a solution for many ills from poor school attendance and test scores to falling property values and tourism rates.

This is beyond hopeful. In fact, it’s revolutionary and it shows that arts leaders’ patience and hard, often discouraging, work on behalf of their industry is at long last paying off. After decades of struggling to devise the means of measuring and proving the arts’ value, of persuading business and political leaders that arts mean better educations, better workers, healthier commerce, more jobs, more wealth, improved communities and happier, more fulfilled citizens (and voters), arts leaders have got the attention of the American public.

They must not ever lose it. An essential part of that perpetual task will be to demonstrate that the arts are not some freakishly different kind of activity, not an enclave of disturbing wackos or erudite elites, but simply the most vivid and freeing example of the creativity that belongs to all humans by biological heritage and that drives every field of endeavor. If you read the AFTA plan and substitute the word creativity for arts all the way through, you get a more accurate vision of the bigger goal we all have to help our nation achieve: a greater understanding, deeper appreciation and increased practice of creativity of every kind.    

The arts are of, by and for all of us because creativity is us. So with the arts as creativity’s ambassadors, let’s take the revolution beyond the realms of  music, image, performance and literature and change the U.S. even more profoundly, to a nation that sees and values the promise of creativity in all of its citizens, communities and pursuits.

Monday Creativity Talent Show!

Why should Friday have all the fun?

From reader Matt Brownson, here’s some cool turntabling: 

Power of creativity: How a jazz festival is resurrecting New Orleans

Nearly four years ago, in August 2005,Vance Vaucresson’s city drowned in a storm. But when the 40th annual New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival opens today, Vaucresson will be there, as he has every year of his life, to celebrate the Creole culture of which his particular craft is famously a part.    

He’s a sausage-maker, the latest in the long line of New Orleans Vaucressons who have produced the delicacies since 1899. His family has been closely connected to the jazz festival ever since Vance’s father, Robert “Sonny” Vaucresson, helped the founders dream it up and began selling his wares at the very first one in 1970. 

 Vance Vaucresson

Born the same year, Vance and the festival grew up together. And you might figure it was deeply rooted people like him who kept the festival alive after Hurricane Katrina. But Vaucresson thinks it was the other way around: The festival’s survival helped keep him from giving up.

“The festival, in a way, was hope for us,” he said.

His family and many others like them needed hope badly after Katrina’s wind and rain caused the levees holding back Lake Pontchartrain to break, flooding most of the below-sea-level city, killing nearly 2,000 people and dispersing most of the rest across America in a diaspora of evacuees. Vaucresson’s sausage plant lay under six feet of water; his equipment was ruined and his supply of meat spoiled. Worst of all, he discovered that his insurance didn’t cover flood damage.  

Even if he could have gotten his operation running again quickly, there was almost no one in the wrecked city to buy anything, so Vaucresson, his pregnant wife and young child went to New Iberia, La., near Lafayette. There they shared a three-bedroom house with 15 people while waiting – on a list of 150 other displaced storm victims – for better housing. 

Eventually, they got a mobile home. But after giving birth to their baby, Vaucresson’s wife became ill and needed multiple surgeries. With her, a newborn and a three-year-old to care for, Vaucresson couldn’t think of trying to move back to devastated New Orleans, he said. And then the worst blow fell: His cousin, who has been his right hand in the sausage business, became so depressed by the hurricane disaster that she committed suicide – and took her children with her. 

Vaucresson had a hard time without her. Even with all his other problems, he had been hoping to sell sausage po’ boys at the jazz festival the following spring, but with no plant and no help, it wasn’t going to be possible. He needed a proper place to make the crawfish sausage, turkey andouille and hot “chorice” sausage that are the Vaucresson’s Sausage Company specialties.   

So with the festival as his goal, Vaucresson put his creativity to work in a new way: He went to a man with a plant in Metairie, La., that was still functioning, a man who had been his competitor. Vaucresson asked him if he would help.

“He was a good Christian man and said, ‘Well, sure,’ ” Vaucresson recalled. “It really showed me a different side of people . He had every right to tell me no.”

But he didn’t. Not only did Vaucresson make his sausages, but he also made a close friend who eventually turned into a partner. It taught him, he said, that ”when you pool together resources, you can weather the storm.”

Having the festival to work toward got Vaucresson going again. His company’s online sales have been steadily rising and at the Jazz & Heritage Festival and the French Quarter Festival - for both of which Vaucresson’s is the only remaining original food vendor – his sausages keep wowing customers as they once did New York Times Food Critic Mimi Sheraton, who named Sonny’s hot-sausage po’boy the “Best Food at Fest” in 1976.  

“We take years and years of recipes and food influences and make products that are very distinctive to the culture” of New Orleans, Vance Vaucresson said.

As its title suggest, the jazz festival is all about New Orleans culture, music and pride. But for Vaucresson, it has an even deeper significance.

“When you’re with the same group of people for so long, even if only for seven days (a year), you really get to know them” like family, Vaucresson said.

 To have the festival continue after Katrina, when the city and its citizens were still desolated, kept the bonds among the festival folk strong. “We could come together,” he said. “It was showing we can come back and rebuild this thing – we can make this happen. I can see it.

“It gave us hope and it reassured us that we were going to be all right,” Vaucresson said. Then he laughed. Without the festival, he added, “I don’t know what I would do with my last weekend in April and my first weekend in May.”

                 NewBirth Brass Band, New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival 2003

Art by the glass

This is some cool creativity – and it features a Clevelander.

Is tearing stuff down creative?

Flint, Mich., which vies with Cleveland for the title of Ground Zero in our current China-Syndrome economy, is apparently getting serious about plowing a lot of itself under.  

The talk of physical downsizing among ailing municipalities is something of a trend now. For cities with no real hope of regaining their lost economic health – cities that have been watching their own decay and impotently wringing their hands for decades -  the idea of deliberately leveling their deserted neighborhoods has begun to sound at least like something active to do. And, in the sudden bubbling of an environmentalism that had never been a burning middle-American passion until climate change literally turned up the heat, the prospect of allowing forest and prairie to bury urban dead zones has, overnight, developed appeal as both solution and absolution for embarrassing urban failures.

It seems more like capitulation than imagination for a city to declare a giant do-over and time-warp back to being a country village.  The kinds of jobs available in such a place may not adequately support even the few remaining residents. And yet returning our metropolises to wilderness has a certain cleansing, Thoreau-like simplicity to it , after all the toxic messes our civilization has gotten us into. 

It’s not creation. It’s not even re-creation. It’s de-creation. But the planet could certainly use the green space.

Wind of change could blow through foreclosed homes

It struck me last night, after reading the Wall Street Journal piece about Cleveland artists buying and renovating some of their city’s foreclosed and abandoned homes and thus helping change neighborhoods for the better, that Cleveland and other hard-hit burgs ought to go a step beyond just helping urban pioneers buy and improve decaying properties – they ought to help those homebuyers change their home-power sources to wind, solar or some other nonpolluting renewable fuel, so that the homes will run clean and the owners can sell excess energy back to the grid.

This would make old neighborhoods cleaner and more self-sustaining, and maybe even help support local alternative-energy equipment manufacturers and suppliers. I’d be willing to bet that a lot of state and local governments already offer home alternative-energy conversion programs that provide funding or tax breaks to people who green up their houses. The federal government sure does, including a 30- percent-of-cost tax credit for installing small wind-energy systems, solar water-heating and geothermal heat pumps.

And where properties just have to be torn down, why not put up small wind farms in their place, as well as urban produce and flower gardens, so neighborhoods can sell what they make and reinvest it in their own services and infrastructure?

As President Obama says, why solve only one problem at a time when so many things need fixing?

See what else wind can generate?

Wind of Change: Enabling Power to the People

Most of us might imagine the creative frontier of  wind energy as a lab full of high-tech materials, computers and innovative research engineers. And we wouldn’t exactly be wrong.

 But Paul Gipe thinks the real frontier lies in pieces of 8 1/2″ x 11″ paper. Probably scattered on an office desk.

That’s because Gipe, a leading North American expert on wind and renewable energy,  sees legislation as the key to putting wind power and its benefits within reach of ordinary citizens.  

  Paul Gipe

“We have an unfortunate tendency to look for technological panaceas,” he said. “The cutting edge of  renewable energy is not the technology, but policy. It’s the policy revolution that is going to make renewable energy possible.”

Gipe, an American, has been in Ontario, Canada, for the last several months, working on getting the government there to adopt an advanced form of  the kind of policy he has in mind: feed-in tariffs. Over the phone from Canada this week, Gipe explained that such tariffs – which were first introduced about 20 years ago in California, but failed to catch on in the U.S. because of then-cheap oil and conservative presidential administrations – have since been put to effective use by Germany and other nations.

What the tariffs do, he said, is level the playing field for wind-energy producers of all sizes and situations by paying them at different rates, based on the availability of wind in the area of production. With feed-in tariffs in place, producers who put up turbines in very windy areas and stand to make a lot of money from the electricity produced are paid at a somewhat lower rate per kilowatt hour; those in less windy areas likely to produce less electricity are paid at a somewhat higher rate per kilowatt  hour.

This, Gipe said, makes it possible for home- or business-owners, neighborhoods, farmers, small towns and innumerable other types of individuals and groups to put up a turbine or two in less-than-prime locations and earn money from the electricity generated.  With tariffs, wind energy isn’t monopolized by utility companies – instead, it becomes an economic boon for all kinds of people and communities and a good reason to adopt a clean, renewable power source that reduces carbon emissions and dependence on fossil fuels.

“Everybody who does this has an incentive to make this work,” said Gipe. “For most Americans, this is a pretty novel idea.”

Some other countries have pushed tariffs the step farther that Gipe hopes Ontario will take, using  what’s called Advanced Renewable Tariffs (ARTs). These set up pay rates for solar as well as wind energy and adjust for project size and other variables.  

Technology will, of course, be a factor in how fast and how well people around the world make use of renewable energy sources. Gipe noted that in Cleveland, Ohio, where leaders have been exploring the feasibility of building an offshore wind farm in Lake Erie, the lack of a tariff policy is the main obstacle to a successful renewable-energy industry because only big companies can participate. But the Cleveland initiative is also complicated by the fact that Lake Erie is a body of fresh water in a cold climate - so far, Gipe said, turbine technology hasn’t found a way to cope with ice.  

In fact, wind-energy technology has actually stagnated a bit, said Richard Steubi, Fellow for Energy and Environmental Advancement at the Cleveland Foundation, which has led Northeast Ohio efforts to develop a wind-energy industry.  He thinks the wind-energy frontier lies offshore and would like the industry to scrap its expensive current practice of  converting land turbines for use in water and start fresh, designing turbines for ocean- and lake-based wind farms with the help of offshore industries already expert in marine technology.        

But Steubi also thinks that turbine manufacturers have gotten caught up in satisfying demand and turning out products – and the products keep increasing in size instead of effectiveness. Their hugeness makes them ever harder to move and set up safely on land and puts a strain on the gear boxes that run the blades.

“I think they’ll soon bump into logistical problems with that. The technology has been to make things bigger and thus more cost-effective” when what turbines need to be is cost-effective on a much smaller scale – small enough to put on top of a building, Steubi said by phone this week.

Roby Roberts doesn’t disagree, even though the Danish company he works for, Vestas, is the world’s top manufacturer of gigantic turbines of all kinds. Roberts, who is senior vice president/external affairs for Vestas America and based in Portland, Ore., said that, eventually, wind-generating of all sorts will be possible, on sites ranging from the largest open spaces to the most cramped urban settings. 

  Roby Roberts 

That’s just not what Vestas is focusing on right now. “We’re really looking at utility-scale projects,” Roberts said over his cell phone while walking to lunch Monday. “The challenge is getting scale to the point that it brings the prices down.”

In the last 25 years, according to the company website, Vestas has increased the capacity of its turbines a hundredfold. But if small-scale wind technology doesn’t interest Vestas at the moment, other advances do.  Roberts cites transmission upgrades including superconductivity; creating flexible power systems capable of making the most of intermittent wind; and high-tech digital “smart grids” that save energy by adjusting for fluctuating demand and power availability.

Research and development are important – and so is persuading people to switch to wind power. Wind makes up only 1-2 percent of energy generation worldwide, Roberts said, ”so we still have a way to go.”    

Gipe is counting on Ontario to spur that movement. What he calls “my vision, my dream” is for advanced feed-in tariffs to spark a revitalization of North America’s industrial midwest through wind power. If Ontario passes new tariffs, the province could become a model for other governments, giving them a new way to look at energy and policy. 

 ”This is ground zero,” Gipe said. “This is a fundamental change.”