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.”

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