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.”