[JPL] A Displaced Jazz Musician Rebuilds in New York

[r durfee]

November 22, 2007
A Displaced Jazz Musician Rebuilds in New York
By VINCENT M. MALLOZZI

The musical Prince of New Orleans has been touring New
York in vagabond shoes.

“I’ve been walking around at night looking at all
the clubs and the restaurants, just trying to figure
out a new beginning for myself,” said Davell
Crawford, 32, sitting on a piano bench recently at
Roth’s Westside Steakhouse on the Upper West Side,
where he practices. “I’m just thankful to be given
another chance in a great city like this, a chance to
fit in somewhere and entertain the people.”

Mr. Crawford, a jazz artist who is as well known in
New Orleans as Mardi Gras, lost everything but his
melodious soul in 2005 to Hurricane Katrina, which
caused many musicians to leave and try to find work in
other cities.

His career ruined by the storm, the man who once
opened for Etta James, jammed with Lionel Hampton and
thrilled audiences on four continents lives in a tiny
Manhattan apartment provided by the Jazz Foundation of
America, which has aided in more than 3,000 emergency
cases involving musicians and their families affected
by Katrina.

“Davell is a cross between Stevie Wonder and Ray
Charles, a male Billie Holiday,” said Wendy
Oxenhorn, the executive director of the Jazz
Foundation. “He is way too talented to be going
through hard times.”

Mr. Crawford, called the Prince of New Orleans by a
former mayor, Marc H. Morial, said that Katrina wiped
out his apartment and his Lower Ninth Ward recording
studio, where he kept his grand piano, recordings,
compositions, jewelry, even money.

The studio doubled as a music school for hundreds of
aspiring young artists whom Mr. Crawford, whose
energetic music embraces jazz, gospel, funk and rhythm
and blues, taught to sing and play the piano. The
catastrophe forced him to live for a while in his
grandmother’s beauty salon, which Katrina left
partly standing, with no running water and no heat.

As the rest of New Orleans struggled to recover, Mr.
Crawford used his life’s savings to support himself
while performing at funerals and benefits around the
city.

For those performances, he took no pay, but great
pleasure in repaying those who had showered him in
better days with thunderous applause at places
including the House of Blues, Charly B’s and the
Maple Leaf.

“Down in New Orleans, we’re a very tribal
community,” Mr. Crawford said. “We’re like
family — we help one another.”

By February 2006, six months of volunteering had taken
a financial toll on Mr. Crawford. He had drifted to
Atlanta and was sleeping on the floors of friends’
apartments.

One afternoon, he found himself in a Burger King
there, with $12 left in his pocket.

“A preacher friend of mine from Atlanta called me
that very day, just by coincidence,” Mr. Crawford
said. “He rushed over to the Burger King and gave me
a hundred dollars — and I just broke down and
started to cry.”

The next day, he received a phone call from Ms.
Oxenhorn, whose foundation began helping him with
bills and finding him work. In August this year, the
foundation brought him to New York and placed him in
his apartment, gave him a donated grand piano worth
$12,000 and had his grandmother’s beauty salon in
New Orleans repaired.

The foundation also provided Mr. Crawford with
recording equipment to make CDs to get bookings for
festival work and helped him land an audition for Blue
Note Records in New York and numerous gigs around the
city.

Those gigs included the foundation’s annual benefit
concert, “A Great Night in Harlem,” held at the
Apollo Theater in May, which raised $750,000.

“We have to keep in mind that this is just one story
out of hundreds of musicians that have needed us,”
Ms. Oxenhorn said of Mr. Crawford’s plight. “Many
of the other musicians we have been helping are
elderly, without any resources.”

For now, the foundation arranges for Mr. Crawford to
play at private parties, which pay just enough to
cover rent and basic expenses. But he dreams of
playing in bigger venues, honing his piano skills in
his apartment on the donated piano and practicing at
the steakhouse.

Mr. Crawford, who has been performing since he was 7,
won a 1998 Big Easy Entertainment Award for Best
Gospel Artist. He is the grandson of James Sugar Boy
Crawford, a pioneer of New Orleans rock ’n’ roll
and composer of “Iko Iko,” a popular song written
in 1954 under the original title “Jock-A-Mo.”

In the early 1960s, Sugar Boy was caught in a
different kind of storm. While on tour in the
still-segregated South, his entourage was stopped by
the local police, and he was taken from his car and
beaten so badly that he decided never to return to
music.

“He had his Katrina,” Mr. Crawford said softly,
“and I had mine.”

While mentioning the places he would love to play in
New York — the Algonquin Hotel, the Blue Note and
Birdland — Mr. Crawford noticed a tip jar on top of
the piano with several bills stuffed inside.

He left his piano bench, picked up the jar and gave it
to a waiter.

“This is not my money,” he said. “When I earn
it, I’ll keep it.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/22/nyregion/22musician.html?ref=nyregion

Roy Durfee
P.O. Box 40219
Albuquerque, New Mexico 87196-0219
rdurfee2003 at yahoo.com


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