Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Summer 2008 - (Page 52)

man named Dave Oxley. I’m very proud to be here today with his son, Frank Oxley on the drums. He’s carrying on as a family tradition and jazz is very much a family affair in New Orleans, if you trace the links between all the Barbarin family and the different Pirons and different families in the history of New Orleans jazz, you’d see that they all kind of link up one way or another. Finally, on trombone, a young man who to me represents one of the finest examples of the successor generation to the old men at Preservation Hall that I learned from. I think at one time it was kind of a question of whether local people from the jazz community would appear and pick up the torch and keep this wonderful tradition going. The first time I heard him on trombone this young man, Freddy Lonzo, I knew that we had very little to worry about because if we had musicians like Freddy in his generation playing this music, it definitely had a future. I think you’ll enjoy hearing him a little bit later in the program. This is Fred Lonzo on the trombone. Raeburn: Thanks, Tom. One of the things I’d like to talk about now is, the fact that the musicians you were studying with were considerably older than you. Someone like Jim Robinson, for example, born in the early 1890s, was probably about 70 years old by the time you encountered him. Yet they opened themselves up to you. They really shared what they had to give with you and I’m sure they got to know you, but at first you were coming, to some extent, from another world than they were. So would you talk about them as people, people like George or Chester Zardis, or George Guesnon or Jim Robinson, because I T.A. SANCTON COLLECTION 52 LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES\Summer 2008 know you got something different from all of them. But who they were as people and the way they invited people interested in New Orleans jazz into their lives I think is something exceptional and worth talking about. Sancton: Well, they were all proud of their music and they all wanted it to continue. I think anybody who showed some interest in wanting to learn what they did and try to carry it on, they welcomed with open arms. In my generation, I was the only local white kid trying to learn this music. I still don’t know why, but later on others did get interested in it. But at that time it was a very unusual thing for somebody from my background to be hanging around Preservation Hall with people from a very different background. And don’t forget, I’m talking about the early ’60s here, and until 1964 Louisiana was a segregated state. So this was a Jim Crow regime and black people and white people didn’t socialize together; it was technically illegal. So somebody like me had very little opportunity to come into contact with this community that had created such a rich cultural tradition. To me it was a revelation. I should say that the “jazz pilgrims,” people I mentioned, had the same experience. Clive and Lars, both several years older than me but not much, coming from a totally different culture and different part of the world, came here and they were smitten with the same thing that got me, which is not just the quality of the music but the human quality of these wonderful musicians, and the opportunity that they had to learn from them. But again, from the local community, I was very much alone in trying to reach out and learn from these people. So what I saw immediately was that they were very open and very happy to pass their music along to us. Almost flattered in a way, not really flattered but they were gratified that younger people wanted to learn their music and keep that tradition going. They were very generous with their time in showing us things. George Lewis, I actually took lessons from him. He really didn’t Tom Sancton, far know much about music in right, jamming at Preservation Hall with any technical way. He couldn’t the George Lewis band, really read music. In fact, he couldn’t tell you the names of ca. 1964. the notes he was using. He instinctively was a musical genius and so the way he taught me was really hands on, showing me how literally to finger different notes, especially his particular way of getting high notes. For the high notes I was just now playing, I was using his fingering, which is totally unorthodox and which is why he made it sound better than most clarinets do in the very high notes. Because he did it the wrong way, but his heart and his soul kind of came out through the horn that way. He showed me those tricks, how to do that, and he showed me different melodies and how to play counterpoint, things like that. Also, my father was close to him as well. We had a wonderful experience with him one time driving out to Mandeville where he spent several years as a teenager with his father who was, as I said, half Choctaw Indian. His

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Summer 2008

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Summer 2008 Contents Friends Editor’s Column Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities George Rodrigue’s Louisiana: Cajuns, Blue Dogs & Beyond Katrina The Historic New Orleans Collection After The Flood Faubourg Marigny: The Creole “Suburb” Preserving New Orleans Jazz, One Generation at a Time: Conversation & Music with Tom Sancton Louisiana Foodways Louisiana Architecture Baton Rouge Photographs, 1863-1910 Jazz Notes The Ogden Museum of Southern Art Louisiana Association of Museums Nature of the “Beast” Louisiana State Museum Bookstand Sound Advice Forum

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Summer 2008

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