 
hungover. The fabled New Orleans music club wears the stench of last night’s beer and cigarettes like a shroud. Sunlight intrudes on dank corners best left dark. Thirty years of sweat, spit, booze, and blood are ground into the threadbare stage carpet. But the dozen student musicians onstage radiate fresh energy and enthusiasm. Loyola University professor and saxophonist Tony Dagradi guides them through a shaky “Mo’ Better Blues,” the theme from Spike Lee’s 1990 jazz film. A boy as tall as his electric bass is long gingerly navigates a solo; the ensemble falls in behind him, awkward but resolute. Every Sunday, the Tipitina’s Foundation, the nonprofit affiliated with the nightclub, sponsors workshops pairing novice musicians with professionals. The goal is to augment lessons learned in the classroom with practical applications — specifically, how to listen to and interact with other musicians on the bandstand. Dagradi smiles: There are no Louis Armstrongs or Wynton Marsalises here today. Not yet, anyway. “For somebody who is very young, this is a life-changing experience,” Dagradi says. “Everybody is happy to be up there. You never know what will create a long-lasting impression.” Such nurturing of the next generation was critical even before Hurricane Katrina. Few cities are defined by — and depend on — culture as completely as New Orleans: Music, food, and Mardi Gras are the calling cards of the Big Easy’s tourist economy. And music needs support at its most basic grassroots level. Tipitina’s owner, Roland Von Kurnatowski, fifty-seven, is an unlikely cultural caretaker. The wealthy attorney and real estate developer grew up in the Carrollton section of Uptown New Orleans and attended Tulane University. But he claims he never set foot in nearby Tipitina’s until 1996, when he first invested in the club. “I give you my word of honor — I’d never heard of Tipitina’s,” Von Kurnatowski says. “Live music wasn’t my thing.” His initial interest in Tipitina’s was pragmatic. He was developing the old Fontainebleau Hotel, a rambling complex centered around an eight-story tower, into a self-storage facility. A dearth of elevators made the upper floors impractical as storage units. Someone suggested renting those spaces as band rehearsal rooms. How to find bands? Buy Tipitina’s. The club first opened at the corner of Napoleon and Tchoupitoulas avenues near the Mississippi River in 1977, courtesy of a bohemian alliance of “fo-teen” friends with a fondness for bananas, pot, the number fourteen, and rhythm and blues. They envisioned the ramshackle room as a base for local piano legend Professor Longhair; they named it for one of his songs. Long, sweaty nights gave way to lost dawns as most major New Orleans bands of the past thirty years, plus hundreds of touring acts, graced Tipitina’s stage. But good music and intentions don’t necessarily pay the bills. In 1984, Tipitina’s declared bankruptcy and closed for eighteen months. When Von Kurnatowski took over during a later period of financial distress, Tipitina’s passed from music fans who knew little about business to a businessman who knew little about music. Some advocates feared for the club’s future. But soon enough Von Kurnatowski grasped its cultural significance and resolved to safeguard it. “After many years of being told that I would be the guy that ruined the whole thing, a few people started to say, ‘Maybe he’s not that guy,’” Von Kurnatowski recalls. The growth of his real estate business — Von Kurnatowski now owns seven thousand apartment units across the Gulf South — meant he didn’t need to profit off Tipitina’s. The club “more or less” breaks even. “It’s like owning a boat — you just keep pumping money in,” Von Kurnatowski says. “If you really ran it like a business, you would ruin it. I err on the side of protecting the image.” Now the club functions as an arm of the Tipitina’s Foundation. “We would like the foundation to become a self-sustaining instrument of progress,” Von Kurnatowski says. The goal is for Tipitina’s “to plug into the nature of what the foundation’s missions are without disturbing what makes it a special place to go.” Established in 1997, the Tipitina’s Foundation supports four major initiatives: the Sunday music workshops; the annual Instruments A Comin’ fund-raiser, which has distributed more than $1 million worth of musical gear to chronically underfunded local schools; a music internship program that teaches such behind-the-scenes skills as sound engineering; and the Music Office Co-ops in New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Alexandria, and Shreveport that provide business development and job training skills for musicians. Katrina forged a renewed sense of mission: If New Orleans is to survive, so must its Technicolor traditions. Since the storm, the foundation has raised more than $2 million for its programs. Contributors range from Bruce Springsteen and John Mayer to such corporate benefactors as Absolut, Popeyes, and Prudential. The foundation has also found common cause with Antoine “Fats” Domino, whose rollicking piano and sunny Creole cadence stamped a Big Easy beat on the birth of rock ’n’ roll. The famously reclusive Domino first befriended Von Kurnatowski after consulting him on home renovation projects. “He’s a good man,” Domino says. Rescued by boat from the second floor of his longtime home in the Lower Ninth Ward, Domino has come to symbolize the city’s struggles to recover — and the lingering threat to its cultural legacy. In May 2007, Domino performed his first and thus far only post-Katrina concert at Tipitina’s as a foundation benefit. In 2007, the foundation produced the double CD Goin’ Home: A Tribute to Fats Domino, featuring the likes of Elton John, Paul McCartney, Robert Plant, Tom Petty, Norah Jones, B.B. King, Bonnie Raitt, and Lucinda Williams remaking Domino classics, often with New Orleans musicians. On February 23, Tipitina’s hosted Domino’s eightieth birthday party as another foundation fund-raiser. Randy Newman rendered Domino’s “Blue Monday” and his own “Louisiana 1927”; the bill also included local favorites Dr. John, Allen Toussaint, Clarence “Frogman” Henry, and Jon Cleary. Louisiana native and Democratic political consultant James Carville presented Domino and the Tipitina’s Foundation with the first Heroes of the Storm award from Friends of New Orleans, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that advocates on behalf of southeast Louisiana. “As long as music lives, New Orleans will never die,” says Carville. “What these guys are doing is absolutely essential to the character of the city.” That is clear during each Sunday afternoon’s music workshop. For an audience of video-camera-wielding moms and dads, the students have swapped licks with North Mississippi Allstars guitarist Luther Dickinson and jammed with ultra-heavy homegrown rock band Down. Hammond B-3 organ master Dr. Lonnie Smith once spent twenty minutes tutoring a toddler. Respected local jazz and funk drummer Johnny Vidacovich, a veteran of the late Professor Longhair’s band, is a workshop regular. “This is the way I came up,” Vidacovich says. “My mom used to take me on Saturday mornings to the Musicians Union Hall…A big band would be rehearsing; you’d sit and learn, ask questions. So this is nothing new. “It should continue,” Vidacovich concludes. “If it ever stops, we’d lose what we got.” |
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