c. 2005 Religion News Service

NEW ORLEANS _ Trumpeter, composer and New Orleans Jazz Orchestra founder Irvin Mayfield has yet to find his father.

The elder Mayfield rode out Hurricane Katrina at his Gentilly neighborhood home, then disappeared during the subsequent evacuation. A few days after the storm, his musician son searched the flooded house. He discovered a flashlight and a stash of peanut butter and cigarettes in the attic, but no indication of his father’s fate.

“He could be anywhere,” Mayfield said. “He’s one of those guys who never had a cell phone, never kept phone numbers. We’re just waiting to hear something.

“Everybody’s been asking me, `How do you deal with this thing with your dad?’ More so than ever, we’ve got to do what it is that we do. What I do is play the trumpet and write music. So that’s how I’m dealing with this.”

To that end, Mayfield reconvenes the 17-piece New Orleans Jazz Orchestra this week for a series of free events billed as “the cultural reopening of New Orleans.” Highlights include a traditional New Orleans funeral procession and a performance at Christ Church Cathedral, which is helping to fund the events with the help of Episcopalians nationwide. Mayfield and the orchestra will debut “All the Saints,” a new composition commissioned by the church.

“I feel like this is the greatest service I can do for my city that I love so much,” Mayfield said. “To fly these musicians back home and have them here for seven days, where they’re rehearsing, walking around, just being in their city and doing what they do. And use this as a catalyst to try to make the culture happen.”

Sustaining the 3-year-old New Orleans Jazz Orchestra, not an easy task before Katrina, is even more of a challenge now. Modeled after Wynton Marsalis’ Jazz at Lincoln Center program, NOJO seeks to sustain a permanent jazz performance and educational institution in the city of its birth.

But tracking down scattered musicians has been a challenge.

“These dudes were all over, and a lot of them were moving around,” Mayfield said. “I called (trumpeter) Leon Brown and he was in Shreveport. Then he went to Lafayette, then Atlanta, then Portland, then back to Atlanta.”

While seeking to rally support for his orchestra, Mayfield found an unlikely champion in the Episcopal Church.

Before Katrina, Mayfield and the very Rev. David duPlantier, dean of Christ Church Cathedral, discussed a jazz commission to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the first Episcopal service in the Louisiana Purchase, only to table the idea.

Days after the storm, duPlantier recruited Mayfield to appear in a documentary DVD produced by the Atlanta-based Episcopal Media Center. Mayfield’s explanation of jazz funeral tradition framed images of Katrina’s destruction.

Then duPlantier and Mayfield resurrected the idea of a church-sponsored commission tied to the bicentennial celebration, but with Katrina as its centerpiece.

To pay for the project _ the budget runs into the tens of thousands of dollars, including the cost of transporting, housing and rehearsing the 17 musicians _ Christ Church Cathedral is using money allocated for its canceled fall concert series, and soliciting donations from Episcopal churches worldwide.

“The Episcopal Church has always had an interest in music and art, especially in response to difficult circumstances,” duPlantier said. “Traditionally, the cathedral is not only a place where art is offered, but where it is commissioned.

“`All the Saints’ is a partnership of two important institutions in the city, one 200 years old, one only a couple years old, but both with a common desire to strengthen the soul of the city and its people through music and art and faith and worship.”

“All the Saints” interprets Katrina and its aftermath within the structure of a jazz funeral procession. Three movements _ Requiem, Memorial, Renaissance _ span the city’s death, a period of mourning and rebirth. Musical themes should strike familiar chords.

“I’m trying to use as many elements of New Orleans as possible,” Mayfield said. “But this is not a Lincoln Center approach. It’s not highbrow. It is what it is. If this experience has taught me anything about writing music, it’s made it very clear what I am and what New Orleans is, and how we can use that.

To Mayfield, Wednesday’s jazz funeral procession is as important symbolically as “All the Saints.”

“People feel like they haven’t had the opportunity to come together in the city and have a ceremony where they can heal,” he said. “The jazz processional is the tool we need for rebuilding New Orleans. You start off with a slow dirge. It’s a mournful time; we have lost a lot in the city.

“But we still have an embarrassment of riches. If we can celebrate what we do have, we can use that to rebuild what we don’t.”

MO/JM END SPERA

(Keith Spera is music writer for The Times-Picayune in New Orleans.)

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