Jelly Roll Morton’s House on Frenchmen St.

In addition to his day job as a photographer at the T-P, John McCusker does an in-depth Jazz History tour of New Orleans. He’s been doing this for years. Today, I finally got to go.

John and I have been trying to get together for months to begin gathering information and photos of sites in the city where our great Jazz musicians lived. I touched on this in a previous post about Kid Ory’s House. We visited just a few more today. Each of these individual sites requires more research and reference checking. I am trying putting together a website dedicated to this information.

The information about these historically significant residences are known only through the collective information of a group of local historians who have read the texts and study the history of Jazz in New Orleans and follow through by going out to find out these exact locations. Together, they piece together gobs of research and do their very best to establish the actual places where our Jazz greats lived and try to verify this information with living relatives and locals who live in the neighborhoods.

I was just beginning to get involved in this with Annie Avery at the PRC prior to Katrina. Even though it is, understandably, not a top priority for the PRC at this time, I am determined to continue the work with these few dedicated loyalists. Jack Stewart was featured in a feature article in Gambit Weekly regarding this same subject. My goal is to document these sites on the web, where they are easily accessed.

This project is a natural extension of my job tracking demolitions in the city. Within that process, I have realized the dual urgency of documenting these Jazz Heritage sites. Some of them are even more endangered than they were before the storm. I have live in New Orleans for 13 yrs and all I have been doing over the past year and half is cramming my head full of architectural history. I am new to the scene compared to so many folks whom I work with at the PRC and the Louisiana Landmarks Commission and other individuals. I have regular head explosions about how fast I must catch up and get a hold of this information but I thrive on it.

Treme is touted as a musicial history icon, mainly because of Congo Square. However, the reality is that the vast majority of individual homes and the stomping grounds where Jazz was born are in Central City, the 7th Ward and also downtown along Rampart St. All these areas are in an extremely fragile state, they could be gone tomorrow. My aim is to add more intimate stories than Wikipedia can offer. This takes time.

The single most important house we visted today was the home of Jelly Roll Mortonin the 7th Ward. Jack Stewart purchased it and is renovating it, slowly, as he can get the funding. It’s a particularly compelling Creole Cottage dating back to the 1870′s because it has the double dormer windows of this period in the rear. They are more commonly found in the front.

More of Today’s Jazz Heritage Sites, at least so far. Often, I have to back and get more photos of properties which I took notes on but I could not get the photographs today, out of respect for the privacy of residents.

Lagniappe Follow-Up:Perserverance Hall Post This unique Jazz Heritage Site has been rescued by Jack Stewart and Willie White. They took it upon themselves to remedy this precarious situation in order to stabilize this building. The badly damaged, rear, part was removed via cherry-picker thanks to Willie White, a local hand salvager. The building is no longer an Imminent Danger at risk of complete demolition by FEMA and the City.