The relatively low percentage of Black students in jazz studies programs remains a topic of interest as scholars want to ensure that the musical culture of an earlier generation of African-Americans lives on.
WHEN 25-YEAR-OLD ASHLIN Parker applied to the jazz studies program at the University of New Orleans, he did so not solely because of the school’s well-regarded reputation; he also couldn’t pass up an opportunity to play and study jazz in “The Crescent City.”
“It isn’t just that New Orleans is obviously a city with a great history in the founding and development of jazz,” says Parker, who plays the trumpet, “but that the university encourages its students to get out into the city and perform in clubs where they can meet musicians who actually play for a living.”
That campus-to-clubs universe is anything but accidental, says Missy Bowen, operations manager in UNO’s music department. “There used to be a train called the Smokey Mary that ran all the way from the Mississippi River to what used to be called Milneburg, where the UNO campus is located today. All of the great jazz musicians in the late 1800s and early 1900s traveled that route to play the Milneburg clubs,” Bowen says.
Although the train line has not operated in more than 70 years, the same general movement of musicians from the lakefront of New Orleans to the French Quarter and Faubourg Marigny continues, with students from UNO playing in any number of clubs throughout the city, in particular the decades-old Snug Harbor Jazz Bistro.
The UNO Jazz Studies Program, which operates within the school’s department of music and emphasizes jazz improvisation, history, theory and arranging, is such a valued local institution that it survived a withering round of post-Katrina budget cuts that resulted in the elimination of UNO’s opera, composition and classical performance class offerings.
