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PHOTO BY GARY LOVERDE
over their heads and egging him on as if they were in church.” Among those in the audience was Chris Joseph, founder of Threadhead Records. “I stumbled in halfway through and at that point had never heard of John Boutte. It was incredibly emotional. People were crying, raising their hands, everybody was on their feet.” Boutte has been suspicious of major labels (“I’m just cautious, I never jump in water head first.”) and found the Threadhead model to his liking. With Sanchez, John Boutte made his Good Neighbor album from a Threadhead loan, which he paid back within a year. He owns the masters and publishing. A portion of the proceeds go to the New Orleans Musicians’ Clinic, another Threadhead stipulation that Boutte is all too happy to endorse. “I’m not saying I got a right to be rich,” he says. “But I’ll be damned if I don’t have a right to wake up and have access to someone who can tell me if I’m sick or not. “Those values came from my mom and dad. You got nine siblings, you got to learn how to share everything. I could say it’s the Catholic upbringing, although I’m more of a practicing humanist than a good practicing Catholic. But who are you if you can’t feel the suffering of your fellow human being?” That philosophy has sparked some of Boutte and Sanchez’s most beloved songs, including “At
the Foot of Canal Street,” a song they wrote after they realized their fathers were both buried in Canal Street cemeteries. Like “The Treme Song,” it’s a tune that d.b.a. audiences know well enough to sing along, verses as well as chorus. “I always look for a universal theme,” Boutte says. “Love, death, the things we’re all confused about.” Current projects include his participation in the musical adaptation of Dan Baum’s Katrina book Nine Lives, which features both Boutte vocals along with piano work that is credited to “Skinny Parcheesi” because, Boutte says, he doesn’t consider himself credit-worthy in a keyboard city like New Orleans. His Jazz Fest appearances include joining Irma Thomas in the Gospel Tent on May 6 for a Mahalia Jackson tribute. The future holds, he hopes, a new album. He gives credit to his collaborators, especially Sanchez and longtime guitarist Todd Duke. But, he warns, don’t expect anything too familiar. “I like R&B, some country, some bluegrass, gospel, jazz. Everybody’s always told me I need to focus. Let me tell you if there’s a buffet in front of me, I’m going to eat off it if that’s what I want to do. I want to be like Monty Python: Now for something completely different.” Michael Tisserand is a former Gambit editor. He is currently working on a biography of the New Orleans-born cartoonist George Herriman, who happens to be a cousin of John Boutte.
Gambit > bestofneworleans.com > maY 03 > 2011
life, from growing up in a musical 7th Ward family through playing cornet and trumpet in school marching bands, through Xavier University and even the military, where he directed and sang in Army gospel choirs. Back in civilian life, he tried a stint in a bank job. It didn’t take. A tour of Europe with his sister Lillian helped lead Boutte toward the more uncertain life of a jazz singer. So did some career counseling from one of his heroes and mentors, the late Danny Barker. “I didn’t see a glass ceiling but a brick wall above my head,” Boutte says. “I decided I had to do what was in my heart. The only limitations I wanted were the ones I set on myself.” He earned critical raves and new fans for his 2000 collaboration with ¡Cubanismo!, leading to the acclaimed release Mardi Gras Mambo, which explored the close musical kinship between Havana and New Orleans. He gigged regularly around town, but those jobs took on a new meaning after the 2005 levee failures. First at the nowshuttered Cafe Brasil and then at d.b.a., Boutte says his sets became “like church.” “It was our meeting place,” he says. “It was on high ground, and there would be these kids at the shows with Common Ground and the health clinic. I knew it was a turning point.” Boutte has never shied way from speaking his mind. He’s a five-foot-one-and-a-half-inch pacifist, he says, but he still packs a punch. “And not a lightweight, either,” he adds. Then he grows serious, which in a conversation with Boutte can happen quickly and often. “Are you culpable if you see someone beating somebody down and you don’t try to intervene? I believe that if you’re silent, you’re just as culpable,” he says. Current shows might include a timely political rant or even a laser stare at some talkers in the back of the club when he sings the line “You don’t really care for music, do you?” from Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” Challenging his audience had never been unusual for him. But at his post-Katrina shows, something new was taking place. “I always used to say shit,” he says. “Now I realized that people were taking me seriously.” By that point, Sanchez already had been making music with Boutte for a few years, ever since they first met at a party at singer Michelle Shocked’s house. “Here the city was devastated and this little guy was carrying so many people, when he himself was broken,” Sanchez recalls. “He was into doing jazz standards. We talked about it. I said, ‘Right now, at this moment in New Orleans history, for whatever reason thousands of people are turning to you. If you don’t tell the tale and sing the story, who’s going to do it?’” The result was a stunning set at the 2006 Jazz Fest, culminating in Boutte’s recasting of Randy Newman’s “Louisiana 1927” with updated lines like “President Bush flew over in an airplane/ with about 12 fat men with double martinis in their hands.” Geoffrey Himes wrote in The New York Times: “The song’s most dramatic recasting was by Mr. Boutte ... when he started dropping local references into the lyrics, older women rose from their plastic folding chairs, waving their hands
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