Danny Barker: The Man Who Saved New Orleans Jazz

The Man Who Saved New Orleans Jazz

By the 1960s, traditional New Orleans jazz was dying. The old musicians were passing away, the young ones were playing rock and roll or rhythm and blues, and the brass band tradition that had defined the city's sound for a century was fading into memory. Then Danny Barker came home.

Born in 1909 in the Seventh Ward, Barker came from New Orleans music royalty. His grandfather was bandleader Isidore Barbarin. His uncles Paul and Louis Barbarin were legendary drummers. Danny picked up the banjo and guitar as a kid and was gigging around the city before he was old enough to drive.

In 1930, he did what a lot of New Orleans musicians did — he went to New York. For the next thirty-five years, Barker played with everybody who mattered: Cab Calloway, Lucky Millinder, Benny Carter, Jelly Roll Morton, Sidney Bechet. He was one of the great rhythm guitarists of the swing era, a working musician's working musician.

But the most important thing Danny Barker ever did happened after he came back to New Orleans in 1965. He looked around and saw that the brass band tradition — the second lines, the funeral processions, the music that made New Orleans New Orleans — was disappearing. The old players were dying off, and nobody was teaching the kids.

So in 1970, Barker founded the Fairview Baptist Church Marching Band, a youth brass band that taught neighborhood kids to play traditional New Orleans music. It was, by any measure, the most consequential music education program in the city's history. The kids who came through that band include Wynton and Branford Marsalis, Nicholas Payton, Shannon Powell, and dozens of other musicians who would go on to carry the tradition forward.

Without Danny Barker, the brass band renaissance that gave us Rebirth, the Soul Rebels, the Hot 8, and the entire modern second line tradition might never have happened. He didn't just play the music. He made sure it survived.

Barker received the NEA Jazz Masters Award in 1991 and reigned as King of Krewe du Vieux during Mardi Gras 1994. He died that same year at eighty-five, having written two essential books on jazz history and, more importantly, having handed the music to the next generation.