All Music Guide

"...Henry Butler is arguably the greatest living proponent of the classic New Orleans piano tradition, playing an amalgam of boogie-woogie, jazz, blues and classical in the lineage of Professor Longhair, James Booker, Tuts Washington, Allen Toussaint and countless other emperors of the ivories..."

Jazz Times

"Henry Butler's name is not a household word, but over the last decade, he has established himself as the finest all-around pianist in New Orleans, a city known for its piano masters. Butler is equally at home in jazz, blues or R&B, and has toured with Verve Big Bands as well as being an acclaimed club performer in his own right..."

Dr. John

"He is the pride of New Orleans and a visionistical down-home cat and a hellified piano plunker to boot...He plays the piano like Art Tatum, but when he starts singing he sounds like Paul Robeson."

Al Campbell

"...The playing is phenomenal, which shouldn't overshadow the emotional vocal performances,...highly recommended disc."

New Orleans Gears up for Jazz Fest

NEW YORK (Billboard) - Eight months after the floods following

Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans in 2005, there was at least one

hard, good fact regarding a threatened music scene: the annual New

Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival took place at its customary Mid-City

Fair Grounds site.
 

Familiar favorites, from Buckwheat Zydeco to pheasant-and-quail

andouille gumbo were served up. Local heroes like singer John Boutte

and national ones like Bruce Springsteen brought audience members to

joyful tears.
 

"I remember talking to Mitch Landrieu, the lieutenant governor,"

festival producer Quint Davis says from his office in New Orleans. "It

was January, and we weren't sure if we could mount the event. And he

told me, 'Not having the festival is not an option.' I knew what he

meant. And I knew that if we put this big, soul-generating battery on

and, for two weekends, people could plug in, it would mean something."
 

The festival also generated $300 million in city revenue last year;

that meant something too.
 

Now, more than two years later, in a city rebuilding only in troubled

fits and starts, the festival arrives again (April 25-27 and May 1-4)

with another positive jolt. The 2008 Jazz Fest marks the return of the

Neville Brothers, who have not played the event since Katrina, and the

festival's full seven-day schedule.
 

Davis says the festival's fortunes now draw heavily on the support of

its corporate underwriter, Shell Oil, which came onboard as title

sponsor in Katrina's wake. It has also been aligned since 2005 with AEG

Live, which has led to the booking of headliners with broad appeal.

This year's crop ranges from Billy Joel to Stevie Wonder, Santana to

Diana Krall. Yet for many in attendance, especially New Orleans

residents, it's the local heroes that define the event -- none perhaps

more so than the Nevilles.
 

"There are still over 100,000 people who are estranged from NOLA, whose

families are separated," Davis says. "To me, the Nevilles embody and

represent those people."
 

And tucked in between Jazz Fest's two weekends is another

soul-generating spark--the two-day Ponderosa Stomp.
 

"It's a complete narrative of the roots of American music," founder Ira

Padnos says, "or, more simply, the ultimate jukebox -- all killer, no

filler."
 

A veteran New Orleans label is also celebrating a milestone as Jazz

Fest draws near. In 2006, when the event's CD tent was in doubt, Mark

Samuels, the man behind Basin Street Records, jumped in to fill that

void. It was one of many steps along a challenging post-Katrina road

for Samuels, his family and the label he founded, whose recording

artist family includes trumpeters Kermit Ruffins and Irvin Mayfield,

clarinetist Michael White and pianist Henry Butler.
 

When Samuels returned to New Orleans in 2005, he found his home in the

Lakeview section and his office on Canal Street virtually wiped out.

Suddenly, all that was up and running was the label's Web site. Though

Samuels relocated with his three children for a while to Texas, he was

determined to return. He began issuing missives online. By mid-2006, he

had restored the second story of his home and was running the company

out of the gutted ground floor, surrounded by whatever inventory had

survived.
 

With four new CDs this spring -- from Mayfield, Butler, White and

singer Theresa Andersson -- Basin Street returns to issuing new music

and marks its 10th anniversary. It's an inspiring story of personal

tenacity and one more significant piece of the New Orleans cultural

puzzle back in place.

Piano Man Henry Butler Remembers Not to Forget New Orleans

It’s a sticky hot Saturday in June, and the great New Orleans pianist Henry Butlerambles past swarms of people chatting backstage at the Bonnaroo music festivalin Tennessee. He’s probably six feet tall but seems taller because of his stick-straight posture. Tapping the ground ahead with a walking cane, he grips onto the arm of his publicist, who whispers a word or two of direction and leads his boss under one of the festival’s aerodynamic shade tents. Blind since birth, the 58-year-old pianist who lost his home to Katrina three years ago is not short on hard luck tales, but he’s more inclined to share a deep laugh, head tilted back, mouth full of teeth.

Growing up, Butler made quite a racket around the Louisiana State School for the Blind, where he learned to play valve trombone, baritone horn, and drums before he was barely big enough to lift them. There, too, the young prodigy discovered his talent for singing and piano. Now one of New Orleans’ best-loved pianists—though he relocated to Denver after the hurricane―he can find his way down a keyboard like few others in this world.

Under the cover of Bonnaroo’s New Orleans Tent, Butler slides up to the piano dressed in a smart suit and a serious pair of shades. As he turns out tunes that are a cross between the boogie of his birthplace and the jazz of his education at Southern University (where he studied under Alvin Batiste) people who have only slipped into the tent for a break from the beating sun are suddenly mesmerized. 

Afterwards, with a paper cup of hot tea on the table before him, Butler presses the palms of his hands on his knees, leans into an Adirondack chair, and talks of making do after Katrina, which along with the bottom floor of his house swept away his piano of 23 years and all the rest of his recording equipment. He speaks too of the challenges of being a blind pianist and of what drives him—40 years into his career—to keep playing every day.

You’ve always been one to challenge yourself. Early on, you learned to read music with Braille when it would have been much easier to just learn it by ear. What was the process like? 

One of the reasons why I decided to major in voice when I went to college is because of what blind people have to deal with when they’re trying to learn a piano score. It was a lot easier for me to learn vocal scores than it was for me to do the piano thing. If you know anything about how the Braille book format is, that’s how piano scores are laid out, like a magazine. You open the page, and whatever hand you start reading with you start tracing a line and the hands are broken up into right hand and left hand. So you’re reading the right hand part and you go across the page reading the right hand and then you try to memorize that. Go over it two or three times, and then the next thing you do is put your hands back on the music and read the left hand part. You try to memorize that and then you try to put them together. As a blind pianist, you have to start from the very beginning memorizing the piece. I had good ears. I could have learned the music like that. 

You got your Master’s in vocal music. Was singing your first love?

Not necessarily. I started on the piano. I mean, I love singing, but I started out in first grade picking out things on the piano. Then I started taking lessons when I was in third grade. The good thing about starting with piano is it allowed me to do a lot more things than if I had started taking lessons as a vocalist. I started working at my arrangements when I was in fifth grade, and a year after I started taking piano, I started my drum routine and learned how to play drums. I did that for three years and then I went to lower brass, and having a developing knowledge of the piano really did help me as I was learning to play baritone horn and valve trombone. 

Which pianists have inspired you the most throughout your life?

Oh man, I’ll tell you what, I have loved so many pianists, so many styles. I like Alicia de Larrocha. I went through my period of really listening a lot to André Watts and André Previn. You may not know Walter Gieseking, but he was a wonderful classical player. He was one of the models that I used when I was listening to [Beethoven’s] “Sonata Pathétique” to learn that. Of course, [Vladimir] Horowitz. On the jazz side of things, Oscar Peterson, Art Tatum, Keith Jarrett, Chick Corea, Mulgrew Miller. I really like Herbie Hancock’s work and Bruce Hornsby’s. There are a lot of gospel pianists that I like, and then there are those who don’t always play a lot of piano but they do play keyboards and synthesizers, and I like a lot of those people as well. I appreciate Allen Toussaint’s work. I like, and I spent some time with, Professor Longhair, who was a great New Orleans piano player. 

Now that you’ve lived in Denver for a couple years, has New Orleans stopped inspiring your music so much?

Not at all, it always will. I’m always going to be an ambassador for New Orleans music regardless of what I’m doing. It’s a music that inspires people and informs people and uplifts people. It really does change and take away the pain from people even if for that moment that they’re hearing it. 

CNN interviewed you recently for a story about New Orleans’ soaring crime rates. Is that what’s keeping you away from the city?

[The article] was sort of exaggerated, but I will say that when I lived in New Orleans in my early years, I grew up in the projects so I’m not that fearful of the crime situation. I am concerned about the white collar crime and the criminal behavior of politicians. When you start stealing the educations of kids who are totally helpless, when you start to take the money away from people who need homes, and when you start stealing vehicles that are given to charities for delivering goods, then to me that’s way more disruptive than anything that a dope user can do by stealing somebody’s purse. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying I condone what dope dealers and dope users do when they go out and steal from people, but that’s often a one-time act. Usually people can get over that faster than getting a bad education that might affect them for the rest of their lives. I’m still sort of recovering from Katrina. I’m still sort of trying to figure out what’s next for me in the next three to five years. It’s hard to know what’s going to happen.

Do you have a feel on where you’ll be artistically in the coming years?

My next record is going to be a real statement record. I think it’s going to be very different and we’ve already talked to a lot of great musical personalities—some who are known throughout the world and some who aren’t—but it’s going to be very different from the PiaNOLA Live CD [released this past April]. I’m looking forward to that. I’m always figuring out how to manipulate the piano. How to realize what’s in me. How to get what’s in me out to the people that are listening. It’s an ongoing practice, and I do my best to play it every day. Whenever I think I’ve mastered something, something else faces me, and I’ve got to learn how to do that. It’s a beautiful thing.

Henry Butler's Magnificent Piano on "Pianola Live"

The CDs I want to write about have been stacking up on my desk lately, threatening to undo the delicately balanced feng shui of the BlueNotes World Headquarters. So I need to get to work on the pile.

The very talented Henry Butler's "Pianola Live" (Basin Street Records) is an easy place to begin, since piano blues is one of my favorites, and Butler's New Orleans-oriented approach is tasty, listenable and inventive, as he approaches a lot of his music from unique directions. 

This is an album culled from his live performances, going back into the 1980s, respresenting sides of his music that Butler wanted to display. It's an extremely enjoyable romp through a set of mostly older standards that cut across genres, from "Basin St. Blues" to "Mother-In-Law." In doing that, he works them carefully into something different than they were, and something uniquely Butlerian.

I don't know a whole lot about the mechanics of what he does, but it still sounds impressive. His left hand sounds like it's doing percussive things that it shouldn't be, And his right hand is all over the melodies, or his versions of the melodies. Listen to what he does with "Basin St. Blues," a standard so standard that you'd think nothing more could be done with it. You'd be wrong.

There's a delicious, hard-boogying version of "Let 'Em Roll," by Butler and Corey Harris for their duet album, "Vu-Du-Menz." There's another pounding turn on "Something You Got," by Chris Kenner, father "Land of 1000 Dances."

I don't want to ignore Butler's vocals. Just like he makes the keyboard do what he wants, he uses his powerful, flexible voice much the same -- whether he's romping through "Mother-In-Law" or balladeering around "You are My Sunshine."

Being a New Orleans pianoman, he also offers up his version of the classic Professor Longhair tune, "Tipitina," with his somber, concerto-like opening morphing slowly, joyfully into a magnificent 9 1/2-minute tribute explored from every piano angle. It's creative, improvisational, emotional music -- which is music at its absolute best. Listen to the cheering at the end of the track.