FARMINGTON – With only two days’ worth of clothes, jazz trumpet player Steamboat Willie escaped New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina claimed the streets of his jazz-loving city.
Prompted by the urging of his fiancee, Teri Pennington, he reluctantly left his French Quarter home the Sunday before the storm hit with only his clothes and some mementos she packed.
“Getting him out was like pulling teeth,” Pennington said Thursday. “It was like taking a small child under my wing.”
From Henderson, La., outside Baton Rouge, where they slept on pews in a church shelter, their odyssey continued to Kemah, Texas, near Galveston, where they stayed with relatives until a week before Rita hit. In New York, Steamboat played in a benefit concert and arrived shortly thereafter in Maine, where his siblings, mother and daughter live.
The Steamboat moniker came in a flash when he auditioned at Lady Luck casino in Biloxi, Miss., in the mid-1990s. When the casino manager asked him his name, he spontaneously blurted it out, dubbing his piano-playing partner Bayou Betty. The manager, unbeknownst to the musician, was a fan of the original Steamboat Willie – an early version of Mickey Mouse.
Reminiscing about his childhood Thursday, Steamboat remembered standing on a pew at about the age of 3 in his mother’s Pentecostal church when the doors suddenly swung open and in waltzed a black gospel choir in purple, red and gold robes singing and swinging, ribbon-flounced tambourines in hands.
“It was make-you-feel-the-Lord music,” he said. “They were black angels and they scared me to death,” he said with a grin.
Apparently, it had an effect. He considers music a spiritual experience.
“Music is the voice of God,” he said. “It’s the universal language that can make people cry even if they don’t understand the words. It reaches into the four corners of the Earth.”
Though he likes the Beatles and Elvis Presley, his biggest influence was Louis Armstrong. Armstrong never lost his smile and had a gentle, gentle spirit, he said. And he was always looking up when he played – looking for spiritual inspiration, he theorized.
Steamboat took up the trumpet at the age of 8 playing along with AM radio – “elevator music,” he called it. Strongly influenced by Armstrong and the black gospel music of his Midwestern churchgoing childhood, his music is also rooted in the New Orleans Dixieland jazz tradition, which he will be bringing to Nordica Auditorium at the University of Maine at Farmington on Oct. 15.
Some musicians shun the Dixieland categorization, he said.
“But Dixieland means playing a feeling more than playing the notes. When the spirit touches the music, it takes on a different feeling and everyone feels it,” he said.
Admission is by donation, with all proceeds going to the American Red Cross to help musicians displaced by Hurricane Katrina.
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