How Henry Butler’s Piano Rekindled a Fiery NOLA Tradition
When the New Orleans pianist Henry Butler reached New York in 2009, the strapping dude with sunglasses and a felt hat looked way younger than 61. Riding a wave of concerts and recordings, Butler, in fact, was a migrant to the city of cities.
Sightless since birth, Butler grew up in a New Orleans housing project, a hungry mind propelled by Braille to studies at a school for the blind, and on to Southern University in Baton Rouge under the auspices of jazz maestro Alvin Batiste. Batiste stressed a grounding in “the continuum”—the line of jazz from its New Orleans ensemble style origins into different zones, swing to bop to John Coltrane’s sheets of sound, gathering new momentum for which past styles held the potential for improvisations as jazz pushed on. Steeped in blues and the fundamentals, Butler read relentlessly as computer-assisted texts enlarged his options; he earned a Master’s in Music at Michigan State, taught several years at Eastern Illinois, and moved home in 1996. Teaching at U.N.O., playing gigs, and recording, Butler told friends, “Life is good.”
All that changed in late August 2005 when Butler was forced to flee to Boulder, Colorado, just before the Hurricane Katrina flood wrecked his spacious home on Elysian Fields Avenue and trashed his 1925 Mason & Hamlin piano. In demand for concerts, he slowly regrouped, and finally left Colorado. Career-wise, New York made sense.