Metacentricities

I mentioned that now and again I’d have a guest blogger. A friend of mine has a new passion, and here are the details.

By Julie Melrose

There are many things I envisioned doing in my lifetime. Buying used sousaphones for musicians in New Orleans was never one of them. But the floodwaters of Katrina changed the course of many lives, albeit some much more directly than others. So here I am in New England, almost two years later, giving myself a crash course in purchasing used low brass instruments—including those strange, clumsy tubas that curl like giant shiny snails around the bodies of the street and club musicians of The Crescent City.

Like the person you meet and instantly cannot imagine not having known, I entered the Tipitina’s Music Co-op by cyberspace a couple of months ago on a quick errand, and seem to have settled in for the long haul to see what I can do to help NOLA’s returning working musicians—although I do not recall ever making a conscious decision to do so.

I discovered the Co-op’s musical instrument recycling program through a simple internet search, while looking for a place that would fix up my late father’s old decrepit trumpet and give it to a musician who had lost one in Katrina.

My father was an ardent jazz fan who spent many happy hours listening to live music in New Orleans, and recordings of that music back at home in Massachusetts. When my mother and I scattered his ashes in the woods in spring of 2005, we did it NOLA jazz funeral style, playing slow brass band processional music on the way to the site my father had chosen, and a jubilant version of “When The Saints Go Marching In” on the way back to the car.

I was glad my father had not witnessed the destruction of New Orleans, but felt quite sure that had he been alive when NOLA’s levees were breached, he would have sent his trumpet to the Gulf Coast along with his financial donation.

So when the desire to carry out my father’s intentions grew bigger than my need to hang onto everything material that had belonged to him, I took that old musty case out of my closet and searched the web until I found a place in New Orleans that would accept donations of “musical instruments in any condition.” 


That place was the Co-op, located above the original uptown Tipitina’s nightclub. The workers’ cooperative is a shoestring-funded program of the nonprofit Tipitina’s Foundation (www.tipitinasfoundation.org), the mission of which is to restore the musical culture of New Orleans. It is doing so primarily by replacing the thousands of school band instruments that were lost or ruined in the flood, and by providing office facilities, community resource referrals, recycled instruments and music business skills training to working musicians returning to the region.


The Co-op’s instrument recycling program collects donated musical instruments in playable or reparable condition, has them repaired (often with labor donated by instrument technicians), and recycles them to working musicians in need of instruments to go back to work. Musicians who receive replacement instruments and skills training through the Co-op show an average 28% increase in music-related income, according to a City of New Orleans economic study.



Musical instrument recycling is a concept that just makes sense, and not only in New Orleans. Throughout the U.S., thousands of musical instruments end up in landfills when owners decide against expending money on repairing them.

There are literally hundreds of thousands of instruments sitting idle in closets, basements and attics—which isn’t good for either people or instruments, since instruments deteriorate with lack of use, and richen when they are played regularly. Many of these surplus instruments were played in school band and orchestra programs, or as part of adolescent creative exploration, and have outlasted their owners’ musical interests.


As I have talked with people as a volunteer instrument collector for the Co-op, I have found that many feel guilty about having these unplayed instruments, and are delighted to learn about a place where they are truly needed and will be put to good use.


Putting recycled instruments in the hands of NOLA musicians has a surprisingly wide ripple effect. Because the economy of New Orleans is largely built on tourism, and the tourist industry there is largely built on musical entertainment, restoring the unique musical culture of New Orleans—upon which crucial aspects of U.S. and world musical culture were built—also restores the economic well-being of New Orleans, as well as helping to restore the emotional and spiritual well-being of its returning residents.


With the reduction in landfill deposits, the savings of the energy and materials needed to produce new musical instruments, the creative and employment boost to New Orleans musicians, the charitable giving opportunity offered to instrument owners, the economic benefits of rebuilding tourism in a devastated region, and the restoration of a crucial part of U.S. musical culture, the Co-op instrument recycling program is truly a multi-dimensional version of a “win-win” situation.


Smaller instruments like clarinets, flutes and trumpets have proven comparatively easy to procure. But even low-end large low brass instruments cost several thousand dollars each when purchased new, and are generally owned by organizations rather than individuals. If there are people who have extra sousaphones sitting around in the back of their closets, the Co-op hasn’t found them yet!

So these days, as I sit at my desk in the course of my other work, I find my attention wandering to web sites where one might find used sousaphones, and putting together donors’ groups of kind souls willing to make modest contributions toward rescuing these precious forgotten giants from auction houses for a worthy cause.

The first collective sousaphone purchase was recently made by the seven members of what I fondly refer to as The Ladies’ Sewing Circle & Sousaphone Society (with a bow to a classic women’s movement T-shirt with a slightly less benign slogan). It went to a second-generation NOLA entertainer. One member of the Society dedicated her donation to her niece, a brave young woman who is learning to play the tuba. Donations ranged in size from $10 to $60, and each was essential to the happy outcome.

The second sousaphone purchase followed shortly thereafter, with the instrument going to a woman street musician whose apartment was looted after she had to evacuate.

Donations are now being sought for the third and fourth group sousaphone purchases, since two suitable fixer-uppers will be available only a couple of days from now. With donated shipping and professional instrument restoration already in place, acquiring the actual instruments (at an anticipated cost of under $700) is the only missing link in giving two NOLA musicians the tools they need to return to employment.

Please contact me at girlbanjoistsrule@yahoo.com if you are interested in making a modest contribution toward an upcoming sousaphone purchase, or would like more information about the musical instrument recycling program of the Tipitina’s Music Co-op. All financial and used instrument donations are fully tax deductible, with a “thank you” letter on Tipitina’s Foundation letterhead documenting your donation.

The shipping address for donations of used musical instruments in reparable condition is:

Mark Fowler

Tipitina’s Music Co-op

501 Napoleon Avenue

New Orleans, LA 70115

Co-op manager Mark Fowler can be reached by email at mfowler@tipitinas.com, or by phone at (504) 891-0580. As this year’s New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival miraculously kicks off two weekends of festivities, I thank you in advance for helping to restore the unique musical culture of New Orleans.

Technorati Tags: music, neworleans

As you’ve probably noticed - I’ve not been posting much, here. Mostly, it’s because I’ve been very busy continuing to settle in, and to start my new technology advising practice, called MetaCentric Technology Advising. I’ve been blooging up a storm on Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what’s happening in the world, at the same time as I’m thinking a lot about my own spiritual journey, and looking to find a spiritual community. There will be more on those things in a while, I’m sure. In the meanwhile, I thought I’d share some links today.

• The National Coalition Against the Death Penalty issued a report that seems to definitively prove what we’ve known all along: innocent people get executed.
• The Governor of Oregon spent a week on food stamps
• Keith Olbermann delivers a stinging rebuke (in his inimical style) to Rudy Juliani, who used fearmongering in a campaign speech.
• Stephen Colbert digs Bush on global warming
• The Evangelical Ecologist has their Carnival celebrating Earth Day
• The National Council of Churches has resources and such for “Earth Day Sunday.” This year’s theme: “The Food that Sustains Us”
• Also in honor of Earth Day: get a toolbar for your computer that helps you save CO2.
• Hugh talks to God.
• The Archdruid talks about the religion of progress and peak oil

It’s interesting when the shape of a life begins to emerge from the fog of a time of chaos. Of course, some of the contours of my life were clear - I had a home, a community, a group of friends, and a wonderful partner. But work, which has, for good, or ill, taken a very large chunk of my mental and emotional space for much of my life, was far from clear. Well, finally, I arrived at some clarity.

It feels good. I feel a sense of energy and focus I haven’t felt since last spring. I’m ready for new challenges, new awarenesses, new things to learn, new people to meet and work with. I feel a sense of how what has gone before works so well in creating what is coming to fruition. I’m happy.

All of my progressive Christian blogger colleagues, and all of my old seminary friends are in church this morning, celebrating, in one way or another, the literal, or metaphorical, or the somewhere-in-between resurrection of Jesus. I’m sitting in my hotel room, after 4 long days of being at a conference, doing a lot of thinking.

This conference, called the “Nonprofit Technology Conference” is one I’ve been attending (except the last two years, when I was preparing for, or in, seminary) for 7 years. It’s changed a lot over that time, and it certainly is food for thought in a larger scale about how the field of nonprofit technology has changed, and how my own position within it has changed over time. But that’s a blog entry for my other blog. This entry is about my own inner, personal changes.

I have come to realize, after this very difficult and challenging 7 months (and the last couple of months have been excruciating) while deciding to leave seminary and losing sight of the shore for a while, that I’ve been searching my whole life for the context and community that would fit me perfectly. A context that would make total sense to me, that I could live within, that I could work within, and that I could be totally satisfied with. Whether it be a karmic issue I’m trying to work out, a result of childhood hurts, my personality and odd set of characteristics, or all of the above, I’ve tried, and failed, to find that context, that community, over, and over, and over again. This has manifested itself both in the changes in my work life, as well as my search for spiritual community, and, more recently, in the way I had tried to find both at the same time. And, of course, what is true is that community, that context doesn’t exist and never will. Every community and context I can be a part of will be unsatisfying in one way or another. I highlighted “satisfied” and “unsatisfying” because it connects with the Buddhist concepts of dukka, or suffering. It is that the present moment can be unsatisfying, and our uncomfortableness with that, and yearning for something that will satisfy us, that will cause us suffering.

At lunch at the conference one day, an old friend of mine and I had been having a conversation about whether or not the condition of humanity had gotten better, worse, or was about the same that it had been a few hundred years ago. We happened to be sitting next to a man who was a Catholic priest or monk (I’m not sure which - he was a part of a large order of brothers) who said, basically “only God knows.” Which I thought was pretty wise. After the conversation wandered around a bit, where we were talking about how we knew we were making things better, he said “I just do the best that I can with what I have, and hope that I’ve done some good.” It was very down to earth, pragmatic, and seemed to be just the words I needed to hear this week.

This morning, I can feel a bit of the spirit of Easter, even though I’m not in church. I feel like I might perhaps be seeing sign of the shore finally. And the shore is simply the deep (more than the intellectual) understanding that I will rather often find parts of life unsatisfactory, and a fuller acceptance of that. And somehow, perhaps simply by grace, that deep understanding opens up my eyes to see the possibilities in life, the space for change and growth, the places of resurrection that are available to each of us at every moment.