A True Believer of New Orleans Music Tradition

Michael White talks a lot about spirituality. It’s central not only to his personal life, but to his career.

He’s not a preacher. Or a theologian or a philosopher--at least not professionally.

White plays clarinet, and that’s the instrument he uses to preach the gospel of traditional New Orleans jazz.

“Unless you’ve experienced the culture that this music comes from, it can be hard to really understand the spiritual side of it,” White, 45, said from his home in New Orleans, home of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, with whom he’ll appear Thursday and Friday in Irvine.

“You can like it from a musical standpoint, but to appreciate more than the theoretical side, you almost have to know what it’s like to be in a New Orleans uptown parade in 97-degree heat, soaking wet, with hundreds of people around and the music is going, people are dancing, you’re walking down the street, people are in elaborate-colored clothing you wouldn’t find anywhere else in the world, older people are becoming young again and babies are dancing to the rhythms in their mother’s arms before they can walk.

“People come together in an almost religious celebration of being in this world, transformed from everyday reality into a spiritual world where everyone is equal,” he continued. “That’s the core of where this music comes from.”

White has spent most of his adult life learning about where this music came from--the music of such jazz pioneers as Louis Armstrong (White always says LOO-iss, not LOO-eee), Buddy Bolden and Jelly Roll Morton.

His fascination with those musical forebears made him an anomaly--at times an outcast--for years among his peers because other New Orleans musicians his age were pursuing either postwar styles of jazz or rock, blues and R&B.; No black musicians took the earliest styles of jazz seriously because it was considered quaint, in some circles even Uncle Tom music that reflected distant racist traditions.

That has begun to change in the last 10 to 15 years, and one significant reason is White’s devotion to and promotion of the gritty, elemental style of jazz.

His own anointment into the faith came from George Lewis, a seminal clarinetist virtually forgotten when White came across one of his albums in a used-record store and bought it despite derisive remarks about Lewis’ raw style from a friend who was with him.

“When I put it on, it was like opening a treasure chest,” White said. “It was the beginning of my understanding the beauty and spiritual side of this music.”

In gratitude to Lewis, whom he never met and who died in 1968, White has just released “A Song for George Lewis” (Basin Street Records, www.basinstreetrecords.com), a solo album salute tied to the centenary of Lewis’ birth on July 13, 1900.

“I had been thinking about doing it for over a year. I’m launching into some new aspects of my career, so I look at this as the beginning of that, and as a way to pay homage to someone who I guess you can say had a lot to do with what I’m doing.”

For the last 20 years, White has spent his days teaching Spanish--for which he holds a PhD--and African American music at Xavier University in New Orleans.

Now, he’ll be teaching part-time so he can spend more time recording, composing and performing, as a regular member of the Preservation Hall band, with his own groups and as a periodic contributor to the Jazz at Lincoln Center program, instituted in 1991 by his friend and Crescent City musician Wynton Marsalis.

White credits Lewis and his fellow New Orleans native son Armstrong as the two most significant figures in helping popularize traditional New Orleans jazz not just around the country but around the world.

Lewis is not nearly as widely recognized as clarinetist-saxophonist Sidney Bechet, but it was Lewis’ recordings in the ‘40s with trumpeter Bunk Johnson that renewed interest in early jazz, interest that had faded even in New Orleans during the ‘30s and ‘40s when big bands and swing were all the rage.

“It’s because of him that there’s this big following all over Europe--except in France, where Bechet is king,” White said. “But there is interest all over Asia and Europe that comes from people listening to George Lewis, and there are dozens and dozens of bands in the rest of the world that were influenced by George in some way.”

Lewis was less technically or musically advanced a player as Bechet or others, but White believes his music held a spiritual purity unmatched by anyone, except perhaps Armstrong.

“A lot of people think he was best when he played in later years with Bunk Johnson. I like him all the way through, but I think the best period may have been in the ‘50s, when his tone reached a point of refinement [and] he had refined his style to being able to imply some of the stuff he’d played before without really playing it. You could actually hear certain things that were there, but not really there, because he expressed it with a certain kind of tone and feeling on a very high spiritual level. It was pure, beautiful and full, and very expressive.”

Earlier this year, White’s “A Tribute to Johnny Dodds” album saluted another pioneering New Orleans clarinetist, and he participated two years ago in Lincoln Center’s tribute to Armstrong, as well as a Bechet centennial concert in New Orleans the previous year.

Do all the tributes relegate White to the role of musical preservationist?

“Is there such a word as ‘continuist’?” he asked with a laugh. “I’m not trying to copy anybody’s style. . . . If you’re being true to yourself, you’re not going to sound like Kid Howard or George Lewis, you’re going to sound like yourself.”

If the realization of the individual’s potential is one hallmark of New Orleans jazz, the other is that the interplay of the participants supersedes the contributions of any single one of them.

“That philosophy is beautiful,” White said. “You put together two seemingly opposing principles--individualism and collectivism--but it’s like a football team. You use everybody’s individual talents, and you want that to stand out, but you do it for the sake of the group.

“That’s a great concept, and when it’s done right, you can hear the conversation going--you hear it in the emotions, you hear it in the spontaneous exchanges.

“Sometimes I tell people in the audience to listen for that back-and-forth conversation. If we do it right, I know we’ve said something,” he continued, then added with a chuckle, “don’t always know what we said, but we’ve said something. That’s an important part of the music, and it’s something you can rehearse.”

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* Michael White appears with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band of New Orleans on Thursday and Friday at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive, UC Irvine. 8 p.m. $13 to $32. (949) 824-4646.