The white piano, on the other hand, was not even Domino’s regular instrument. That piano, Domino told his biographer, was “so beat up that you could see the rusted metal through the ivory, it had been played so hard.” According to the authors of Up From the Cradle of Jazz: “The Ninth Ward blues built off of pianos and horns.” There was an old upright in just about every small music club in the Lower Ninth Ward. But the preservation of cultural artifacts after Katrina, such as Domino’s piano, was something of a different job.Īs show-stopping as Domino’s white Steinway grand is, it is the opposite of the first piano he played, acquired by his family in the 1930s. “The black working class in New Orleans,” the historian George Lipsitz wrote in Katrina’s aftermath, “has long refused to concede that white property is more important than black humanity.” After the storm, neighborhood traditions like the parading of Mardi Gras Indians persisted, despite and because of the challenges of rebuilding those communities. And it is not the same as choosing property over people, something that does not bode well in New Orleans. Tending to the artifacts the storm left behind, as White did, can feel restorative. They weren’t really about me, they symbolized New Orleans history and culture and the present state of the culture.” “The black working class in New Orleans has long refused to concede that white property is more important than black humanity.” “And the ones that were in cases looked like bodies in coffins. “They looked like bodies,” White told me. The only things salvaged by volunteers were some of his clarinets. White’s house near the London Avenue Canal in Lakeview took in water up to the roof. Most of Michael White’s enormous collection of artifacts from early jazz musicians-some 50 clarinets, reams of sheet music, reeds and mouthpieces, and taped interviews with musicians-is gone. Letters, handwritten scores, photographs, cocktail napkins, matchbooks, and musical instruments were under the beds and in the attics of working musicians and their descendants.

The history of New Orleans music had an additional vulnerability before Katrina: The homes of the city’s musicians and writers held much of the city’s musical heritage. Other jazz landmarks are in grave disrepair. Louis Armstrong’s birthplace, for example, was torn down in the 1960s to build a city jail. These objects-some partly restored, some not-are all the more important in light of the city’s record of demolition of many significant musical landmarks, despite the recent efforts of preservation groups to turn the tide. More particularly, it is a lesson about the importance of preserving the material remains of the city’s past even as it focuses on the future. It is a tale about persistence in the face of government neglect, cataclysmic disaster, and the painful incompleteness of reconstruction. It is this last fact that makes the story of this instrument such a powerful metaphor for New Orleans since Katrina. Despite the painstaking restoration, the white grand piano is unplayable. At the dedication ceremony in 2013, Lieutenant Governor Jay Dardanne said, “His beautiful grand piano, fully restored, will serve as the perfect symbol for Louisiana’s resilient nature and ever-evolving musical heritage.” Curators from the Louisiana State Museum raised $35,000 to have it reassembled and restored, and it now sits beneath a spotlight in an exhibit room as if waiting for Domino himself to sit down and play it.

Submerged in nine feet of water from a massive breach in the nearby Industrial Canal, it sat for weeks in the fetid lake that covered 80 percent of New Orleans after Katrina. That is, if you were unaware of the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina 10 years ago, including Domino’s home on Caffin Street in the largely obliterated neighborhood known as the “Lower Nine,” where the white Steinway once held pride of place in Domino’s living room. Mint in New Orleans’ French Quarter-you might think he had been kind enough to donate one of his signature grands to the museum for its music collection. If you could see Fats Domino’s piano today-white and gleaming on a pedestal at the Louisiana State Museum in the Old U.S.

Fat dominos today