Finding a New Groove

New Orleans trombonist Stephen Walker blares out the 1930s Gershwin hit "I've Got Rhythm" on the Mercy Corps-sponsored stage at Billy Reed's restaurant. Portland's Dan Gaynor is on keyboard. Photo: Dan Sadowsky/Mercy Corps

It's a typical winter night in Portland, rainy and cold, but the sounds emanating from Billy Reed's Restaurant & Bar are vintage New Orleans. Trombonist Stephen Walker, a 27-year-old native of the Big Easy, is kicking off his makeshift jazz band's second set with a hometown anthem.

"This is how we do it where I'm from," Walker announces, then presses a brass mouthpiece to his lips and leads his five-piece ensemble in a rollicking rendition of "Mardi Gras in New Orleans." It's an upbeat tune with an undertone of sadness for Walker. Even as he sets down new roots in Portland, the mold-ridden house he left behind in New Orleans' Mid-City neighborhood is never far from his mind.

Mercy Corps is sponsoring this evening's performance at Billy Reed's - a popular watering hole in the historical heart of the city's small African-American community - to help Walker and other Hurricane Katrina-displaced musicians find their groove and a regular paycheck in an unfamiliar town. Using a $10,000 donation from VH1, Mercy Corps hitched the idea of a weekly jazz series to a larger Portland welcome wagon for New Orleans jazz artists.

Formed last October, the nonprofit organization Nola2PDX has provided airline tickets, hotels, donated instruments and other work opportunities for roughly 50 Gulf Coast musicians. It's the brainchild of organizers of February's Portland Jazz Festival and Sho Dozono of Azumano Travel. Walker, one of about 15 who remain in Portland, has played twice on the Mercy Stage. His most recent gig was in late December, when he led two New Orleanians (on saxophone and upright bass) and two Portlanders (on the guitar and drums) through two hours of jazz standards like "I've Got Rhythm" and "Take the 'A' Train."

A Precocious Musician

Walker, whose long, lanky profile matches the sleek lines of his brass instrument, started making a living as a musician while still a student at the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts, the high school-level conservatory that counts Harry Connick Jr. and Wynton Marsalis among its graduates. At age 15, he traveled to Greece on a 10-day performance tour as part of a local brass band led by fellow student Irvin Mayfield, who today is Louisiana's official cultural ambassador and a leading voice for rebuilding New Orleans.

Walker went on to record with Grammy-award winning trumpeter Nicholas Payton and pop artist Lenny Kravitz, and later joined two of Mayfield's acclaimed New Orleans-style jazz bands: Los Hombres Calientes and the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra.

As Hurricane Katrina gathered force off the U.S. Gulf Coast last summer, Walker's career was also building up steam. The owner of a jazz club where Walker played regularly remarked that other local musicians would "rush over after their own gigs to sit in and jam with him." He was midway through recording the first album of his own band, Funk'n Horns.

"I was playing every night, everybody knew who I was. I was living the life. Then the hurricane came and messed everything up," he says, snapping his fingers and breaking into a raspy, staccato laugh two octaves higher than his baritone speaking voice.

An Offer from Portland

Like most New Orleanians, Walker considered the approaching storm a minor inconvenience. When the evacuation order came, he drove about 100 miles west to his grandparents' house in Franklin, Louisiana, taking only two pairs of pants, two shirts, a pair of shoes and his trombone. "I thought I was coming back real soon."

Instead, he spent three weeks with an uncle in Atlanta, where he appeared just once at Atlanta's premier jazz club, Churchill Downs, because he was still "in shock." His four brothers and sisters ended up in Washington, D.C., where his parents now live. But Walker, who says he's not a big-city kind of guy, wanted to go someplace smaller.

At the mid-October start of a previously scheduled two-week U.S. tour with the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra, he got a call from one of his bandmates, saxophonist Devin Phillips, who had accepted an unusual offer of hospitality from a trio of well-connected Portlanders. Bill Royston and Sarah Smith, co-directors of the three-year-old Portland Jazz Festival, and travel-agency owner Sho Dozono were advertising free flights, hotel stays, debit cards, studio time and other amenities for New Orleans musicians who needed a temporary home.

Royston, who was at home recuperating from recent surgery when Katrina struck, says watching television news coverage of rising floodwaters was like "watching 150 years of American music history float away." He and his collaborators resolved to rescue the music. They quickly assembled what were essentially free long-term vacation packages, sweetened with assurances of a paid performance slot when the Portland Jazz Festival rolled around in February.

Walker visited Portland during a break in the Jazz Orchestra tour before returning for good in November, checking into the Park Lane Suites in the hills above downtown Portland. Surrounded by his Gulf Coast brethren and musical soulmates, Walker was the happiest he had been since the hurricane. "It was like a family reunion."

Creating a Venue for New Orleanians

Nola2PDX organizers had pledged to help Walker and others book regular performances in the handful of jazz clubs around town. But they were concerned about taking away business from Portland musicians. That's where Mercy Corps stepped in.

The agency, encouraged by Dozono, devised a plan to establish a new stage that would "give New Orleans musicians the chance to play music and earn a living by adding to the existing venues," explains Matthew De Galan, Mercy Corps' chief development officer. Providing these kinds of opportunities are in line with the agency's philosophy of getting disaster survivors back into a normal routine as quickly as possible and allowing them to play an active role in their own financial and emotional recovery.

Mercy Corps initially envisioned creating its own club, but talks with VH1 and Nola2PDX led to the formation of the weekly stage at Billy Reed's, a casual-dining, 6,000-square-foot restaurant that anchors an award-winning complex of neighborhood shops and eateries where an old dairy facility once stood. Nola2PDX organizers say the Mercy Stage, because it guarantees a weekly paycheck for performers, is vital to their efforts to support visiting New Orleans musicians financially.

"We knew all the contacts, we knew all the venues," Royston says. "But it wasn't until Mercy Corps [came on board] that we could put people on a stage together where everybody gets to make a little bit of money."

Like New Orleans, an Uncertain Future

Walker played the Mercy Stage at its Dec. 10 debut, then again on Dec. 29. That night, dressed in an oversized black suit that accentuates his boyish looks, Walker performed solos with eyes closed and shoulders hunched, blowing into his trombone with the intensity of one of his idols, Louis Armstrong.

"I like the fire, the energy he brings," Walker tells me before the show. "When Louis Armstrong hits, he hits hard. That's the way I like to play."

By this time, he'd nailed down a weekly January gig at a ritzy Portland jazz club, the Blue Monk, and moved into a one-bedroom apartment in Northwest Portland with his girlfriend of four years, Yuko, a student from Japan. She hopes to continue her studies at Portland State University.

Where Walker will be a year from now is still up in the air. It's not hard to envision him in Portland, where he now says he's committed to staying at least until the end of the year.

"I'm tired of moving," he says. Relaxed and chatting with patrons after the show, I tell him he looks comfortable in his new surroundings. "Yeah, I'm getting real comfortable," he answers, smiling broadly.

But in an earlier conversation about his future, he looked me square in the eye and said he intended to finish recording the Funk'n Horns debut album that was interrupted by Katrina. Then, when he declared his aversion to big cities, and I pointed out that most people would put New Orleans in that category, he was quick to retort, "New Orleans? That's home."