Author: seabreeze
Date: 2019-12-25 09:21
That would be 1958 to 1960. I used to visit Mina Crais at the Vieux Carre Music Shop, 706 Bourbon St, to hear the latest jazz records and talk shop with her. She became a luminary figure in the New Orleans Jazz Club, traditional jazz journalism, and record production later and just passed away last year at age 93. (She got me--despite my preference then for the later jazz styles of Buddy DeFranco and Alvin Batiste--to become a member). Bill and Mina Lea Crais were well acquainted with Burke and just might have let him sell clarinets out of their store too, but I don't actually recall him doing that. I always saw him at the little open stall just two blocks away, behind the cathedral, that might just as well have been a taco or Italian ice stand. If Burke had his own shop on Bourbon Street, I didn't know about it. I was just a high school kid testing the waters in those days and there were lots of things I didn't know and was too shy to ask about. Crais' store was two blocks from Preservation Hall and one block from where Rouse's Grocery is today on Royal St., in front of which Doreen Ketchens can be found entertaining tourists.
A bit later on, I worked for the Port of New Orleans, and sometimes heard Ray Burke playing for conventions in the stylish Rivergate Exposition Hall that was eventually torn down--over protests of modern architecture fans--to build the present eyesore of a Casino. The rugged lines of Burke's playing worked as well against the abstract lines of the modernist building as they did with a backdrop of shotgun houses or Spanish Cabildo buildings. So I guess that's another tidbit about him.
Post Edited (2019-12-26 00:11)
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The Clarinet BBoard
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