By VINCENT M. MALLOZZI
The musical Prince of New Orleans has been touring New York in vagabond shoes.
Skip to next paragraph
City Room Blog
The latest news and reader discussions from around the five boroughs and the region.
“I’ve been walking around at night looking at all the clubs and the restaurants, just trying to figure out a new beginning for myself,” said Davell Crawford, 32, sitting on a piano bench recently at Roth’s Westside Steakhouse on the Upper West Side, where he practices. “I’m just thankful to be given another chance in a great city like this, a chance to fit in somewhere and entertain the people.”
Mr. Crawford, a jazz artist who is as well known in New Orleans as Mardi Gras, lost everything but his melodious soul in 2005 to Hurricane Katrina, which caused many musicians to leave and try to find work in other cities.
His career ruined by the storm, the man who once opened for Etta James, jammed with Lionel Hampton and thrilled audiences on four continents lives in a tiny Manhattan apartment provided by the Jazz Foundation of America, which has aided in more than 3,000 emergency cases involving musicians and their families affected by Katrina.
“Davell is a cross between Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles, a male Billie Holiday,” said Wendy Oxenhorn, the executive director of the Jazz Foundation. “He is way too talented to be going through hard times.”
Mr. Crawford, called the Prince of New Orleans by a former mayor, Marc H. Morial, said that Katrina wiped out his apartment and his Lower Ninth Ward recording studio, where he kept his grand piano, recordings, compositions, jewelry, even money.
The studio doubled as a music school for hundreds of aspiring young artists whom Mr. Crawford, whose energetic music embraces jazz, gospel, funk and rhythm and blues, taught to sing and play the piano. The catastrophe forced him to live for a while in his grandmother’s beauty salon, which Katrina left partly standing, with no running water and no heat.
As the rest of New Orleans struggled to recover, Mr. Crawford used his life’s savings to support himself while performing at funerals and benefits around the city.
For those performances, he took no pay, but great pleasure in repaying those who had showered him in better days with thunderous applause at places including the House of Blues, Charly B’s and the Maple Leaf.
“Down in New Orleans, we’re a very tribal community,” Mr. Crawford said. “We’re like family — we help one another.”
By February 2006, six months of volunteering had taken a financial toll on Mr. Crawford. He had drifted to Atlanta and was sleeping on the floors of friends’ apartments.
Oneafternoon, he found himself in a Burger King there, with $12 left in his pocket.
“A preacher friend of mine from Atlanta called me that very day, just by coincidence,” Mr. Crawford said. “He rushed over to the Burger King and gave me a hundred dollars — and I just broke down and started to cry.”
The next day, he received a phone call from Ms. Oxenhorn, whose foundation began helping him with bills and finding him work. In August this year, the foundation brought him to New York and placed him in his apartment, gave him a donated grand piano worth $12,000 and had his grandmother’s beauty salon in New Orleans repaired.
The foundation also provided Mr. Crawford with recording equipment to make CDs to get bookings for festival work and helped him land an audition for Blue Note Records in New York and numerous gigs around the city.
Those gigs included the foundation’s annual benefit concert, “A Great Night in Harlem,” held at the Apollo Theater in May, which raised $750,000.
“We have to keep in mind that this is just one story out of hundreds of musicians that have needed us,” Ms. Oxenhorn said of Mr. Crawford’s plight. “Many of the other musicians we have been helping are elderly, without any resources.”
For now, the foundation arranges for Mr. Crawford to play at private parties, which pay just enough to cover rent and basic expenses. But he dreams of playing in bigger venues, honing his piano skills in his apartment on the donated piano and practicing at the steakhouse.
Mr. Crawford, who has been performing since he was 7, won a 1998 Big Easy Entertainment Award for Best Gospel Artist. He is the grandson of James Sugar Boy Crawford, a pioneer of New Orleans rock ’n’ roll and composer of “Iko Iko,” a popular song written in 1954 under the original title “Jock-A-Mo.”
In the early 1960s, Sugar Boy was caught in a different kind of storm. While on tour in the still-segregated South, his entourage was stopped by the local police, and he was taken from his car and beaten so badly that he decided never to return to music.
“He had his Katrina,” Mr. Crawford said softly, “and I had mine.”
While mentioning the places he would love to play in New York — the Algonquin Hotel, the Blue Note and Birdland — Mr. Crawford noticed a tip jar on top of the piano with several bills stuffed inside.
He left his piano bench, picked up the jar and gave it to a waiter.
“This is not my money,” he said. “When I earn it, I’ll keep it.”
