INTERVIEW: Ladies and gentlemen, NOLA legend John Boutté

A YouTube video from 2007 can answer many questions about the New Orleans jazz vocalist John Boutté.

Partnered with Paul Sanchez, his frequent collaborator, Boutté offers a stirring portrait of a flooded-out home state in the song “Louisiana 1927.” Boutté, wearing dark shades and a loose-fitting shirt, contorts his body along with the turns of the tune. Singing about being “washed away,” the singer offers a signature voice, emanating from a focused face with a half-upturned smile and serious look of musical determination. He fully embraces the song when gliding into a scream of “What’s happened down here / is the winds done change,” the beat kept by a simple patter on his stationary tambourine. The performance beautifully showcases the unique talents of a music man who defies classification.

Since that day in 2007, when Boutté and Sanchez played the Threadhead Party, the singer’s popularity has only grown. His “Treme” song, a catchy tune written in the 1990s, was the theme song for Treme, the smart HBO series that charted the uphill battle of many New Orleanians post-Katrina. The energy and enthusiasm of the number have made it one of the most recognizable tunes out of the Crescent City in decades.

Boutté, despite enormous success, still leads a working musician’s life. Tourists and locals alike can still catch him at his regular residency at d.b.a. on Frechmen Street, a gig he’s played for more than 10 years. Every time he plays, and every time a rerun of Treme airs on HBO, one can hear the history in his voice, the trials and tribulations, the accomplishments and laurels.

“I was very fortunate from the standpoint that my mother and father, although they didn’t want us to be musicians, they definitely realized the value of music,” Boutté said recently during a phone interview. “So, you know, at 8 years old, I was hitting the horn. Actually I kind of harassed my mother to get it from a grandaunt, and you know she popped up with a horn, made a little satchel for me, and I joined the band in school.”

Playing instruments and singing songs were common occurrences at a young age. Boutté, a self-proclaimed free spirit, said he even sang to his dog, perhaps his first official audience member.

“I used to sing a lot because it would drive my sisters crazy. So I realized the power of the voice, especially when it was on loop. I really realized, you know, that there’s really a lot of not only enjoyment that I got out of hearing music and trying to make music and perform, but it had value for me, you know, even as a young kid. And I was surrounded by great guys, man.”

Boutté said his father used to cut the hair of a lot of old-time, legendary figures who often played traditional jazz. They were the neighborhood crowd, men who worked as carpenters, masons and bricklayers during the day, and then retreated to their instruments and voices at night.

There were also the influences of a more sacred nature.

“I was brought up Catholic, and there’s a sanctified, spiritualist church right behind us. And they used to rock out every Sunday morning,” he said. “I’d hear them from 9 until 2 in the afternoon in the backyard … not to mention the brass bands we had. We had music in the streets for every occasion.”

The connections among his Seventh Ward neighbors were as numerous as they were varied. The singer said his brother even married Sidney Bechet’s grandniece.

“All we knew is these guys they made music. We didn’t know them as the superstars that they really were around the world. We just knew them as neighborhood cats. Danny Barker was a big influence. Also, I got to admit, in New Orleans when I was coming up, in the ‘60s / early ‘70s, they really took pride in their music programs. We had incredible music educators. We had great band teachers.”

Even in 2014, several decades out of high school, Boutté is able to spout off the many instructors who helped prepare his musical journey. That journey carried over into the singer’s college years at Xavier University. It was at this institution that Boutté took a course in classical piano.

At the same time he started earning his musical chops, there were some voices from his family that tried to firm up his economic longevity. “I always love music, man, but you know how things [are]. Always come from a big family you get a lot of advice, and then folks are always like, ‘Hey, you know, you need something to fall back on.’ So, of course, I did the practical thing and got a degree in business, joined the Army, did my duty to God and my country, and realized I had to get out of that mode, man.”

His years away from the music scene didn’t mean he left his creative desires in the Seventh Ward. He carried them with him, and eventually had the pleasure of meeting Stevie Wonder. Working as a banker, Boutté classified this time in his life as “one of those magical moments.”

“He told me I had something special. He said, I had a signature voice, which I didn’t know what the hell that was. … What that means is you sound like nobody but you.”

The affirmation of his talents surprised Boutté, especially since he had stopped singing back in college. During his formative years, he was tired of the criticism over his voice.

Here’s how he put it: “I’m a small guy. You wouldn’t expect me to have a voice like Barry White, right. So I’ve got small vocal chords, high pitch, and, you know, where I went in college they hated my voice, man. They thought I had nodules on my vocal chords. They said, ‘You need to talk like a man, etc., etc.’ So at 17, right, because I went to college very early, at 17, as a freshman, that kind of crushed me, man. … They thought my voice was too airy, it was too high and that I could change that. Trust me, I’ve been through puberty; this is it. This is what you’re getting, baby. I’m not trying to fake it. I even had people say, you’re trying to sound like Louis Armstrong.”

The musician did an about-face only after his singing voice was praised by one of the all-time greats. Wonder changed Boutté’s life. The following day, as Boutté remembers it, the newly enlivened singer quit his banking job. His family thought he was “nuts,” but he was determined to enjoy his life. The prospects of not having much money didn’t scare him.

“If I’m going to be broke, that’s how it’s going to be,” he said. “But I’m going to do what I think I’m going to be happy doing, and it was making music.”

To convince himself he had made the right decision, he traveled with his sister to Europe while she toured her own act. He mostly helped with logistics and appreciated the life on the road. On his return to the Crescent City, he realized he needed more than cameo performances on his sister’s gigs.

“It was like, somebody fed me one Lay’s potato chip, and say, OK, you don’t need anymore,” he said. “Eventually I stepped out on my own.”

He began to write music and perform small gigs. He eventually attracted attention, especially after a performance at the French Quarter Festival where his band didn’t show up. Instead Boutté called up his friend James Andrews to hit some beats on the drums. The concert was spontaneous and led to more musicians stepping up to help the singer create some music. A pianist and bassist joined the mix, and the results were inspired.

“Next thing I know I had a band, and I did the set,” he said.

A music executive in the crowd offered his business card to Boutté with promises of a recording contract. The singer brushed off the offer, knowing how many of these conversations turn out. However, three months later, they were talking contracts.

Here’s where quintessential Boutté takes over. The contract, according to the singer, needed to be one page.

“It’s got to be no longer than one page long because what … I want on there is not going to take a page,” he remembered. “So [the music executive] calls me, right, and he says, ‘Look, I sent out the contract, but I got to tell you it’s two pages.’ I’m like, ‘What?’ He says, ‘The lawyer says we need one page separately to sign your name on.’ I said, ‘Fair enough.'”

Boutté’s songs throughout his career have been reflective pieces highlighted by references of his family and neighborhood. From “At the Foot of Canal Street” to the “Treme” song, the compositions couple thoughtful lyrics with jazz-infused beats — sometimes slow, sometimes upbeat.

“I wrote the ‘Treme’ song after 1993 for the Jambalaya record. Thank goodness I did. Everybody thinks I wrote that song for the series, but I didn’t. I wrote that song because I was living in the Treme, and I was writing what I was experiencing, you know, that Treme life. And it was beautiful. Who would have thought?”

Boutté said the record needed one more tune, and the “Treme” song was the last one to make the cut. At first, the band “giggled” at its seeming simplicity.

“I remember when I first wrote it, I liked it. I didn’t know why. I liked the groove I had, which is a simple blues. You can’t go wrong with that. … But the lyrics I think were important, you know, because the first two lyrics kind of hit on the two things that most people go to their grave never knowing anything about, which is sex and death.”

Here’s how Boutté analyzes those oft-quoted opening lines of the “Treme” song: “I realized the opening lines to that song is: ‘Hanging in the Treme / watching people sashay / past my steps / by my porch / in front of my door.’ So hanging in the Treme I meant just like chilling out, right, but a hanging could be a lynching, which produces death. Watching people sashay is a form of voyeurism. Sashaying is like somebody walking very kind of sexy, so there you go. I had sex and death in the first two lines, man. You know, I should have been an advertisement agent. I would have really been making money, you know. I think it was part of my training in business to hit those two areas that most people wouldn’t even think about. I wasn’t thinking about it like that, you know, but you never know.”

The success from the song and his continual gigging are impressive, especially since Boutté said he’s not a client of a major label and owns the masters and writing privileges to his songs.

“I had some major labels and everybody trying to coordinate, but then I’ve just always been independent, man. I don’t like people telling me what to do. I like being in charge. I like being in charge. I don’t mind taking the fall when things go wrong, but, you know, I don’t like things going wrong. That’s why I like to be in charge because lots of people like to put it on someone else’s back if the music fails or the tune fails or whatever, right.”

Boutté made a parallel to his old life in the banking world where he would have to prepare quarterly reports to gauge his success. Playing music is the opposite. He receives feedback instantaneously, and he likes the absence of a delay. “I don’t want to have to wait for three months to find out did I do a good job,” he said. “Some people would say I don’t have any ambition. That’s not true. I just don’t run after money because there’s more important things in life, but I also realize that nobody ever gets rich working for themselves. And gosh man, all I need is a bowl of gumbo or a po’boy to keep my stomach full, and hey that’s the engine on me, and a piece of paper and pencil to write. Everybody always thought I’m a fool to think that way until HBO came along and started buying my songs.”

Boutté said he realizes there’s a give and take with the crowd that forms at d.b.a. on Frenchmen Street. They have paid their $10 cover charge, and they will most likely hear the hits, including the “Treme” song. But sometimes he’s not in the mood, and together they need to come to a happy medium.

“I think they appreciate the honesty that if I go in there feeling bad, and I play tunes that pull me out of it,” he said. “I don’t always go on wanting to play the happy-happy-joy-joy set because that’s not right. Sometimes really I’m sad. When you’re going to a regular gig that you’ve had for over 10 years, some days you don’t want to go into the office, man, but you still do it. … We sing our way out of any bad feelings we have.”

He doesn’t work off a setlist because, as he said, nothing should be written in stone. “I see what’s on my heart at the time, what I want to say, what needs to be said at the moment,” he said.

When talking about his playing habits, Hurricane Katrina and the recovery efforts following the levees breaking are never too faraway: “After the levees fell, it was really a community thing that we had going on down on Frechmen there. There was no money. Trust me, no money, even when I started charging three years ago. I never charged for people to come to my show. I said, give a donation. What you think we’re worth? If you don’t give us enough, then we won’t show up next week. You dig what I’m saying? Give us what you think, what you can afford, and what you think we’re worth. I feel bad about making people pay for music, but I got to eat, right? … I did that for so many years on Frechmen. I watched pregnant ladies come in, and then I watched them come in with their babies. And they’d be breast-feeding the babies at the front of my stage, and I watched those little kids dancing around the dance floor. And next thing I know, they got … a little horn in their hands.”

The hardest job for the jazz vocalist is keeping a rein on his emotions during performances. At times, Boutté admitted, he has become overly emotional on stage, and that’s when the music suffers a bit.

“People don’t come to see you cry on stage,” he said. “There’s a balance there where you have to be able to emote, but you don’t go so far that you get out of tune and you start cracking. Lots of time I’m guilty. I’ve had to stop and walk off because I’ve become overwhelmed. I’ve had people even ask me, why’d you cry? Why’d you cry?”

He referenced jazz great Ben Webster to provide an answer: “Why are you crying? Do you know what [Webster] said? He said, ‘Because I sound so good.’ But, you know, there’s certain times when certain notes or certain chords [are] like a hot knife through butter. They just hit my heart, and I’ve got recordings I’ve done on JazzFest where I realize I crossed that line. I can hear my voice cracking because I’m caught up in the emotion so much.”

He remembers one time at JazzFest when he performed Annie Lennox’s “Why.”

“I had my eyes closed. I knew it was just a beautiful rendition because I was in the right place, and everything felt perfectly. And I looked up, and I was feeling a tear in my eye. And I look, and I saw these women cry. And I saw the guys, the husbands, boyfriends crying, and the kids were crying because they saw the parents cry. I didn’t mean to do that, right. That’s also the joy I get out of playing the ‘Treme’ song sometimes. You know you get that … baseline and that groove going, and you just want to take your hair out and shake your ass. You know what I’m saying? You don’t care.”

Today, while gigging at d.b.a. and enjoying his success, Boutté sometimes becomes nostalgic. He’s had several points in his life when he made a left turn or right turn, never to return to his starting place. At the time, they were scary forays with great uncertainty, but the musical risks have paid off dividends … and that’s not saying anything about the money involved.

“My dad, look, he wanted me to be a lawyer, but then he came to his senses,” Boutté said. “We had a talk. He said, look John, the only way you’re going to be successful in life is to do something that makes you happy. Ding, ding, ding — it went off in my head. I realized what I had to do, which is music. Eventually I got to that point where I had the courage to quit my banking job and never turn back again, but my mother, of course, like all good mothers, they worry about their kids. She said, ‘Oh no, those musicians are alcoholics, drug addicts and weirdos.'”

She has changed her mind on his career aspirations and loves her son’s music. In fact, Boutté still plays music for his 92-year-old mother. It doesn’t matter who the audience is, this jazz vocalist is happy to test the waters and try something new (and something traditional). He credited his troupe of fellow musicians, his so-called “band of bandleaders,” for following his lead and knowing what it takes to succeed.

“It’s like a good gumbo, man,” Boutté said. “I just throw the good ingredients in and just let it boil.”

By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com

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