Maurice Durand and a Chance Encounter With Jazz History

Every time I visit New Orleans I find something remarkable, or at least interesting, just by wandering around.  On my visit last week, geocaching took me to a spot on Burgundy Street in the Bywater neighborhood in the Ninth Ward - a spot I didn't know exsisted.  It's a large arch, erected in in 1919 "by the people of this the Ninth Ward in honor of its citizens who were enlisted in combative service and in memory of those who made the supreme sacrifice in the triumph of right over might in the Great World War."

The arch is pretty interesting and impressive in and of itself.  I found a website on the monument and its history here.  I don't know how tall it is, but I'm almost six feet tall, and the top of my head only made it one-fourth of the way or so up the four large brass plaques on the arch.  You can see two of the plaques in the picture to the left, the other two are on the other side of the arch.  They list the names of all the men from the Ninth Ward who served in World War I.  I was a little surprised, but shouldn't have been, to see that the names are divided by race; three of the plaques list the white soldiers who served, while one of the two on the back honors the "colored" men who served in the war.

As I was looking at the names of the African-American Ninth Warders who served, one name jumped out at me: that of Maurice Durand.  I knew that Durand was an early jazz and brass band trumpet player from New Orleans, and it seemed to me that he would have been about the right age to have served in the first World War.  But I wasn't sure whether or not this name represented the right Maurice Durand.  When I got home, a little research revealed that, yes, this was Maurice Durand, the musician.

An early-eighties interview with saxophonist and bandleader Harold Dejan placed Durand in the correct part of New Orleans:

Maurice Durand had his own little band too, so I played with him too. Durand lived on Deslonde Street in the 9th Ward and used to get all the jobs down St. Bernard Parish. During the day he worked at a broom factory. He played on all the weddings and St. Joseph day parties. Maurice used to play in the Alley Cabaret by the St. Bernard Market, that's on Claiborne and St. Bernard and in the back was the Alley Cabaret.

But did Durand serve in the military during WWI?  Yes, he did, as it turns out.  Discussing the famous Onward Brass Band and its members in his book Fallen Heroes: A History of New Orleans Brass Bands, Richard Knowles says that Durand played both clarinet and trumpet in the 816th Pioneer Regimental Brass Band, which spent time in both England and France during the war.

Durand, born just outside of New Orleans in 1893, was a student of the legendary Professor Jim Humphrey, who taught so many early jazzmen.  He had a youthful band with Willie Humphrey, the Professor's grandson, and later became something of a protégé of Manuel Perez, the famous cornetist.  Durand played with the Onward, Tuxedo, Imperial, and Terminal brass bands and played dance band jobs like the ones described by Harold Dejan above.  According to the brass band history website containing the quote from Dejan, Durand also gigged at the famous Pythian Temple Roof Garden uptown.

That same website states that Maurice Durand never recorded, and that's almost true.  Fed up with the meager pay, he retired from music in 1933 and moved to San Francisco in 1944 - he died there in 1961.  But jazz researcher Bill Russell tracked him down and recorded an interview with him in 1958.  During the interview, Russell persuaded him to play a little trumpet, and on the CD which accompanies the Fallen Heroes book, you can hear Maurice Durand play 16 measures of "I'm Confessin'."  His lip is obviously out of shape, but you can also tell that this is a man with a good command of the trumpet.  

I'm not sure how interesting all of this is to anyone else, but my chance encounter with a little bit of jazz history fascinated me.  I was glad to pay tribute to a jazz pioneer.