Doreen Ketchens reflects on growing up in New Orleans historic Treme neighborhood, her development as a jazz clarinetist, and playing music with her family on the streets of New Orleans and in concerts and festivals around the world. Ketchens plays the Twin Cities Jazz Festival Friday June 20th at 6 PM on the Jazz88 Main Stage in St. Paul.
TRANSCRIPT
PETER SOLOMON: I’m Peter Solomon. This is the morning show, and today I have the pleasure of speaking with Doreen Ketchens, a very well known clarinetist out of New Orleans and one of the headliners for this year’s Twin Cities Jazz Festival. Welcome Doreen, and I want to say first, I’d love to hear about where you grew up, because I know you’re from the neighborhood of Treme, but I’m really curious about how you started playing clarinet.
DOREEN KETCHENS: Hi, Peter, thanks for having me. It’s actually a pretty famous story. I was just in fifth grade and I was trying to get out of a history test. That’s how I started playing the clarinet. Well, actually, that’s how I started with music. I was in my favorite part of the day, which was recess, and there was talk of a pop quiz when we got back, and I was like, well, we’ve never had a pop quiz before. I don’t see why we’d have a pop quiz now, and I was always pretty popular, so naturally they listened to me. But when we gotten in the classroom. Yes, there was pop quiz, and I got the stink eye from a few people. But I always sat in the middle of the class because I figured if you sit in the front of the class and teach you, they think you know everything. If you sit in the back of the class, the teacher will think you don’t know anything, but if you sit in the middle, you kind of get lost. So I sat in the middle of class with about 30 kids in the classroom, and he started on the first row and went, you know, all the way down. And I noticed that he was asking, like, you know, about four or five questions, maybe five or six questions. So I tried to memorize the answers, you know, the correct answers to the questions. And I wasn’t faring very well. So I looked out the window and I said, “God, if you get me out of this, I’ll do anything.” And about two minutes later, the principal came on the loudspeaker. She said, “Anyone interested in joining the band report to the band room immediately.” And so I raised my hand, so did a whole bunch of other people, but he did pick me, and we ran down to the band room.
And the band room was a very large room. I mean, it was really large, and it’s decorated with musical instruments and stuff like that, and they had pictures of instruments on the walls. And when I walked in, I saw the flute, and I’m like, Oh, my goodness gracious. What is that? That is beautiful, you know? So see, I’m gonna play the flute. But of course, when it got time to sit down, you know, I sat in the middle. So when he asked the first girl, she said flute. And then second girl, she said flute. And then all these girls said flute. And when he got to me, you know, I didn’t want to play the flute now, because it was kind of common, you know. So the clarinet was next to and I said, I’ll play the clarinet. That’s how I started playing the clarinet. You
SOLOMON: You didn’t actually start playing jazz, as I understand it, until you were in college. Can you talk about how that started?
KETCHENS: Oh, yeah, well, I was strictly classical. I mean, I wasn’t even interested in jazz, but when I was in Loyola, played in the Concert Band, and we played in the Concert Band, there were a lot of other instruments there, And there was this gorgeous tuba player. I mean, just gorgeous. And now I used to stare at him a lot, but when he looked my way, I wouldn’t, you know, but he had a jazz band, and his clarinet player was, you know, kind of cutting up. So he asked me, you know, he said, “Hey, you want to look into playing some, you know, some jazz?” And I’m like, “Okay.” And he was very patient. It was a good time to spend with him, you know, I needed a good excuse for spending time with him.
And that’s, you know, and going from classical to jazz wasn’t that easy for me, you know, I mean, as far as the improvisation and stuff like that, so I don’t even know if I would have been able to do it without that added, you know, just liking him so much.
SOLOMON: So I want to get back to like, who your influences on the clarinet are, but could you tell me a little bit about the neighborhood where you grew up?
KETCHENS: Oh, I grew up in Treme. Yeah, yeah, there’s music everywhere. On my block, there was a bar on every corner. There was a funeral home down the street, around the corner, around the other corner, churches everywhere. So there was music everywhere. You grow up in this kind of environment, and it’s just normal to you. But you know, when I look back on it, I’m like, Oh, my goodness gracious, you know, I was surrounded by music, all kinds of music, not just jazz, you know, but R and B and gospel, all kinds of music, even in that fifth grade class I was telling you about when I, you know, raised my hand. the jazz funerals used to pass by our window weekly. And sometimes the teacher let us go and see, and other times, you know, we just have to let it pass by because we were doing something. I mean, it’s very culturally rich. You know, a lot of people lived close by. The Dirty Dozen brass band lived close by, and other musicians, Shannon Powell, you know, James Andrews, you know Trombone Shorty, and a whole bunch of other people I’m not even thinking about, you know, but it was our existence, you know, and really a gift to have come up in.
SOLOMON: So when you did start learning to play clarinet, like, who were the people that kind of inspired you when you started playing jazz? I should say.
KETCHENS: When I started playing jazz, I didn’t understand what to do as far as the improvisation went. I mean, I could read almost anything, but I didn’t understand the improvisation. And again, being blessed with being born in New Orleans, you know, I could go out to the French Quarter and, you know, ask these different musicians, hey, you know, what do you do? Because when trying to play with the tuba player’s band, I had to, like play that evening, you know, and I didn’t understand it. And cats would tell me things like, well, you know, you got to learn the chords and how they relate to one another, and then, you know, put them in the language and stuff. Like, I’m like, “Man, I can’t go back to school. I need to learn how to improvise tonight, right?”
So I ran across this guy, I went to the Palm Court Cafe, and this guy named Pud Brown. He must have been in the 70s at that point, and that night he was playing clarinet, and he sounded really good, you know. And I went up to him afterwards, and I asked him, I said, “How do you know how to play so many songs?” And he said, “Well, you learn the song like “Amazing Grace,” you know. And you can play, you know, you learn 1000 songs, you know, stuff like that. They just had a way of relating to things in a simple, you know, manner. Pud was a circus baby, so, meaning his parents worked with a circus, you know, he didn’t have any inhibitions towards instruments. I mean, he just, when he had free time and they weren’t rehearsing, he could just go and pick up an instrument and start playing it so he could play anything. But he was playing clarinet that night, and he showed me a few things, and he said, “Look, if you want to improvise tonight, what you gotta do is you gotta find somebody you really like, you know, find a recording of somebody you really like, and steal it, period, that’s what you do.” And it took me a second to understand it, but I did understand it, and that’s exactly what I did. And from that, that became my bridge, you know, and my confidence, you know, I just sit on that solo until, you know, I felt comfortable enough to jump off. And you know, if it wasn’t going so well, I could jump back onto that solo and stuff like that. So that’s it.
But Louis Armstrong was my influence. I mean, as much as I love the way Pud played and stuff, I wasn’t a club hopper, you know, so I didn’t get a chance to hear him that often, and he hadn’t recorded a whole bunch of things. Whereas, you know, you could pull up Louis on the radio, you could pull up Louis at the at the library. So that’s what I did. And even my parents had some Louis Armstrong recordings, and it helped me, because I really liked listening to it, and then, like imitating too.
SOLOMON: Do you feel connected to, like the early New Orleans kind of iconic clarinetists like Jimmy Noone and Johnny Dodds… and Sidney Bechet?
KETCHENS: I didn’t learn from them, I mean, but I respect what they do, you know, also, like Artie Shaw, Pete Fountain, Benny Goodman, I mean, I respect what they do, but I had already sort of built in my own language by the time I actually started listening to those cats, which you know, is good, because it you know, my own language is my signature, and you know, so I feel really good where I am. I mean, I still learn from them cats. I mean, you know, maybe steal a few licks, you know, every so often, but the influence is not really,
SOLOMON: You mentioned before the tuba player. Of course you ended up getting married to Lawrence Ketchens. And can you talk a little bit about the musical partnership you guys had for so many years?
KETCHENS: Oh, wow, yeah. Well, from the beginning, you know, he was very patient and understanding, but honest. I remember one time we were playing, and we were “When the Saints Go Marching In, and he’s playing his bass lines, you know, and I came in, and he stopped playing. He said, “That’s not jazz, is it? You can’t play that like Mozart, girl. You gotta play. You gotta speak.” So he is very honest, and, you know, he’s very attentive and and very patient. And a big part of me finding my voice inside of everything, and yet another person who I always seek approval from, you know, I mean, because I knew it may come off a little edgy or something like that, but it was going to do me a whole lot of good. And Lawrence wasn’t afraid of anything, you know, he was always ready to try it, to call it, to whatever people ask for a song, he say, okay, hold on. And we had a big book, you know, we had a fake book and a real book.
And, you know, if we were able to listen to it, fine, if we weren’t just sit there and read it, because at that time, it was just the two of us playing together. And then we started playing with a tap dancer so we can have some rhythm. And eventually the band got bigger and bigger. But, you know, Lawrence had this way of just inspiring, you know, either just do better, I mean, and do it well, you know, it’s like, it’s alright to be a jack of all trades, but, you know, you don’t want to be a mediocre anything. You want to be at the top of your game on everything. So that’s what we did. And since we started out as two we play songs like “South Rampart Street Parade” and “High Society” that had these different parts, you know? And so he’d take the trombone parts and the trumpet parts and the bass parts, and I take all the woodwind parts and stuff like that, so there was already always a challenge. And like I said, he was very patient, and I was absolutely crazy about him, and that’s why, you know, I just went through that, that deep water of the transition from having something written on the page to actually being able to create it, you know, and then I had the blessing of a baseline anytime I wanted. So I had plenty of time to practice, you know?
SOLOMON Can you talk about why you like playing on the streets with your band? What is it about that that setting that appeals to you and that seems right for the music?
KETCHENS: Well, in the beginning, like I said, Lawrence wasn’t afraid of anything, you know, and we needed to play, and we needed to make money, and we were actually walking on the street because Lawrence, Lawrence’s father had died, and then a month and a day later, my father had died, and we were actually in Connecticut at that time, and our mothers had been in long relationships, so we decided we’d come down for a little while just to help them through their transition. And I started selling, you know, we call them suppers, at my mom’s sweet shop, and it was sort of spinning wheels, you know, it wasn’t a lot of money. It was a lot of work. You know, get up really early. You got to buy, you know, the money you make, you know, most of it, you got to invest in more food for the next day and stuff like that. It just wasn’t working as well as we thought it would. And so we took a break, and we’re walking out in the quarters, and we saw some people playing on the street. And he’s like, “You know, we could do that.” And I’m like, “Man, you must be crazy. I’ve been to college. I am not playing on the street, you know!” But love makes you do crazy things, right? So here we go. We got our book and our music stand, and we go out on the street and we’re playing some music, and people like it. I mean, we were young, we were cute, you know, we sounded good, and we were making money. We made more money in a short period of time playing music on the street than we did for hours on end, you know, making food and delivering food, you know, all over the city. So, you know, I consider that a blessing and a message. So we started, you know, that’s how we started doing it. And, you know, we learned a lot of music out there on the street, and we played a lot of music out there on the street, met a lot of people, played with a whole bunch of other people, and actually developed what we became from the streets.
Now, you know, people will say, “Oh, man, I know you played all over the world, you know, but you’d rather be right here.” No, it’s not true. I mean, how could you even think that? That doesn’t make any sense. But you know a lot of people, they see you on the street, and they figure they can offer you a cookie, you know, wrapped in $1 you know, and you’ll go anywhere. And it’s just not that way. I mean, we’ve traveled the world, you know, actually, we traveled the world playing the streets too, you know, because Lawrence wasn’t afraid of anything, you know, let’s go to Switzerland, you know. Hey, let’s get on a plane and go to Switzerland, play the streets. And we sure did.
SOLOMON: The last thing I want to ask you about, I know your daughter plays drums. Can you talk about how you’ve passed on the music to your children?
KETCHENS: We raised three, and the oldest girl, you know, had two kids that were the three of them were close in age, so we would help one another, you know, she’d take them to like, T ball and stuff like that. And when we had to babysit them, they had to come out on the street with us. And so, you know, when you’re coming out on the street with us, you can’t just sit there, you know, you gotta do something. So we teach them a little bit about notes, you know, teach them how to read and stuff. But you know, they’d have a little competition on the drums, you know. And we play, and we bring the drum set out there, and each one of them would try and play, you know, and if they were good, they they play for, you know, a song or two. But if they weren’t, then they get fired. You know, Lawrence would say “You’re fired.” And at first they like being fired because it meant they didn’t have to work, but after a while, you know, that competition bug gets in, and then they don’t like being fired, you know. So Dorian, or actually, Juan, he’s a rapper, and all kinds of other things. You know, he kept it going too, and he plays some really good drums. But Dorian, she was four, and, you know, when Katrina hit, we had to take her with us everywhere we went, and we were playing a lot of schools, and we didn’t want her to be sitting out in the audience, because, you know, she was only two, so we had a lot of read along books and stuff like that for to play with on side of the stage. But she started getting really bored really quickly. And, you know, she didn’t seem very happy. And at the time, our drummer was our cousin, Dwayne. He said, I’ll take care of her. So he picked her up, he put her on his knee, and he put one drumstick, and he put the drumsticks in her hand, and he put his hand over her hands, and he played the gig that way, and she smiled. She just kept smiling. And I thought that was so wonderful.
When they would come out with us, you know I’d give them opportunities to earn some money too. So, you know, they played. Well, you get a little money and you can go and get you something out of store or something like that. And mostly it was Dorian, you know, with us. And so, you know, she would play a tune. I tell her, you play two or three songs, you go to Walmart, and you can get anything you want. She was always pretty practical, you know, so it was never an issue. And that’s how she started playing. And she was really good, and she didn’t stress over playing, you know, she just played. She played what she heard. We were just a trio, you know. So, you know, she had these little inflections that she did and stuff like that. So, she’s a very, very good drummer, you know. I mean, after a while, she started actually earning money like the guys you know, because she was that good.
SOLOMON: Is there anything else you want to say in advance of your performance?
KETCHENS: I just want to say thank you for the support, and Dayna has been absolutely wonderful. We had gone and we had played at Smith music, and she saw us, and, you know, heard us, and thought, you know, it’d be great for us to be a part of the festival, and I thought so too, and now it’s going to happen, and I’m really excited about it, and proud of it too, and looking forward to just knocking everybody’s socks off, you know, because y’all have great weather around that time of year.
SOLOMON: Yeah, specifically in June. Yeah, not February, yeah, yeah,
KETCHENS: I’m looking forward to it.
SOLOMON: I spoke with Doreen Ketchens. You can see Doreen’s jazz New Orleans on the Jazz88 main stage, Friday, June, 20th at the Twin Cities Jazz Festival. Go to Twin Cities jazz festival and click on Schedule for more information. I’m Peter Solomon for Jazz88.
