Past Is Present in White’s New Orleans-Style Jazz : Traditional: The clarinetist, who plays with the Preservation Hall band in Irvine tonight, strives to keep repertoire alive and growing.

Life’s turning points are rarely evident when you approach them. But from the vantage of time, they can become crystal clear.

That’s the way it was for clarinetist Michael White, a champion of traditional New Orleans jazz who will be part of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band at the Irvine Barclay Theatre tonight.

It was an impromptu stop at a record store in 1979 that led him to the brand of jazz he’s been promoting tirelessly ever since.

He was giving a fellow musician a ride to a party for an uptown church (Mahalia Jackson’s church, in fact) when the man asked White to stop at the record store. “We were looking around in the store,” recalls White, now 38, “and he found this album by George Lewis. I asked if he’d ever heard George Lewis (a seminal jazz clarinetist from New Orleans) and he said no and put it down. I picked it up and looked at it, and it was like the picture was looking at me. I was compelled to buy it.

“I went and put the record on, and all of a sudden a darkness was illuminated. A light had come on in my inside, in my soul. In that music, I could almost hear my life being played out. I knew right then: ‘That’s it, that’s what you’ve been looking for.’ . . . That was the real beginning.”

Until that time, White had been playing his clarinet in high school and college marching and concert bands, having been inspired to pick up the instrument at age 14 by an aunt who played “mostly classical music. Take away the music and she was lost.”

After being enlightened by that George Lewis record, he started to notice that only old musicians were still playing in the traditional New Orleans style. White, then in his late 20s, became one of the first younger-generation black musicians from New Orleans to take up the style that had originated around the turn of the century.

The style bears little in common with what most people think of when they hear the term “New Orleans jazz”; to many, that implies the slick, slippery Dixieland style.

Traditional New Orleans jazz is characterized by a trumpet, a clarinet and a trombone soloing over a foundation of bass (tuba or string bass), drums, piano and banjo. Generally, at least one of the soloists carries the melody while the others add elements that complement or contrast with it.

As White puts it, “If you don’t have certain rhythmic principles, collective improvisation and polyphony, you don’t have New Orleans jazz. It has nothing to do with making judgments about what’s good or bad. . . . A lot of musicians think that if they hear the chord changes and can play along, they’re playing it. But there’s a lot more to it.”

In addition to his periodic stints with the Preservation Hall Band (he often sits in for aging clarinetist Willie Humphrey), White has two groups of his own. His Original Liberty Jazz Band has recorded two albums for the Antilles label: “Crescent City Serenade” from 1991 and “New Year’s at the Village Vanguard,” a live set issued last year. Both feature White’s friend and fellow New Orleanian, trumpeter Wynton Marsalis. White also has a quartet that is a staple at the annual New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival.

White and Marsalis aren’t the only younger musicians who have gained respect for traditional New Orleans jazz in recent years, but White still encounters jazzmen of the contemporary be-bop influenced school who look askance when anyone suggests there is anything relevant about the older, seemingly less-complicated music.

“That’s a common attitude among modern musicians. I compare (traditional jazz) to classical music,” White said. “It’s as if someone decided to say, ‘I’m not going to play any of that Beethoven stuff because it’s not what’s happening now.’

“If you look at the last major innovative thing in jazz that revolutionized everyone,” he continued, “you have to talk about be-bop. Most mainstream players in this country tend to be be-bop players, and be-bop is 50 years old now.

“If you’re talking about something truly contemporary, it would be something like Kenny G., which is really watered down to the point where it is less involved than 50-year-old be-bop. So what’s the difference between playing 50-some-year-old music or 90-some-year-old music?

“I came to realize that this music has a set of principles you can identify and then use those to create something of your own. You’re doing yourself an injustice if you don’t find the traditional New Orleans jazz artist in you.”

White not only strives to assert his own personality through his instrumental style but has been doing his part to keep the repertoire alive and growing. He wrote three of the songs for the “Crescent City Serenade” album, including the title tune.

“The problem we had with New Orleans jazz for a long time is that a lot of the players were content with a limited, ever-dwindling repertoire of common, simple harmonies, with fewer marches and fewer hymns.

“I think you should cover the gamut of 1920s music, what we know of (cornetist) Buddy Bolden’s music as well as the revival style. But I would not be beyond taking something out of contemporary popular music, or ethnic music certainly, that would fit into the New Orleans style.”

He finds he doesn’t have much company as a latter-day composer of traditional jazz. “Wynton has some things he wants to do, but he’s got a foot in a lot of different camps,” White said with a chuckle. “But in New Orleans, no, there isn’t anybody else writing this style of music.”

A big part of the reason White remains so committed to a musical style that’s been around for nearly a century is that he has seen firsthand what the music was created for.

“I started playing in 1975 in Doc Paulin’s Brass Band and got a real taste of the functional side of the music. It was almost completely non-commercial. We were playing in the community for neighborhood parties, church parades, jazz funerals. I got to see what the purpose of the music was and the types of functions it was created around. . . .

“You would have not only wide creativity among the musicians but also among the dancers. The music would feed the dancing, and the dancing would feed the music. They were creatively improvising dances--each one had his own way of doing it.

“In the brass-band tradition, parades would last six or seven hours and you’d stop and get to listen and talk to some of the musicians about what you’re doing. It was almost like a religious service, and you’d get an opportunity to contribute to that.

“But I think the whole sense of community in this music, from a historical perspective, runs even deeper.”

If White sometimes sounds more like a historian or musicologist than a musician, there’s a reason for that, too: He teaches Afro-American music at Xavier University in New Orleans, the same class taught previously by New Orleans jazz paterfamilias Ellis Marsalis and banjo player Danny Barker.

Also, White holds a Ph.D. in foreign-language education (hence the “Dr.” he uses on his albums and concert billings). In addition to his jazz courses, he teaches Spanish.

His formal education notwithstanding, when he elaborates about the music he loves, it is always with the soft-spoken excitement of a participant, not the dispassionate distance of an academic.

“In the post-Reconstruction period, there were a lot of racial tensions as well as social and economic changes in New Orleans, particularly in different elements of the black community. People had aspirations of equality, expectations of freedom. That’s what it seemed Reconstruction would bring.

“Then it went in completely the opposite direction. There was a loss of light, a change in economic and political status (for blacks). There were riots and Jim Crow legislation.

“All that left a highly spirited community with a need for expression. The music that came out of that became jazz. It created exactly what that generation had needed. It was like an exercise of democracy: You could do things in the music you could not necessarily do in everyday life.

“There was the whole idea of competition (among musicians) and having your individuality as a human being praised, having that become something important in life and giving you a reason to go on and develop an individual style. At the same time, you were part of a collective when playing with an individual band.”

All this musical and social history doesn’t just come rolling off White’s tongue. The classes he has taught, including a recent workshop he offered in New Orleans that many fellow jazz musicians attended, “gave me a chance to really analyze the musical things that are going on. I was glad I got a chance to talk about that, and play it, in front of a lot of musicians.”

Given how strongly traditional New Orleans jazz is rooted in a specific period and social milieu, White marvels at the way it has charmed so many different people in so many different places.

“It served a function to black New Orleans at the time. But because the music captures so many universal passions and emotions, those can be picked up by people all over the world. I’ve seen Japanese teen-agers who can hardly speak English almost addicted to New Orleans jazz. I think the music captures a lot of emotions that are repressed in other cultures, and people want to identify with it. I’m very happy about that.”

Which brings him back to the thing that grabbed him on that George Lewis record so many years ago.

“George Lewis, like everybody, had a few faults musically. But when he played, I could hear life. I could be moved.

“I’ve heard a lot of technically close-to-perfect players who don’t say anything. Their music sounds pale, mundane, like a series of well-measured exercises, like fake emotion. It makes me think they are reading a part that says ‘Add emotion here.’

“When George Lewis played, it was like telling a story of people’s lives. There was love, joy, sadness, hate, bitterness, sorrow. You could hear dancing. All this is like life set to music.

“I started to realize, too, that (Lewis) is a cult figure all around the world. His music changed and influenced many thousands of lives. Most of these technical wizards didn’t influence anyone.”

The proof, as the adage might have gone, is in the tear ducts.

“I’ve seen George Lewis’ music, even to this day, make people cry.”

* The Preservation Hall Jazz Band of New Orleans plays tonight at 8 at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive, Irvine. $18 to $22. (714) 854-4646.