From New Orleans to Richmond: How "Mr. Jazz" found a home after Katrina
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Mr. Jazz this week at the Answer. He's a big fan of IPAs. Photo: Sabrina Moreno/Axios
When Michael Gourrier describes what Hurricane Katrina took from him, he simply says: "What the water didn't get, the mold and mildew got."
Inside The Answer Brewpub on Broad Street, he tells me he fled the city he was born in with "this," forming a minuscule space between his thumb and index finger.
The big picture: Twenty years ago, Gourrier — now a Richmonder lovingly known as "Mr. Jazz" — was still in New Orleans, where Katrina destroyed his ranch-style home and the decades' worth of LPs and photographs he had collected.
- He's one of hundreds of thousands of New Orleanians Katrina would displace.
- He misses the music. The food. But Eloise, his wife of 46 years, was tired of evacuating.
- Insurance rates had soared. The city gentrified, he says, with people moving in next to music clubs then complaining about the music.
What they're saying: "So when people in [New Orleans] ask me, when are you coming home? I tell them: I am home," he says proudly.
- "My home is Richmond, Virginia."
State of play: At 85, Gourrier has earned a reputation as the city's jazz historian — a title long set in New Orleans, where he says jazz was born.
- His encyclopedic music knowledge turned into a 50-year career in radio that started by sneaking jazz back into clubs that had gone disco.
- For 25 years, he was the drive-time voice on New Orleans' WWOZ, where his "We've Got Silver at Six" segment — listened to worldwide — became a fixture that even musician Horace Silver took notice of. Silver would later write a song in Gourrier's honor.
- After Katrina, he spent nearly two decades at Richmond's WRIR station, where he became the jazz director before retiring this year.
Zoom in: Gourrier landed in Richmond in January 2006, after pit stops in Houston and Austin. He was encouraged by friends at the Richmond Jazz Society who connected him with WRIR.
- He quickly became a fixture once again, hosting stages at the Richmond Folk Festival, becoming a guest lecturer at VCU and mentoring younger DJs.
- And he's loved the city right back, often joking that people say he should work for the Chamber of Commerce as Richmond's hype man.
The latest: Even while retired, Gourrier still wears his custom Mr. Jazz ring from a San Antonio craftsman, drives with a "MR JAZZ" license plate and excitedly widens his eyes when you ask him why preserving jazz is so important.
- He'll tell you about Congo Square, where enslaved Africans in New Orleans gathered to dance and drum, and how the Haitian Revolution influenced the genre.
- And he'll remind you that Richmond has a part in that story, too, with a music scene that's strong — even if it's getting more expensive and inaccessible.
The bottom line: "Jazz is America's classical music," he says. "In the time that I got left here, I'm gonna do whatever I can to expose people to it."