O. Perry Walker to hold benefit for tsunami victims

O. Perry Walker to hold benefit for tsunami victims

O. Perry Walker Senior High School will hold a “Jam Session” to benefit the victims of the recent tsunami disaster in Japan. The benefit will take place on Tuesday, April 12, 2011, at 7:00 p.m. at  the Suite Jazz Café (3680 Holiday Drive, Algiers, La.) and will feature entertainment by the Rebirth Brass Band, the Roots of Music, the TBC Brass Band, and the O. Perry Walker Jazz Ensemble.

Additional performers were being added last week. Admission is $5.

All monies raised would go to Yoshio’s Wonderful World of Jazz Foundation in Japan. Mr. Yoshio, a renowned trumpeter who is known as “the Louis Armstrong of Japan,” comes from Japan to New Orleans every August to perform at the Satchmo Summer Fest. For the past two years, Yoshio Toyama has donated many instruments to the O. Perry Walker High School music program, the Roots of Music, and other bands in the Crescent City.

Last year, Mr. Yoshio, his wife Keiko and members of his foundation visited New Orleans as they have for many years during the Satchmo Summer Fest and surprised the West Bank school by donating 16 instruments and $1,000 to O. Perry Walker band director Wilbert Rawlings presented him with an official band jacket with his name on it and declared him an honorary member of the O. Perry Walker Mar­ching Band.

Mr. Yoshio and his wife first visited New Orleans in 1968 to study jazz and ended up staying six years. He returned two decades later but was discouraged by what he described as a major drop in support for young artists who played in the city’s many marching bands that once could boast of shiny instruments and strong community support. The city, like the support for local music programs, had changed dramatically, he said.

“But in the ’90s, (the instruments) were all beat up, and kids had guns and drugs,” Mr. Yoshio told the local daily paper last year “It was sad for me. The places we used to visit had become so dangerous we were afraid to go there.”

Mr. Yoshio and his wife returned to Japan and started the Wonderful World of Jazz Foundation so they could find a way to present New Orleans teenagers with horns instead of guns.

“The people of Japan wanted to send horns to New Orleans be­cause Louis Armstrong gave such a wonderful present called jazz to the world,” he told the local daily paper. “We’ve been doing it for 15 years. We’ve brought 760 instruments to New Orleans.”