By Dan Emerson
At the 2024 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, clarinetist and bandleader Doreen Ketchens finished her set in the Economy Hall tent and announced her next gig: “We’ll be back on the street tomorrow,” she told the audience.
On the street in the French Quarter is where Ketchens has become a fixture and crowd favorite since she began performing there in 1987 with her late husband, sousaphonist Lawrence Ketchens.
Ketchens, 58, grew up in the music-rich Treme, where she lived three doors away from a home where the influential Dirty Dozen Bras Band practiced. It was the home of co-founder and saxophonist Roger Lewis, who made a prescient prediction about Ketchens’ music career.
Ketchens studied clarinet in elementary school, beginning as a fifth-grader at Joseph Craig Elementary. Her first choice was flute, but most of the girls picked that instrument, so she decided on the clarinet. In junior high school, her band director, Donald Richardson, provided encouragement, and her talent on the challenging horn began to attract attention.
As a teenager, Ketchens had a very specific musical ambition: “I wanted to be the principal clarinetist with the New Orleans Philharmonic and then the New York Philharmonic.”After John F. Kennedy High School in New Orleans, Noreen auditioned and was accepted to NOCCA, Louisiana’s Arts Conservatory in New Orleans, where she studied with classical clarinetist Stanley Weinstein.
Ketchens also attended Delgado Community College, Loyola University of New Orleans, Southern University In New Orleans, and won scholarships, from the New York Philharmonic, and the University of Hartford’s The Hartt School She also completed an internship with the symphony orchestra in Hartford. Ketchens has a doctorate in music from Five Towns College.
Noreen worked her way through conservatories and college as a chef, and met arranger and sousaphonist Lawrence Ketchens at Loyola.
“I wasn’t even thinking about jazz at that time.” Noreen says she took up jazz to impress her future husband, and “fell in love with jazz;” the two soon became street music fixtures in the French Quarter.
“We grew the business together,” she says, referring to the enterprise known as Doreen’s Jazz, “The reason I am a female bandleader today is, I was rejected so much as a clarinet player by all the other bands (in New Orleans), especially the older guys play who play traditional. We had been individually playing with other people. He found a lot of work, even tours but nobody wanted to hire women.
“One time, (R&B singer-songwriter) Teddy Riley needed a clarinet player for a tour. Lawrence told him ‘My girlfriend plays clarinet.’ He turned it down because he said having women on tour causes lot of problems; plus he’d have to get an extra hotel room… all the flimsy excuses for why not. Then, on tour (Riley) had two male clarinet players, instead of just hiring me.”
As a teenager growing up on St. Phillip Street, Noreen’s classical practicing could be heard at a nearby sweet shop, where she worked. “One day Roger Lewis came up to me at the sweet shop and said ‘You’re going to be the first female to record with the Dirty Dozen, mark my words.’”
Decades later, Ketchens joined the Dirty Dozen to add some Treme funk to the Black Crowes’ album “Three Snakes and One Charm.”
While she does tour in the U.S. and abroad, Ketchens has earned much of her international fan base through what could be described as “touring in reverse.” People from around the world come to her in what may be the most high-profile busking spot in the world.
Ketchens’ current, favorite French Quarter venue is the 700 block of Royal Street, near Rouse’s Quarter grocery store. “People can hear the clarinet for two blocks.
“Playing the streets is a very humbling experience. People see you and assume certain things about you. When you play really well and they hear you assume another layer of things about you. The streets taught us to play hard and well, how to read an audience, and also to entertain. A lot of entertainers play what they want, period. We’re we trying to get people to stop, listen and donate. We’ve got to play what they want to hear.”
That might mean playing “Saints” five times a day, or “House of the Rising Sun,” which Doreen enjoys singing. “We can’t be condescending; we’ve made more money on those songs than anything else.”
Ketchens has been called a female Louis Armstrong, partly because of her awe-inspiring clarinet technique, and ability to hit and hold high notes. Ketchens has performed for four U.S. presidents, and frequently been featured in documentaries about new Orleans, and HBO’s Treme T V series. With an extensive, self-produced discography and overseas tours, She’s become as much of a modern ambassador for New Orleans music as her trumpet counterpart, Kermit Ruffins.
Those two aforementioned songs will be part of her set at the Twin Cities Jazz festival, which she’ll play at 6 p.m., Friday, June 20 on the main stage.
But her music should not be considered background music, she says. “We’ve never wanted to be background music; even when we play a wedding, it’s not background music. And we like to get people involved.”
Her Mears Park set will include several evergreens – a spiritual to start off, also “Saints” and “House of the Rising Sun.” And, Ketchens will put her audience-reading skills – honed over the decades on the gritty French Quarter streets – to use, and piece together a spur-of-the-moment set.
Her band at the Festival will also include pianist Leslie Martin – “an absolutely wonderful musician who has played with the Squirrel Nut Zippers” – her daughter, Doreen Garner, on drums, and electric bassist Christian Mitchem. Doreen’s husband, who previously provided the band’s bass lines, died of a heart attack in January, at the young age of 61. Doreen is soldiering on as leader: “You gotta do what you gotta do”
Two days after her TCJF appearance, Ketchens will perform in the Tuba Bach Festival in Big Rapids, Mich. From the conservatories to the streets…and back again.
More on the 2025 Twin Cities Jazz Festival at http://www.jazzpolice.com/archives/18223
Link to article: http://www.jazzpolice.com/archives/18160
