New Orleans Radio Calling

As New Orleans' musicians scattered across the South in the days after Katrina, help came from an unlikely source: the tiny but venerable local public-radio jazz station WWOZ, which resumed operation just five days after the storm and used its Web site to connect the city's lost and devastated music community.

"WWOZ is a beacon out there that says, 'New Orleans is on the air,'" says New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival director Quint Davis. "So there's a voice and a presence in New Orleans. For a while, we didn't exist."

On September 1st, three days after the storm, WWOZ manager David Freedman, 61, was holed up with his wife in a Hot Springs, Arkansas, Comfort Inn, watching streaming news feeds on his laptop, unable to reach anyone he knew. "The first call I got was from my engineer in Dallas, who miraculously got through on my cell phone," says Freedman. Soon, the two had located their program director in Lake Charles, another engineer in Lafayette and their Webmaster somewhere on the road to South Carolina. With help from New Jersey sister station WFMU and emergency money wired from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, they set about getting a Webcast running and putting together an online crisis center.

On Saturday, September 3rd, the station resumed operation, streaming music and information about resources to help musicians find housing, health care, instruments and gigs. "It started with a jukebox of New Orleans music that one of my DJs had on MP3 files, and I recorded some announcements over the telephone from my motel room," says Freedman. By September 9th, most of the station's DJs were recording shows from wherever they were and sending them to be uploaded.

Webmaster Christian Kuffner performed the most Herculean task: restoring the station's Web site -- without his own computer. "I was trying to keep it up through libraries and Internet cafes," says Kuffner, who maintained a version of the site while en route to South Carolina to escape the storm. He posted the whereabouts of musicians who'd been located, then others started e-mailing him with more information. "Before I knew it, it took off on its own," says Kuffner, who received 800 e-mails a day in the weeks following the storm.

The list at wwoz.org, which accounted for roughly 1,000 displaced people, was a lifeline to New Orleans musicians. Ten days after the storm, Louisiana state troopers helped Freedman get into New Orleans to survey the damage to his studio. The roof was wrecked, but he was relieved there wasn't more damage. "We could theoretically be broadcasting from the city in three weeks," he says.

There are still many stumbling blocks (for one, the city might not let the WWOZ staff back in to broadcast), but Freedman is on a mission. "I think the rule here is to re-establish that this is New Orleans, and it's recognizable by its culture," he says. "If you don't have an active fountain of the culture, then it's just going to get packed away in a trunk."