ERIK SANZENBACH / L’Observateur / October 27, 1999

RESERVE – Special education and band students at East St. John HighSchool were treated to a special teacher on Thursday afternoon.

New Orleans pianist and recording artist Henry Butler regaled students with his piano playing and gave them a lecture on the how to listen to music.

Butler taught the special class as part of the Teach for America Awareness Week. In the past, Teach for America has brought in such localcelebrities as Mike Ditka, Mayor Marc Morial and Sen. Paulette Irons toteach kids about their jobs and how education relates to their different careers.

The Teach for America Corps is a federal program that provides teachers for school systems. The corps has teachers in every school in St. JohnParish.

Superintendent Chris Donaldson said Teach for America teachers have really helped out in a system that needs more certified teachers.

“In general, they are great help,” said Donaldson, “and they are all very energetic.”Butler, who has been playing piano since he was 7 years old, told the East St. John students that all the things they learn in school would help themin life.

“I knew I didn’t have anything to lose by going to all these classes,” Butler told the kids. “I even discovered that algebra helped me in my reasoningability.”Butler lectured on the different components of music and how they work together to make songs. He also went through the different styles ofmusic from the blues to modern alternative rock. He illustrated hislecture by playing examples on the piano.

One of the components of music that Butler stressed was rhythm. In orderto make music, a musician has to have a steady beat.

“One has to have steadiness and stability,” Butler said. “Rhythm is beingconsistent, and one must be consistent in life. Learning the beat makesone concentrate.”Butler graduated from Southern University with a degree in voice. While incollege he was taken under the wing of another famous New Orleans musician and teacher, Alvin Batiste. Butler said that up until college hehad mostly been playing pop and New Orleans-style rhythm and blues.

With Batiste’s tutelage, he learned how to play jazz piano and also discovered the importance of learning other cultural music styles. He is anexpert on African rhythms and Cuban/Caribbean jazz. He has also studiedBulgarian and Russian folk music. All of it, he said, has helped him tobecome a better musician.

Butler has been blind since infancy, and many of the East St. John Highstudents were curious as to how he plays the piano when he can’t see.

He explained to the students that he knows where the keys are by the different groupings of the black keys on the keyboard and where they are in relation to the white keys.

“You don’t need to see to play the piano,” claimed Butler, grinning. “In fact,some of my sighted friends are slower on the piano than I am, because they are always looking where their hands are.”Butler stressed that a disability shouldn’t stop anybody from getting an education. He told of how he went to a school for the blind in Baton Rougeand studied English, math, history, civics and science.

“I had fun in all those classes, and I learned a lot,” Butler said.

Today, Butler has a trio and a quartet and he travels all over the country playing music. He has just returned from San Francisco, where he and histrio had been playing in several clubs.

Butler’s latest release is a CD titled Blues After Sunset on Black Top Records.

As the class wound down, Butler played a composition he wrote called Orleans Inspiration, a piece that contains all the elements of New Orleans music, from the rollicking piano style of Professor Longhair to the hard- core early rock and roll rhythms of Fats Domino.

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