Offbeat Magazine's Michael Dominici interviewed Ben for the Jazz Fest '04 edition.
FEST FOCUS: PANORAMA JAZZ BAND (Lagniappe Stage, 2:55pm Sunday May 2nd)

MD - The Panorama Jazz Band play a wide spectrum of music with enthusiasm, intelligence, and wit. How did you first become interested and inspired to play?

BS - It's nice to be asked about myself and, of course I can't speak for every individual in the Panorama. I'm glad you feel the spirit and intelligence of this collection of musicians. I have the best group of people you could ever want to work with. The beautiful character of our music is due to the people who play it. I've heard other people play similar repertoire and it leaves me cold. I've always responded to rhythm and melody in a physical, sexual, spiritual way that I couldn't deny. Maybe this is what it's like to be gay (minus the oppression): "Wow, this is who I am. Can't change it, better go with it..." My first big musical epiphany happened at age 5 in my hometown, Annapolis, Maryland which has a very strong African presence going back to the earliest days of the slave trade. There was a parade (for 4th of July or Memorial Day or something) and the Annapolis Drum and Bugle Corps came down the street, a Black brass and percussion outfit. I don't remember any of the specifics, what kind of music they were playing (I don't think it was anything Caribbean like what goes on here) I just remember the power and the thrill of it and thinking, "I have to be part of that sound!" I had music in school but got into modern dance and choreography in high-school. Learned a lot about how to perform, how to present material to an audience, how to reach into yourself. I was able to get back to that feeling-level where you know what you want and nothing gets in your way. I went to college for dance and that was where I got reconnected to music. It was there (during the New Wave phase of pop music - Devo, the Talking Heads, Blondie et al) that I hit on to one of my major goals in life: to make music for people to party and dance to without electricity. Just good ol' people power. Started taking clarinet lessons and majored in music composition.

MD - Why the clarinet?

BS - I found it was the instrument I kept wanting to write for. Just loved the tone. At some point at school, a friend and I smoked a joint, he put on a Preservation Hall Jazz Band record and I heard Willie Humphrey play "Mood Indigo" with that furry, Albert system tone of his. I thought, "I can do that." I'd been playing the recorder for 10 or 12 years at that point, so I had a lot of confidence. But clarinet was harder than I expected.

MD - Who are some of your favorite clarinetists and what is it about their approach that speaks to you musically and otherwise?

BS - So many. After the Willie Humphrey experience, there was a long period where I listened exclusively to big band music, primarily Goodman and Ellington with all his great clarinetists, Barney Bigard, Russel Procope, Jimmy Hamilton and Johnny Hodges on alto and soprano sax. (The guy that turned me onto Hodges, a calypso singer in New York named Johnny Barracuda, described Hodges tone like "whipped cream on top of jelly.") I don't cry very often, but under the right circumstances, Hodges' reading of "Passion Flower" will break through all my psychic defenses. But all those great clarinetists - Bechet, Johnny Dodds - it was just their tone, really, that grabbed me. And all the energy, humor and brilliance that they put through it. The Smithsonian puts on a big festival every 4th of July on The Mall in DC and I went down one year. I'm walking around and I hear this clarinet riding out over top of a brass band. I'm thinking, "that's IT!" That was when I met Michael White for the first time. We talked. That was in 1985 and I'd been playing clarinet for a year and a half. I came to Jazz Fest in '87 and '88 then ran home, got my stuff and moved here with 100 bucks in my pocket. Michael and I have been close ever since. Later I discovered Alexandre Stelio and the other great Creole clarinetists from Martinique. We play a lot of their music. And the klezmer clarinetists, Naftule Brandwein and Dave Tarras. Both those styles opened up whole new ranges of expression.

MD - On one hand, one gets the impression that you simply like playing a variety of styles from various cultures that share a common musical thread. But, on a deeper level your music embraces a universal perspective and you bring a level of worldly sophistication and freshness to traditional jazz that seems to scream "It's all connected, we're all connected!" Is there a more spiritual purposefulness at play here as well?

BS - I've witnessed old Black ladies get off on the klezmer and old Jewish ladies hopping around to the Caribbean music we play. There's definitely an intention to bring people together and an attempt to show the Unity in human Diversity. There are clarinets all over the world. The Martinique bands and the klezmer bands both used a clarinet and trombone front-line. You have banjos and accordions in both styles. Our accordionist, Patrick Farrell, has been adapting the accordion to New Orleans style jazz. When people come in and hear us at the Seaport on Bourbon Street, they don't know what we're playing, but they dig it! They say, "what do you call that style of music?" And I tell them, "Well, actually it's several styles." But the fact that you have this one band playing these different styles, pulls them all together in folks' minds.

MD - Can music save the world?

BS - Well... Somebody needs to. That's a tough question, something I still struggle with. When I was in college and was just starting to dedicate myself to music as my life's work, Ronald Reagan was president and we all expected to look up one afternoon and see a series of mushroom clouds on the horizon. So the thought was "here I am dancing through the meadow with my flute while greedy, self-righteous madmen plot the end of everything good in the world." Recently I saw a film about what globalization is doing in places like Argentina and Chiapas, the havoc that American-style consumerism is wreaking on the natural environment and indigenous people all over. What am I doing about it? I haven't totally answered that question. But a lot of people sit around in despair asking themselves, "what can I do." We feel isolated and powerless. Music gives me courage and strength. Music gets past all the words to something authentic and positive we all share. Without it we'd be in worse shape than we are now. As a white, middle-class American, I feel an extra responsibility to represent something good and authentic in the world - the joy of being alive.

MD - Tell us about your background.

BS - White, middle-class all-American male. English, Swedish, Dutch, Welsh, German. I was raised as a Quaker and attend the meeting here in New Orleans. I have Quaker ancestors behind 3 of my 4 grandparents (the fourth one became convinced as an old lady...) Grew up in Maryland along the Chesapeake Bay (where people steam their crabs instead of boiling them, by the way....) We used to go down the end of our street and hang a chicken neck in the creek. You could pull up blue crabs all day long.

MD - What attracts you about New Orleans?

BS - Not boiled crabs... New Orleans is a place where people dance in the streets on a regular basis. It's a good antedote to some of the inhuman aspects of my cultural heritage. Like racism, greed, competition...

MD - What do you feel that The Panorama Jazz Band brings to the table?

BS - We're all immigrants here. But of all the people who leave their homes, very few of them come to New Orleans. New Orleans attracts the few, the proud, the rhythmic... We're a hard working band. People hear us on Bourbon St. and say, "this is what we were looking for!" It's not because we play that much actual New Orleans music, but because we play good-time party music that is not all hopped up on electricity. Human energy. We swing. We have this new brass band, The Panorama Brass Band, and we did a lot of Mardi Gras parades this year playing jazz, klezmer and everything else. People love it!

MD - You have had the opportunity to play in a variety of places and settings. How does that affect the way you perform and what are some of the most interesting, exciting, and most unexpected moments you've had?

BS - The biggest one for me is weddings. We do a lot of weddings. And everybody is in a good mood, ready to party. For the families, it's a really big moment in everybody's life and I love that we get to be part of that. Again, it's one of those authentic human situations. I love the moment in a Jewish wedding when they put the bride and groom up in the chairs and carry them around, everybody's dancing the hora in a big circle. That's a really high energy moment. And the band KEEPS playing, you think your chops are going to give out, but you CAN'T stop. So you stay with it and something else kicks in. Mardi Gras parades are like that for me, too. After you hit that wall of exhaustion (half-way through your fourth parade in three days, for example) you just give it up to the Great Spirit and keep going.

MD - What are some of your favorite places that you have traveled to? How have these experiences influenced you musically and otherwise?

BS - I've been to Europe a few times with a local dance company, Komenka, who do a whole Louisiana program. So you're switching from jazz to Cajun, to Mardi Gras... We went to France several times and played these little folk festivals in small towns. The best thing is always meeting musicians and dancers from all over the world, Latin America, Africa, Eastern-Europe, China, Malaysia. One thing that really surprised and affected me was the fact that, because we were American, we were automatically superstars to everybody. There was a group from Albania at one of these things and we could communicate a little in Italian. They would just follow us around smiling! It was a hell of a thing! And see, people in other parts of the world can not understand what it is to swing. There was a big jam session and everybody was playing the Bolivian folks song, "El Condor Pasa" (the melody that Paul Simon made into, "I'd rather be a hammer than a nail...") So, I took my turn at the mic and started doing a little run of the mill syncopation like any New Orleans jazzer would do. The place FELL OUT! We have something very special here that people in other parts of the world go nuts for! But on the other hand, we went to a little Gypsy festival in the very north of Hungary one year. They bussed us out to a little, dirt-poor village way the hell out there in the Carpathian basin. We're playing for a small crowd of Gypsies in the middle of a soccer field. In between dance numbers, we'd do a musical selection so the dancers could change costumes. So, we're half-way into "The St. Phillip Street Breakdown," a George Lewis number, and I feel something wet land on my right hand while I'm playing my solo. I look up and this tough motherfucker in the back row with his posse is sneering at me. Then he spits on me again and it lands on my shirt. So I stop playing and go for the guy. Lucky for me, the other cats in the band, Tony Green, Patrick Mackey, Ronnie Magri and Steve Calandra go, "Be cool, Ben, be cool." Them boys would have ripped me apart!

MD - In the grand scheme of things how important is Sidney Bechet's legacy and do you wish more was done in New Orleans to honor the great musical legacies of Bechet, Jelly Roll Morton, Professor Longhair and others that made significant contributions to our rich musical culture?

BS - In general, people dig music, but they don't really understand it. So people like Fess and Jellyroll are ignored by the general public and Milli Vanilli are big stars. And Bechet has to move to France. I think 99% of people hear music with their eyes. And that suits "Big Music," Sony and AOL Time Warner, just fine. You can lead a horse to water - and we should - but it will usually be missed by the mass consumer culture. The people who are ripe for what New Orleans offers will eventually find their way here. Some of us never leave!

MD - What's on the immediate and long term horizon for Ben Schenck and The Panorama Jazz Band?

BS - More weddings. That's top priority to us. The brass band just finished tracking a new CD that should be out in a few months. I'd like to get more festivals like the jazz fest and play in Europe with this group. And we're all really dying to get to Martinique. It's all in how you define success. We're not interested in living on the road - we got families. We want to make a living playing music that we love and get the chance to connect to different kinds of people. New Orleans allows us to do that.