In New Orleans, faded memories are all that's left of the Jazz basketball franchise 

• Cover design by Derek Carlisle

NEW ORLEANS—Jory Dexter Woodis is someone with a pair of resume items that don't come around very often.

A former resident of Orem, Woodis currently plies his trade as a clarinet player in a half-dozen bands that gig in and around the French Quarter of New Orleans. These might not be names known terribly well by those outside of the Crescent City, but the bands and venues he's associated with ring true in NOLA.

They're the reason he left Utah, in search of a place to fully embrace his role as a trad-jazz horn player (who, in addition to the clarinet, counts the saxophone as a gig-ready instrument). His timing was unfortunate, though, moving to New Orleans at a pivotal moment in recent history.

Traveling in his car with his wife, Brittney, Woodis received a call on the second day of his cross-country move, informing him that the country was largely shutting down due to a sudden uptick in COVID-19. Arriving in New Orleans, he was now in a new city with no gigs—as compared to the near-dozen performances he might give in a typical week these days.

"I play with a lot of different people," he said with a bit of understatement. "I have six regular gigs that I play every week, and pick up another four or five at random."

Speaking of random, this writer crossed paths with Woodis due to the significant quirk on his resume: He's maybe the only working musician in New Orleans who's actually played jazz music at a Utah Jazz basketball game.

He's quick to point out that he's not a sports nut, let alone a basketball fan. Yet he enjoys the quirky distinction of having played second lines—or the celebratory, brass band-led parades that are also staples of NOLA funerals—at Salt Lake City's Vivint Arena.

"There was a series of restaurants down below the court, clubs for people with season tickets," Woodis recalls. "They would hire us to walk around and do a second line parade through the restaurants before the games. I did about seven or eight of them. We'd dress up and play during the pre-games."

As Woodis remembers it, the Jazz franchise was more committed to the continuation of the team's name and spirit at that point in time, eventually letting Woodis and his Utahn second line go due to costs.

"Nowadays, I don't think they're concerned about it," Woodis says of the Jazz-and-jazz combo. "When we started doing it, they really wanted it. But we heard there were some budgeting issues, and they didn't want to pay us what we wanted and ... they just weren't that interested."

The name Utah Jazz has long been a light and lazy punchline, of sorts, with the state not necessarily known for a deep history of producing players (and fans) of the great American art form. And yet...

City Weekly tried to break down that misunderstood connection in a cover story last March, titled All That Utah Jazz. In it, we noted the many musicians who do perform jazz in and around SLC and its environs, while also giving some ink to the oft-forgotten franchise that moved from New Orleans to Salt Lake, taking the "Jazz" name with it.

Here, we restart that story and travel back in time to the National Basketball Association of the mid-1970s...

History
The New Orleans Jazz were a debuting National Basketball Association (NBA) team in the 1974-75 season, a few years ahead of the arrival of Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, who would help relaunch the league into national popularity. The Jazz of that time were a team in search of an identity, and they found the personification of that in a guard named "Pistol" Pete Maravich, a former star player at nearby Louisiana State University.

Though their LSU linchpin gave the team a leading scorer and (theoretically) a ticket-selling centerpiece, a run of knee issues kept the highlight-creating Maravich from ever achieving his highest ceiling as a player.

The team, meanwhile, listed through five uneven and curious seasons in New Orleans. After splitting time in two smaller arenas during their debut season (which ended with a moribund 23-59 record), the squad moved to the Superdome.

Ever-linked with the term "cavernous," the outsize Superdome stadium didn't result in a meaningful change in the fortunes of the NOLA version of the Jazz. The team, if anything, turned in a consistently unimpressive record for the balance of its term: 38-44 in the bicentennial season of 1975-76; 35-47 in 1976-77; and 39-43 in 1977-78.

In their final New Orleans-based season of 1978-79, the Jazz regressed to a woeful record of 26-56, only a shade better than their initial campaign.

Wikipedia, in one, single, gruesome paragraph, summarizes the dysfunction and pure bad luck that seemed to haunt the franchise: "The Jazz ultimately compiled a win–loss record of 161–249 (.393) in five seasons in New Orleans. After what turned out to be their final season in Louisiana, the Jazz were dealt a further humiliation when the Los Angeles Lakers selected Magic Johnson with the first overall pick in the 1979 NBA draft. The pick would have been the Jazz's had they not traded it to acquire Gail Goodrich two years earlier. Also, the Jazz had given up the rights to Moses Malone in order to regain one of the three first-round picks used for the Goodrich trade; the combination of Johnson and Malone blossoming into Hall of Famers and Goodrich's ineffective, injury-ruined few years in New Orleans made this transaction one of the most lopsided in NBA history."

The 1979-80 season saw the franchise in a new city, state and time zone, with the Utah Jazz returning pro basketball to the Beehive State after the Utah Stars' short-ish run in the now-defunct American Basketball Association (1970-76).

The Stars, too, had a weird historical lineage, with the franchise morphing out of the Anaheim Amigos (1967-68) and then Los Angeles Stars (1968-1970) of the ABA, a league that gave the NBA a decent run for its money during the late '60s and early '70s. Several of the ABA's teams were eventually folded into the NBA, thus effectively eliminating the ABA from the nation's sporting map, though the Utah Stars (who played at the Salt Palace) weren't among that crop, having been ingloriously dropped from the league during the 1975-76 season due to financial woes.

If they'd have held on a little longer, they'd have likely joined the squads that blended into the NBA the very next season.

SLC basketball fans, then, had a relatively brief dry spell, with the New Orleans Jazz moving lock, stock and barrel to Salt Lake City in time for the 1979-80 season, which dovetailed nicely with the Bird/Johnson-lead renaissance in the NBA. The franchise's former city, meanwhile, had to go to the woodshed for a good long while, having lost not only the Jazz, but also its predecessor, the New Orleans Buccaneers, which toiled in the ABA from 1967-1970.

Legacy
In 2000, a basketball-size arena was built in the shadow of the Superdome. Several teams (including the Minnesota Timberwolves and the then-Vancouver Grizzlies) flirted with moves to NOLA. By 2002, though, the new stadium coincided with the Charlotte Hornets' desire to switch locales, thus giving birth to the New Orleans Hornets.

Following 2005's devastating Hurricane Katrina, the Hornets would spend time in Oklahoma City for two full seasons, before fully re-establishing residence in NOLA for the 2007-08 season. Finally, in 2013, the ties to Charlotte would be severed with the franchise renaming itself the Pelicans.

• Courtesy Photo
• Jazz musician Jory Dexter Woodis moved from Utah to New Orleans in 2020.

These days, it's hard to find much of a reference point to the New Orleans Jazz in NOLA, let alone any notices of shorter-run franchises like the Buccaneers. In the French Quarter, you can walk down almost any block and see historical signs and markers that tell the story of the 300-plus-year-old city's past, with no shortage of them dedicated to music, food and other forms of culture. Sports, though, are something of a secondary concern in New Orleans, with the Saints dominating the local sports coverage, LSU running a solid second. Then, and only then, you've got that Pelican Fever.

Anecdotally, this can be seen in the city's street fashion choices, too. On a given day, you'll see two-dozen pieces of Saints paraphernalia worn by the good citizens of New Orleans before seeing a single bit of Pelicans gear, though the team has NBA relevance with a 29-28 mark as of press time, which includes a grim, record-warping 10-game losing streak.

Meanwhile, the only time this writer saw a New Orleans Jazz throwback tee in the wild was at an indie rock show. Figures!

We tried to get some additional historical background from the main franchises discussed here—the Utah Jazz and the New Orleans Pelicans—but phone calls, emails, and messages through Facebook and Instagram all went unreturned by the teams' PR and marketing staffs. When it comes to the New Orleans Jazz, it seems, all bets are off on people wanting to discuss them.

Jory Dexter Woodis, for example, is just one more person without an opinion about the Jazz' half-decade run in NOLA, though his quietude on the topic is understandable. Asked if he'd ever played a gig in NOLA and then had a fan ask him about the New Orleans Jazz, he's quick with a simple answer.

"No," he says. "No, I never have."

Thomas Crone served as City Weekly's music editor in 2022. Still contributing to the CW, he now lives and writes in New Orleans, Louisiana.