A lovely legacy

Some days, the doors of the small elevator inside the old Art Deco firehouse that shelters the Arts Council will yawn wide open, but there won’t be anything there.

“We always joke that is Derek coming to check on us,” says the council’s events manager, Jonathan Grimes. “We still believe he is with us.”

Before he died peacefully last September following a long illness, Derek Gordon had transformed his leadership post at the Arts Council and the organization’s role in local culture. Baton Rouge began to take itself seriously as an arts city.

Gordon was a pied piper for artists and funding and blended in with creatives, children and officials alike.

Sunday in the Park, River City Jazz Masters and the Debbie Allen Dance Residency are all parts of his legacy.

Even near the end, Gordon never stopped detailing new ideas. Hospice care was at his home when Allen, the acclaimed choreographer and actor, saw him for the last time. They talked about her upcoming Baton Rouge show.

“It was more me talking and him listening,” Allen recalls. “He was authoritative, but with a gentle hand. He could make people understand why art was valuable, why [certain projects] needed to happen.”

Gordon defined the term “boomerang citizen.” He was grown here, in the fecund silt of the Mississippi River, and groomed at LSU, where he studied vocal performance before taking off. He then steered Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York City, but came back to Baton Rouge in 2006 armed with a Rolodex of big connections, ready to help his hometown turn heads on a national level.

“He was such a champion of not only the arts in general but of artists,” says Ana Andricain, a Broadway performer who, prompted by a fast friendship with Gordon, moved back home to Baton Rouge a couple of years ago. “He really wanted to make a difference.”

Gordon worked to stretch the definition of art and performance, to convert folks who thought they didn’t belong in a concert hall or who could never imagine signing their names to grant proposals.

Chancelier “Xero” Skidmore, a spoken word poet and local arts education advocate, recalls how many times Gordon asked his opinion on creative initiatives in public schools.

Skidmore regrets not sitting down with Gordon more often.

“I always just had a lot going on,” Skidmore says, shaking his head. “I was always too busy, and then it was too late.”

Gordon often hired John Gray, a jazz trumpeter, to perform for Arts Council functions. He helped Gray learn how to match his performance to the mood of the crowd. As Gray riffed on his horn, he would watch Gordon closely.

“He had the pedigree and chops to function at a high level,” Gray says, admiring Gordon’s ability to work a room and make a great impression. “He was a cool cat. You don’t talk a person’s ear off at a social event before you move on.”

At their performance honoring Gordon earlier this year, Debbie Allen’s dancers stretched out their limbs beneath purple lights and glided across the floor on graceful, tough bare feet, their faces filled with joy and then wracked with soundless sobs.

Allen explained Gordon’s love singing and church, jazz and opera; the way he poured himself into this city, and how she will return again and again even after his passing.

Part of that performance displayed her own feelings of pain, but the gestures of her dancers told of something else.

They revealed an eternal striving; a seeking that could heal her and others who grieve, that could become a guiding spirit to keep an organization and a city moving forward, though it will find a new rhythm hammered out by a new leader, a poetic soul learning fast how to become a local.

That man is Eric Holowacz.

“All the things he did, all the inspiration Gordon gave—you’re talking about how to keep that lamp lit,” Allen says. “That light has to stay on.”