By CHRISTOPHER MADSEN

"Look at this," Satoru Ohashi said to me as I approached him for an interview. On his computer monitor were pictures of instruments lying on a sidewalk. "This is my friend's bass and amp, completely ruined." His friend, of course, lives in New Orleans, as does he—or did, before Hurricane Katrina. Satoru scrolled down further to reveal pictures of a house devastated, a living room waterlogged and its contents strewn about haphazardly. We both just shook our heads helplessly.

Satoru Ohashi (right) performing at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival in April 2005. (Photo courtesy of Satoru Ohashi)

Satoru, 34, is the Juilliard Jazz program's newest student. He joined us almost immediately after both orientation and the destruction of New Orleans. The subject of much attention since his arrival, Satoru is a member of New Orleans University's Louis Armstrong Jazz Quintet and was featured in a recent article in The New York Times. On recommendation of a colleague, Victor Goines, the artistic director of jazz studies and himself a New Orleans native, agreed to hear a live trumpet audition from Satoru over the phone, and subsequently offered him the opportunity to do graduate work at Juilliard. I sat down with Satoru for a few minutes in the lobby of what has become his new institution for learning.

"When I saw a picture of how big it was, that's when I realized," he said. Satoru, who is originally from Japan (he studied Japanese literature at Hosei University in the early '90s), fled New Orleans the day before Katrina hit. It's no coincidence that this was also the day that the evacuation order was officially announced by Mayor C. Ray Nagin. "They should have told us what would happen," Satoru said, instead of waiting until the last minute to effectively deem just how dire the situation was.

"I evacuated one year earlier, for [Hurricane] Ivan," Satoru said, recalling that the media frenzy surrounding the relatively non-threatening storm in August 2004 was much more intense than the short, one-day notice that residents received about Katrina. But why would a storm of such magnitude go virtually ignored by the media until it was too late? "I think that the mayor and the media went crazy about Ivan the year before," prompting some unnecessary evacuations, Satoru said. He thinks that perhaps they didn't want to make the same mistake this time. Obviously, this decision proved wrong, as Katrina annihilated the Gulf Coast with the power of two Ivans.

"For Katrina, we didn't expect a threat until after she hit Florida," he said. Ivan took longer to move through the Gulf, so there was more time to prepare. In fact, residents were given almost a week's notice to prepare for the onslaught of Ivan, whereas Katrina started to be taken seriously only a few days before it hit. "For Ivan, I packed my car full of belongings and drove to Houston, 24 hours." This time, all he had time to pack were two trumpets, a passport, a sleeping bag, DAT tapes, and some expensive headphones.

Satoru told me that, although he remembered his practice tapes, he couldn't play along with them because he left his recorder in the glove compartment of his car, which is sitting on the third level of a parking garage in the French Quarter. "I [wanted] to send my friend over to check my car, but since there's another [storm] coming, I don't want to bother him," he said, referring to Hurricane Rita, which, at the time of this writing, is threatening New Orleans all over again. He has no idea if his car is untouched, broken into, or stolen altogether. Luckily, however, one of his friends sent him a DAT recorder so that his normal practice regimen can finally resume.

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Satoru exudes a natural friendliness, and despite all he has been through, he doesn't harbor any visible resentment about what has happened. I asked how it feels to be so abruptly thrust into this new experience at Juilliard. "The people are so nice, and I'm really glad to join," he said. "But [as] for the class situation, it's still confusing." A week after his acceptance into the program his class schedule is still in the process of becoming finalized.

Nearly all first-year students have a lot on their plates, but Satoru is clearly dealing with more issues than most. Having him around serves as a great reminder of what a positive attitude can do. After all, while enduring all that loss, he's now studying at the premier jazz performance program in the country. It's a testament to his talent as well as his mindset.

Christopher Madsen, who earned an artist's diploma in jazz this past May, is performance coordinator in the jazz studies department.