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Butler did it
Blind, award-winning musician and photographer Henry Butler accepts no limitations
BY TAMARA WIEDER

HENRY BUTLER HAS never been one to shy away from a challenge. Blind since birth, the New Orleans native took up piano and voice while a student at the Louisiana School for the Blind, and began playing professionally at age 14. A four-time W.C. Handy "Best Blues Instrumentalist — Piano" nominee, Butler and his funk-infused R&B and jazz have won fans and critical acclaim for decades.

But being a blind musician isn’t the only way he has surmounted a potential obstacle. Henry Butler is also an accomplished photographer whose work has been exhibited throughout the United States. "I’ve come to believe, I’ve come to know," says Butler, who as a fledgling photographer relied on instinct and intuition rather than sight, "that if you really believe you can do something, you will do it."

Q: When did you first know that you’d be a musician? Was there a moment when you just knew?

A: I think it was probably in the sixth grade, when I knew that it would be a substantial part of my life, when I did my first arrangement for two trombones and a piano. I guess it was more the reaction that I got from it than the arrangement itself, although the accomplishment was good for my little, young psyche. I guess I kind of fed off the congrats for a little while. Then, when I moved to the seventh grade, they gave me one of the school-dance bands to arrange for, and I thought that was kind of fun.

Q: When did you decide that music was going to be your profession, and not just a hobby?

A: I started actually playing professionally when I was 14 years old. At that age, coming from a poor family — of course, we never called ourselves poor; we didn’t have a lot of money, but when I started making money at 14, I thought, well, this is not all bad. Then I started working with other bands, a little more sophisticated groups, with school teachers, when I was a junior in high school. My independent study was to do all of the arrangements for that group. All that was fun. It was long school days, and on the weekends pretty long nights, but the nights were fun.

Q: I read that when you were at the Louisiana School for the Blind, musical involvement was pretty common among the students.

A: It was. It was a strong musical program. Out of about 120 students, you figure almost two-thirds of the students were involved in some musical group or entity. Most of us were involved in several. For instance, I was a member of the choir and the band, and sometimes glee club, and whatever school-dance bands we had, I did most of the stuff for that. It was good. And also, it was a great way to develop discipline.

Q: You switched your major from piano to voice, and one of the reasons was that there just weren’t that many Braille scores available for piano?

A: Yeah, and not only that, I think the main reason was, you know, blind people never get a chance to sight-read a score. They have to memorize from the very beginning. Because if you’re looking at the score, as a blind person, you have to have your hands on the score — and obviously you need two hands to play the piano. So until they can figure out a different way to make these scores accessible to blind people ... also, I didn’t really want to cheat by learning the scores by rote from records.

Q: Why?

A: Because I really wanted to learn how to read music. Even if it meant in a really in-depth score, memorizing from the very beginning. The last score that I worked on was Sonata Pathétique by Beethoven, and if you know anything about that music, you know it’s not that easy. That score came in three or four Braille volumes, and it’s laid out like a book, so there’s no way you can sight-read it.

Q: That seems like an example of you having to tweak your musical plan because your blindness has presented an obstacle. Have there been many of those instances?

A: I think each person is tweaking either their musical plan or their plan in general once they realize obstacles — I’m not sure I call them obstacles as much as I would think of them as vehicles that teach or give guidance. I know of one or two blind players of either piano or organ who decided to go on and make a go of it, even though it takes a lot longer to learn a score. There was one guy at the University of Michigan who did it for a while, but frankly, I don’t think he succeeded on the concert tour, mainly because of that. You can’t take a year or two or three to learn a piece. Too many people out there, too much competition.

Q: How’d you first get interested in photography?

A: I had been going to visual-art exhibits, and I’d been trying to figure out a way to really understand — over and above an intellectual realization of what people were describing to me — I was trying to figure out how I could get something spiritually, or something inwardly. It was in 1984 when I was dating this beautiful lady, and she was full of artistic tendencies, and we would go out to see a lot of exhibits. One day we were with a screenwriter friend and his wife, and we went to see this exhibit, and they were all describing what this photo looked like, and the composition of something else, and a painting over there, and intellectually, okay, I could sort of understand what they were saying, but I just felt so empty. I couldn’t figure why they were so excited by looking at these images. So at dinner, I just decided that I wanted to be a participant in the visual-arts world. And I just made a decision that I was going to start shooting pictures. I was going to actually become a photographer.

 

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Issue Date: March 18 - 24, 2005
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