New Orleans musician builds new life playing in Northeast Tarrant

The soothing sounds of Frank Sinatra fill Keller’s Café Medi every Friday night, but there’s no big band or even a four-piece in sight. It’s just one man, Bill Haden Jr., with his saxophone, a microphone, an amp and a computer, which provides the piano, strings, drums, horns, bass and other accompaniment.

The 72-year-old New Orleans native emulates the lounge musicians of old as a one-man band using a computer program called Band-in-a-Box to create the other instruments. He has more than 400 songs in his catalog.

“I get all the credit and I get all the blame,” Haden jokes. “I do it for the enjoyment that I get. Little children come up and have never seen anyone play live.”

Like a lot of New Orleans transplants, Haden’s journey to North Texas started 11 years ago when Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Gulf Coast. More than 80 percent of New Orleans flooded after the storm, causing catastrophic damage and loss of life in late August 2005.

“Even though my home didn’t have a lot of damage, I couldn’t get to it,” Haden says. “All the disruption to the roads, the trees and the power lines. I spent three-and-a-half weeks in a hotel in Lafayette waiting for the roads to open back up.”

Lifelong musician

Haden’s whole life had been built around music. He was first inspired to pick up an instrument, he says, when he heard the music coming from the African-American church across the street from his home as a child in Louisiana. He started with the trumpet, which became difficult because he had asthma, he says. He dabbled in guitar before finally deciding on the saxophone, his instrument of choice.

“The music just got attached to me, I guess,” he says.

Haden also comes from a musical family. His grandfather was a music teacher, and his grandmother played the organ at church. His father, Bill Haden Sr., played the saxophone and clarinet and was a member of the New Orleans Jazz Club. And now, another generation is carrying on the family tradition. Two of his five grandchildren play instruments, at Indian Springs Middle School and Keller High School.

Music is Haden’s passion, but it was never his day job. He joined the Louisiana Air National Guard at age 18 and served for 32 years. For 25 years, he worked as a federal civil service technician at the base, too. He has also worked at a glass company and, later, as a draftsman for the same military unit from which he’d retired.

“I knew too many guys back in New Orleans who were destitute from being professional musicians,” Haden says. “Unless you’ve got the right people booking you and everything, it’s a hard life. I never lived that kind of life. I had a family at the time. I had no aspirations to go on the road.”

Not that he hasn’t had some big gigs. He’s played the Mercedes-Benz Superdome, home of the New Orleans Saints, in front of 10,000 people. He’s opened for bands such as The Temptations and Frankie Ford.

For more than five years, he played during brunch at a casino in Mississippi. Eventually, the band lost the gig because customers would remain at their table to listen to the music, causing a line to back out the door.

And he’s in the Westbank Musicians Hall of Fame, which honors musicians from the New Orleans area. Haden was inducted as a member of The Nobles in 1999 and again as a member of Burgundy in 2003.

Through his long career, though, Haden has never learned to read music — he just plays what’s in his heart, he says: “It’s a gift that you have the ear to be able to hear something and reproduce it or know what it’s supposed to sound like.”

When he moved to North Texas, Haden, a divorced father of two, performed at various senior centers and nursing homes in the area. He did that until 2014, racking up miles on his van. That’s when he met Manos Moursi, owner of Café Medi, who invited him to perform there every week. He also gigs at DeVivo Brothers in Keller and its Latin-fusion sister restaurant in Southlake. (Café Medi has locations in Keller and Hurst, www.cafemedi.com.)

Moursi says customers dine at the restaurant specifically to see Haden perform.

“He’s a really good guy as a person and he’s a very good musician,” Moursi says. “I see the response from the customers — they really like him. His voice and the songs he chooses take you back in your memory.”

This story was originally published August 24, 2016 at 11:40 AM with the headline "New Orleans musician builds new life playing in Northeast Tarrant."