MEADOW BRIDGE - It's seventh-period band class at Meadow Bridge Junior-Senior High, and the band has a John Philip Sousa march to play.

Teacher Travis Riddle frowns thoughtfully at the sheet music. "You know, a march is really close to jazz," he decides. "Let's see if we can convert it."

The kids have done this before. Clarinets, trombones and trumpets take their places in the converted old shop room; there isn't enough sheet music to go around, so everyone shares. There aren't enough kids to play all of the parts, so Riddle picks up the battered school-issue tuba himself.

"This'd be nice on a trap set," he muses out loud. A tall girl in the back of the room grins, abandons her snare drum and slips into the seat of a drum set in the corner. As if on cue, the conductorless band slides into something a lot jazzier than Sousa ever intended.

Three years ago, Riddle was a New Orleans jazz musician.

When they heard Hurricane Katrina was coming, he and his wife, Wendy, evacuated with their children. They watched on a hotel lobby TV in Alabama as their entire way of life was destroyed.

They tried to get help from FEMA, but the "agent" who called was a scammer trying to steal their identities. They tried to go home, but an 18-wheeler fell apart on the road in front of them. A piece of flying metal gutted their truck and killed the driver behind them.

When they finally got home, they found nothing but filthy flood wreckage. Wendy's uncle, missing in the storm for two weeks, was dead. Neighbors were starting to turn against each other.

"We spent most of the Christmas season burning everything we owned," Riddle says. Four different insurance adjusters tried to wriggle out of the claim. "We were going to have to go bankrupt."

Riddle brought his family home, to the place where he grew up: Southern West Virginia.

They stopped at a Wal-Mart, to buy some necessities. They were inside 10 minutes - long enough for somebody to notice their Louisiana license plate.

"Welcome to West Virginia," said the note they found on their car. "We hope you want to stay."

'Being in the band is cool'

Leah Whitt - the trap-set drummer - is the only remaining member of the Meadow Bridge band, pre-Dr. Riddle.

"I was here when we had four people," she says. Yes, in the whole band.

Meadow Bridge, population 307, is a country community surrounded by farms and forests. The whole school has only about 250 kids, grades seven through 12. Music teachers never stayed; the kids saw 17 different ones in the past 20 years.

Then "Doc" Riddle showed up. There are 54 kids in the band now.

"Everybody just wanted to join the band all of a sudden," says ninth-grader Austin Midkiff, Whitt's partner on percussion. "Dr. Riddle just had this passion. You could tell there was going to be a future with it."

At the end of band practice, it's jam session time. Now, it doesn't matter if there's a shortage of sheet music; as eighth-grader Nick Rookstool points out, "You don't need music to play jazz." Rookstool grabs his trumpet, Whitt her sticks and Riddle joins in with a clarinet. An eighth-grader in a blue-and-gray Meadow Bridge Wildcats football jersey - the trombonist who, during practice, wheedled the rest of the band into playing a piece called "Furioso" one extra time because it has one of those slidy trombone parts - spins a blue-and-gray basketball on his finger and listens.

MEADOW BRIDGE - It's seventh-period band class at Meadow Bridge Junior-Senior High, and the band has a John Philip Sousa march to play.

Teacher Travis Riddle frowns thoughtfully at the sheet music. "You know, a march is really close to jazz," he decides. "Let's see if we can convert it."

The kids have done this before. Clarinets, trombones and trumpets take their places in the converted old shop room; there isn't enough sheet music to go around, so everyone shares. There aren't enough kids to play all of the parts, so Riddle picks up the battered school-issue tuba himself.

"This'd be nice on a trap set," he muses out loud. A tall girl in the back of the room grins, abandons her snare drum and slips into the seat of a drum set in the corner. As if on cue, the conductorless band slides into something a lot jazzier than Sousa ever intended.

Three years ago, Riddle was a New Orleans jazz musician.

When they heard Hurricane Katrina was coming, he and his wife, Wendy, evacuated with their children. They watched on a hotel lobby TV in Alabama as their entire way of life was destroyed.

They tried to get help from FEMA, but the "agent" who called was a scammer trying to steal their identities. They tried to go home, but an 18-wheeler fell apart on the road in front of them. A piece of flying metal gutted their truck and killed the driver behind them.

When they finally got home, they found nothing but filthy flood wreckage. Wendy's uncle, missing in the storm for two weeks, was dead. Neighbors were starting to turn against each other.

"We spent most of the Christmas season burning everything we owned," Riddle says. Four different insurance adjusters tried to wriggle out of the claim. "We were going to have to go bankrupt."

Riddle brought his family home, to the place where he grew up: Southern West Virginia.

They stopped at a Wal-Mart, to buy some necessities. They were inside 10 minutes - long enough for somebody to notice their Louisiana license plate.

"Welcome to West Virginia," said the note they found on their car. "We hope you want to stay."

'Being in the band is cool'

Leah Whitt - the trap-set drummer - is the only remaining member of the Meadow Bridge band, pre-Dr. Riddle.

"I was here when we had four people," she says. Yes, in the whole band.

Meadow Bridge, population 307, is a country community surrounded by farms and forests. The whole school has only about 250 kids, grades seven through 12. Music teachers never stayed; the kids saw 17 different ones in the past 20 years.

Then "Doc" Riddle showed up. There are 54 kids in the band now.

"Everybody just wanted to join the band all of a sudden," says ninth-grader Austin Midkiff, Whitt's partner on percussion. "Dr. Riddle just had this passion. You could tell there was going to be a future with it."

At the end of band practice, it's jam session time. Now, it doesn't matter if there's a shortage of sheet music; as eighth-grader Nick Rookstool points out, "You don't need music to play jazz." Rookstool grabs his trumpet, Whitt her sticks and Riddle joins in with a clarinet. An eighth-grader in a blue-and-gray Meadow Bridge Wildcats football jersey - the trombonist who, during practice, wheedled the rest of the band into playing a piece called "Furioso" one extra time because it has one of those slidy trombone parts - spins a blue-and-gray basketball on his finger and listens.

"Being in the band here is cool," says the football player, Keith Donelow.

Whitt has decided she'll stick with music. In two days, she plans to skip her senior prom to try out for the band at West Virginia University.

"It's because of Dr. Riddle," she says. "He introduced me to jazz."

Riddle remembers what started him toward music: His band director at Whitesville Junior High, Denny Sayer, gave him a recording of the legendary jazz clarinetist Pete Fountain.

"I just thought I'd never heard anything like him in my life," Riddle says. He wound up earning a doctorate in music education, and eventually playing trombone with Fountain's band.

The two haven't gotten to play together since Katrina destroyed both of their homes. Fountain, who used to have his own club in the French Quarter, now plays a couple of days a week at one of the Gulf casinos.

"Maybe someone will come along in here," Riddle says of his Meadow Bridge band, "and be the next one."

First snow

When Riddle gets home from school, his oldest daughter, 16-year-old Hannah, is smiling - her boyfriend has sent flowers to the house. Nine-year-old Mary is walking home from school with her best friend, and 13-year-old Bobby is playing with some of the family pets: two hedgehogs, an iguana named Iggy, and two cats, including a big orange one who survived Katrina in their abandoned house.

Bobby has decided he likes their home in Fayette County better than Louisiana. "I like it a lot more," he explains, "because when it's hot, it's not dead hot."

The kids have definitely adjusted - "I think they did better than us," says Wendy Riddle, who lived in the New Orleans area all her life. She laughs now about the time she spent hours sledding with the kids in the first snow, even though she already had the flu, and about the time she got her truck stuck on an icy road.

"I learned how to put on tire chains," she remembers.

She talks on the phone to her friend Cheryl, who spent these past two years living in a FEMA trailer. She remembers how it used to be, when she would sit with her mom and sister on the porch in the warm evenings, and they'd stroll downtown on Friday nights to hear the jazz.

"You just kind of wonder now if it all really happened," she says.

Wendy Riddle has just been accepted into medical school in Lewisburg. She still works part-time as a registered nurse. The rest of the time, she studies.

Or gardens. She has surrounded their new house with daffodils from an abandoned old homestead nearby, saplings from the surrounding woods - and a few plants she rescued from her native New Orleans, like the warm-loving cypress trees flourishing in her cool mountain back yard.

"They live!" she says proudly. "I didn't think they would."

To contact staff writer Tara Tuckwiller, use e-mail or call 348-5189.