New Orleans Brass Bands S/D

I can't go without mentioned the (however unlikely) on the level Wisconsin brass band scene, Mama Digdown's and Youngblood. I'm sure I've hyped up Youngblood on other threads, but they really are something these days, the new Def Jux album will be tight. It wasn't until after I started listening to a lot of other brass band music that I realized how unique their sound is, clean and precise instead of greasy and raucous (both are great in their way of course).

Speaking of which, what about brass bands from neither New Orleans nor Wisconsin?

The parallel in Minneapolis (where I live) is the Jack Brass Band. I'm all for this kind of thing, but these groups are to Rebirth what Antibalas is to Fela.

I lived in New Orleans for a year and my favorite Rebirth album is still Take It To the Street. Ex-Rebirth member Kermit Ruffins has his own band which is pretty great, too. I find Dirty Dozen boring on CD and in concert, sorry.

My favorite Rebirth story was seeing the guys perform in the bywater one night when members of the Afghan Whigs were in the audience, then seeing the band again in the Zulu parade the next morning. Turns out Rebirth had literally performed all night and went straight to the parade without rest. A float got stuck on a tree, and Rebirth were still energetic enough to challenge a high school band to a battle while the parade stood still. Guess who won.

I still listen to 'New Orleans Album' quite regularly, but it's the only one I've got.

I don't suppose anyone's heard the new one (Medicated Magic)?

I've been listening non-stop to the New Birth Brass Band record, it is HOT SHIT. Totally on Rebirth's level or more so, and it's probably the most spontaneous, live sounding studio album I've ever heard.

or was it not so brass band-y?

Recommend me some New Orleans funeral jazz, please!

And I know this is rockist of me, but the older and more authentic, the better..

thanx

Other than that, just go to Louisiana Music Factory and check out anything by Treme Brass Band (the most well-known band playing in a really trad style that's still around) or Dejan's Olympia Brass Band.

I'll send you a mix if you want to e-mail me, I'm always happy to spread the gospel. Also my brass band should be playing at the Green Mill again in the next couple months.

I really hope their 20th anniversary show dvd comes out, the show was sort of a mess but Cheeky Blakk came out and did Pop That Pussy for 15 minutes, humping trombone cases, Kabuki riding on her back, etc. :>

Yeah, remind me! I've missed you guys a few times now!

New Birth Brass Band, D-Boy
Rebirth Brass Band, Hot Venom
Stooges Brass Band, It's About Time
Soul Rebels Brass Band, No More Parades
Lil' Rascals Brass Band, Buck It Like a Horse

Also a word about Derrick 'Kabuki' Shezbie - he's the main trumpet player for Rebirth, and he was in New Birth as a teenager (he's all over D-Boy). He's SO MUCH LOUDER than any trumpet player I've ever heard, not to mention the fire. His sound is completely wide-open and really sums up the brass band sound for me (he takes the solo on the Rebirth tune I posted above).

HOWEVER, yeah, they take marching band pretty seriously down south and a lot of those kids have incredible chops. We were standing outside of Tipatina's during a parade last Mardi Gras and this high school trumpet line came by blowing high F's and we were like WHAT?! I think that a huge majority of New Orleans brass band musicians came up in those bands and always check them out during parade season, etc.

I am also interested in Jordan's mix.

But still go to Donna's and the Maple Leaf and Le Bon Temps and Cafe Brasil!

most of which are hosting jam bands anyway)

Oh god this is so horribly OTM.

I am also interested in Jordan's mix.

Send me your address.

In Tower Records I noticed in the new Downbeat magazine a nice article on New Orleans brass bands and more. The Stooges Brass band, Hot 8, and Soul Rebels are all here. I haven't checked to see if the article is online.

As a contributing supporter of afropop.org I get a weekly e-mail thing from them. This week they have a nice photo-essay by Ned Sublette(musician, musicologist and author of that immense book on Cuban music) on New Orleans. Sublette is living there for awhile and studying the Caribbean roots of New Orleans. He's got an interview with Donald Harrison and some others. I think you can check it all out at afropop.org

I think one was called Yarl River Blues Band.

I'll be going down to Jazzfest the first weekend to play with Mama Digdown's and see brass bands, can't wait.

From the April issue excerpt on Downbeat's website:

Next Generation New Orleans Brass Bands
Brass Beyond The Streets

By Jennifer Odell

Philip Frazier honks his sousaphone on a chilly January Sunday on the corner of Daneel and 3rd streets. Musicians start to shuffle away from the crowd milling outside the Bean Brothers Bar and strap on horns and snare drums, ready to get their roll on. Dancers for the Undefeated Dicas Social Aid and Pleasure Club come around the corner and tubas, sousaphones, saxophones and bass drums fall in line as the Divas belt out The Staple Singers’ “I’ll Take You There.”

Winding past Mary’s Nightowl Bar, Candlelight Bar, Sandpiper and The New Look, the parading community group hits all of the Uptown neighborhood’s brass band stops. Ostrich plumes fan the air above the Divas in time with Frazier’s non-stop vamps. When the dancers slow down and form a circle, trading moves with kids, the band plays even harder, echoing braay swueals off the projects across the street. This is how brass band music was born.

But it’s growing up. And while playing the second lines and funerals remains important, many of today’s hottest brass players are concentrating more on polishing their CDs and getting national recognition than on stealing the show on Sunday afternoons. The current generation is following the successful business model created by the Dirty Dozen and Rebirth brass bands; updating a traditional sound to make the music relevant to a larger audience. And with each step forward, another cross-breed of the brass band sound is born. Mardi Gras Indian bands like Big Sam’s Funky Nation are based in funk, the Soul Rebels are purveyors of hip-hop and the Hot 8, New Birth and the Stooges hold down the street scene with their bebop-heavy takes on the traditional style.

MARDI GRAS 2005: a photo essay by Ned Sublette
Also Check out Interviews with Joseph Roach, Donald Harrison, and Vicki Mayer by Ned Sublette

The only recording of I've heard of Kermit where he sounds really good is Treme Brass Band's Gimme My Money Back, which is ten years old.

Have you heard the Stooges and Hot 8 cds, Steve?

Jordan is SO SO SO OTM about Hot 8.

I love Hot 8 to death and I'm so happy that they finally put out a damn record. I wish the mix did a little more justice to the drummers (same for the Stooges record actually), but it's really good anyway.

MAKE IT FUNKY!
Michael Murphy
USA, 2005, TBD

New Orleans is at the center of this story about musicians who brought funk to rhythm & blues and rock & roll. Featuring Big Sam's Funky Nation, the Neville Brothers and Allen Toussaint, with special appearances by Bonnie Raitt and Keith Richards.

Friday 6/17 at 9:30 p.m.
Saturday 6/18 at 3:15 p.m.

FREE OUTDOOR MOVIES & MUSIC
At the SILVER PLAZA in Downtown Silver Spring

MAKE IT FUNKY!
Friday night fun will surely ensue when New Orleans funk legends Walter Washington and Big Sam's Funky Nation perform live in conjunction with MAKE IT FUNKY!, yet another film in our fabulous - and FUNKY! - Music Documentary strand.

Friday 6/17
Music starts at 7:30 p.m., film rolls at 9:30 p.m.
FREE!

Back to New Orleans stuff-I've seen Big Sam's Funky Nation mentioned in Offbeat but I don't know anything about them.

September 8, 2005
Jazz Musicians Ask if Their Scene Will Survive
By BEN RATLIFF, New York Times
New Orleans is a jazz town, but also a funk town, a brass-band town, a hip-hop town and a jam-band town. It has international jazz musicians and hip-hop superstars, but also a true, subsistence-level street culture. Much of its music is tied to geography and neighborhoods, and crowds.

All that was incontrovertibly true until a week ago Monday. Now the future for brass bands and Mardi Gras Indians, to cite two examples, looks particularly bleak if their neighborhoods are destroyed by flooding, and bleaker still with the prospect of no new tourists coming to town soon to infuse their traditions with new money. Although the full extent of damage is still unknown, there is little doubt that it has been severe - to families, to instruments, to historical records, to clubs, to costumes. "Who knows if there exists a Mardi Gras Indian costume anymore in New Orleans?" wondered Don Marshall, director of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival Foundation.

"A lot of the great musicians came right out of the Treme neighborhood and the Lower Ninth Ward," said the trumpeter Kermit Ruffins, temporarily speaking in the past tense, by phone from Houston yesterday. Mr. Ruffins, one of the most popular jazz musicians in New Orleans, made his name there partly through his regular Thursday-night gig over the last 12 years at Vaughan's, a bar in the Bywater neighborhood, where red beans and rice were served at midnight. Now Vaughn's may be destroyed, and so may his new house, which is not too far from the bar.

On Saturday evening Mr. Ruffins flew back to New Orleans from a gig in San Diego, having heard the first of the dire storm warnings. He stopped at a lumberyard to buy wood planks, boarded up 25 windows on his house, then went bar-hopping and joked with his friends that where they were standing might be under water the next day.

The next morning he fled to Baton Rouge with his family, and now he is in Houston, about to settle into apartments, along with more than 30 relatives. He is being offered plenty of work in Houston, and is already thinking ahead to what he calls "the new New Orleans."

"I think the city is going to wind up being a smaller area," he said. "They'll have to build some super levees.

"I think this will never happen again once they get finished," Mr. Ruffins added. "We're going to get those musicians back, the brass bands, the jazz funerals, everything."

Brass bands function through the year - not only through the annual Jazzfest, where many outsiders see them, and jazz funerals, but at the approximately 55 social aid and pleasure clubs, each of which holds a parade once a year. It is an intensely local culture, and has been thriving in recent years. Brass-band music, funky and hard-hitting, can easily be transformed from the neighborhood social to a club gig; brass bands like Rebirth, Dirty Dozen and the Soul Rebels have done well by touring as commercial entities. Members of Stooges Brass Band have ended up in Atlanta, and of Li'l Rascals in Houston; there could be a significant brass-band diaspora before musicians find a way to get home to New Orleans. (Rebirth's Web site, www.rebirthbrassband.com, has been keeping a count of brass-band musicians who have been heard from.)

The Mardi Gras Indian tradition is more fragile. Monk Boudreaux is chief of the Golden Eagles, one of the 40 or so secretive Mardi Gras tribes, who are known not just for their flamboyant feathered costumes but for their competitive parades through neighborhoods at Mardi Gras time. (Mardi Gras Indians are not American Indians but New Orleanians from the city's working-class black neighborhoods.) Mr. Boudreaux, now safe with his daughter in Mesquite, Tex., stayed put through the storm at his house in the Uptown neighborhood; when he left last week, he said, the water was waist-high. He chuckled when asked if the Mardi Gras Indian tradition could survive in exile. "I don't know of any other Mardi Gras outside of New Orleans," he said.

These days a city is often considered a jazz town to the extent that its resident musicians have international careers. The bulk of New Orleans jazz musicians have shown a knack for staying local. (Twenty or so in the last two decades, including several Marsalises, are obvious exceptions.)

But as everyone knows, jazz is crucial to New Orleans, and New Orleans was crucial in combining jazz's constituent parts, its Spanish, French, Caribbean and West African influences. The fact that so many musicians are related to one or another of the city's great music families - Lastie, Brunious, Neville, Jordan, Marsalis - still gives much of the music scene a built-in sense of nobility. "Whereas New York has a jazz industry," said Quint Davis, director of Jazzfest, "New Orleans has a jazz culture." (Speaking of Jazzfest, Mr. Davis was not ready to discuss whether there will be a festival next April. "First I'm dealing with the lives and subsistence of the people who produce it," he said. [Since this article ran, they announced that the Fest will take place somewhere in Louisiana next April-steve k])

And most jazz in New Orleans has a directness about it. "Everyone isn't searching for the hottest, newest lick," said Maurice Brown, a young trumpeter from Chicago who had been rising through the ranks of the New Orleans jazz scene for the last four years before the storm took his house and car. "People are trying to stay true to the melody."

Gregory Davis, the trumpeter and vocalist for the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, one of the city's most successful groups, said the typical New Orleans musician was vulnerable because of how he lives and works. (Mr. Davis's house is in the Gentilly neighborhood; he spoke last week from his brother's home in Dallas.)

"A lot of these guys who are playing out there in the clubs are not home owners," he said. "They're going to be at the mercy of the owners of those properties. For some of them, playing in the clubs was the only means of earning any money. If those musicians come back and don't have an affordable home, that's a big blow."

Louis Edwards, a New Orleans novelist and an associate producer of the Jazz and Heritage Festival, said, "No other city is so equipped to deal with this." A French Quarter resident, Mr. Edwards was taking refuge last week at his mother's house in Lake Charles, La.

"Think of the jazz funeral," he said. "In New Orleans we respond to the concept of following tragedy with joy. That's a powerful philosophy to have as the underpinning of your culture."

In the meantime, Mr. Boudreaux, chief of the Golden Eagles, has a feeling his own Mardi Gras Indian costume is intact. He was careful to put it in a dry place before he left home. "I just need to get home and get that Indian suit from on top of that closet," he said.

One of the weird side effects of this whole thing is that most New Orleans musicians are instantly on tour as of now, since that's the only way they can make some money. I sent a snare drum down to Rebirth last week and saw them play up here a few days ago, and we're playing a benefit show with the Stooges in a couple weeks too. Apparently Bill Summers and Davell Crawford played in Minneapolis tonight, etc.

New Orleans r'n'b singer Marva Wright and her extended family are now in Maryland. I got sent an e-mail asking for clothes and stuff. The e-mail didn't say where her band is, or if she was gonna do any singing around here.

...with more pictures here:
http://babelogue.citypages.com:8080/pscholtes/#a1446

...and more to come. Weird to think that Houston is now the safehouse of this culture. Houston!

Katy Reckdahl also tells the incredible story of her and her husband, brass band veteran "Kid Merv" Campbell, here:
http://blogs.citypages.com/blotter/2005/09/a_survivors_sto.asp#more

Mike from Jack Brass Band is talking about getting the Soul Rebels to play Minneapolis...

ihttp://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2005/09/15/dip.DTL

Some upcoming shows that I know about:

-Rebirth Brass Band, tonight at Martyr's (Chicago)
-Rebirth Brass Band, Sept. 20th on that big pay-per-view benefit show at Madison Square Garden & Radio City Music Hall
-Stooges Brass Band, Sept. 25th at ??? (Boston)
-Stooges Brass Band/Youngblood Brass Band/Mama Digdown's Brass Band, Oct. 9th at the King Club (Madison)
-Stooges Brass Band/Mama Digdown's Brass Band, Oct. 10th at Fitzgerald's (Chicago)

There should be a lot more dates in the midwest and elsewhere from Rebirth, Hot 8, Stooges, etc.

http://www.sfgate.com/n/pictures/2005/09/15/shezbie3.jpg

(do you still check your hotmail address?)

http://blogs.citypages.com/blotter/2005/09/survivor_storie_8.asp#more

http://citypages.com/databank/26/1294/article13694.asp

http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/article.php?id=19015

"But the musicians from New Orleans - among them the Neville Brothers, the original Meters, Irma Thomas, Kermit Ruffins and the Dirty Dozen Brass Band - outsang and outfunked most of the better-known stars. The programming was smart: New Orleans musicians had the first and last words, in the form of parade music from the Rebirth Brass Band.

New Orleans music, from jazz to hip-hop (which wasn't represented at the concert), has a distinctive rolling swing that's directly derived from community celebrations. It's deeply connected to Mardi Gras songs (like "Iko Iko" and "Brother John," which the Dixie Cups sang on Tuesday night, and "Hey Pocky Way" performed by the Meters and the Neville Brothers) and brass-band music for funerals and parades.

Famously musical New Orleans neighborhoods like Tremé and the Ninth Ward were hit hard by the flooding; how they will be rebuilt, and who will return, is still an open question and one that worries New Orleans musicians. "Nothing's going to be the same," said Ms. Thomas, the 64-year-old queen of New Orleans rhythm and blues. "But by the same token, what ever is? The main thing is to bring everybody back, because that's the ambience of the city."

But for the moment, it didn't matter that the performers' homes and neighborhoods have been damaged. They were executing the old African-American alchemy of tribulation into joy.

The politics of New Orleans's plight were not entirely sidelined. Bette Midler said, "I could stand up here and talk for hours about ineptitude, stupidity, blame, inequality, global warming, the dangerous destruction of the wetlands, but if I did, what would all those other people have to talk about?" She was loudly booed after mocking President Bush. Former President Bill Clinton, who introduced Mr. Fogerty, received a long ovation.

Cyril Neville, of the Neville Brothers, wore a T-shirt reading, "Ethnic cleansing in New Orleans"; his brother Aaron wore a baseball cap reading, "Evacuee." And when the Meters sang "People Say," their bassist, George Porter Jr., said, "People want to know - do we have a right to live?"

Backstage, Ms. Thomas said that both her house and the club she owns, the Lion's Den, were badly flooded. "We're among the New Orleans easters who lost everything," she said. "But we're gonna be all right." Onstage, backed by Ry Cooder, Lenny Kravitz and Buckwheat Zydeco, she sang a riveting, unsparing version of Bessie Smith's "Backwater Blues": "When it thunders and lightnin' and the wind begins to blow/ There's thousands of people ain't got no place to go."

Aaron Neville joined Simon and Garfunkel for "Bridge Over Troubled Water," and he followed Art Garfunkel's rickety, overwrought verse with one that was tender, idiosyncratic and delicately poised; later, with his brothers, he sang a humbly devout "Amazing Grace." The Meters, who defined New Orleans funk in their own songs and as a studio band, regrouped for one song, then merged with the Neville Brothers (who include Art Neville of the Meters). And Kermit Ruffins, a trumpeter and singer, growled a steamy "St. James Infirmary" with the Dirty Dozen.

Louisiana musicians also propelled strong performances by non-natives. Elvis Costello belted "The Monkey Speaks His Mind" with the Dirty Dozen and the song's writer, Dave Bartholomew, and found the scorn and vitriol in Allen Toussaint's "On Your Way Down," with Mr. Toussaint at the piano. Diana Krall, also with the Dirty Dozen, dug into the Fats Domino hit "I'm Walkin'." And with Buckwheat Zydeco, from Lafayette, on accordion, Mr. Cooder sang another Domino song, "My Girl Josephine," with a knowing rasp.

The longest segments went to the rock stars. Mr. Fogerty...
...An unexpected consequence of the hurricane is that it has focused attention on New Orleans's music, with all its local quirks and underappreciated genius. Ms. Thomas, for instance, is recording an album while she's in New York. With luck, the sounds of New Orleans will remind the world that rebuilding the Crescent City is not only a commercial project but also a cultural one. "

Regarding media attention for New Orleans bands--It is sad it Katrina to get attention, but it's also sad it took Katrina to get some New Orleans groups on the road. Some of the press is happening now because some of the groups are touring the U.S. for the first time. The artists also need to get the word out. Somebody needs to set up or update a website for the Lil' Stooges Brass band. Texas Fred Carter, according to an e-mail I got, is booking Lil' Stooges at Chick Hall's, outside D.C., but the show is not yet on the club's website. The band deserves media ink in the nation's capital, but somebody's got to spread the word.

http://homeofthegroove.blogspot.com/

Mantra for New Orleans: 'We Will Swing Again'
By DAVID CARR, N.Y. Times

NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 25 - In many American cities, indigenous culture is a bonus amenity, an add-on to the business and civic functions of the metropolis. Here, though, the first and last conversation you have will be about where you went, what you ate, who you heard play. The people who make music, who perform cabaret - and those who pour the whiskey that accompany the shows - are precisely the point here, and they play big for their size. If there is no show, there is no New Orleans.

"We will swing again in that place," Kermit Ruffins said by phone from Houston, where he went when Hurricane Katrina came. Mr. Ruffins is a trumpeter beyond compare, the crowned emperor of the New Orleans sound, who cooks red beans and rice and plays with his band, the Barbecue Swingers, every Thursday down at Vaughn's, in the Bywater section of the upper Ninth Ward. A flashlight aimed at Vaughn's last Thursday night revealed an intact building - and a big mess to go with it. "Could be six months, could be eight, could be a year," Mr. Ruffins said, "but I can't wait to get there and throw the grand reopening party on the new New Orleans. Count on that."

Workers interviewed this week up and down the high-low culture scale echoed Mr. Ruffins's optimism to a person. The message they sent from near and far was the same: This wounded city will heal itself show by show, and gig by gig, because culture - ribald, prissy and everything in between - is the nub around which the whole ball of yarn is wound. New Orleans without zydeco, without jazz, without theater, without nude dancers and orchestra players, is just a swamp town with hot summers, bad schools and a lot of mosquitoes. If this city is to return, it will do so on the backs of the artists who make it a place like nowhere else.

Mark Samuels, the owner of Basin Street Records, said as much. His small New Orleans label is the home to Mr. Ruffins, Los Hombres Calientes and Dr. Michael White. Mr. Samuels spent last week sneaking into the city from his temporary headquarters in Austin, Tex., to grab CD's so his artists would have something to peddle at their shows. Sitting at his brother's house in Metairie outside New Orleans last week, he showed pictures of his house in Lakewood South - a total loss by the looks of it - and shared his hopes and worries about the future.

"You can redo Bourbon Street anywhere in the world," Mr. Samuels said. "All you have to do is let people drink on the street, expose themselves on balconies and open a bunch of T-shirt shops. But New Orleans is a lot more than that. There is nowhere else in the world where you can head out to the Maple Leaf and hear the Rebirth Brass Band. That can't be recreated somewhere else."

Still, many New Orleans artists are now at large, playing for big audiences elsewhere. The Rebirth Brass Band tore the roof off in New York the other night as part of a benefit, and the Olympia Brass Band is setting out on tour from Phoenix. But while the money may be good, the tours will not be successful unless they end in New Orleans, where the rents were cheap and the clubs ample.

Many of those clubs made it through. Tipitina's is fine, for example, and Preservation Hall endures. As for the Rock n' Bowl, where the crash of pins mixed with the twang of a plucked guitar, John Blancher, who owns and runs the place, would like to reopen, but is also looking into some properties in nearby Lafayette. The club on the second floor is fine. But beneath it is mayhem, the result of eight feet of water rolling strikes for a week.

"I expect to reoccupy it," Mr. Blancher said. "From the outside, you would never want to even walk in there, but the inside is fine."

The insides of New Orleans seem great. The soul of the place, now dispersed, continues to thrive. The body is a hurting unit, though.

Dr. Ike - Ira Padnos to those who don't know him - is a medical doctor and a local scenester, the kind of man who embodies New Orleans's glorious, weird vibe. An anesthesiologist who worked through the storm at the Louisiana State University's hospital, he is now performing cultural triage in his role as executive director of the Mystic Knights of the Mau Mau. He won't say this - modesty is a persistent feature of the local milieu - but both his jobs will play a role in putting the paddles on the stilled heart of New Orleans. The Mystic Knights run the Ponderosa Stomp, a roots music festival that runs concurrently with the city's giant Jazzfest - "all killer, no filler" is its advertising cry - and serves as a reminder that much American music started and persists here. Reluctantly, the Knights have decided to move the Stomp to Memphis this year, for a benefit show, which is fine, but it is not New Orleans.

Many of the cities cultural treasures were not flooded, Mr. Padnos said. But for New Orleans to return, he added, "depends on people - the waiters, the musicians, the Indians - who live in the Ninth Ward, the Seventh Ward and Tremé, all of which were hit hard by the flooding. You need those people to come back to drive the city's culture."

It is still unclear what exactly they will be returning to, if they return. For instance, somewhere in the basement of the Orpheum Theater here there are 10 timpani drums floating in the muck and mire. At some point, Jim Atwood, the owner of the drums and a member of the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra, will retrieve his equipment - likely ruined - and assess his future. But he is not expecting anything approaching normal anytime soon.

"Normal, when you are talking about New Orleans, is always a relative term," Mr. Atwood said. He and his wife, a flutist in the orchestra, said they have not really come to terms with what happened to the city and what it means for them.

"We have yet to have that conversation out loud," he said. "But when we do, I think it is likely we will conclude that New Orleans is where our home is, and hopefully our jobs as well."

The jobs may be there, but what many culture workers in New Orleans would like is an audience.

"Art here comes up from the streets," said Barbara Motley, who owns Le Chat Noir, a cabaret on St. Charles Avenue left relatively undamaged by the storms. "The city failed a lot of the people who live here and I think they will be slow in coming back, with good reason."

"On the other hand, this is New Orleans," she added, "so I would not be surprised if people decide they need a laugh and a show. We'll see, won't we?"

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Sept 26-27 NYC @ Living Room and Barbes
Sept 29 Milwaukee, WI @ Highbury
Sept 30 Madison, WI @ Great Dane
Oct 1 Baraboo, WI @ Tha Shack
Oct 2 Green Bay, WI @ Malones
Oct 4 Iowa City @ Iowa City Yacht Club
Oct 5 St. Louis @ Broadway Oyster Bar
Oct 9 Madison, WI @ King Club (w/Digdown and Youngblood Brass Band)
Oct 10 Chicago, IL @ Fitzgeralds (w/Mama Digdown's Brass Band)
Oct 14 Wash D.C. @ Surf Club
Oct 15 Arlington, VA @ festival (??)

If y'all have the means and the interest, any promotion will be greatly appreciated.

Anybody with any Philly contacts or ideas for last-minute gigs there?

I do not think they have gigs yet for the 12th and 13th. I think they're looking for gigs between Chicago and D.C., such as in Philadelphia.

http://complicatedfun.com/katrina/

I don't think the New York shows got much pre-press, but they split the bill with Slavic Soul Party who presumably have their own crowd.

Someone also sent me this bit of complete WTF-ness:

Lil' Stooges Brass Band | New Orleans Jazz
Productshop NYC — The Lil' Stooges Brass Band are a wonderfully gothic jazz
outfit that hail from New Orleans. These cats sound like they could
perfectly score a Tim Burton film. They're known as one of the hottest
outfits out the big easy.

So the New York press that missed the earlier shows may now have another shot.

The Stooges show in Madison was a blast, although they've certainly switched things up on this tour. Sammy, the snare drummer, is out on tour with Trombone Shorty so they got a drumset player (Christmas) in his stead. He just got off tour with Gerald Levert (!) and he's a bad motherfucker. They've also got some electric instruments now, so it's different but good. Can't wait for our shows together this weekend.

http://stoogesband.blogspot.com

I saw the below listed at the very cool home of the groove audio blog (which is featuring obscure James Booker selections). Not a brass band, but something folks in Southern Cal should check out:

October 20, 21, 22, 23, 2005
Katrina Benefit Series featuring Eddie Bo and band, plus special
guests, such as Mickey Champion, at
Little Pedro’s
901 E. 1st St. (at Vignes)
Los Angeles, CA 90012
213-687-3766

Rebirth are playing DC twice, in addition to Baltimore and a NY show at B.B King's upscale place.

I still can't find Troy 'Trombone Shorty' Andrews tour listed anywhere.

Did the Stooges Brass Band ever get another NY date for Sunday?

Did the Stooges Brass Band ever get another NY date for Sunday?

I'm not sure, I'll check tonight.

The New York Times

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 11, 2005
New Orleans strikes up the band
By Shaila Dewan


NEW ORLEANS It would not be fair to say the music ever totally evacuated this city of jazz, where even in the darkest hours a lone harmonica player or a busker serenaded empty balconies. But on Sunday, it began its grand re-entrance, with the first jazz funeral procession to take place since Hurricane Katrina.

The brass band, reunited from across the country, toted donated instruments. The procession leaders wore salvaged bits of their traditional funeral finery. Just after 2 p.m. on the corner of North Broad and St. Bernard, the strains of "Just a Closer Walk With Thee" streamed past the heaps of stinking garbage and fallen roofs like milk and honey and sweet Abita beer, a flash of grandeur and ritual that hearkened to a New Orleans past and, many in the crowd swore, future.

Mourners carrying pictures of the chef Austin Leslie, a New Orleans legend who died in Atlanta last month after being rescued from his attic during the flood, followed behind with the measured step of brides moving down the aisle. But the procession was not for Leslie alone.

"This is the first opportunity we had to show the whole spirit of New Orleans," said Gralen Banks, whose yellow shirt and hatband showed his membership in the Black Men of Labor, one of the social and pleasure clubs for whom the jazz parades are a cherished tradition. "And we're not going to pass it up for love or money."

Symbolically, the procession reclaimed a city occupied by out-of-towners, passing like an apparition past soldiers in camouflage and workers in hard hats.

Most jazz funerals begin with a dirge-like tempo, with the band following a caisson or hearse to the cemetery. After the mourners "cut loose the body," as people here say, the procession turns into a celebration, winding through the streets, playing in the funky style invented in, and still largely the sole province of, New Orleans.

This time, things were improvised. Leslie, whose name was synonymous with fried chicken for generations of New Orleans residents and whose restaurant inspired the 1980s television series "Frank's Place," had his funeral Friday in Atlanta. He was cremated because he could not be buried in New Orleans, and his relatives plan to bring his ashes here when they return.

So the procession became a cross between a true jazz funeral and a secular "second-line" parade, conducted by the social clubs every week during second-line season, Labor Day through Mardi Gras.

At a second-line, spectators and parade are one and the same, with the brass bands leading long lines of dancers through the neighborhoods, stopping along the way at favorite watering holes. Labor Day weekend this year would have marked the Prince of Wales club's 77th annual parade, said Joe Stern, a member.

"Without second-line, there is no Louis Armstrong, there is no Idris Muhammad, there's no Wynton Marsalis," Stern said, ticking off some of the city's jazz greats. The procession began at Pampy's Creole Kitchen, where Leslie worked in his final years, with Banks and other members of his club leading the way.

The procession was far smaller than usual, but residents who had ventured home to start cleaning their property were overjoyed to see a critical piece of the city's identity restored.

On La Harpe Street, Mildred Matthews, 79, came out on her porch, dancing and waving a soiled orange fly swatter as if it were a silk banner. "Y'all come back home to New Orleans!" she yelled. Her sister, Genevieve Neustadter, a retired teacher who moved home to New Orleans in June and lost everything, shouted into her cellphone: "A second-line parade passing. Call me back."

Both the sisters knew Leslie, had eaten in his restaurants. But a funeral was not what came to Matthews's mind. "I thought it was a welcome home," she said. "I'm back and I'm back to stay."

Six of the nine members of the band, the Hot 8, had come for the day - Bennie Pete, the leader, from Atlanta, Big Al, the trumpeter, from Baton Rouge, a guy named Swamp from "somewhere in Alabama." They were joined by Charles Joseph, a trombonist.

The band manager, Lee Arnold, was handing out fliers for his "Save Our Brass!" campaign to help musicians get back on their feet. In the next week, he said, the band would travel to shelters to play for evacuees.

But for now, they were home, doing what they do best. "They were upset about how the city looked," Arnold said. "But when they start hittin' - when they start playing music - that's when the smiles come out."

As the second-line approached the concrete slab where Chez Helene, Leslie's restaurant, once stood, the music slowed again.

A poster bearing a photograph of Leslie - wearing a white ship captain's hat, surrounded by photographs of shrimp dishes and garlic cloves - was propped up in the middle of the street. Next to it, another poster read "We won't bow down. Save our soul. 10/9/05."

celebration, winding through the streets, playing in the funky style invented in, and still largely the sole province of, New Orleans.

This time, things were improvised. Leslie, whose name was synonymous with fried chicken for generations of New Orleans residents and whose restaurant inspired the 1980s television series "Frank's Place," had his funeral Friday in Atlanta. He was cremated because he could not be buried in New Orleans, and his relatives plan to bring his ashes here when they return.

So the procession became a cross between a true jazz funeral and a secular "second-line" parade, conducted by the social clubs every week during second-line season, Labor Day through Mardi Gras.

At a second-line, spectators and parade are one and the same, with the brass bands leading long lines of dancers through the neighborhoods, stopping along the way at favorite watering holes. Labor Day weekend this year would have marked the Prince of Wales club's 77th annual parade, said Joe Stern, a member.

"Without second-line, there is no Louis Armstrong, there is no Idris Muhammad, there's no Wynton Marsalis," Stern said, ticking off some of the city's jazz greats. The procession began at Pampy's Creole Kitchen, where Leslie worked in his final years, with Banks and other members of his club leading the way.

The procession was far smaller than usual, but residents who had ventured home to start cleaning their property were overjoyed to see a critical piece of the city's identity restored.

On La Harpe Street, Mildred Matthews, 79, came out on her porch, dancing and waving a soiled orange fly swatter as if it were a silk banner. "Y'all come back home to New Orleans!" she yelled. Her sister, Genevieve Neustadter, a retired teacher who moved home to New Orleans in June and lost everything, shouted into her cellphone: "A second-line parade passing. Call me back."

Both the sisters knew Leslie, had eaten in his restaurants. But a funeral was not what came to Matthews's mind. "I thought it was a welcome home," she said. "I'm back and I'm back to stay."

Six of the nine members of the band, the Hot 8, had come for the day - Bennie Pete, the leader, from Atlanta, Big Al, the trumpeter, from Baton Rouge, a guy named Swamp from "somewhere in Alabama." They were joined by Charles Joseph, a trombonist.

The band manager, Lee Arnold, was handing out fliers for his "Save Our Brass!" campaign to help musicians get back on their feet. In the next week, he said, the band would travel to shelters to play for evacuees.

But for now, they were home, doing what they do best. "They were upset about how the city looked," Arnold said. "But when they start hittin' - when they start playing music - that's when the smiles come out."

As the second-line approached the concrete slab where Chez Helene, Leslie's restaurant, once stood, the music slowed again.

A poster bearing a photograph of Leslie - wearing a white ship captain's hat, surrounded by photographs of shrimp dishes and garlic cloves - was propped up in the middle of the street. Next to it, another poster read "We won't bow down. Save our soul. 10/9/05."

By MICHAEL TISSERAND(Gambit editor and author of the book Kingdom of Zydeco) http://www.tucsonweekly.com/gbase/Currents/Content?oid=74104

"....On Sunday, Oct. 9, the city of New Orleans had its first of what is sure to be many jazz funerals. A second-line honored chef Austin Leslie, who died of a heart attack in Atlanta during the evacuation. The Hot 8 Brass Band played, and a few members of the Black Men of Labor danced. But they were outnumbered by journalists from The New Yorker, The New York Times, CNN, CBS, The Associated Press and others in search of a symbol of regeneration. As the band passed, workers in hazmat suits stood on the sidewalk and stared.

I'm like all those other journalists. I'm looking for a sign, too. Something to tell me that we're going to pass the test. I haven't found it yet. Maybe it's too soon. Maybe we just need to start the rebuild without one."

Blogger Chuck Taggart posted this intro paragraph for a Keith Spera article on Dr. Michael White and all the historic objects and cds this jazz musician and professor lost:

The heartbreak continues. I guess I didn't post this as the lead because I felt we needed a drink first. As bad as our own experiences were, and as bad as they are for tens of thousands of people, you hear stories like this and it makes your head want to explode. I'm not sure we'll ever be able to truly get over the loss to the city of New Orleans, particularly when reading about people like Dr. Michael White, one of my favorite jazz musicians.

Saturday, October 22, 2005
By Keith Spera
Music writer New Orleans Times-Picayune

Jazz clarinetist Michael White returned to his Gentilly home on Friday for first time since Hurricane Katrina and confronted a desolate tableau: beige bricks stained and striped by 6 feet of water; a front door branded with the bright orange and red marks of search teams; dead grass and demolished trees.

"It reminds me of one of those 'Twilight Zone' episodes," White said as he approached the door, "where I'll go in and find my own body."

Instead, he found his body of work, his valuable jazz artifacts and his personal treasures -- now decimated by water and mold.

For White, jazz is life; his instruments, family. He leads the traditional Original Liberty Jazz Band and is a respected scholar of New Orleans music and culture. He occupied an endowed chair at Xavier University, published meticulously researched articles and biographies, and lectured on topics ranging from Congo Square to the early history of New Orleans brass bands.

He lived alone in the 5200 block of Pratt Street, surrounded by jazz music, books and artifacts. The night before Katrina struck, he fled to Houston with several vintage instruments, among them the model for the giant clarinet mural outside the downtown Holiday Inn.

But he left behind 40 others, including a clarinet owned by King Oliver sideman Paul Barnes.

[...] Picking through debris in the ruins of his house, he found little to salvage. Outfitted with a mask and green rubber gloves, he stepped gingerly over a pile of jazz magazines just inside the door, now reduced to pulp. He spotted the remains of a new two-volume encyclopedia documenting the Harlem jazz renaissance, to which he contributed five biographies.

To the right hung a framed smudge, what was once a rare 1960s Bob Coke photograph of jazz bassist "Papa" John Joseph, a distant relative of White's. Joseph died of a heart attack onstage at Preservation Hall in 1965, reportedly after performing "When the Saints Go Marching In."

"No matter what had happened during the day, I'd look at that picture, and it gave me strength," White said. "It was the most beautiful picture I'd seen of Papa John. Wherever you went in the room, those eyes followed you. There was wisdom, but also truth."

Inside a waterlogged closet lay White's collection of vintage wooden instruments. He couldn't open the warped door.

"I don't know if I want to," he said. "That would be like (finding) relatives."

His casualties included more than 4,000 CDs and LPs. And there were as many books and a vast trove of research material, including primary source documents, voluminous notes and taped interviews with musicians. He had original sheet music from Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver, Sidney Bechet and Louis Armstrong.

Also gone are a set of banjo strings played by legendary jazz raconteur Danny Barker; a medal appointing White to the Chevalier rank in the French Order of Arts and Letters; snapshots with the late jazz legend Kid Thomas Valentine and President Clinton; and a 1993 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival poster autographed by artist John Scott.

Accompanying him Friday were a cameraman and writer Jason Berry, who is directing a documentary about jazz funerals that features White. Berry marveled at the scale of the loss, both to White personally and to jazz scholarship in general.

"Not that many people carry the history and culture like Michael does," Berry said. "It's the way Louis Armstrong did, the way Danny Barker did, the way Wynton Marsalis does. They are those rare players who rise to another plateau and become more than musicians. That's why it's so heartbreaking to see his loss."

Berry carted soggy artifacts to the porch: a painting of legendary clarinetist George Lewis, one of White's heroes. A sketch from Africa. Framed album artwork from Bunk Johnson's "Brass and Dance Band" and the Young Tuxedo Brass Band's "Jazz Begins."

"Michael, I think some of this can be salvaged."

"At this point," White said, "I'm trying to figure out if I can be salvaged." "I tried very hard to picture what this would be like, but you can't begin to imagine. The hard part is that there's a lot of history here that can't be replaced. It's all gone. I'm overwhelmed. I wouldn't know where to start."

Since evacuating, White has lived in a Houston hotel, exiled with his aunt, sister, nephew and elderly mother. Early on, he wondered if he could find work in Houston. He eventually landed a Sunday jazz brunch gig at a restaurant called Tommy's Seafood Steakhouse.

He is hunting for an apartment in Houston. But if Xavier University reopens in January, he wants to return. For now, he's written two "positive, upbeat" songs about a restored New Orleans.

And he takes comfort in the message of the jazz funeral, in which the spirit of the deceased is cut loose to enjoy a better life. Death, followed by rebirth.

"I have to keep remembering that," he said. "That's what gives us the courage to carry on."

On November 18th & 19th, Galactic's "10-Year Invasion Fall Tour" tour will culminate with a pair of unique performances at Washington DC's 9:30 Club. Dubbed "9:30 in New Orleans," these tour-ending shows will be a New Orleans style party featuring improvisational collaborations, a multitude of special guests and covers of classic material. Legendary vocalist and keyboardist Ivan Neville will make special appearances with Galactic throughout both nights, as will The Stooges Brass Band, who will also open the night of the 18th with a traditional, celebratory NOLA brass band show. The following evening will begin with a special performance by Robert Walter, who will be joined by Stanton Moore and Robert Mercurio of Galactic.

That Dr. White article, above, is another oh so sad tale.

Speaking of Baltimore. I received the following in an e-mail:

$50 donation.

HBO's The Wire is teaming up with Sonar to bring a little bit of New Orleans to Baltimore. The cast and crew of the show will all be on hand to help celebrate All Saint's Day with some of the Big Easy's best bands. All proceeds go to helping the victims of hurricane Katrina. (The ticket price is a tax deductible donation.)

The Wire & Associated Black Charities Present a Hurricane Katrina Benefit
FAT TUESDAY HOODOO THROWDOWN featuring
The Subdudes • Rebirth Brass Band • The Iguanas
Hosted by Wendell "The Bunk" Pierce
This Tuesday!
November 1
@ Sonar • 407 E. Saratoga St., Baltimore, MD
6pm Doors • All Ages!

Advance tickets throught Ticketmaster.

(Yes Dusk we know it's not really Fat Tuesday).

Hot 8 Brass Band are doing a series of benefits and gigs this week in NYC.

Also, Lousiana Music Factory, where I've gotten almost every single brass band cd, is back in business!

I saw this book advertised by the LSU Press in the Oxford American:

Keeping the Beat on the Street
The New Orleans Brass Band Renaissance

Mick Burns

"Told in the words of the musicians themselves, Keeping the Beat on the Street celebrates the renewed passion and pageantry among black brass bands in New Orleans. Mick Burns introduces the people who play the music and shares their insights, showing why New Orleans is the place where jazz continues to grow.
Brass bands waned during the civil rights era but revived around 1970 and then flourished in the 1980s, when the music became cool with the younger generation. In the only book to cover this revival, Burns interviews members from a variety of bands, including the Fairview Baptist Church Brass Band, the Dirty Dozen, Tuba Fats’ Chosen Few, and the Rebirth Brass Band." Mick Burns is the author of The Great Olympia Band and has played jazz professionally in Europe and the United States for forty years. He lives in Spilsby, Lincolnshire, in England.

Still waiting on word whether local DC/Baltimore promoters will get gigs for the Hot 8 Brass Band.

So I noticed online somewhere that the Stooges Brass Band apparently played Philly recently with indie-rock media darlings Clap Your Hands Say Yeah.

HA!

NY Times article on UK writer Nik Cohn and his involvement with New Orleans rap pre- and post-Katrina

This guy blogged about the Stooges in Philly in October (and others did as well) and elsewhere I saw a reference to this great show further north at M.I.T. that supposedly took place on 10/30:

Bayou Bash Concert featuring The Wild Magnolias, 7pm (doors at 6:30pm) at Kresge Auditorium. Bayou Bash’s main event!! This concert will be a huge gathering of New Orleans musicians including Big Chief Bo Dollis & The Wild Magnolias, the famous Mardi Gras Indians, who will perform with other Jazz standouts including: Marva Wright, Davell Crawford, Rockin' Dopsie, Jr, Bob French and the Lil Stooges Brass Band.

Davell Crawford is amazing btw (great organ player and sings like Stevie), and he's been having random gigs all over the place.

Jordan:

I've read about Davell in Offbeat but have never heard him...

His grandfather wrote Iko Iko (under the name Jacomo, and of course he hasn't seen a dime from it)!

Hot 8 and the Stooges are sort of the generation after Rebirth, and the style is a little bit different. The tempos are slower in general and the beat is more broken up. Things I love about this album:

"Jisten to Me" - the sounds like a street tune to me, and probably best highlights how Dinneral (the snare drummer) isn't afraid to throw in the craziest, out-of-nowhere shit and make it work.

"I Got You" - most of the bands are playing this tune now, the bassline is funky as shit. The 50 Cent quote in the trombone solo (not even a quote really, he sticks with it for 16 bars) is nice. I'm pretty sure it's Joe, the trombone player who got shot and killed by the police last year.

"Skeet Skeet" - this is the hit, and I loved hearing it blasting out of cars in New Orleans. There are no solos, it's like three minutes long, I love the 5th Ward Weebie verse, and whole end sequence going from the "shorty" chant to riff to the shout chorus is fire.

"Sexual Healing" - the drumming on this ridiculous, it's great how they keep the original beat on the song while turning it into something totally New Orleans and unique. They've played it at all the club shows I've been at and it's usually the last, craziest song of the night. It made me realize how well-constructed the original Gaye tune is, and I like the accapella bridges (although it's even better when everyone in the club knows the words).

"Rastafunk" - this is one of the tunes that was recorded a few years back when Shamar and Herb (now in Rebirth) were in the band, and then the newer horn players went back and overdubbed parts as well, so it's a wall of brass.

"Get Up" - this is my favorite joint on the album, listen to this one first. The groove and the bassline are so ridiculous I sometimes have to listen to it three times in a row, and the rapping is on it too. I don't think I've heard them play it live but it seems like it would be the ultimate second-line tune.

I think the best SOUNDING brass band records are Hot Venom and D-Boy. It took H8 ten years to come out with this one, but hopefully they'll do another record soon (I know they were planning on going in the studio before the hurricane hit).

I am still waiting to hear back from Hot 8 regarding getting any local dates.

I'll post here later about the Stooges opening for Galactic earlier tonight. I'm reviewing it, so I gotta write that first.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/filmandmusic/story/0,16373,1644513,00.html

http://static.flickr.com/15/68062290_ab398a6b86.jpg?v=0

I guess Hot 8 are not near the internet these days. Their website has not been updated, and my follow-up e-mails to the various e-mail addresses listed on the site have been ignored. I wonder if any of the contacts I gave them will be booking them in the DC and Baltimore area? I have a phone # that I had put off dialing, maybe I will spend the bucks and do so.

Published: Thursday, November 24, 2005
"...At any rate, with 2005's catastrophic hurricane season finally safely past, it seemed as good a time as ever to check in on some of those most affected: the evacuees in the temporarily Houston-based New Birth Brass Band.

Outwardly, they are doing great. Every Wednesday evening, they play to a marvelously enthusiastic midweek crowd at Under the Volcano, and they also have standing Friday- and Sunday-night gigs at St. Pete's Dancing Marlin and a Sunday-afternoon affair at Dan Electro's. At the Volcano gig last week, despite the absence of their trombone player, they were simply smokin'. Trumpet and sax interwove over tuba boo-yahs amid the polyrhythmic rumble and clatter of bass drums, snare drums and hissing tiny cymbals -- this stuff is a syringe full of pure China white heroin for you beat junkies out there.

And like Volcano owner Pete Mitchell says, nobody can sit still at these shows. Sure, half the room (there were about 100 people in there on a midweek night) might not be dancing outright, but they're either tapping their feet or nodding their heads. And dancing is what this band is all about. The New Birth feeds off the crowd, and the crowd feeds off the New Birth. People holler encouragement and sing along. Guys dance with girls, girls dance in packs, guys dance alone, blacks and whites and evacuees and locals dance together -- and the people who sit boogie on the way to the bathroom when they go take a leak. I'm a pretty inhibited guy and no kinda dancer, but at one point I found myself cutting a rug with a girl I had just met when all I intended to do was go get a beer. The vibe is terrifically hellafied: Where there is the New Birth Brass Band, there is also the infectious joy of New Orleans.

I talked to three twentysomething women -- Volcano regulars who had never heard of the band before stumbling into one of their sets a month or so ago -- who have become staunch converts to the New Birth cause. "There should be more people here," says account executive Laurie Chidlow. "There are lots of Houstonians who love New Orleans, and if they knew this was going on, I think they would be here."

"Laurie told us about it, and this is our first time here, and we are very impressed," adds financial analyst Susie Hale. "We are gonna be here every Wednesday from now on, definitely."

"They are so New Orleans!" says Chidlow. "And not the creepy New Orleans -- not the 'Let's go to Pat O'Brien's and pay $9 for a drink' New Orleans," adds their friend Katie Edwards. "This is like you're on the street and a band plays and you're dancing in the street."

And Edwards, Hale and Chidlow all hope the New Birth is here to stay. Hell, all of us would love that; right now New Orleans is a culture without a city, and in many ways Houston is still a city without a culture.

All of us, that is, except for the members of the New Birth and the New Orleans natives at the show. I caught up with New Birth bass drummer and bandleader Tanio Hingle between sets and asked him what he missed the most about his hometown. "I just miss it -- just the whole nine yards, just bein' in our neighborhood playin' music -- bein' able to step out the door and just start playin' music…Seein' everybody -- family. I miss my family -- I got some people who ended up in Atlanta. My mother, grandmother and a bunch of others are up there. That's one of the hardest parts: not bein' around my family, because I am a family man."

Plans in works for `musicians' village' in New Orleans
12/6/2005, 4:45 p.m. CT
By JANET McCONNAUGHEY
The Associated Press

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Singer Harry Connick Jr. and saxophone player Branford Marsalis are working with Habitat for Humanity to create a "village" for New Orleans musicians who lost their homes to Hurricane Katrina.

More than $2 million has been raised for the project dreamed up by Connick and Marsalis — a neighborhood built around a music center where musicians can teach and perform, Jim Pate, executive director of New Orleans Area Habitat for Humanity, said Monday.

The first $1 million came from benefit concerts in New York three weeks after the storm, said Quint Davis, the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival producer who helped arrange the concerts.

"The money being used to build these homes for New Orleans musicians was raised by New Orleans musicians. Our pact with them was to help New Orleans' musical community," Davis said during a Tuesday news conference.

In a telephone interview Monday, Connick said he and Marsalis — both honorary chairs for the national Habitat's hurricane rebuilding program — returned to their hometown several weeks after the storm and were trying to think of ways to help.

"I had been kind of coming up blank. The problem is so massive, it's hard to know where to begin," Connick said. "As we talked, we both realized we should really stick to what we know, which is music."

Connick said four or five of the 16 musicians in his own band lost their homes. "There's a ton of musicians who have no place to go," he said.

Pate said the organization hasn't decided on a location, but is looking at three older, predominantly black neighborhoods in New Orleans. He said Tuesday that the project will need $7.5 million to $15 million, and would include a music center named for Ellis Marsalis, the jazz pianist and educator. Marsalis has taught hundreds of high-school and college musicians over the years and is the father of the musical family that includes Branford, Wynton, Delfeayo and Jason.

"Ellis has been kind of a rock for music in this city," Mayor C. Ray Nagin said.

Branford Marsalis said the project is a thank-you to the musicians "who made it possible for people like me and my brother Wynton and Harry Connick Jr. to get out and spread the word."

Habitat cannot reserve houses for a specific group, and non-musicians would also live in the musicians' village, Pate said. However, musicians who lost their houses and have little or no insurance — and will provide labor for a Habitat house — will be asked if they'd like to live there.

"We'd hope some of our musician partner families could do some of their sweat equity by doing performances or concerts for some of our volunteers who are coming from all over the world," Pate said.

It's a fantastic idea, said Banu Gibson, who sings '20s and '30s jazz.

"So many musicians have moved out of town, and a lot of the good ones, too, which is really depressing," she said.

Gibson is back in her own house, but two of the seven musicians in her band lost homes they had bought in the last couple of years. "All the money they raised to put down as a house payment, $25,000 to $35,000, is gone," she said.

Bassist Peter "Chuck" Badie, 80, would love to see the dream become reality, and to live in a Habitat home.

"I'd be tickled to death," said Badie, who's staying at a jazz enthusiast's home after floods destroyed his house in the Lower Ninth Ward. "A village for musicians would be the finest thing. But build it where?"

The New Orleans Area Habitat for Humanity covers Jefferson, Orleans and St. Bernard parishes, and is in the "embryonic" stages of adding Plaquemines Parish. Pate said it hopes to build 250 to 500 houses in the four parishes, and possibly as many as 200 in the musicians' village.

"We desperately need them back, because they are the soul of our community, or much of the soul of our community," he said.

(btw, I YSI'd a Stooges tune from last year's tour, before the keyboard/drumset lineup on this thread)

Death of an American City
The New York Times | Editorial

Sunday 11 December 2005

We are about to lose New Orleans. Whether it is a conscious plan to let the city rot until no one is willing to move back or honest paralysis over difficult questions, the moment is upon us when a major American city will die, leaving nothing but a few shells for tourists to visit like a museum.

We said this wouldn't happen. President Bush said it wouldn't happen. He stood in Jackson Square and said, "There is no way to imagine America without New Orleans." But it has been over three months since Hurricane Katrina struck and the city is in complete shambles.

There are many unanswered questions that will take years to work out, but one is make-or-break and needs to be dealt with immediately. It all boils down to the levee system. People will clear garbage, live in tents, work their fingers to the bone to reclaim homes and lives, but not if they don't believe they will be protected by more than patches to the same old system that failed during the deadly storm. Homeowners, businesses and insurance companies all need a commitment before they will stake their futures on the city.

At this moment the reconstruction is a rudderless ship. There is no effective leadership that we can identify. How many people could even name the president's liaison for the reconstruction effort, Donald Powell? Lawmakers need to understand that for New Orleans the words "pending in Congress" are a death warrant requiring no signature.

The rumbling from Washington that the proposed cost of better levees is too much has grown louder. Pretending we are going to do the necessary work eventually, while stalling until the next hurricane season is upon us, is dishonest and cowardly. Unless some clear, quick commitments are made, the displaced will have no choice but to sink roots in the alien communities where they landed.

The price tag for protection against a Category 5 hurricane, which would involve not just stronger and higher levees but also new drainage canals and environmental restoration, would very likely run to well over $32 billion. That is a lot of money. But that starting point represents just 1.2 percent of this year's estimated $2.6 trillion in federal spending, which actually overstates the case, since the cost would be spread over many years. And it is barely one-third the cost of the $95 billion in tax cuts passed just last week by the House of Representatives.

Total allocations for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the war on terror have topped $300 billion. All that money has been appropriated as the cost of protecting the nation from terrorist attacks. But what was the worst possible case we fought to prevent?

Losing a Major American City

"We'll not just rebuild, we'll build higher and better," President Bush said that night in September. Our feeling, strongly, is that he was right and should keep to his word. We in New York remember well what it was like for the country to rally around our city in a desperate hour. New York survived and has flourished. New Orleans can too.

Of course, New Orleans's local and state officials must do their part as well, and demonstrate the political and practical will to rebuild the city efficiently and responsibly. They must, as quickly as possible, produce a comprehensive plan for putting New Orleans back together. Which schools will be rebuilt and which will be absorbed? Which neighborhoods will be shored up? Where will the roads go? What about electricity and water lines? So far, local and state officials have been derelict at producing anything that comes close to a coherent plan. That is unacceptable.

The city must rise to the occasion. But it will not have that opportunity without the levees, and only the office of the president is strong enough to goad Congress to take swift action. Only his voice is loud enough to call people home and convince them that commitments will be met.

Maybe America does not want to rebuild New Orleans. Maybe we have decided that the deficits are too large and the money too scarce, and that it is better just to look the other way until the city withers and disappears. If that is truly the case, then it is incumbent on President Bush and Congress to admit it, and organize a real plan to help the dislocated residents resettle into new homes. The communities that opened their hearts to the Katrina refugees need to know that their short-term act of charity has turned into a permanent commitment.

If the rest of the nation has decided it is too expensive to give the people of New Orleans a chance at renewal, we have to tell them so. We must tell them we spent our rainy-day fund on a costly stalemate in Iraq, that we gave it away in tax cuts for wealthy families and shareholders. We must tell them America is too broke and too weak to rebuild one of its great cities.

Our nation would then look like a feeble giant indeed. But whether we admit it or not, this is our choice to make. We decide whether New Orleans lives or dies.

-------

On a slightly brighter note, some of these pictures of the Rebirth show on Thanksgiving for second-liner refugees are amazing:

http://www.chriscarson.com/html/photo_of_the_day_archives/archives/2005_11_24_01.htm

http://www.bestofneworleans.com/dispatch/current/news_feat2.php

December 13, 2005 Gambit Weekly

West of the Sixth Ward
The Treme Brass Band fled the flood. They ended up in the desert.

Compiled by Katy Reckdahl

Two months ago, six men arrived in Arizona with no instruments. They came to play music.
Members of the Treme Brass Band gathered in Phoenix a few weeks after the hurricane. Still, the place doesn't feel like home, says bandleader Benny Jones Sr.

"When I see the cactus, I think of the Western movies and the cowboys that we used to watch on TV," he says. "It feels pretty odd to me."

Jones was staying in Dallas when he received a phone call from the head of an Arizona-based group, the Jazz Refugee Project. The man had gotten Jones' name and number from a bandmate who had evacuated to Phoenix.

The Refugee Project promised six months of housing and gigs. Jones found the idea appealing, but implementation might be tough, he said. "I told the man, 'My band is scattered out like a checkerboard.'" But after two days, Jones had reached three guys. Two days later, a few more. Within a week, he had an entire band -- but no instruments.

Of the group that moved to Phoenix, only Eddieboh Paris escaped with a horn -- his trombone. "That's because the other guys had to think about themselves, not their instruments," says Paris, who evacuated early, on Sunday. Most of his bandmates didn't leave. Three -- bass drummer Anthony Bennett and saxophonists Elliott "Stackman" Callier and Frederick "Shep" Sheppard -- spent the storm in their homes, then left by boat and chopper. Tuba player Jeffrey Hills weathered the hurricane in the Lafitte housing project, then walked across town in chest-deep water with his two small children on his shoulders. (Longtime Treme bass drummer and singer "Uncle" Lionel Batiste also sat out the storm in the Lafitte and evacuated a few days later by bus. He opted to return to New Orleans rather than travel to Phoenix.)

In late September, the Jazz Refugee Project dispatched a van that started in Mississippi and wound its way through Texas, picking up musicians. It was 120 degrees and sunny when they arrived in Phoenix. "Oh, Lord, it was hot," says bass drummer Bennett. "I was wearing shorts and flip-flops, and it felt like the flip-flops were melting off my feet."

At first, the Refugee Project supplied loaner horns. Soon, donated horns came via overnight delivery from members of the Jack Brass Band in Minneapolis, the Tipitina's Foundation and national charitable organizations.

The band has now settled into a routine, playing a few gigs a week and traveling around town in a Refugee Project van. But it's taken a few adjustments. The 2 a.m. bar-closing time has prompted at least one bandmember to carry a flask. The band plays a significant number of gigs in Phoenix's retirement communities, where the band is less apt to perform contemporary numbers like "Gimme My Money Back."

Treme's presence has also bolstered the city's traditional-jazz community. "There are 47 venues in Phoenix that play jazz, but it's mostly modern -- bebop and fusion," says Phoenix clarinetist Joe Hopkins, vice president of the Arizona Jazz Society. "Yet the Treme band has made inroads into clubs and with people who've never listened to this music. I think that's significant."

How long Treme will remain in Phoenix is still unclear. But on Tuesday, Nov. 22, the CBS' The Early Show, as part of its "Week of Wishes," featured Minnesotan Pat Lindgren saying that she'd seen Treme play at Donna's Bar & Grill. Her wish was to see them perform again in New Orleans. In response, the program marshaled weighty resources: temporary housing for band members in the French Quarter courtesy of Hibernia Bank, $60,000 worth of home furnishings from Sam's Club, and -- from the Jazz Foundation of America -- employment playing jazz in Louisiana schools, some new instruments, and first-month's rent and security deposits.

In Phoenix, band members sat and watched, speechless. Jones, certainly, plans to return home as soon as FEMA gives him a trailer. Trombonist Eddie King also plans to go back. But others aren't sure. They talk about the sputtering New Orleans economy, hard-to-find housing, and gigs that pay half as much as Phoenix gigs. Saxophonist Sheppard says that he misses friends but has no other reason to return to what he calls "The Big Raggedy."

Not surprising, says New Orleans cultural advocate Morgan Clevenger. "Most musicians that I know, they love New Orleans and they want to come back. But if you don't have the necessary quality of life, they're not coming back."

Final decisions have yet to be made. In the meantime, music is the perfect distraction. "Often I sit around thinking about how my homeowner's insurance has not come through or wondering what my children are doing," says Bennett. "The only time I get any peace is when I'm playing music."

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I'm not surprised that Uncle Lionel didn't go with them, I honestly can't picture him outside of New Orleans. He IS New Orleans.

http://www.gumbopages.com/looka/
"Bad news. I got an email from Mary Katherine yesterday ... Stevenson Palfi, the New Orleans-based documentary filmmaker best known for his amazing film "Piano Players Rarely Ever Play Together" (featuring performances from Tuts Washington, Allen Toussaint, and Professor Longhair two days before his death), took his own life a few days ago. He had lost his home, his office and almost all of his possessions, presumably including several years worth of work he had done on an unfinished in-depth biography of Allen Toussaint."

I'm finally leaving for New Orleans tomorrow. I'm starting to freak out a little bit about what it's going to be like. Stupid hurricane.

Also this week, Keith "Wolf" Anderson rejoined the band here. He had been in Detroit and I think I heard he got busted up there for public urination of all things.

Tuba Phil and some other guys from the Rebirth were at this week's Volcano show, and the whole joint went crazy when they tore into "Hush Your Mouth." Glen David's rewrite of Levert's "Casanova" was also damn cool, and having Wolf in the band has led to some serious 'bone battles. (Incidentally, I think Glen David's as much a potential breakout star as Kermit is... the guy is an incredible showman.)

I don't know what this has to do with anything, but it's pretty funny. Kenny Terry was walking around after the show sporting a Rand McNally map of NO -- he is the guy on the cover in the red jacket and white marching band cap blowing his horn in the Quarter.

I'm glad New Birth is doing good.

Adam, are you moving back? Good luck, dude.

I'm also getting married in N.O. sometime within the next year!

The Nation magazine has several articles on serious New Orleans stuff:

Here's an excerpt from Ari Kelman's "In the Shadow of Disaster":

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060102/kelman
"Craig Colten, a Louisiana State University geographer, agrees. He insists low-lying parts of the city shouldn't be rebuilt. His proposal is extremely controversial, with displaced residents understandably invoking their "right of return" and with most members of the reconstruction committees reluctant to reintegrate wetlands into the city after Mayor Nagin got burned for suggesting that the Ninth Ward might not be rebuilt. But Colten still believes that part of the backswamp should ooze into selected low-lying areas. An equitable method, he believes, would be to "take land from many neighborhoods--Lakefront, Ninth Ward, Gentilly--and relocate rich, poor, middle class to denser settlement on higher ground." Colten's "new New Orleans," then, would resemble the old New Orleans--from an era before wetlands vanished. It would also touch off battles over whose neighborhoods should be abandoned."

OffBeat Magazine [offbeat@offbeat.com]

"L. J. Goldstein, New Orleans attorney, photographer and founder of the infamous Krewe de Jieux, has organized a Honakkah Second Line on Thursday December 22 beginning at 6 p.m. at Spanish Plaza (Riverwalk) proceeding to Jackson Square. The Reunion Klezmer Band will perform, the first time the New Orleans Klezmer Allstars and former clarinetist Ben Schenk have played together since Schenk left the band."

http://s38.yousendit.com/d.aspx?id=2WX72H6TOE43V34S22C0V2F6NC

GONE...BUT NOT FORGOTTEN
Hurricane Katrina has taken more from us than our homes, neighborhoods and businesses. We’re profoundly sorry to report that these wonderful members of our music community have passed on within the last week.

Brian O’Neill
1955-2005
Composer, arranger, vocalist, pianist and Bonerama trombonist, Brian O’Neill passed away suddenly after suffering an apparent heart attack while on a solo gig in New Orleans O’Neill was noted for his work with Wayne Cochran and the CC Riders in the ’70s as well as being a mainstay of the popular New Orleans R&B vocalist Luther Kent’s band “Trick Bag” for the past 25 years. As a freelance trombonist O’Neill was one of the most frequently-called trombonists in New Orleans. O’Neill penned the most recent “Bone Up” from the Bonerama’s Live From New York. O’Neill appeared in countless sit-ins with the Bonerama horns including appearances with Gov’t Mule and the Radiators. Fellow Bonerama trombonist Mark Mullins recalls, “I met Brian on a gig at a Mardi Gras parade 21 years ago and after the first song I realized that is what I wanted to sound like. To have him in the Bonerama band was just a constant inspiration on both a personal and musical level. There was so much he had not had a chance to say yet.”

Stevenson Palfi
1952-2005
The director of Piano Players Rarely Ever Play Together, a documentary that presented New Orleans legends Allen Toussaint, Tuts Washington and Professor Longhair playing together in the studio, was found dead of a gunshot wound in in New Orleans. Palfi had lost much in the wake of Hurricane Katrina; his Mid-City home was severely flooded, and reportedly was very depressed over the loss of his home and life's work. Palfi was staying with his ex- wife at the time. Reportedly he left a suicide note. Palfi is survived by his daughter, Nell.
“His seminal work was non-pareil as a rare, timely and brilliant piece of documentary film-making. Henry Roeland Byrd, a.k.a. Professor Longhair, died during the filming of this work. Stevenson had the foresight to capture the entire second line celebration of Fess’ life and death.” said Justin Zitler, attorney for SongByrd Inc., the Professor Longhair estate. Informed of Palfi’s death, Allen Toussaint said, “My friend Stevenson Palfi’s life’s work was immortalizing others and in so doing, he has immortalized himself. His work will outlast all of us.”

Stevenson Palfi will be honored with a tribute this year at OffBeat's Best of The Beat Awards on January 21 at the House of Blues.

The New Orleans Musicians Hurricane Relief Fund is
proud to sponsor the Social Aid & Pleasure Club All-
Star Second Line on Sunday January 15, 2006. For
the first time ever, a coalition of 27 Social Aid &
Pleasure Clubs will march together through the
streets of New Orleans to call attention to their
needs and role in renewing the city. The Second Line
begins at the Backstreet Cultural Museum at 1116 St.
Claude Avenue in Treme at 11:30 a.m. and ends
uptown at Washington Avenue and South Saratoga
at about 4 p.m.

My band will be going down around Mardi Gras, and just before that playing a concert for NOLA relocatees in Chicago.

By GARY RIVLIN
Published: January 11, 2006
NEW ORLEANS, Jan. 10 - The commission devising a blueprint to reconstruct the city will propose on Wednesday . . . the creation of a new jazz district downtown. . . . The jazz district would be in the old Storyville section, north of the French Quarter, an idea championed by the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, a member of the commission and the co-chairman of its culture committee."

The New Orleans Area Habitat for Humanity covers Jefferson, Orleans and St. Bernard parishes, and is in the "embryonic" stages of adding Plaquemines Parish. Pate said it hopes to build 250 to 500 houses in the four parishes, and possibly as many as 200 in the musicians' village."

Is this the "musician's village"?

Here's an excerpt from the L.A. Times re Wynton's project:

"To accelerate the process, Nagin's commission is asking the Federal Emergency Management Agency to release updated floodplain maps which effectively could make the decision for many homeowners by raising home insurance rates and setting other new financial barriers to redevelopment.

A subcommittee is proposing a new jazz district near the French Quarter at the former location of Storyville, a fabled district of musicians and houses of ill-repute at the turn of the last century.

It later fell into disrepair and was demolished. The idea to re-create a cleaned-up version of Storyville, which gave rise to musical legends including Jelly Roll Morton, is being championed by the Pulitzer Prize-winning jazz virtuoso Wynton Marsalis."

Cleaned up and recreated early 20th century bordellos in WyntonMarsalis-land! Ugh. Putting Wynton on the committee may help kill New Orleans music rather then help it.

Btw, I'm going to be down for four days during the last weekend of Mardi Gras, for a gig at Donna's and just to check things out.

"On Saturday, January 21, 2006, OffBeat
presents “The Best of the Beat Awards,”
its annual celebration of the best of New
Orleans’ music at the House of Blues, 225 Decatur
Street. The Best of
The Beat starts at 6 p.m. and ends at 2 a.m.

This year, OffBeat recognizes R&B legends
Allen Toussaint and Irma Thomas
with Lifetime Achievement in Music awards.
Toussaint is the influential songwriter and producer of
some of the city’s signature records, as well as a
performer in his own right. Thomas is the voice of
such classics as “Wish Someone Would Care,” “It’s
Raining” and “Breakaway.” Also honored are
Wanda Rouzan for Lifetime Achievement in
Music Education, “Uncle” Lionel Battiste of
the Treme Brass Band, who receives this year’s
Heartbeat Award, and George and Nina Buck
(GHB Records and the Palm Court Jazz Café), for the
Lifetime Achievement Award in Business.

The Best of The Beat will also include a tribute to the
late music documentarian, Stevenson Palfi.

HOB STAGE

7:00: John Autin

7:45: Morning 40 Federation

8:30: Awards with Stevenson Palfi Tribute

9:15: Papa Grows Funk with Anders Osborne and Tim
Green

10:00: Davis Rogan

10:30: Fred LeBlanc and Paul Sanchez of Cowboy
Mouth

11:15: Theresa Andersson with members of World
Leader Pretend

12:00: James Andrews with Shannon Powell

12:45: Walter “Wolfman” Washington

1:30: New Orleans Live Animals

PARISH STAGE

7:15: Coco Robicheaux

8:00: New Orleans Jazz Vipers

9:30: Quintron with C.C. Adcock

10:15: Ingrid Lucia

11:00: Michael Hurtt & His Haunted Hearts

11:45: White Bitch

12:30: Shannon McNally

1:15: Ghost"

http://citypages.com/databank/27/1313/article14090.asp

I'm heading down too, in time for the night of Feb. 23.

After Katrina, the Jazzman Plays On

By Anne Hull
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 30, 2006; A02

NEW ORLEANS -- Peter Badie is in the kitchen, rummaging around in a drawer for a spoon. This isn't his kitchen. His kitchen was filled with 10 feet of water during Hurricane Katrina and likely awaits the wrecking ball. The 80-year-old jazz musician is homeless and temporarily living in a spare bedroom of a Creole cottage here in the Faubourg Marigny section of town. This is Sue Hall's kitchen.

"Sue Hall, where is that big pan?" Badie calls out.

"Peter, it's where you left it," says the voice from the other room.

Horns and clarinets drift from speakers above. Badie catches sight of his black sunglasses on the counter. He snatches them up and slips them into his shirt pocket, mindful of being a neat houseguest. "Sue Hall, I've got some fish cakes out here."

The hurricane has forced all sorts of unexpected arrangements, and Badie and Hall are just one unlikely Odd Couple living in the aftermath. Badie is an accomplished acoustic bass player who has toured with Lionel Hampton. Hall booked bands at the Palm Court Jazz Cafe. When she heard that Badie lost his home in the Lower Ninth Ward, she offered him a place to stay.

Hall has red hair and pearly skin. She was born in Kankakee, Ill. Chili pepper lights hang in her kitchen; Southern folk art and pink flamingos abound. In the middle of this bright whimsy is Badie, an austere modern jazzman, as cool as midnight itself, dealing with his homelessness, anger and unsure future.

This is life in New Orleans now: tenuous, with strange forgings and new beginnings. No one is saying how long the arrangement will last.

Badie -- known as "Chuck" -- has a salt-and-pepper soul patch. He is a widower and devout Catholic. His routine is simple. He rises mid-morning, says his prayers and then emerges from his borrowed room and makes a pot of grits. He is immensely proud, almost to the point of defiance. He recently returned a $4,000 check that the musicians union sent him by mistake.

At Hall's kitchen table, he reads the New Orleans Times-Picayune from cover to cover. "They say New Orleans will be back," Badie says. "Not for me it won't. I'm 80 years old."

Badie was born in 1925 in the Black Pearl section of Uptown in New Orleans. His father was a jazz saxophonist with the Eureka and Olympia brass bands. Badie didn't pick up music until he got out of the Navy in 1945 and used the GI Bill to enroll at the Grunewald School of Music in New Orleans, a beacon of progressivism in a city cleaved by race. "Whites were on the first floor and blacks were on the second floor; to me, that's integrated," Badie says.

Zoot Sims, Dizzy Gillespie -- Badie played with the best of them. Along with other black musicians, he helped found the A.F.O. (All For One) record label in 1961. But musicians were paid so little that Badie worked as a lunch waiter at the Royal Sonesta Hotel in the French Quarter for 15 years, making $500 a week, five times what he earned playing music.

Before the hurricane, he had a standing gig at the Palm Court, and he rolled up in style: punctual, a pressed shirt and a 1979 black Cadillac roomy enough to carry his bass in the back seat. He lived alone at his house on North Johnson Street. Other musicians die in rental apartments, but Badie had his house.

Now he sits in Hall's kitchen, holding a letter from his homeowner's insurance company, typed with the words "No Compensation."

"Not one quarter," he says, smoldering.

Five months after the storm, Badie still drives to his house every day and stares at it. The mysteries of his losses plague him. "I had six suits," he says. "I'm talking about suits. Not that mix-'n'-match jive. Six suits. Now, where did they go?"

He was wise enough to store his two basses on the second floor of the Palm Court before the storm, saving them from ruin. He momentarily forgets his troubles when describing his 1946 Epiphone. "It's got a sound, baby, you can hear around the corner," he says. "People said, 'Chuck, don't ever sell it.' Cats would snap it up in a second. I did a lot of records with that." "The Man I Love," "A Change Is Gonna Come." One of the basses is stretched out across Hall's living room. Who knows where it will finally rest. Badie has been looking into the Habitat for Humanity "musicians' village" that singer Harry Connick Jr. and saxophone player Branford Marsalis are trying to create for Louisiana musicians left homeless by the storm.

For now, this pink cottage is home. Badie shows his appreciation by cooking: breaded pork chops, cabbage, neck bones, turnips and carrots, and oyster dressing. "Oyster dressing?" Badie says. "Oh, that will kick you. See, I re-boil them crawfish heads and get that stock ."

The phone rings again, and Hall comes into the kitchen. She's been trying to find a trombonist for a gig. The hurricane scattered New Orleans jazz musicians across the country; two-thirds have still not returned. "I must have called 10 trombone players," Hall says.

Badie frets over what to wear to the gig. His suits are gone. He goes into his bedroom to make a call about finding a new white shirt.

Hall drops her voice and whispers, "He's old school, the last of a generation. A man of integrity."

When Badie takes his place on stage at the Palm Court the next night, he reveals nothing of his troubles. The club owner introduces the musicians. "Mr. Chuck Badie has lost his home," she tells the crowd. Badie's eyes are hidden behind his dark shades. Someone counts off a beat, and the band sets off, with Badie plucking fiercely to the end.

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

http://www.rctimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060129/ENTERTAINMENT05/601290321/1005/MTCN0303

http://homeofthegroove.blogspot.com/

Oh, here's an article from Billboard--

Sad reality sinks in for New Orleans music scene

By Todd Martens Sun Feb 5, 5:44 PM ET

LOS ANGELES (Billboard) - Like nearly every house in New Orleans, Bethany
Bultman's home has holes in its roof. Buckets to catch rainwater surround
her desk, and she is hesitant to go out at night. Much of her neighborhood
is still completely without power.

She is one of the lucky ones. Leaky roof aside, her house suffered little
damage, and she has a second one in Massachusetts, a world away from the
devastation Hurricane Katrina inflicted last August. Bultman admits to
missing her Cape Cod getaway, but she cannot bring herself to abandon New
Orleans. There would be the guilt of leaving behind the city and those who
are suffering, but more important, there are checks to write.

Bultman inscribes upwards of 70 per week, each for $100, each given to a New
Orleans musician. To date, her efforts have been funded largely by donations
from Pearl Jam and nonprofit organization Jazz Aspen Snowmass; she recently
was promised $250,000 from MusiCares, the Recording Academy's charitable
arm.

The checks Bultman writes are allocated only to those who work, which these
days in New Orleans can mean performing at a club in front of a handful of
FEMA workers.

On many nights, money from the door is minimal or nonexistent. Bultman hopes
her $100 subsidy is enough to dissuade someone from taking a gig in another
city. If instruments and artifacts from the city's musical heritage were
washed away, then New Orleans' soul -- the musicians who define it -- must
stay.

"As the time wore on," Bultman says, "more and more musicians who were
dumped all over the country wanted to come back. We soon realized that this
is really about giving people instruments and giving people hope, and that's
when we started paying the gig fees."

Two months ago, Bultman, a writer/historian and the co-founder of the New
Orleans Musicians' Clinic, was urging displaced musicians to return to the
city. She started the clinic with her husband in 1998 with the assistance of
Dr. Jack B. McConnell, the developer of Tylenol tablets whose son, Page,
played keyboards for the band Phish. With a mix of pride and a dedication to
preserving a music culture that she says "percolates out of the ground,"
Bultman hoped all New Orleans' evacuees would soon be returning.

'NEW ORLEANS IS NOT A HEALTHY PLACE'

Reality, however, soon sunk in, and now she is not so sure. "The goal was to
get everyone we could get back to New Orleans," she says. "Now that we're
back, we've moved away from that. We've moved away from the fantasy that
everything would go back to the way it was. New Orleans is just not a
healthy place for everyone to come to."

Eight of the city's ZIP codes are still without full power, according to the
January 24 status report from the mayor's office. The area affected most by
Katrina -- the Ninth Ward -- remains under curfew, and 911 emergency
availability is scattered. Few hospitals are open, and the New Orleans
Musicians' Clinic, which had free use of the Louisiana State University
School of Medicine in New Orleans, has lost such privileges, as much of the
facility needs extensive repairs.

And for many, life was not all that great before Katrina. One in four of the
city's residents lived below the poverty line, and a great number of its
working musicians relied on a steady influx of tourists.

Bultman stays in touch with the national organizations providing relief to
New Orleans musicians, including MusiCares, which announced its pledge in
support of her efforts January 25.

She is heartened by the outpouring of generosity of her top donors and has
nothing but praise for MusiCares. But five months after Katrina, Bultman
feels that little has been accomplished. Nearly all of the 200 musicians she
helps lack a place to live. She worries the situation will only get worse
with a dearth of health care and tries to communicate to the national
associations that the effort to restore the music community in New Orleans
is one that will take years -- and one that will happen one saxophone at a
time.

RETURN TO SELF-SUFFICIENCY

Pianist Joe Krown was playing 12 gigs per week prior to Katrina. His wife,
who worked at Tulane University Hospital, was laid off after the hurricane.
He filled out the paperwork for nearly every charity dedicated to helping
musicians.

"I have a mortgage and a rent and no income, and before I said anything more
to a couple of them, there was a check in the mail," Krown says. "That
happened with MusiCares and the Musicians' Clinic and the Jazz Foundation."

He also benefited from the New Orleans Musicians' Relief Fund, which was
started by one-time dB's member Jeff Beninato and his wife, Karen. Along
with Chicago rock group Wilco, the couple brought Krown and such musicians
as Leroy Jones, George French, Craig Klein and Cranston Clements to Chicago
for a benefit show that raised more than $100,000.

Beninato says he started the charity two days after Katrina hit New Orleans,
and a few days after that he heard from MusiCares. He began working with the
national organization, providing names of musicians he knew were still in
New Orleans.

Beninato is re-outfitting the New Wave Brass Band, hoping to get the big
band in marching form for Mardi Gras. Providing instruments for working New
Orleans musicians has become a group effort, and MusiCares is at the
forefront. Wick says the charity has helped more than 600 musicians get new
instruments, and he says MusiCares receives between 30 and 80 applications
per day.

MusiCares has partnered with Gibson and the Guitar Center chain and launched
its Music Rising replacement initiative in New Orleans with U2's the Edge.
While an unknown number of musicians still need a place to live, they need
the instruments to make a living.

Krown, for one, says he was able to replace some equipment thanks to
MusiCares, and the program has made it easier for him to be self-sufficient.
"It was starting to feel like I was begging, and I have too much pride for
that," Krown says.

Reuters/Billboard

http://www.nojazzfest.com/schedule/index04.html

Actually, I'm happy just to see the names of all those locals returning to the Fest, but yeah, the headliners: could Quint be any more lame than re-booking Dave Matthews and Jimmy Buffett?

And Mama Digdown's at Donna's warms my heart. God, I love that place.

But at least the crowds won't be so overwhelming this year.

Way back when they also used to bring in some out-of-town jazz, and have more local jazz. I wonder if the Essence Fest is going to come back to New Orleans? It was never that imaginatively booked--smooth jazz, big name old-school funk, soul and rap for buppies; but I always thought that Quint should at least try to reach a little of that audience as well (but with cleverly chosen acts that would appeal to that demographic).

Quint doesn't care about the obscurities who play Ponderosa Stomp; Guitar Gable on the roster isn't gonna bring in very many additional people, while Buffett still attracts HORDES of Parrotheads. Phil Phillips singing "Sea of Love" last year brought tears to my eyes, partly because I couldn't believe it was the first time he's been asked to perform there. Authentic stuff like that is a blip on the JF schedule, and I feel like every time a soul legend like Johnnie Taylor passes away without playing Jazzfest, while Little Feat does AGAIN, it's just another thing Quint's gonna have to answer for at the pearly gates.

http://www.nola.com/news/t-p/frontpage/index.ssf?/base/entertainment-1/1140077747113660.xml

The local musicians who are involved are stuck with playing up to Quint--since he's the only game in town. It's frightening that until a corporate sponsor stepped in, there was nearly gonna be no brass bands --check out this quote from Keith Spera'a article:

"Jazzfest also announced a partnership with American Express. The company will promote various local acts and sponsor the Jazz & Heritage Stage, which debuted at the 2005 festival with a lineup of brass bands and Mardi Gras Indians. Budget constraints would have forced the festival to drop the stage had AmEx not stepped in, Davis said."

Anyone who's down the week before should check out the French Quarter Festival which is in many ways what JF should be. Free, all-local on a couple stages spread throughout the French Quarter. The food from the many stands (run by local restaurants etc) maxes out at $4. When I worked at the Aquarium lunch was the greatest thing in the world during the FQF: walk outside, get some food and a beer and watch the Nightcrawlers or Rebirth for an hour.

Ha ha. Funny how "shit" transposed to "hits."

Tanio and Fat Man have been in Germany for the past few weeks. Glen David got in some mess here and had to leave town -- something about a woman, I was told.

Last night's line-up was a kit drummer (who did a pretty good job by the way), Kenny Terry, Corey Henry, Kerwin and a trombonist I didn't recognize. And the McNeil NewsHour had a crew there -- they shot footage all night long. The reporter told me he was working on a documentary about Reggie Houston, who was living in Portland pre-Katrina and will be returning to NOLA for the first time during JazzFest.

Also, there are strong, believable rumors that a New Orleans bar/social club will be opening near downtown here. A famous NOLA musician is involved, but I can't say who right now. I should be going public with it in a week or two.

Meanwhile, the tension between the exiles and the locals is growing. New Orleanians are now the boogie man here -- they're getting blamed for everything scary about Houston. It would be funny if it weren't so sad -- after all, we've been Murder Capital USA for several years running in the not too distant past, but people here are acting like "those people" have come in here and despoiled Eden.

Things reached fever pitch a couple of weeks ago when a teenaged girl claimed she was snatched off the street in broad daylight and gangraped for 12 hours by three guys who she said had New Orleans accents. Houston's Third Ward was aboil for about 72 hours, until the girl finally confessed she made the whole thing up. In fact, she had run off and had consensual sex with a guy she met on myspace.

Fifth Annual Ponderosa Stomp
May 8th, 9th and 10th, 2006, at the Gibson Factory, Memphis Tennessee
THREE-DAY MUSIC FESTIVAL WILL BENEFIT NEW ORLEANS MUSICIANS VICTIMIZED BY HURRICANE KATRINA

From 5 P.M. till 2 A.M Nightly, Admission $40 per Night
Celebrating the Unsung Heroes of the Blues, Soul, Rockabilly, Swamp Pop and New Orleans R&B

Artists
Arch Hall, JR, Clarence "Frogman" Henry, Joe Clay, Jay Chevalier, Rebirth Brass Band, Willie Tee, Eddie Bo, Al "Carnival Time" Johnson, Rockie Charles, Tammy Lynn, Alvis Wayne, Warren Storm, Lazy Lester, The Bad Roads, Barbara Lynn, Roy Head, Lil Buck Sinegal, Archie Bell, Scotty Moore, DJ Fontana, Sonny Burgess, Hayden Thompson, Ace Cannon, Hi Rhythm Section, Travis Wammack, Willie Cobbs, Kenny Brown, The Bo Keys, The Nightcaps, Kenny & the Kasuals, ? & the Mysterians, Lady Bo, Billy Boy Arnold, Jody Williams, Deke Dickerson & the Eccofonics, Johnny Jones, Chick Willis, Little Freddie King, James Blood Ulmer, Betty Harris, Dale Hawkins, Dennis Coffey, William Bell, Fillmore Slim, The Tennessee Three featuting W.S. Holland and Bob Wootten, Wiley and the Checkmates, Syl Johnson, Herb Remington, The Fabulous Wailers, Bobby Patterson, The Climates, Carl Mann, Rayburn Anthony, Big George Brock, Henry Gray, Matt Lucas, The Rockabilly Country Band, Sleepy Labeef and Jumpin Gene Simmons.
more to come . . . .

Oh, here's what they posted back in December on their message board--

12-07-2005

Posted by: senor chubba
This is a temporary move strictly for this one gig. We are producing other shows in New Orleans now for 05 and 06. Keep in mind final plans for the stomp happen in August and September -and the hotel and travel situation in New Orleans is not so good. Residents who were flooded cannot find rooms to stay while they repair their homes. The stomp happens during jazzfest week- what little rooms are beginning to be available will probably be gobbled up. Flights are scarce. Most of the stomps audience comes in from out of town- we have to have rooms available. This year's stomp is a benefit for New Orleans musicians - we feel we can have the greatest impact in terms of helping by producing the show elsewhere for this year. This was not an easy decision. Please check our show schedule as we will be adding shows for New Orleans in early 2005. We live and work in New Orleans - and we are committed to doing everything we can- however, the stomp is first and foremost about the helping musicians."

They're doing a one night thing at the South by Southwest Fest in Austin shortly as well I see--"Ponderosa Stomp Gulf Coast Revue at SXSW
Friday, March 17, 2006
Continental Club in Austin, Texas

The luck of the irish will be needed as Mystic Knights of the Mau Mau invade SXSW. the Knights will be bringing a special Ponderosa Stomp Gulf Coast Revue to the Continental Club in Austin, Texas. Featured performers will include, Eddie Bo, Al Carnival Time Johnson, Tommmy McClain, Roy Head, Barbara Lynn, Warren Storm, Classie Ballou, Archie Bell, Lil Buck Sinegal, Lil Band O'Gold, The Bad Roads and Zakary Thaks will appear. Lastly, special guest will be Shreveport native DJ Fontana."

February 27, 2006
Critic's Notebook
In the Music of New Orleans, Katrina Leaves Angry Edge
By JON PARELES, N.Y. Times
NEW ORLEANS, Feb. 26 — The beat was crisp New Orleans funk, thumping to keep the crowd dancing at the uptown club Tipitina's. The band onstage, Dumpstaphunk, was led by Ivan Neville, the son of Aaron Neville and a member of New Orleans's first family of rhythm and blues.

Like many top New Orleans musicians, he was back in town for a club date on the weekend before Mardi Gras, when so many local musicians returned to the city's clubs that it almost seemed they had never gone away.

In this city that holds so many roots of American song, music is more than entertainment. It's a ritual and a lifeline.

On the surface of the music scene here, much was familiar. More than 80 nightclubs offered live music, perhaps two-thirds the number before Hurricane Katrina. The clubs in the French Quarter and uptown, in neighborhoods spared major flood damage, were booked with New Orleans all-stars: funk bands like the Radiators and Galactic, brass bands like the Rebirth Brass Band and the Soul Rebels, jazz musicians like Kermit Ruffins and Trombone Shorty.

They're still playing New Orleans standards as the drinks flow. But there's a changed spirit: the tenacity of holding together bands whose members have been scattered and the determination to maintain the New Orleans style. And in new songs, an open anger coexists with the old good-time New Orleans tone. Over a funk beat, Mr. Neville had something to say.

"Talkin' to the powers that be!" he declaimed like a preacher. "A lot of people got disenfranchised, displaced, and now we got a lot of distrust." He moved into a song built on the local greeting "Where y'at?" But one verse listed whereabouts of displaced New Orleanians: "Where y'at? Texas! Mississippi!" Another asked the federal government: "Where y'at, when we really needed you?"

In the 21st century, the most commercial New Orleans music has been hip-hop. Juvenile, a New Orleans rapper, has spent most of his career doing gangta boasts. But he has just released the single "Get Ya Hustle On," with a video clip shot in the ruins of the Ninth Ward.

It shows children in masks of President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and the city's mayor, C. Ray Nagin, wandering through the wreckage as Juvenile raps lyrics like "We starving, we living like Haiti with no government" and "I'm trying to live, I lost it all in Katrina." A house he had just built was destroyed in the hurricane.

There has always been more to New Orleans music than its nonchalant facade. The city has repeatedly catalyzed American music, as sounds that started in the streets of New Orleans reached the world as jazz, put the roll into rock 'n' roll and taught new syncopations to rhythm and blues. Within the songs is the tension and fascination between classes and cultures: African, European, French, Spanish, Caribbean, Native American, rich and poor.

"They don't all get along," said Nick Spitzer, the host of the Public Radio International program "American Routes" and one of the authors of "Blues for New Orleans: Mardi Gras and America's Creole Soul" (Penn Press). "But they've created an amazing shared culture." New Orleans musicians have long been able deliver troubled thoughts with a smile, as Louis Armstrong did in "Black and Blue" and Fats Domino did in "Ain't That a Shame."

When New Orleans musicians play the old songs, what once came across as easygoing now carries a streak of bravado.

Like other New Orleanians, many musicians have lost their homes, possessions and sometimes family members, and they are traveling long distances to play in their old local haunts.

A song like "Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans" now echoes with the knowledge that some natives of the city will never return. And there are new, bleaker resonances when a Mardi Gras Indian group like the Wild Magnolias sings the traditional song "Shallow Water Oh Mama," or when a brass band picks up the bouncy "It Ain't My Fault."

Vaughan's, a club in the Upper Ninth Ward, is too small for a stage. Mr. Ruffins, a trumpeter, has returned to his regular Thursday gig there after a long hiatus imposed by the storm, and he and his band were nearly backed against the club's wall by the dancing crowd. He was playing and singing old New Orleans songs like "Mardi Gras Mambo," with a jovial Louis Armstrong growl.

Yet no one, onstage or off, has forgotten that the Lower Ninth Ward, still in ruins, is only a few blocks away.

Mr. Ruffins finished one set with a pop standard once sung by Bing Crosby, "Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams." Halfway through, in casual New Orleans style, he handed the microphone to an audience member, who belted the song — with a line about castles tumbling — and then held on to the microphone long enough to add, "That's for all the people that lost their houses."

Later, Mr. Ruffins agreed. "Those tunes take a whole different meaning now," he said. "At one time in the club, we would just be singing them. Now, I listen to the words."

I missed Hot 8 on Saturday, but Rebirth killlled it from 1 am - 3 am without a break.

Mardi Gras Dawns With Some Traditions in Jeopardy
By JON PARELES, N.Y. Times
Excerpts from his article:

For longtime New Orleanians, Mardi Gras isn't a frivolous diversion from deep problems; it's a symbol of continuity and identity. "It's not that we're going to celebrate and party and forget our rough times," said Irvin Mayfield, a jazz trumpeter whose father drowned during the flooding after Hurricane Katrina. "We're going to celebrate and party and make that about our rough times."

Bands whose members have been scattered to various states have driven and flown in to play New Orleans dates. Mardi Gras Indian practice sessions have been held as far away as Texas. Coolbone, a brass band that played a jazz-funeral tribute to Clarence (Gatemouth) Brown on Saturday afternoon, now has members in Texas and Alabama; a saxophonist for the Rebirth Brass Band now lives in New York City. But the groups are staying together.

Musicians who are synonymous with New Orleans, like the trumpeter Kermit Ruffins, have moved back and reclaimed their regular local dates. "I couldn't wait to get back," said Mr. Ruffins, who established himself so quickly in Houston after the storm that he's lending his name to a barbecue restaurant there. "All my life I grew up in the little nightclubs, and I couldn't wait to go back to just the old hole-in-the-walls."

For musicians, as for hundreds of thousands of other displaced New Orleanians, housing is the main problem. Real estate prices have skyrocketed because so much of the city is uninhabitable. Mr. Ruffins said that musicians who could make comfortable livings as New Orleans expatriates would still be eager to return. "If they had thousands of homes for people to stay in, I know that every musician who left would be right back," he said.

No upheaval would make Mr. Boudreaux change his Mardi Gras ritual. "You gotta do this," he said. "If that spirit is in you, it has to come out."

The Mardi Gras Indians represent one of New Orleans's endangered neighborhood traditions. So do the brass bands that play for jazz funerals and other neighborhood parades. Parades in New Orleans aren't complete without a "second line" of strutting, dancing, clapping spectators turned paraders — a street-level, neighborhood celebration. Now, in places like the Lower Ninth Ward, there are no neighbors.

A foundation associated with the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival (which starts April 28) bought and distributed 900 strings of marabou feathers and 175 pounds of custom-dyed large African ostrich plumes — two pounds per Indian, with 75 to 100 feathers per pound. The festival has also been paying the cost of police permits for second-line neighborhood parades — which was raised, in January, to $3,605 — and fees for the brass bands. "This is all that is left of this jazz culture in the world," said Quint Davis, the director of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival.

Tipitina's, a club devoted to New Orleans music, is now a nonprofit foundation. It has been distributing instruments, including a shiny new brass sousaphone for the leader of the Rebirth Brass Band, which had New Orleans gigs all through the weekend. It also turned its upstairs offices into a community center for musicians, where they can use computers, get free legal help and meet one another: a kind of substitute for neighborhood hangouts that are now gone. And in November 2005, it began holding Mardi Gras Indian practices, which used to take place in neighborhood bars. The practice sessions doubled in size each time until they outgrew the club.

Long-term questions remain about what will happen to New Orleans traditions. High school bands in African-American neighborhoods were a vital training ground and source of instruments for young New Orleans musicians; with far fewer students in the city, many schools are closed down or consolidated, and music instruction is unlikely to be the most pressing priority for those that reopen. But on Carnival weekend, the clubs were full of familiar New Orleans names and sounds: brass bands like the Hot 8 and the Soul Rebels, funk bands like Galactic and the Radiators, the bluesman Walter Wolfman Washington and jazz musicians like the New Orleans Vipers and Trombone Shorty.

In the aftermath of the storm, there has been a huge surge of interest in New Orleans music. "Since Katrina, the culture in this city is being recognized more," said Bo Dollis, chief of the Wild Magnolias, another parading tribe. "And without the music, I don't know how this city will survive."

Then, flanked by tribe members in feathers and beads, he took to the stage of the Rock 'n' Bowl in the Mid-City neighborhood — much of it still dark and deserted — to sing the old Indian songs once again.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/28/arts/28fats.html?th&emc=th

Fats Domino article

I see that they announced today that they have added "Bruce Springsteen and the Seeger Session" to Jazz Fest. Alas, based on a quick perusal, Quint has not added the TBC Brass band, Ponderosa Stomp type obscure Louisiana artists, New Orleans rap and bounce artists(Juvenile's new cd and video is getting lots of attention elsewhere-- ILMer Jess Harvell has a nice piece in the Baltimore City Paper), or Mississippi blues and soul performers. They added a few token 'world' music acts, but not as many as they have had in previous years.

A Keith Spera article excerpt for the N O Times-Picayune-

Shorty and Lenny: On the Friday before Mardi Gras, local trombonist and trumpeter Troy "Trombone Shorty" Andrews wrapped up a months-long tour with Lenny Kravitz's band. After that final show in Anaheim, Calif., Kravitz informed Andrews that he planned to hang out with him in New Orleans for Mardi Gras.

Little did Andrews know that the trip would result in a role reversal. Normally, Kravitz is the leader, Andrews the side man. But at the House of Blues on Lundi Gras, as Andrews' band, Orleans Avenue, opened for Dr. John, Kravitz joined them as a backing musician. He played three songs on drums -- James Andrews' "New Love Thing," Jessie Hill's "Ooo-Poo-Pa-Doo" and a jam -- then switched to guitar for a final "Big Chief."

Kravitz had rehearsed the other songs at sound check, but not "Big Chief." "That was his first time playing it," Andrews said. "It was spur of the moment. But he was killing it. It was amazing. That was very nice of him."

http://www.nola.com/sounds/t-p/spera/index.ssf

Storied Church May Be Victim of Katrina
St. Augustine, Founded in 1841, Is Called Vital Link to Culture of New
Orleans

By Kari Lydersen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 19, 2006; A07

NEW ORLEANS -- Parishioners at one of the nation's oldest African American
Catholic churches may have celebrated their last Mass as a parish last
Sunday, even as they continued their efforts this week to keep the doors
open at St. Augustine.

The church, in the Treme neighborhood near the French Quarter, is a center
of racial harmony and great jazz, playing a central role in New Orleans
history and culture. With so much of the city devastated by Hurricane
Katrina, local residents are rallying behind the church and hoping the
parish can be saved.

"The people of New Orleans have lost so much; we don't want to lose this,"
said Sandra Gordon, 52, a church volunteer who has been coming to St.
Augustine since 1965, when Hurricane Betsy destroyed her former church.

In the face of a much-reduced city population and physical damage to many
churches post-Katrina, the Archdiocese of New Orleans is closing seven
parishes and delaying the reopening of 23 churches. Attendance at St.
Augustine, down to fewer than 200 people pre-Katrina, increased
significantly afterward. But archdiocese officials said current attendance
is not enough. ....

It was one of the first churches where slaves, free blacks and whites
worshiped together. After a period as a segregated white church and then a
black church, it has had an interracial congregation and services that blend
elements of Catholicism with African spirituality and homegrown New Orleans
culture. Portraits of the African American "Mardi Gras Indians" are
displayed side by side with saints on the walls, and the church is known for
popular jazz masses and jazz funerals, including an annual "Louis Armstrong
Jazz Mass."

I think they added rapper Juvenile to the Fest (he has/had the #1 selling cd on the Billboard charts recently) and he is apparently going to be backed by jam band Galactic, who also backed him on the Jimmy Kimmel show. On the jazzfest website chatboard some of the jambanders and other aging hippies were whining about a rapper being added. Ugh to those complainers.

Juvee + Galactic? Weird.

http://s52.yousendit.com/d.aspx?id=0ERYNF7VPXIO61B86JAU78GUAH

"...on Christmas Day the Times-Picayune--declaring that "before a community can rebuild, it must dream"--published a vision of what a smaller-but-better New Orleans might look like: "Tourists and schoolchildren tour a living museum that includes the former home of Fats Domino and Holy Cross High School, a multiblock memorial to Katrina that spans the devastated neighborhood."
"Living museum" (or "holocaust museum," as a black friend bitterly observed) sounds like a bad joke, but it is the elite view of what African-American New Orleans should become. In the brave New Urbanist world of Canizaro and Kabacoff, blacks (along with that other colorful minority group, Cajuns) will reign only as entertainers and self-caricatures. The high-voltage energy that once rocked juke joints, housing projects and second-line parades will now be safely embalmed for tourists in a proposed Louisiana Music Experience in the Central Business District.

But this minstrel-show version of the future must first defeat a remarkable local history of grassroots organization. The Crescent City's best-kept secret--in the mainstream press, at least--has been the resurgence of trade-union and community organizing since the mid-1990s. Indeed, New Orleans, the only Southern city in which labor was ever powerful enough to call a general strike, has become an important crucible of new social movements. In particular, it has become the home base of ACORN, a national organization of working-class homeowners and tenants that counts more than 9,000 New Orleans member-families, mostly in triage-threatened black neighborhoods."

Not sure I agree with everything Davis asserts, but I thought I'd put it out there for discussion.

http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6301342.html

What are your thoughts on the future of New Orleans rap and New Orleans cultural life in general?

NC: Unless the black neighborhoods are restored, there can be no real future for rap in New Orleans. The authorities seem bent on portraying all young black males as looters and gangstas. This is nonsense, as my book makes clear. The city can have no genuine life without its youth. If the Mardi Gras Indian tribes and second-line parades are reduced to tourist attractions, as seems to be the plan, everything that has made the city so alive and ever-evolving will wither. Even those who dislike rap should understand that it's the music of the streets today. Banish it, and New Orleans becomes a museum.

Have you had any contact with the artists and personalities so vividly described in Triksta, such as Choppa, Junie B, Earl Mackie, and Supa Dave, since the book went to print? How are they doing?

NC: I'm in contact with the great majority of people in the book, except those I'd already parted ways with pre-Katrina. They all survived the hurricane but lost everything: homes, jobs, possessions. They are scattered around the South, some in Houston, some in Atlanta, and others in Dallas, San Antonio, and Florida. Only Seventh Ward Snoop and Wild Wayne are back in New Orleans. Most of the others want to return but, as I've explained, they're being kept out."

I posted this over on ILX, but it's obvious this thread is the place for it:

The Mardi Gras Index: New Orleans by the numbers 6 months after Katrina:
http://www.reconstructionwatch.org/MardiGrasReport6.pdf

We need a solidarity movement with evacuees around the country to deal with these issues on a massive-protest scale. Anyone game? Or should we just joing ACORN? What should we do?

What should we do?

I don't know, but if you figure it out, tell me.

I wish I could be as positive about ACORN as Mike Davis but I am not.
Bush and the Republics seem uninterested in building the levees to category 5 level or to restoring the wetlands. FEMA won't even draw up the flood insurance maps that have been promised (and there's still no new permanent head of FEMA). It's all well and good to say you want 9th Warders to return, but to what--unless you can protect the folks from flooding, you're sentencing them to another Katrina or worse. And of course pre-Katrina New Orleans had its problems that still need to be dealt with--good luck in getting the Republicans (actually any politicians of either party) to propose anything creative regarding education, job-training, crime, etc.

Musically, Without the school system and young African-Americans in brass bands learning from their elders in brass bands, it's not clear how vital this culture can remain. Certain brass bands and related Mardi Gras Indian troups will hold on, but they'll be more isolated. But these musicians, be they now stuck in a Disney museum city or not, deserve support and not dismissal as minstrels. And folks of all races shouldn't be ashamed to see them and support them.

http://newyorknighttrain.com/zine/issues/3/orleans.html

Juvenile's New Orleans, the ghost town America made
http://citypages.com/databank/27/1322/article14261.asp

Here are some Mardi Gras weekend photos, including one of the Hot 8... audio coming Wednesday...

http://blogs.citypages.com/pscholtes/2006/04/calling_all_my.asp

Btw, when were you at the Backstreet cultural museum? I played there on Saturday of that weekend.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/09/arts/music/09kun.html?pagewanted=print

The grid schedule is out and Hot 8 and the Stooges are both playing the 2nd weekend. Sorry. The Stooges are with jam band Galactic at a club show at night somewhere during the first weekend though, but I do not yet see any club gigs for Hot 8 listed at their website or in Offbeat (yet).

The Treme Brass Band are at Donnas the Friday of the first weekend.

I think we're at Donna's on Saturday, but I don't think anything's confirmed yet.

Bo Dollis on the mend?: We also heard Big
Chief Bo Dollis of the
Wild Magnolias is in the hospital. He was
recently reported to be in intensive care with a
diabetes-related illness, but according to his
manager, Glenn Gaines, Mr. Dollis has passed a crisis
and is doing much better. More on this when we
hear...

I know the Treme Brass band will be at Donna's on Friday 4-28. I will be gone before the annual Monday night Piano thing.

My band (Mama D1gd0wn's Brass Band) is at Donna's on Saturday 4/29. Looks like Rebirth has some Rock n' Bowl gigs that weekend. I'll see what Hot 8 are up to.

We're opening for Rebirth tomorrow night, looking forward to it.

(just sent you an email curmudgeon)

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/23/arts/music/23sann.html?_r=1&th=&emc=th&pagewanted=print

"The Mahogany Brass Band was playing for its first time since the storm, and it was the first time all its members — dispersed as far as Phoenix and San Francisco — had seen one another. Brice Miller, its leader, started a strikingly emotional "St. James Infirmary" alone as a tearful solo trumpet dirge; when he sang the lyrics, about seeing a lover's dead body, he interjected, "My baby's New Orleans!" . . . .The good times in the music were more treasured at this Jazzfest, and rightly so. Behind the scenes, each band had to recreate itself after the
evacuation: to find its place in New Orleans or to reconstitute it somewhere else. The New Birth Brass Band, originally from New Orleans, wore new T-shirts depicting both Louisiana and Texas.

Still, New Orleans music hasn't stopped putting pleasure first. Jazzfest is, as always, a festival of good-time dance music, whether it's traditional jazz, bayou zydeco, brass-band struts, Mardi Gras Indian chants or fiercely complex electric funk. A superb jazz pianist, Jonathan Batiste, grounded his jubilant, splashy harmonies in Caribbean and New Orleans rhythms. Brass bands like Rebirth, New Birth and the Soul Rebels spanned classic second-line swing and hip-hop-influenced funk, with the Soul Rebels also pushing toward Latin beats. And there was plenty of straightforward funk from New Orleans elders like the Meters [NOTE: I found them jam-band dull-Curmudgeon] and Dr. John [Eh], as well as next-generation funk bands like Galactic [self-indulgent, dull solos]and Papa Grows Funk[skipped them].

The destruction in New Orleans is bound to change the city's culture. (For one thing, an influx of Mexican labor for construction is bound to add yet another ingredient to New Orleans music.) And whether a majority of the city's population can ever return will be decided by large political and economic decisions, not by who's playing in the clubs. But this Jazzfest was a symbol of how eager the city's culture is to rebuild itself, and how resourceful New Orleans' inhabitants — current and former — can be. If the New Orleans of deep local traditions does not renew itself, it won't be for lack of desire.

The triumph of this year's Jazzfest was that on the surface, it was a normal Jazzfest: crowded, sweaty, ebullient and full of homegrown New Orleans spirit. "Normal is an incredible word to use down here," said Quint Davis, the producer and director of Jazzfest. "Normalcy is a nonexistent term."

While it wasn't straight-up hip-hop and second-line inflected brass band style, Irvin Mayfield & the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra were booming out the horn power with lots of special guests including Trombone Shorty and Mayfield's colleague in other groups, Bill Summmers. I think that's whom I saw Kirk Joseph(one-time Dirty Dozen member who has his own group now) blowing tuba with. The all-women Pinettes Brass Band were just ok--the Ol Skool Brass Band and the more traditional Paulin Brothers Brass Band were better.

Alan Toussaint and Elvis Costello used a New Orleans horn section to get across old Toussaint songs, and songs they had worked on together for the upcoming River in Reverse cd. Unfortunately Toussaint rushed through his beginning of the set retrospective, doing too many of his songs as a cheesy medley. The new stuff lacks catchy melodies. The horns sounded strong though. Bruce Springsteen used a New Orleans-inspired horn section. He got more attention though for adding a verse about Bush to Blind Alfred Reed's
1929 song "How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live"--
he called him "President Bystander." Springsteen was taken to the Lower Ninth Ward and spoke about "criminal ineptitude that makes you furious... that's what happens when people play political games with other people's lives." He finished with a slow, funeral tempo take on "When the Saints Go Marching In," done duet-style with Marc Anthony "Chocolate Genius" Thompson. I only saw the beginning and end of Springsteen's long set (I left the huge 20,000 or more mob scene there to go see excellent swamp pop supergroup Lil' Band of Gold in front of 100 people or so). The version of "When the Saints" was impressive, his beginning of the set takes on songs associated with the new Seeger cd were less so.

Here's some interesting quotes from a Dan Deluca article syndicated by Knight-Ridder:

"There are plenty of efforts to help displaced musicians, like TipitinasFoundation.org. Habitat for Humanity broke ground this week on a Musicians Village in the Ninth Ward. But if, as jazz patriarch Ellis Marsalis says, "music bubbles up from the streets" here, what happens when the streets are deserted?

"It's just phenomenal the Third World treatment they've gotten from the federal government," said singer and pianist Dr. John, the New Orleans native who was born Mac Rebennack. "This city is the country's greatest ambassador to the world with its music."

He fears that if developers turn it into a "shuck-ass Disneyland, it ain't going to survive. The politicians just want to push it into something they can make more money on. They don't give a damn about these people."

For many New Orleans musicians, business has been good on the road but hurting at home - if they have one. "After the hurricane, a lot of people had New Orleans on their mind," Bennie Pete, tuba player for the Hot 8 Brass Band, said before a gig at Tipitina's on Wednesday. "We got a lot of bookings."

But keeping the band together has been a trial. Pete's family lost its home in the Ninth Ward so he has been living in nearby Kenner. Other band members are as far-flung as Houston, Atlanta and New York.

"They say they want to rebuild the city, but do they want to rebuild it for us?" said the bandleader. JazzFest, he said, promises exposure to a wider audience, but "other than that, it's just another gig."

After seeing Glen up onstage several times in one day, a friend of mine predicted we would see him again later. Sure enough we did, standing next to us watching Etta James! He said to me "I'm here to get a music education."

Oh yeah I almost forgot, 95-year-old Lionel Ferbos can still blow that trumpet trad New Orleans style...

--Mahogany Brass Band at Jazzfest

--Glenn David pushing the Edge offstage during New Birth's fest set

--Juvee

--The Digdown show went great, at least half the Stooges lineup was with us and there were a lot of heavy dudes in the house

--Hot 8 @ Cafe Brasil started slow but turned into a party, too bad their hot snare drummer Dinnerall wasn't there

--The "Rascals" at the Blue Nile on Monday was actually more of a 6th ward all-stars thing, best brass band set I've seen in ages. Damn.

Apparently The Edge played with Dave Mathews--but I did not go anywhere near that show. I wish I had still been in town for that Rascals set.

Hot 8 are playing Central park in NYC in August, and hopefully will get a DC area show right around that time.

There sre still many folks just discovering how the young brass bands incorporate hiphop and funk, and don't wear white dress shirts and caps and play Preservation Hall style (not that there's anything wrong with that).
I forgot to mention that Clarence Frogman Henry still sounded nice. Whille he joked around with it a bit, "Ain't Got No Home" took on a new poignancy. Not too many other New Orleans old-time r'n'b singers performed (some are no longer with us). I loved bluesman and more Snooks Eglin when I saw him down there years ago, but was less wowed this time. I had seen Walter Wolfman Washington in the DC area ages ago and enjoyed him. At jazzfest he was kinda uneven--too bluesrocky sometimes, but othertimes he nicely took advantage of his horns and organist.

I have vague memories of seeing Lee Dorsey opening for the Clash in 1979 in Philadelphia. The Ponderosa Stomp folks get slightly younger soulman Rockie Charles to appear at their events plus folks like Al Carnival Time Johnson and others.

I just saw the Offbeat magazine weekly e-mail description of that accident you referred to. How terrible:

"We’re saddened to hear that Hot 8 Brass Band
trumpeter Terrell Batiste lost his legs in
an accident in Atlanta. He was putting up cones on
the highway to alert drivers that his truck had broken
down when he was hit. . . ."

The wizards of 'OZ
While showcasing New Orleans culture, radio station WWOZ became a cultural icon itself. General Manager David Freedman and his colorful collection of music devotees are hellbent on saving it.
Wednesday, May 03, 2006
Dave Walker http://www.nola.com/search/index.ssf?/base/living-6/114663642483370.xml

"With WWOZ mostly returned to task -- broadcasting live from Jazzfest and Monday's annual Piano Night concert -- Freedman continues to ponder the station's larger role in cultural restoration.

Mostly, he worries about the city's "living culture" as created by its high school marching bands, church choirs, second-line clubs and Mardi Gras Indian tribes.

Without restoring those, "this city is going to be a museum of its past," he said.

Recalling seeing kids carrying their school-issued instruments through the Treme neighborhood, Freedman wonders where the next generation of New Orleans musicians will come from.

"We'd watch those kids blasting their trumpets and trombones on the sidewalk as they walked home," he said. "We were watching New Orleans re-create itself in front of our eyes. Until we can see that again, we think that the culture of New Orleans stopped on Aug. 27, as living culture.

"I'm as focused right now in the future of marching bands as I am in the future of the radio station. I think (the station has) landed. We're on our feet and . . . we're going to make it. I am concerned that the marching bands won't make it.

"We know those rhythms will cease in this city in a generation."

To be taught, he said, only in music conservatories. If then.

"As corrupt as the school system was, the one function it could handle beautifully was as a carrier for our culture," Freedman said. "If we don't somehow redevelop that, we're going to be without that culture in the future."

. . . . . . .

Thanks, The Edge! We couldn't have done it without you.

'So much of my life, well, drowned' -A depressing article by Edna Gundersen on brassmen Dr. Michael White and Irvin Mayfield. Jazz clarinetist and music professor Michael White lost his huge collection of recordings, sheet music, books and instruments at his home in the Gentilly section.

by Steve Hochman

"On that note, leave it to New Orleans to overcome the cancellation of not just one but two of the final JazzFest 2006 day's headliners and still go out partying.

And it wasn't Lionel Richie, who moved over from another stage to headline the Acura in Fats' place after Simon, that made the concluding magic. It was the replacement for Nicholas Payton, the trumpeter scheduled for the closing Jazz Tent slot who was also injured and unable to appear. With that opening, a gaggle of stars of the ever-vibrant brass band scene here took over the stage for what was billed as "Takin' It To the Streets JazzFest Finale Jam 2006." There were a couple of Andrews, some of Rebirth Brass Band and the Lil' Rascals, some New Orleans Nightcrawlers, a fraction of the Dirty Dozen, trumpeters Christian Scott and Maurice Brown, two sousaphones, singer John Boutte and we lost track of the rest. Morgan Freeman was spotted in the crowd looking on as everyone danced to funky cutting sessions of "Caravan" and, of course, an ending "When the Saints Go Marching In." The only thing that would have made it better would have been for them to really take it to the streets, leading the audience out the gates with a second-line. So we'll just pick it up again next year where we left off, then."

If celebrities want to help they need to go up to the 17th street canal and FIX THE MOTHER FUCKING LEVEE. I haven't seen the Industrial Canal lately so it might be in just as bad shape but as of two days ago at the 17th they are NOT DOING SHIT. There was like one dude smoking a cigarette surrounded by idle machinery. Hurricane season starts in 3 weeks.

Sad news. When I saw him just a couple years ago he was using his big ol' belly to bump his piano-on-wheels across the stage and didn't look frail at all.

They don't have a record or a website, but here's the website of the people that did the documentary, and it has a pretty hot clip on there.

http://images.citypages.com/articles/0000/CallingAllMyPeople.mp3

Calling all the people
Come back home
New Orleans
Where you belong

On a brighter note, I see that the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in DC is going to include 3 special free concerts with Louisiana artists under tents down near the Washington Monument. Hot 8 are gonna be playing Saturday July 8th along with Chief Monk's Mardi Gras Indian troupe.

Hot 8 at SXSW. In the first clip they're doing Word on the Street, a Digd0wn/Youngbl00d tune.

Also looks like there's a new S0ul Rebels joint, live in the studio.

Crowd goes wild. Band goes batshit. playing like an all-brass Funkadelic on crystal. Amazing.

Friday June 30

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG
Jubilee Stage
6:00-8:00 p.m.

Friendly Travelers (gospel)
Dr. Michael White and the Original Liberty Jazz Band (jazz)

Friday July 7

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG
Jubilee Stage
6:00-8:00 p.m.

Hot 8 Brass Band
Big Chief Monk Boudreaux and the Golden Eagles Mardi Gras Indian Tribe

Saturday July 8

BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG
Jubilee Stage
6:00-8:00 p.m.

The Dixie Cups
Davell Crawford

THE 22nd ANNUAL KENNEDY CENTER OPEN HOUSE ARTS FESTIVAL:
Featuring Sounds Along the Gulf Coast Highway

Sat., Sept. 16
12 p.m.-7 p.m.
Throughout the building
FREE (some events may
require free tickets)

The 22nd annual Kennedy Center Open House Arts Festival celebrates the Center’s 35th birthday with more than 30 performances, activities and events for the whole family presented throughout the building. A parade featuring a marching band, The Wild Magnolias, Tremè Brass Band, ArcheDream, and DC dance company Step Afrika, kicks off at noon near the Hall of Nations entrance and progresses along the Center’s main plaza. This year’s festival highlights the arts of the Gulf Coast region—following fabled U.S. Route 90 from San Antonio Texas, through Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Jacksonville, Florida. The festival also presents programming selections from the 2006-2007 Season at the Kennedy Center and Washington, D.C. area artists.

NOTE: Complete Open House Schedule to be issued later.

From the Los Angeles Times

New Orleans Endures the `New Normal'
Sure, Mardi Gras and Jazz Fest came back. But everyday life in the city remains shattered.
By Ann M. Simmons, Times Staff Writer
July 15, 2006

excerpts:
"At the end of the school year, 25 of 128 New Orleans public schools had reopened; and just 12,000 of the city's 60,000 students had returned. By September, 57 schools with space for up to 34,000 students are expected to be open, although according to school officials, there only will be staff to handle 22,000."

"The low-income workers lived in public housing units, most of which are still closed. Meanwhile, house prices and rents have skyrocketed.
Public housing residents have been clamoring to return, and over the last few weeks, hundreds have been coming home for the first time since the storm. Residents of St. Bernard Housing Development in the 7th Ward, who had erected a "Survivors Village" outside the city's largest public housing complex, recently learned the units are among hundreds slated for demolition under a federal plan to rid New Orleans of obsolete public housing in favor of modern developments.

The tenants said they planned to fight the decision, but housing officials, citing safety concerns such as collapsing lumber and mold, said the demolition would move ahead."

As the world starts documenting the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, WDSU gets in the game locally this Thursday at 6:30 p.m. with "A Song for New Orleans."

The film focuses on the Rebirth Brass Band,
their experiences and losses due to Katrina, and the
return of the band and their music to New Orleans.
The feature will be aired this evening in New Orleans,
and will be repeated twice during the week of the
Katrina Anniversary. The Executive Producer,
Emerson Coleman, VP of Programming for Hearst-
Argyle Television in New York, had seen Rebirth and
was interested in using the story of the band as a
hopeful symbol for the rebirth of New Orleans’ music
and culture. The film includes interviews with
OffBeat publisher Jan Ramsey, Tipitina’s
manager Adam Shipley, and interviews and
performances with Charmaine Neville, Kermit
Ruffins, Donald Harrison, Jr. and, of course, the
members of Rebirth Brass Band. "A Song For New
Orleans" will also be broadcast on Hearst-Argyle
stations throughout the US in the coming weeks.
Check your local listings for air times.Check out the links here for information on "A Song"... - http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?t=kka5txbab.0.kg6vuxbab.ks58lun6.3064&ts=S0198&p=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.wdsu.com

www.katrinadinner2006.com

Oh! HBO is showing Spike Lee's New Orleans/second-line documentary on Monday and Tuesday night. Some dudes from my band might be in it. I need to get friends with cable stat.

New Orleans bands that rarely traveled before Katrina, continue to hit the road. The Treme Brass band are coming to DC in September to get a National Heritage Award, and will be playing at the award ceremony out in the Maryland burbs (Strathmore) and 2 shows at the Kennedy Center.

Not sure about other New Orleans brass bands--Stooges, Hot 8, Treme, etc. They all have been playing some gigs around the US over the summer it seems, but nothing too regular back home...

One New Orleans Procession
Free
One New Orleans Procession in the tradition of a Jazz Funeral from the Convention Center to the Superdome. Lieutenant General Russel L. Honoré will be the Grand Marshall of the One New Orleans Procession. Also Honoring 1st Responders, the lives lost in Katrina, and the rebirth of New Orleans. Everyone is invited to participate.

And for those with money to spare:

Wynton Marsalis : Rebuilding the Soul of America Katrina Anniversary Events
August 27, 2006 : August 30, 2006
Visit website for more info
http://www.celebratejazz.org
Various Locations
More details to follow...
Admission: $50.00 : $2500.00
Wynton Marsalis will return to New Orleans to produce a television special marking the hurricane’s anniversary. Wynton and his production partner Lisa Marie Hoggs will team with producers John Cossette and Don Mischer to helm “New Orleans: Rebuilding the Soul of America One Year Later,” a live television special taking place at the New Orleans Morial Convention Center. He is also planning a three:day tribute to New Orleans, from August 27 through the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina on August 29, to include in the television special. The event will feature the Ambassador of Swing Talent Search at Harrah’s New Orleans Theater, including performances by Wynton Marsalis, jazz vocalist Cassandra Wilson and some of the hottest local talent in Louisiana and Mississippi; and Cooking with Music, an event featuring Lagasse and Marsalis to welcome back New Orleans school children.

Branford Marsalis is the guest editor, so I guess it was up to him, although it is interesting that he (rightfully so, I think) downplays the Marsalis reputation as the "first family of New Orleans jazz".

Part of a Reuters syndicated Billboard article

By Chris Walsh

NEW YORK (Billboard) - Before Hurricane Katrina hit, Tanio Hingle lived in a house in the Treme section of New Orleans with his wife and three kids, gigging around town with the New Birth Brass Band. The eight-piece played four or five times a week in places like Joe's Cozy Corner, Donna's Bar & Grill, Tipitina's and House of Blues.

Since Katrina, Hingle and his family have been living in an apartment in Houston; he drives back to New Orleans to repair the house when he's not playing shows. "We're still not back to normal. We're trying to get there," he says. "The insurance money wasn't enough to cover house repairs."

Today the band mostly plays shelters, schools and churches -- sometimes the airport. Hingle's been able to get one or two gigs a week, which come mostly as referrals from Bethany Bultman, co-founder and executive director of the New Orleans Musicians Clinic. Bultman set up the NOMC Emergency Fund last year, after Katrina.

"We're hoping to create opportunities for the musicians to play in shelters and schools," she says. "We want to keep the culture alive."

Support directly to NOMC includes approximately $80,000 from Bruce Springsteen, about $25,000-$30,000 from Bonnie Raitt, plus contributions from Huey Lewis, Pearl Jam and others. "Gig fees" from donors go directly to musicians. One goal: to save the traditional music of New Orleans.

NEW INSTRUMENTS

And NOMC's not alone in that mission. On Tuesday (August 29), the one-year anniversary of Katrina, the Tipitina's Foundation will host a ceremony at the legendary Tipitina's Uptown venue to hand over $500,000 in new instruments to 11 New Orleans school music programs. The ceremony will feature performances by Ivan Neville and the Original Uptown Allstars with the Dirty Dozen Horns, Trombone Shorty and Orleans Avenue, the Rebirth Brass Band and other locals [Soul Rebels]
Terence Blanchard is a Blue Note recording artist who wrote the soundtrack music to Spike Lee's four-hour documentary, "When the Levees Broke," which premiered in two parts on HBO August 21-22. A New Orleans native, Blanchard moved back to the city in March.

"It's not alive and well -- it's alive," he says of the state of music in his hometown. "Many of the musicians are still not home. Many are in Dallas and Houston. They actually travel from Dallas and Houston to New Orleans to play.

"When Spike (Lee) came to my old neighborhood, I wanted to show it off. But there was nothing alive there. No insects, rodents, birds, nothing. It was all dead. There's my house and the street where I used to play football with my friends and the picture window that I used to look out from while practicing my piano lessons."

Reuters/Billboard

http://www.neworleansnetwork.org/anniversary

In repeated nods to the city's extraordinary cultural past, Mr. Bush visited the home of the music legend Fats Domino in the Lower Ninth Ward and listened to a brass band. He talked about restoring the "soul" of New Orleans, even as he was forced to acknowledge that much of the damage had not yet been repaired. The city, he said, was calling its children home.

"I know you love New Orleans, and New Orleans needs you," Mr. Bush said. "She needs people coming home. She needs people -- she needs those saints to come marching back, is what she needs."

I saw some of Rebirth Brass on tv last night as the TV One network showed that SOng for New Orleans documentary.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/29/AR2006082901315.html

The Singles File
Wednesday, August 30, 2006; Page C05

-- Chris Richards

DJ BC: "Dirty Brass"

A wedding DJ from Boston strikes mash-up gold, coupling a vintage ODB verse with the hustling horns of New Orleans's Dirty Dozen Brass Band. Download it at http://djbc.net/mashes/wu .

The Singles File
Wednesday, August 30, 2006; Page C05

-- Chris Richards

DJ BC: "Dirty Brass"

A wedding DJ from Boston strikes mash-up gold, coupling a vintage ODB verse with the hustling horns of New Orleans's Dirty Dozen Brass Band. Download it at http://djbc.net/mashes/wu .

http://news.yahoo.com/photos/ss/events/us/081201presidentbush/im:/060829/480/e7de6f11593e40c381a68613b689ee9b?sp=-1&lsp=3000

from the gumbopages Looka blog:
The Arabi Wrecking Krewe, a group of amazing volunteers who've been helping to bring musicians back to New Orleans and gutting their flooded homes for them, most recently took on the wrecked New Orleans East home of legendary saxophone player Kidd Jordan

The Rebirth Brass Band and some school bands at a Tipitina's Foundation event

(and probably a khaki work shirt, but we'll all be wearing the same thing...I'm one of the shorter guys with black hair, but not one of the two shorter guys with black hair who play the trumpet)

Treme needs someone to update their website (and the Stooges Brass Band apparently never decided to learn tech stuff from you Jordan, and keep that site updated). Treme want to release a new cd but don't have a label.

I can't get to the Louisiana Music Factory website right now, but it looks like the Original Pinstripe Brass Band has a new record out. They've got a more traditional style than Rebirth/Hot 8/Stooges/Soul Rebels/etc., but they're way funky.

There's another video of the Hot 8 up on youtube. It looks to me like they're playing at the big second line that happened in January, but I wasn't back in N.O. yet so I'm not sure. Anyone know?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfOqPg4hKCc

And here's a piece about trad BB music I did for WWOZ the other day.

http://wwozstreettalk.blogspot.com/

Aug. 21st posting-
"Sousaphone player Jeffrey Hills is a family man with a wife and three kids. Before the storm, they lived in public housing and Jeffrey was known for playing with the big time Olympia Brass Band.

Since Katrina, the Hills have lived in three states, unable to find a way to return to the city. Now they're in Houston. Jeffrey makes the 5 hour commute every week to keep his regular gig at Harrah's Casino.

I caught up with him in between sets, hanging out in his car."

http://houstonpress.com/Issues/2006-10-19/news/feature_full.html

SAYING GOODBYE

Producer/engineer Keith Keller died [of a heart attack]September
6. At Chez Flames, his studio on Annunciation
Street, he produced a variety of musicians, from
Alex Chilton to G. Love and Special
Sauce to Rebirth Brass Band to King
Sonny Ade and Charlie Musselwhite. A jazz
funeral has been arranged to escort Keller’s ashes
to the Mississippi River, where some will be
scattered on the waters. The jazz funeral with the
Treme Brass Band starts Saturday at 1 p.m. at
the Backstreet Cultural Museum (1116 St. Claude
Ave.) and proceeds on St. Claude to St. Phillip, St.
Phillip to Rampart, Rampart to Conti, Conti to
Decatur, Decatur to Iberville and Iberville to
Woldenberg Park and the Mississippi. All are welcome
to help say goodbye to Keller.

What happened to Joe's son?

JOE GLASPER (LIL JOE & FAT) age 45 a retired construction worker and musician passed away on Wednesday, October 25, 2006 in Houston, TX. Joe is preceded in death by his father Joe Glasper, Jr., grandparents Antonia Bierria & Ethel Johnson, 2 uncles Jerry Johns & Irving Bierria, Jr. & 1 aunt, Margaret Thornton. He leaves to cherish his many precious memories his devoted wife, Karen Glasper; his mother, Rose Bierria Glasper; his daughter, Monsharda Wells; sons, Brian "Radio" Glasper, Burnell, Brodrick, Rodrick, Brandon Edwards & Linden Andrews; grandchildren, Terriell, Brodrell, Charrionda, Kirsten, Brodyana & Brodrick Edwards; godparents, Rudolph Whitehead & Joyce Daniels; godchildren, Terrineka Harden, Shantrell & Sharell Lamar, Tyronisha Andrews, Michael Ross & Marlen Lawson Jr; 12 uncles; 18 aunts; 3 great aunts; mother in law, Gloria Wells; fathers-in-law, Joseph Tadlock, Antoine Barriere Jr., brothers- in-law, Matthew Brock III, Antoine Barriere III & Eleath Tate and a host of relatives & friends. Relatives and friends of the family, graduates of the 1979 Class of McDonald 35; members of Southern University Marching Band, Sidewalk Steppers, First Lady, Original Jolly Bunch & all Social & Pleasure Clubs, Rebirth, Lil Rascals, Treme, Preservation Hall, New Birth Brass Bands, patrons of Joe's Cozy Corner Bar, Uptown & Downtown Neighborhood Bars, Community Barber Shop; The Hume Child Care Center, High Dimension Church, Hair by Roz, GQ Barber Shop, Milton's Barber Shop, Lapitte Academy & Westside Senior High School, Day Zimmerman Security, Bee's Car Wash, & Fairfields Complex all of Houston, TX are invited to attend a Mass of Christian Burial on Saturday, November 4, 2006, 11:00am, at St. Augustine Catholic Church, 1210 Gov. Nicholls St., New Orleans, LA 70116 . Visitation will be held from 9:00am until the hour of service. A Traditional Jazz Funeral will follow with Interment at Holt Cemetery. The family will receive friends on Friday, November 3, 2006 at St. Augustine Catholic Church from 5-8pm. Professional Funeral Services, Inc. "Divine Service for a Divine People" 1620 Elysian Fields Avenue New Orleans, LA.

Neeta Ragoowansi of SoundExchange has money for
Louisiana artists. The company has royalties for
many local artists, and they need to be disbursed by
December 15 or the artists will lose
them.

The following artists or their
representatives or their estates need to get in
touch with Ragoowansi as soon as possible: Clifton
Chenier (pictured), the Dixie Cups, Clarence
“Frogman” Henry, Lazy Lester, Kenny Peal, Chris
Ardoin and Double Clutchin’, Ernie K-Doe, Dirty
Dozen Brass Band, Queen Ida, Angelica Maria, Chris
Thomas King, Beau Jocque, Big Tymers, Jean Knight,
Sidney Bechet, New Orleans Classic Jazz Orchestra,
Joe Jones, Barbara George, Danny Barker, Bruce
Daigrepont, Huey “Piano” Smith & the Clowns, Smiley
Lewis, George Lewis, James Booker, Storyville, Bunk
Johnson, Roosevelt Sykes, New Orleans Blue
Serenaders, Snooks Eaglin, Johnny Wiggs, Mannie
Fresh, Chris Tyle’s New Orleans Rover Boys, Sweet
Emma Barrett, Earl King, New Orleans Ragtime
Orchestra, Eddie Bo, Paul Barbarin, Jimmie Noone,
The N’Orleans Statesmen, Papa Don’s New Orleans Jazz
Band, Earl Scheelar’s Funky New Orleans, Lonnie
Johnson, George Girard, Connee Boswell, Edmond Hall,
Kid Howard, Tangle Eye, Capt. John Handy’s New
Orleans Jazz, Soilent Green, Deadeye Dick, Choppa,
Sing Miller, Armand Hug, Nicholas Payton, Exhorder,
Percy Humphrey, Original Dixieland Jazz Band, Sam
Butera, Blue Lu Barker, Mia X, Albert Burbank, Lisa
Angelle, New Orleans Blue Serenaders and New Orleans
Ragtime Orchestra. Ragoowansi can be contacted by
calling 212-713-1677 or emailing
neeta@soundexchange.com.

The Quarter will be open Sunday for “Down By the
Riverside: A Concert of Thanksgiving” at
Woldenberg Park. The free show presented by the
New
Orleans Jazz and Heritage Foundation runs from 1-5
p.m. and features Craig Klein and the Arabi
Wrecking Krewe All-Stars—Stanton Moore, Dr. Michael
White, Deacon John, Marlon Jordan, Matt Perrine,
Rick Trolsen, Leroy Jones, Mark Breaux, Freddie
Lonzo, Topsy Chapman, Bob French, Bruce “Sunpie”
Barnes, Benny Jones, “Uncle” Lionel Batiste, Kirk
Joseph and more. All have put in their time with
the Arabi Wrecking Krewe helping to gut musicians’
houses, and Sunday they play together for the first
time.

STOP THE VIOLENCE

Friday at 1 p.m. the Anirtak Theater—formerly the
State Palace—plays host to the Stop the
Violence Hip-Hop Town Hall Meeting. The
recent
violence that has erupted in New Orleans and
particularly in Central City has brought local
hip-hop artists BG, Mia X, Joe
Blakk, Head-Roc,
DJ Jubilee, Sess 4-5, Fifth Ward
Weedie, and L.O.G. together to address
the problem. This town hall meeting is sponsored by
the Hip-Hop Caucus Institute with the goal of
creating a youth coalition to oppose violence and
help bring about social justice.

http://www.nola.com/search/index.ssf?/base/news-6/1167461915258450.xml?NZNENO&coll=1

I wound up doing a story about Dinerral on NPR. You can check it out here:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6735417

Jordan, I heard you came down - call me anytime.

Matt.

On a lighter note, has the Ponderosa Stomp lineup been announced? I might actually be able to afford to go this year--unless Kathleen fucking Blanco's moronic smoking ban means I can't smoke at Rock n Bowl.

OTM.

Roky Erikson's gonna be at the Ponderosa Stomp, with only one night announced so far--at the House of Blues (for some reason)
http://www.knights-maumau.com/news.php?PHPSESSID=b7857518bfe1836beecad5e05f4cf21f

"At the Ponderosa Stomp, Roky Erickson will be surrounded by legendary performers, including master arranger Wardell Quezergue and the New Orleans Rhythm & Blues Revue, soul songwriter supreme Dan Penn, rockabilly wild man Dale Hawkins, R&B soprano Little Jimmy Scott, Texas Tornado co-founder Augie Meyers, Stax sessions guitarist Skip Pitts, Gulf Coast guitar empress Barbara Lynn, Mardi Gras king Al "Carnival Time" Johnson, Excello harp master Lazy Lester, keyboardist extraordinaire Willie Tee, President of soul Rockie Charles, hillbilly bopper Jay Chevalier, tough Texas shouter Roy Head, and rockabilly wailer Joe Clay, with more to come."

2007 JazzFest lineup. I haven't looked at it closely but am assuming it is similar to prior years, i.e., some good local artists, too many big name out-of-towners, few Ponderosa Stomp obscure types, and maybe 1 or 2 token rappers or contemporary r'n'b artists.

http://www.nojazzfest.com/

Looks like all the cool brass bands are on the first weekend.

Jordan, do you know anything about Smitty Dee's Brass Band who are there on the second weekend? A google seach tells me Dimitri Smith of the band used to be in the Olympia Brass Band, so that makes them more traditional, right?

I don't think Aaron Neville is gonna be there again (last year he said his breathing problems get compounded in post-Katrina New Orleans) and I just read that his wife died of cancer. He's living in Nashville now. http://www.tennessean.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070106/OBITS/701060330/1090/NEWS