The Storm Still Rages

(Above: The Preservation Hall Jazz Band marches through the streets of the French Quarter immediately following the April 27 re-opening of New Orleans-music shrine Preservation Hall, which had been closed since Katrina. Photo by Michael Weintrob.)

It’s been a year since the citizens of New Orleans were subjected to the horrors of Hurricane Katrina’s floodwaters. People died by the thousands while relief efforts foundered and the weaknesses of emergency plans were exposed. For a week, the world watched this ultimate reality-television show—even as wheelchair-bound elders and dehydrated infants perished in the stifling heat, pundits made smug jokes about those who stayed behind to suffer, and televangelist/politician Pat Robertson explained away the destruction of New Orleans as divine retribution.

But on the new Dirty Dozen Brass Band album Ivan Neville doesn’t let Robertson’s rhetoric go unanswered—“Don’t go and talk about my Father, 'cause God is my friend,” Neville charges in an emotional rap with the DDBB backing him up on their stunning reinterpretation of Marvin Gaye’s classic What’s Going On. The album is a departure from the Dozen’s trademark second-line brass-band rhythms, but it’s true to the band’s vision of expanding this traditional music into a lexicon that can interpret a wide range of styles. Along with Neville, the DDBB gets help from Chuck D, Guru, Bettye LaVette and G. Love on the project, its Aug. 29 release marking the one-year anniversary of Katrina’s landfall. This is only one of a number of outstanding recordings by New Orleans musicians released in the wake of what’s generally acknowledged as the greatest disaster ever sustained by an American city.

Ivan Neville, son of Aaron and part of what used to be called the “First Family of New Orleans Music,” was displaced by Katrina and now lives in Texas along with several other members of The Neville Brothers. He also contributed to Sing Me Back Home, the outstanding album made by New Orleans musicians exiled to Texas. “Ivan nailed that, he really felt it,” says DDBB saxophonist Roger Lewis, one of the countless musicians who lost his home in the flood. Lewis expresses outrage at Robertson and other public figures who appeared to exult in the suffering of New Orleans’ poorest. “It was an immature statement for a reputed man of the cloth to make,” says Lewis, who’s been taking visiting journalists on tours of the devastated Lower Ninth Ward, where he was born. “We’re looking at the total demise of a neighborhood,” he says as he drives through the debris-ridden blocks of collapsed houses. “Everything out here was under 20 feet of water. It was like a lake. A lot of people’s lives got lost. A lot of people’s history got lost. It’ll take 30 years to clean up this mess.” Lewis also expresses frustration about the recovery’s slow, inefficient pace. “It’s all about greed,” he says. “Somebody been swingin’ with the money. Somebody don’t really care.” It’s a charge voiced by many New Orleans musicians these days.

“I’m mad, I’m tired and I’m salty,” says Dr. John, who recorded the inspirational Sippiana Hericane after Katrina was followed a week later by Hurricane Rita, which devastated western Louisiana. “They try to shuffle us under a rug, but when you look at the bottom line of all of it, there still ain’t been no federal help, basically FEMA’s been a disaster, the [Army] Corps of Engineers has been a disaster, they need to put dikes in there and save the wetlands. Unfortunately it’s something they could’ve done anytime in the last 50 years … but everybody—true to form in politics—pockets all the money they can. It always happens. The city, the state, the feds, everybody does the same thing. We lost another 150 miles of wetlands last year. Bobby Charles, who wrote ‘Walking to New Orleans,’ the whole town he was livin’ in is gone. He used to call me at least twice a year and tell me he’s gettin’ closer and closer to havin’ Gulf Coast property which he never wanted. You got a city where the work force, the people that makes New Orleans what it is, are basically stuck elsewheres. My band members are all over the place. My bass player’s in Michigan, my drummer’s in Baton Rouge … I was talking to [New Orleans musician] Henry Butler—he’s got no place to go back to, he was trying to find a place in Dallas or Colorado.”

Butler, the virtuoso pianist and vocalist who was also part of the Sing Me Back Home project, has relocated to Boulder, Colo., and is adopting a wait-and-see attitude about returning to New Orleans. “I’m keeping my options open,” he admits. “I’m not in a rush to make a quick decision. I wanna see what they do. They don’t always make wise choices in terms of how the politicians deal with the general citizenry. I’m saddened that there’s not really a school system in New Orleans at this point. You’ve got 40 or 50 chartered schools, all operating on different standards. I don’t know how you can call that an educational system. If you can’t educate your children I don’t think you can claim to have a real city.

"I love New Orleans and I don’t want that to get lost in all this, but as long as I’ve been conscious of it I’ve never liked what the politicians have been doing; I’ve never [felt] they truly cared about the arts. I know the current mayor [Ray Nagin], for instance, could care less about music. I know people he’s hired as consultants and they’ve just been ignored.”

Butler is doing his part for New Orleans music by touring constantly and bringing the sound to as many people as possible. He recently tore it up at Michael Arnone’s Crawfish Festival in western New Jersey, playing two sets with Corey Harris and sitting in with The Radiators in addition to his own set. “It’s great therapy for me,” says Butler. “I think every New Orleans musician worth his salt is doing that wherever he or she lands. I’ve been working with some of the guys in Boulder and we do New Orleans versions of jazz standards, blues and other things. I wind up breaking down the whole New Orleans rhythmic conception. I can do it because I’ve been teaching kids to do it for years; I’m not one of those guys who says ‘Oh you just have to feel it.’ I tell them where the accents are and, if you can articulate it, some of these guys can do it. … Since so many of us are dispersed, we’re spreading New Orleans information all over. It’ll take a long time to see how it affects the general music cuisine in society.”

Irma Thomas, fabled “Soul Queen of New Orleans,” was all but wiped out by Katrina. Her house and her nightclub, The Lion’s Den, were both destroyed. It’s the second time Thomas has been displaced from New Orleans by a hurricane—she was forced to move to California for several years after Camille hit in 1969. “This isn’t the first disaster I’ve lived through and I’m sure it won’t be the last,” she says defiantly. “Camille was nothing compared to this one. Then I only lost my work, but this time I lost everything. I’m working on getting my home rebuilt, but I’m getting out of the nightclub business.”

Thomas reacted to the disaster—like a number of local musicians—by going into the studio and making an outstanding record, After the Rain, an R&B classic imbued with the spirit that’s made New Orleans music central to the city’s identity. DDBB, Dr. John, Irma Thomas, The Radiators, Cowboy Mouth, Papa Grows Funk, Davis Rogan, Juvenile, Christian Scott, Theresa Andersson, the subdudes, Kidd Jordan, Leslie Smith, Marc Stone, Eric Lindell, Morning 40 Federation, Mute Math and John Mooney are only some of the New Orleans musicians who’ve released excellent albums since 8/29. Though Virgin Records in New Orleans went out of business after the flood, the independent Louisiana Music Factory has thrived by selling local recordings.

New Orleans native Paul Sanchez and his band Cowboy Mouth were recording new album Voodoo Shoppe in Atlanta when Katrina hit. As Sanchez sits on the front porch of a Creole cottage in the French Quarter on a beautiful spring day, a mule-drawn carriage ambles by lazily and friends stop along the street to chat. It’s hard to believe that only two blocks away devastation stretches for miles without end, but the tears Sanchez cannot hold back as he speaks of his hometown tell the story. Like so many other newly homeless New Orleans musicians, he lost everything in the flooding following Katrina, including the Gentilly home he and his wife Sally built, his music equipment and all his band’s back catalog and merchandise.

“We were in shock,” he recalls. “My wife and I were online at a site she jokingly called yourhouseisunderwater.com and you could see a satellite picture of your house. We just got a new roof put on which was supposed to be hurricane proof. It was perfectly intact but the rest of the house was underwater. We sat there every day for three weeks looking at the house. I was down to all my possessions in a suitcase. We came back in December. It was weird; you see people going through the ruins of their house and you say, ‘don’t go through it, it’s useless.’ But when you’re there, it’s your house, so we stumbled through it and started going through all this wet stuff we couldn’t keep and then we realized you just have to say goodbye to your stuff. My house sat in sewage for three weeks, and every inch of the place, where you laughed and ate and made love, it’s covered with shit and you never want to see it ever again.”

Sanchez tried to figure out another place to live but realized he couldn’t survive away from the culture that’s nurtured him over a lifetime. “It’s really cool to be home,” he says. “The people are really beautiful and they make me very hopeful about the future. The politicians are useless; it’s the same old business. Let’s clean up the city; let’s get the rubble and the dead cars out of here. The people are the reason to be here—for moments like riding my bike with John Boutté to the second-line parade in his neighborhood. He took us to Claiborne and Orleans, a spot where he used to play ball—we came to this playground and there were literally hundreds of cars that had been ruined and abandoned after the storm. People were dancing everywhere and all of a sudden one of the kids in the crowd jumps on one of the cars and starts leaping from car to car. It was amazing. It was a statement, but not a violent statement; It was an expression of frustration, of dancing on the abandoned city. The whole day had been beautiful, white people and black people dancing together, celebrating New Orleans in that very unique way, doing a second-line. Dancing on the abandoned vehicles. Dancing past the destroyed homes. That’s New Orleans, that’s the jazz funeral right before your eyes.”

Sanchez’s friend John Boutté is a great vocalist, one of the many outstanding musicians well known to New Orleanians but not the general public. Boutté has forced attention on himself since 8/29, however, through the sheer emotional impact of his performances, first on the Sing Me Back Home project, with his astonishing rendition of Annie Lennox’s “Why?” but most dramatically with his historic set at this year’s Jazz and Heritage Festival. He whipped the crowd into a frenzy with a hair-raising update of Neil Young’s “Southern Man,” urging them to “scream like you’re in the Convention Center… scream like you’re in the Superdome!” Then, in a climax that will stand as one of the great moments in Jazz Fest lore, he rewrote the lyrics to Randy Newman’s epic “Louisiana 1927,” a move that would’ve sounded foolish if it wasn’t so powerfully appropriate. This time the clouds came in from the Gulf, and when Boutté transformed Newman’s line into a reference to the deadly flood that followed the collapse of the Industrial Canal by singing “six feet of water in the streets of the Lower Nine,” the screams of recognition from the crowd nearly drowned him out. By the next verse it was “12 feet of water in the streets of the Lower Nine” and people were out of their chairs, lamenting and moaning like worshipers at an ecstatic church service. “President Bush say, ‘Great job, great job what the levees have done’,” Boutté sang. “Don’t let them wash us away.”

Since the disaster of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, New Orleans has been more celebrated than ever for its rich musical heritage and unique culture, elements that have bravely soldiered on even as the city’s economy has continued dying. Only a fraction of the city’s small businesses remain open, and every day the dire economic realities cause more to close their doors for good. However, more than a third of the city’s population has returned, and most of those who’ve stayed are determined to make the best of it. They’re living without basic services like public transportation, schools and hospitals, even electricity and water in some sections, but they value the unique experience of the New Orleans lifestyle so much that they’re willing to put up with horrible conditions to stay there.

The flood’s devastation blanketed all sectors of the population with misery but saved its harshest degradations for the inner-city poor who lost everything and are dispersed across the country in a continuation of the Diaspora that began 200 years ago when their ancestors were brought to America as slaves. The musical culture that’s been nurtured in those communities and handed down from father to son, mother to daughter and neighbor to neighbor lies at the heart of New Orleans’ music and is gone, perhaps forever, lost among the miles of blasted, rotting houses, some still containing remains of the dead.

The city has always been known as a party town, a desirable convention destination and sports mecca, but both the Convention Center and Superdome were badly mangled in the storms and the chaos that ensued, and all but a few large corporations have relocated out of town. The party continues, but with far fewer business people and many more adventurers and thrill seekers drawn to this surreal, lawless wasteland.

Increasingly it looks like the music is all that’s left. And the younger, hardier tourists who come to New Orleans for this music have been rewarded with one richly memorable event after another, from the emotional moment of Voodoo Fest last Halloween to the triumph of a New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival that proved the city could pull off a major logistical event with a heavyweight like Bruce Springsteen as its main attraction. The House of Blues is back in business, as is Tipitina’s and other upriver clubs like The Maple Leaf and Carrollton Station. Venues that featured occasional music, like The Kingpin and Vaughan’s, have added additional live music nights to their schedules. “There were a lot of bands that were around town, looking for places to play last November,” says Steve Watson, co-owner of The Kingpin. “We figured it was our job in the recovery to give these musicians work.”

Bourbon Street—years ago the center of the city’s music scene—has devolved into a tawdry T-shirt mall filled with angry, violent drunks and lined with bars featuring karaoke and dumb cover bands doing “Play That Funky Music.” But Frenchmen Street—a bohemian enclave just downriver from the French Quarter—has become a serious street hang over the years and has assumed additional importance since Katrina. The corridor runs from Checkpoint Charlie’s past the Hookah Cafe, The Blue Nile, Cafe Brasil, d.b.a., The Apple Barrel, The Spotted Cat and Snug Harbor. You can’t get a loaf of bread or a light bulb in most New Orleans neighborhoods these days, but the Frenchmen Street corridor remains the most vibrant street-music scene in the country, a stretch where you can hear all kinds of jazz, blues, rock, metal, avant-garde and country music, most of it with no cover charge.

During Mardi Gras, Frenchmen Street was packed with revelers. One of the most anticipated shows was a Mardi Gras Indians jam session at d.b.a. headlined by Big Chief Monk Boudreaux with a John Gros-led group as the backing band, and featuring Anders Osborne, who collaborated with Boudreaux on two memorable albums for Shanachie Records.

Gros began the set, fronting a band with Jellybean on drums, Donald Ramsey on bass and Robert Maché on guitar. Though the songs were written before Katrina, they all seemed to reference the tragedy, climaxing with angry funk rocker “Rat a Tang Tang,” written as a shaggy-dog story about punishing someone who did Gros wrong, but ending up as powerful anti-Katrina mojo. Osborne joined the fray, chanting “Indians, here dey come!” to bring up Boudreaux and add Kirk Joseph to the mix on sousaphone. Monk picked up the chant and, with Jellybean rolling a second-line drum rhythm, the moment was pure New Orleans, a mixed group of black and white musicians hammering out a monster groove that had every body in the place moving. At the height of the piece the PA and all the house lights cut out, but the back line still had juice, so the guitars and drums continued in total darkness, breaking into a wild jam as the crowd picked up the chant: “Indians, here dey come!” After about 15 minutes of this, the band took a break and hasty repairs were made to the power system. In a town where there’s a new band called The Rolling Blackouts, a power failure isn’t going to stop anything. The PA came back online and the show, now lit by candles, resumed with Boudreaux chanting an incantation and other Indians moving toward the stage to answer his exhortations. “Mardi Gras morning well here it come,” Monk bellowed over a hectic pulse. “We’re gonna get together and have some fun.” The words seem simple on the page, but in this context, the lines—repeated over and over with variations—took on a magical vibe as Monk transformed into the shaman, an elemental force that seemed to invoke the furious moment of the storm itself. Osborne took off on a solo flight, then Monk began another chant: “Everybody got soul, soul, soul,” and just as it hit another peak the power went out again. The crowd erupted in excited cheers and whistles, and the call-and-response went on for half an hour with the band wailing in the darkened room and the audience continuing the chant.

“Monk said his voice knocked out the power, and he was just getting warmed up,” a slightly disappointed but still smiling Gros says after the show. “He would have gone all night long.” But the important thing is that the show still happened, even without power, and none of the audience members left unfulfilled. This kind of frustration/reward dichotomy is the reality every New Orleans musician now faces. During Jazz Fest, Cowboy Mouth was in the middle of an intense set when the power gave out. When the subdudes returned to town to debut their new album, Behind the Levee, they played at Southport Hall with tarps covering the stage to keep the leaky roof from dumping rainwater on the band. Meanwhile, in Mid-City, Walter “Wolfman” Washington played acoustic candlelight gigs at Banks Street Bar, and Eddie Bo re-opened the legendary Mid-City Lanes even though the building’s first floor was destroyed by the flood.

Few musicians have permanent homes to return to and many have moved on. Others have made compromises. “I’m not proud of it, but my house filled with water and I sold it as-is, and I’m leaving town,” says Radiators guitarist Dave Malone, who moved to a place an hour-and-a-half outside the city but is looking to find a new place in New Orleans. Meters bassist George Porter Jr. moved his family but is working on rebuilding his home so he can stay in town when he plays local gigs. John Brunious, leader of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, is staying in a French Quarter apartment but doesn’t know for how long. “I love New Orleans,” says Brunious after the PHJB played a stirring set on the back lawn of New York’s Gracie Mansion to kick off this year’s JVC Jazz Festival. “But there’s nothing left there.”

Brunious has seen the neighborhoods he grew up in reduced to rubble and his friends scattered across the country. “The musicians in the PHJB all grew up within a mile of each other, playing together and listening to the great musicians of the past,” says Ben Jaffe, who runs Preservation Hall, the St. Peter Street shrine to traditional New Orleans jazz. “Now the banjo player is living in Houston, the drummer is in Georgia—we’re gonna lose a tradition that’s been part of our heritage. We’ve got to get these musicians back to New Orleans to teach these kids about their heritage. I hate to say it, but New Orleans jazz has been on the endangered species list for a while. There need to be some red flags going up. We only have a small window to do this because we’re losing musicians every day … It’s tragic that the city could lose The Neville Brothers. There’s no way to put a dollar value on the cultural significance of someone like Cyrille Neville or Aaron or Art Neville living here in New Orleans. Those guys participate in Mardi Gras Indian practices, their children are a big part of the hip-hop community, and they participate with the Tipitina’s Foundation in teaching young kids recording techniques.

“New Orleans is the cultural spine of the United States. We are the epicenter. We’re not the South. We’ve never been the South. We were settled by the French, we were settled by the Spanish. We’re an African city, the northernmost point of the Caribbean.”

Jaffe has dedicated his life to keeping this music alive, and the only hopes for the culture’s survival are the singular efforts of people like him and other small-business owners who’ll buck the odds and stay in New Orleans no matter what the future holds. Andy J. Forest, a local songwriter, virtuoso harmonica player and visual artist, has invested every penny he and his wife Gwen could get in a new coffeehouse, Cofféa, which promises to be an important meeting place for local artists. Forest plans to be part of his city’s future. The café is located right next to Piety Street Studio, one of the few studios in New Orleans that continued operating after the hurricanes.

Owner/engineer Mark Bingham watched Elvis Costello and Allen Toussaint work their magic at Piety Street on The River In Reverse, ran the mixing board as The Radiators made their definitive studio recording, Dreaming Out Loud, played on John Mooney’s Big Ol’ Fiya and watched Morning 40 Federation develop from a ragtag group of eccentrics into a great contemporary rock band on Ticonderoga.

Morning 40 has become the band most closely associated with the bohemian Ninth Ward neighborhood known as the Bywater, where Cofféa and Piety Street Studios, Vaughan’s, Markey’s, The Saturn Bar and Elizabeth’s restaurant are all clustered around the 19th-century Creole cottages that are among the few houses not destroyed by the hurricanes. Though their music bears little relation to traditional New Orleans jazz and funk, Morning 40 still embodies the sound of the Bywater streets.

“I don’t think you can fake that,” says saxophonist Josh Cohen, “and the reason is because we wrote those songs as we were out getting drunk at the bars in New Orleans, hanging with the people in New Orleans. Of course Morning 40 Federation is influenced and inspired by traditional New Orleans music. How can you not be? The syncopation of the rhythms, the repetition of riffs, hitting the flatted fifth every now and then for that blues impact.

“I think Katrina hitting New Orleans gave us a renewed sense of purpose and reaffirmed that what we’re doing is significant—if nothing else, just to give people an outlet to relieve stress through going out and seeing a show and dancing and forgetting their problems. If we were a bunch of wimps we could’ve moved out of New Orleans for convenience’s sake because it’s inconvenient to live there now, especially in the Bywater—there’s no grocery stores around anymore since Robert’s closed down. There’s a series of inconveniences associated with living in New Orleans, but we’re like spokespeople of New Orleans to some degree, and we realize that it wouldn’t send a good message if we left. It’s also because we have a deep love and affinity for the city. I’ve traveled around the country and there’s no place as friendly as New Orleans.”

Young rock musicians like Morning 40 Federation may in fact be the future of a New Orleans music scene that will be less rooted in tradition and more in keeping with the innovations that originally created those traditions. “To my mind New Orleans has been a transplant scene for the last 15 years,” says Bingham. “The only new stuff coming out of New Orleans music really has been hip-hop, and the local-music power structure ignores that as much as possible. People are still gonna come to New Orleans because it’s a free zone and there’s still going to be hundreds and hundreds of musicians here. The people who are still here will still play Jazz Fest and play the second-line stuff at brunches if tourists come back. There will always be a traditional scene because it’s fun music to play and there’s an ever-modern audience for it. But it’s a double-edged sword to institutionalize the sound of New Orleans as what happened before 1975. If the tourist commission keeps promoting New Orleans music as something it’s not, it’s only a matter of time before it catches up to them.

“The jazz departments in New Orleans colleges are extraordinarily conservative, it’s like ‘Straight No Chaser’ University. And it’s rough, because jazz wasn’t meant to be codified, and when it becomes codified, let’s all go to sleep. Far be it for me to tell people how to promote their city. As a creative center it already exists but, when you have a creative music center, the press and music establishment are the last people to find out—people in power won’t let you write about it until it’s already over. A lot of these bands from my neighborhood, I wouldn’t even know they existed if I didn’t live and work among them. To have the Morning 40s and Moose Jackson and The Radiators and Mooney all in the same camp, Shannon McNally and Jim Dickinson working together, I love this whole weird mixup of things.”

New Orleans businesses have developed vague plans for music in the city’s new footprint, like the 20-acre jazz theme park proposed by a downtown hotel conglomerate, but institutionalizing its cultural history as a museum piece without restoring the communities that supply the young musicians is ultimately an empty gesture. “The people of south Louisiana, New Orleans and all, we all of the spirit,” says Dr. John. “We got strong beliefs in that we ain’t letting them bury us under the Gulf of Mexico. I’m hanging on to every little bit of our culture. The thing I most fear is I don’t wanna see New Orleans become a shuck Disneyland or a shuck Las Vegas.”

For too many, though, New Orleans is unfortunately turning into a war zone. The murder rate is back up and street violence has escalated to where the National Guard and state police have been called in to restore order, and a curfew has been imposed. The city is desperate to keep bad news from reaching potential tourists, but at least one street gang has been mugging pedestrians in the French Quarter and jazz great Hilton Ruiz was beaten to death on Bourbon Street under circumstances so clouded his family has been forced to file a lawsuit to find out what happened.

“All I have in this world,” raps New Orleans hip-hop star Lil Wayne on his latest, Tha Carter II, “is a pistol and a promise … Gangsta gumbo—I’ll serve ’em a pot of it.” In late June, five black teenagers got a taste of that pot. They were massacred in Mid-City, in part of what police describe as a turf war among rival drug gangs. The scenario shocks even beyond the fantasies of the haughtiest gangsta rap. It’s all part of a horrendously chaotic present reaped from the seeds of a past when crime and political corruption ruled the city hand in hand. There is, of course, always hope, and with any luck the inspiration of the city’s music community can help create a new identity for New Orleans, one where “gangsta gumbo” is only part of a rhyme and not the definition of everyday life.

To read more about New Orleans at PasteMagazine.com, check out the following links:

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