New Orleans has long been a piano town. And it’s long been a parade town. Therein lies the problem: If you’re a pianist, you can’t join the parade. No one’s yet found a way to strap a Steinway around his or her neck and march down St. Charles Avenue. This dilemma has often perplexed Jonathan [...]
“I want to embark on another journey that will include the music of my own generation,” Nicholas Payton said over coffee at Café Luna on Magazine Street in 2009. “I want my music to reflect all the records I listen to, not just the jazz records. When I went to the stereo as a kid, [...]
Back in 1986, when BeauSoleil was first starting to tour a lot outside Louisiana, back when the Doucet brothers still had a bit of hair atop their heads, the band played at the Kennedy Center, Washington’s red-carpeted bastion of high culture. BeauSoleil was just a quartet in those days—Michael Doucet on fiddle, David Doucet on [...]
In 2007, the Folk Alliance hosted a concert by three banjo players at Memphis’s Marriott Hotel. The three men sat in a semi-circle of chairs, the drum-like bodies of the banjos in their laps, the thin sticks of their fretboards pointing to two o’clock. It was a historic occasion, for all three men were African-American, [...]
When Christian Scott took the stage of the Jazz Tent during the 2006 Jazz Fest, the short trumpeter in the trim afro was wearing a white shirt and jacket, like so many young jazz musicians. His jacket, however, was a blinding, shimmering gold, more suitable for Little Richard than Wynton Marsalis. It was the kind [...]
There’s a reason you will likely hear “Walking to New Orleans” more than once during this year’s Jazz Fest. Fats Domino’s 1960 top-10 pop hit evokes the desire to come back home to the Crescent City better than any other song. And for the thousands who were flushed out of town by the Army Corps [...]
The 2005 Breaux Bridge Crawfish Festival was everything Jazz Fest used to be: small, local and funky. Out-of-towners made up maybe 10 per cent of the crowd, which was dominated by grandparents in their lawn chairs, married couples sharing paper plates of crawfish and teenagers in tight T-shirts glancing over their shoulders at groups of [...]
