In September 2005, the New Orleans Jazz Vipers were one of the first jazz bands back on the streets of New Orleans. It was a month after the hurricane and almost no music venues were open yet, so the band played outdoors, near the corner of Decatur and Gov. Nicholls streets, outside Angeli on Decatur.

“Then the Angeli people invited us in,” says Viper bassist Robert Snow. The band would play Tuesday nights at Angeli for nearly a year—until the city of New Orleans put a stop to it. Angeli doesn’t have a live-music permit. Because of the city’s zoning process, it would be nearly impossible for the café to get a live-music permit, even for the acoustic, traditional jazz of the Jazz Vipers. That despite the fact that the late-night café is located in the noisy French Quarter on a particularly raucous strip of Decatur, within clear earshot of the jukeboxes and sound systems at Molly’s, the Abbey, and Margaritaville.

Snow is steamed. “I think that the city should not be asking for permits, period. Anyone trying to help musicians should be left alone,” he says. Residential neighborhoods are different, says Snow, a born-and-raised New Orleanian whose father, Sidney Snow, is a well-known jazz guitarist and bandleader. He understands that the city needs to enforce reasonable time restrictions and limits in some of this city’s more bucolic neighborhoods. But he feels this city’s own acoustic music—jazz—belongs in Vieux Carre venues. “You’re talking about the French Quarter,” says Snow. “The problem is that some new people have moved into the Quarter from somewhere else and then started complaining about the noise. Well, they should move to South Dakota. Because the Quarter has always had music.”

By the same token, jazz musicians have always had the Quarter. The gig at Angeli wasn’t the highest-paying gig in town, but once the Jazz Vipers passed the tip jar and sold some CDs, each of the band’s six or seven members typically walked out the door with $60 or $70. In all, Angeli’s seven-nights-a-week of jazz employed 20 to 30 musicians a week, Snow estimates. The gig helped them to pay bills during tough times.

Viper guitarist John Rodli thinks back to September 2005. Angeli “was a pretty special place, especially in the beginning,” says Rodli, as people returned to New Orleans and found themselves clinging to jazz, the music of a torn-apart city. During those times, permit enforcement wasn’t a worry. “Live music was the last thing the city was concerned with,” he says.

The Vipers also scored a steady Wednesday gig at a lounge in the Bywater that had, pre-storm, only hired musicians on Thursdays. Earlier this fall, city enforcement shut down that gig too, along with the bar’s weekend gigs.

The Vipers have replaced their Tuesday-night gig with another venue that they’d prefer not to name at this point because it may not have a music permit either. The extra money is an especial relief to Rodli, whose girlfriend is expecting their first child in March. Or it had been a relief. Just before press time, a Vipers gig was scrapped there too because the club got wind of a threatened permit sweep by the city.

The loss of these few gigs has hit the city’s musicians hard. That’s because the city’s devastated tourism industry has left jazz musicians with few of the more lucrative convention gigs that helped them make ends meet. Now, local gigs supported by locals are the only way they’re surviving. The next time the city debates how best to save its culture, says Snow, it should consider curtailing permit enforcement. “We don’t want no help from the city,” he says. “We’ll never see any part of that big million-dollar Irvin Mayfield [national jazz park] deal. Just get out of the way and let us play.”

After Katrina, jazz musicians seemed welcome almost everywhere. Loyal music nightclubs began offering more music as a show of support to musicians. Other longtime local establishments, like Angeli, opened their doors to music for the first time. Brand-new clubs such as Ray’s Boom Boom Room on Frenchmen Street put their focus on live music. Charitable groups like the New Orleans Musicians’ Clinic and the New Orleans Musicians’ Hurricane Relief Fund were paying musicians $100 a night just to play.

“We’re trying to make sure that all of our musicians stay working and that nobody leaves,” says Beth Fisher, the communications director for the New Orleans Musicians’ Clinic. “At first, we were paying musicians who were playing in Jackson Square and almost anybody who was working, playing their instrument anywhere,” The clinic’s first gig fund, which offered immediate help to all musicians, eventually morphed into a second gig fund, which helped non-profit agencies to hire musicians. Now the clinic has shifted to a third gig fund that funds four traditional clubs in the city—Snug Harbor, Ray’s Boom Boom Room, Palm Court, and Preservation Hall—in an effort to help traditional jazz musicians, particularly those over age 55, “because they can’t work two and three jobs like the younger musicians can,” says Fisher. She’s not aware that the clinic paid anyone for a non-permitted gig, but musicians say that some of the early gigs that the clinic supported, many of which continue today, are technically illegal. “We’ve all been doing what I call ‘below the radar’ gigs,” says one older jazz musician, who admits to at least two of those gigs each week.

This same musician says that he’s rattled by the citations at Angeli and at the Bywater club, mostly because it may indicate a move toward stricter enforcement, which could doom other gigs—“wholesome, positive gigs,” he says—that, he believes help to keep musicians like him busy, sane, and financially above water.

The tone of the arts portion of the city’s Master Plan, enacted in October 2002, isn’t optimistic about music joints in any part of town. It reads: “While the New Orleans music scene has traditionally depended on neighborhood venues (e.g. Tipitina’s, Maple Leaf, Carrollton Station, Funky Butt) as a place for local musicians to develop their talents and gain audiences, attendant noise, parking, and garbage concerns have made some of these venues generally less welcome in neighborhoods.”

Yet club and coffeehouse owners hosting these “below the radar” gigs say that they’ve heard no complaints. In fact, they say, their neighbors have embraced the music, as long as it’s acoustic and ends by 10 p.m. Those criteria have nothing to do with the law, says Edward Horan, zoning administrator for the city’s Department of Safety and Permits. Basically, a place is either allowed to have live music or it’s not. Restaurants and coffeehouses are prohibited from having live music unless they are specifically granted a permit for that.

Frenchmen Street is an exception to this, ever since a new “arts overlay” began to allow music at restaurants as long as the band is three pieces or less and plays only unamplified, acoustic music. The overlay also requires a few more things: that there be no permanent stage, that the restaurant’s full menu be offered during the entire performance, and that the music wraps up by 11 p.m. Sunday through Thursday, and by 1 a.m. on Friday and Saturday.

Ray’s Boom Boom Room has been featuring music since May, but he hasn’t yet complied with all of the overlay’s criteria. The club also was missing a state alcohol license, which forced owner Elray “Ray Ray” Holmes to close the Boom Boom Room’s doors for about a week in early November. Now that he’s ironed out his licenses with the state, Holmes says, he’s focused on getting his city permits in line. And while he intends to do everything necessary for compliance, he’s still not sure that his district should have such strict rules. “I think Frenchmen Street is making a name for itself. I call it the jazz district; it is where the locals want to go,” says Holmes, who describes his bookings as “local, homegrown music” like brass bands and jazz acts. He doesn’t understand, however, the necessity of the overlay’s limits on band members, amplification, and permanent stages. “They just need to waive all of that; it really doesn’t make sense if no one is complaining,” he says.

Horan, the zoning administrator, says that under the club’s current zoning, Holmes also must meet the city’s definition of “restaurant,” which means that 51 percent of his sales must come from his menu. “He needs to push food,” says Horan, who has urged Holmes to apply instead for a conditional-use permit, which is what the Spotted Cat, d.b.a. and Café Rose Nicaud have done in order to offer live music on Frenchmen Street as legitimate bars, not simply restaurants.

The difference between the Quarter and the Marigny is that Holmes can actually apply for a new designation in the Marigny. That wouldn’t be possible across Esplanade Avenue. “The Marigny embraced and created something that they could support and foster. And the Quarter residents have restricted entertainment to Bourbon Street.” Beyond Bourbon Street, the Quarter does have another legal entertainment district, on the first three blocks of Decatur Street—this allows the House of Blues to operate. Any live-music establishments outside of these districts are technically illegal, unless they’re long-running clubs that have asked to be “grandfathered” into legality. The requests are not rubberstamped—a current court case challenges the length of time a club has to feature live music before it can be considered eligible for grandfathering. Some well-known venues have not even requested grandfathering, Palm Court among them.

These closely guarded entertainment districts are hard-won victories for French Quarter residents, who have spent years fighting against “commercial encroachment” like loud bars, bed-and-breakfasts, and T-shirt shops. In 1994, a group of Quarter residents formed French Quarter Citizens for Preservation of Residential Quality, which focuses on “quality-of-life” issues in the Vieux Carre. In 1999, the group’s co-president Dr. Carol Greve wrote a letter to members citing noise as “the most pressing problem for residents.” One of the group’s members spent two weeks walking around the Quarter and created a detailed map that included problem venues like bars. “As you read these figures, remember that the French Quarter is only 78 blocks,” wrote Greve. “There are 143 bars-clubs. Of these, 76 have live entertainment. These figures do not include hotels.”

Greve say that those same concerns exist today, even if a proposed club wants to offer only acoustic music. “Acoustical jazz would be great because it wouldn’t disturb neighbors,” she says. But her organization opposes live music of any sort if it’s performed outside the two defined entertainment districts. As a result, it was her organization that complained about Angeli. “This is such a difficult issue because we’re so sympathetic to musicians,” says Greve. “And we haven’t done anything about some places, like a restaurant that brings in a jazz combo on Sundays.”

Greve says that her group has discussed creating a distinction between acoustic jazz and the booming, overamplified music often heard on Bourbon Street today. “Because there’s definitely a difference,” she says. “But so far that’s not been done. At this point, if someone gets a live entertainment license for a nice jazz combo, the next owner can come in and do anything. Once you get live entertainment, you get live entertainment.”

The tension about live entertainment is particularly pronounced regarding Rampart Street, which has a musical history that dates back at least a century. Here’s how the New Orleans Master Plan describes it: “The Rampart Street corridor, historically associated with African American arts and entertainment, contained many music clubs and gathering places for musicians. The area of the famed Storyville red-light district, along with the Tango Belt below Basin Street, formed an entertainment district with numerous saloons and cabarets.”

Most of Storyville was demolished in the late 1930s to make way for the Iberville public housing project. The rest of Rampart will not re-live its history either, since, according to the report: “Bourbon Street-style entertainment with its alcohol orientation, amplified music, and commonplace littering is found unacceptable by residents.” Instead, the report recommends that Rampart Street be revitalized as a “mixed-use arts and cultural district steeped in African American and jazz history.”

Which begs the question: can you have a district “steeped in jazz history” without allowing actual live jazz? The answer: not if residents oppose it. One study recommended that live music be permitted on the first several blocks of Rampart Street. Residents did not agree nor did their councilwoman, so Horan and his department uphold their wishes. “The neighborhood association does not want to legalize live music in the French Quarter, the birthplace of jazz,” he says.

Greve’s concerns about live-music clubs extend even to Rampart Street, typically considered a dingy stepchild of the Quarter, the street where prostitutes, hard liquor, and used condoms have long been an everyday part of the scenery.

“Our fear,” she wrote in 1999, “is that Burgundy and the side streets leading up to Rampart will become residential dead zones.” That same year, the organization went to the city council with a 300-person petition opposed to the Funky Butt’s proposed re-zoning as an entertainment district. That opposition continues. The Funky Butt, once located at 714 N. Rampart St., was a hot jazz spot from 1996 until the summer of 2005, when it closed. Attempts post-Katrina to re-open it as a live-music venue were not supported by former city Councilwoman Jackie Clarkson. Her replacement, newly elected Councilman James Carter, has not adopted a position on the issue.

Jordan Hirsch, administrator for the New Orleans Musicians’ Relief Fund, calls the restrictions “ridiculous.” He sees them as symptoms of a bigger problem: that New Orleans has not decided how the arts fit into the city’s rebuilding process. “As a result,” he says, “the city is falling back on what was in place pre-Katrina. But that’s not equal to the task right now.”

Hirsch thinks that the city should ease up on permit enforcement for jazz gigs as long as they have the support of the community and are generating jobs for musicians. “If someone can find musicians who are in town, put together a band and play in post-Katrina New Orleans, I say God bless them,” he says.

Horan, who has worked with the city’s zoning since 2000, says that any changes like that would have to come through the city council. Whenever French Quarter residents or any other residents have wanted to make changes, says Horan, they did so by exerting pressure on the council. Musicians could do the same thing. “But there isn’t an organized musicians’ community that can exert political influence to make these kind of changes,” he says. “And often laws get written by he who yells loudest.”

Nearly two hours earlier, the club had been dancing its usual route, following Basin Street to Orleans Avenue, then crossing under the bridge for U.S. Interstate 10. Over the years, this massive bridge has become sort of a brass-band cathedral—musicians use the bridge’s acoustics to amplify and echo every note. Whenever a procession passes underneath, drummers step up their rhythms and horn players point their bells skyward and start playing high riffs. As if on cue, the crowd’s second-liners yell in response and thrust their arms in the air. But during the Family Ties parade, the ritual was disrupted. As is typical, when the crowd felt the bridge’s shadow, they slowed and the trumpet players lifted their horns heavenward. But the band’s riffs went unheard when two NOPD squad cars switched on their sirens to hurry the crowd along. Small children covered their ears as ear-piercing sirens echoed off the concrete.

“When a parade stagnates, it can create a dangerous situation,” explains NOPD spokesman Sgt. Jeff Johnson. “The sirens, lights, and the vehicles in general are used to protect the participants. It’s the police department’s responsibility to move the parade along, because the streets along which the parade is rolling can’t be closed for an extended amount of time.”

Club members say that friction with the NOPD is nothing new. “They’ve been raining on our parades for years,” says Tamara Jackson, a founding member of the uptown club VIP Ladies & Kids.

What is new after Katrina is that the NOPD has tripled its rates since the hurricane and now charges nearly $4,000 for the favor. “They’re trying to price us out of existence,” says Jackson, president of the New Orleans Social Aid and Pleasure Club Task Force, which has been trying to re-negotiate the parade fees for nearly nine months.

NOPD Superintendent Warren Riley increased the fees shortly after the All-Star Second Line Parade, hosted by the task force and 32 social aid and pleasure clubs. Hundreds of social aid and pleasure club members and three brass bands returned home for the January 15 parade, which wound through traditionally black downtown neighborhoods. (One Uptown NOPD captain refused to let the parade pass through his district and so the parade had to scrap plans to also march through Uptown.) Club members wearing ReNew Orleans t-shirts dedicated the parade to returning residents’ needs, including housing, jobs, and health insurance.

After the parade was over, club members socializing in front of the Zulu Club on Broad Street and Orleans Avenue got word that a shooting nearby had wounded three people. Bystanders say that the shooting was prompted by a pre-Katrina grudge about a jacket.

A few days later, NOPD’s Riley announced in a memo that, in the interest of public safety, he would be bulking up the numbers of officers assigned to every second-line and raising the fees accordingly, from approximately $1,250 to $4,445. The task force met with Riley and asked him to re-consider. At first, he agreed to lower the rate to $2,200. Then, in mid-March, as a crowd waited in Central City for a funeral procession in honor of a member of the Single Men Social Aid and Pleasure Club, Jasmine Sartain allegedly shot and killed 19-year-old Christopher Smith. A nearby police officer shot Sartain in the leg when he would not surrender his weapon. Family members reported that the two had a long-held feud about a young woman, and that Sartain had, they said, shot Smith once before and left him for dead in 2004.

“When they shot each other before, that wasn’t caused by a parade,” says Tamara Jackson. “This time wasn’t either; they just decided to settle their score.” She emphasizes that Riley’s preferred number of NOPD officers were present at this procession, which leads her to believe that the proposed solution is not only expensive but ineffective.

NOPD’s Johnson disagrees. “I don’t believe anybody could predict that gunman,” he says. “Could the same thing happen at a Mardi Gras parade? Yes, in fact, it did at the Muses parade two years ago. My captain was eight feet away from where the shooting took place, and we had an entire contingent of police along St. Charles Avenue. But no detail can prevent a shooting. All we can do is try to prevent it by making sure that a parade moves smoothly and doesn’t stagnate.”

Jackson notes that the predominantly white Muses parade rolled on despite the shooting, whereas black second line parades are usually halted after an incident. She also believes that the NOPD’s assertion that second-lines breed violence is unsupported by data. The task force has asked for statistics that compare violence in neighborhoods on days with and without second lines, she says, but they haven’t received anything.

She is disappointed that after the March shooting, parade fees once again increased, this time to $3,760, and this increase stuck. After task-force negotiations failed, the American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana sent a demand letter to the NOPD on behalf of members of this city’s social aid and pleasure clubs. In a May 16 letter signed by ACLU staff attorney Katie Schwartzmann and cooperating attorney Carol Kolinchak, the ACLU stated that the NOPD could avoid litigation only by rescinding “the unreasonable and excessive fees presently being charged.”

“As you are no doubt aware, the Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs of New Orleans and the accompanying Second Line Parades are an integral part of our rich culture and heritage,” wrote the ACLU. “We are aware of a number of clubs that have already cancelled their parades due to this increase in fees, and there are many others that will have to cancel if the fees are not changed.” The ACLU’s position is that the fees at their current rate prevent social aid and pleasure clubs from hosting parades and infringe on the First Amendment rights of club members.

This First Amendment claim has an interesting New Orleans connection. Back in the late 1970s, attorneys Mary Howell and Bill Rittenberg filed Bowman v. Landrieu in federal district court, alleging that a city ordinance that banned street musicians from parts of the French Quarter denied musicians “their rights to free exercise of speech through the playing of music.” Judge R. Blake West agreed and issued an injunction blocking enforcement of the ordinance. The decision was one of the first in the nation to protect music as a form of speech. It has now become common for courts to also interpret dance and other kinds of art and performance as protected speech.

But fees are only part of the issue. The NOPD’s role in these parades needs clarification, says Louisiana State University anthropology professor Helen Regis, a member of the task force who has written about second-line culture. The sirens at the Family Ties parade were not an isolated incident, she says. “All second-line parades have at least one dirge to honor members of the club who have passed since they last paraded.” Often, when the parade slows, the NOPD escorts get impatient and switch on their sirens, ruining the dirge. “Why is it up to the police to determine the pace of these traditional, sacred events?” Regis asks.

There seems to be hostility toward the second-line tradition, she says. Regis says that it’s “not unusual” for squad cars at the tail end of the parade to hit pedestrians. Some cars, she says, drive up and push paraders with their bumpers; Regis herself has had her foot rolled over at a parade. “It’s difficult for me to understand as an observer if this is due to individual officers’ behavior or general police policy,” she says. NOPD’s Johnson says that he knows of no such contact and emphasizes that, in general, officers have respect for the clubs and any other group they escort.

In her academic work, Regis argues that each club, whether it be made up of 60-year-olds or 20-year-olds, is expressing what it means to be black in New Orleans today. “When the NOPD interferes in unnecessary ways,” she says, “they’re interfering with that expression.”

Jackson agrees. On one hand, the tradition gives her and other VIP club members an excuse to step down the streets of Uptown wearing apple-martini and pink outfits. But they’re always aware of the history behind it, she says. “Our ancestors incorporated benevolent societies for us to take care of our own—they put together their money to pay for each others’ doctors’ visits and provide for proper burials. This is our heritage, our African American heritage.”

It is a sore point for Tamara Jackson and other club members that city leaders don’t seem to care about the fee hike, even though they will, at the drop of a hat, hire a second-line club for their own causes. “When the city holds a special event, they always ask a second-line club to be present. Are we an attraction for violence then?” asks Jackson. “When Bell South airs a commercial with a person jumping with an umbrella, are we an attraction for violence? At Jazz Fest, social aid and pleasure clubs parade through the grounds every hour. Are we an attraction for violence then?

Hot 8 Brass Band snare drummer Dinerral Shavers grew up in the Lower Ninth Ward, a couple blocks from the levee. After Katrina, his mom’s house floated an entire block. He seemed the perfect candidate for Habitat for Humanity’s Musicians’ Village. But when he and most of band mates applied, all of them were turned down. “We were told to straighten out our credit,” he says.

Seven members of the Rebirth Brass Band lost their homes after Hurricane Katrina. Not one has applied for the Musicians’ Village, says leader and tuba player Phil Frazier. “I think a lot of musicians have bad credit, so they’re just not messing with it,” he says.

Habitat started getting the upper Ninth Ward site ready at the end of February, just after Mardi Gras. At the end of April, just before Jazz Fest, volunteers gathered at North Roman and Bartholomew streets and started construction on the first three houses. The first 75 homes are going on the site of the now-demolished Joseph Kohn Middle School, a 5.5-acre parcel of land purchased from Orleans Parish Public Schools in January. Habitat hopes to build an additional 250 to 300 houses in the surrounding neighborhood, on what are now vacant lots. Jim Pate, head of New Orleans Area Habitat, says that they’re hoping for musicians in anywhere from a third to half of these houses.

Between February and May, Habitat received 61 applications. About 50 percent were denied outright or were incomplete. The others are either moving slowly through Habitat’s next two phases or are stalled, most often because of missing paperwork. The refusal rate may seem high, says Pate’s colleague Sarrah Evans, but typically Habitat families are denied at a much higher rate, more like 80 to 90 percent. That said, they have already accepted about 30 families for the non-musician houses in the Village. So that part of the Village is moving along.

The Musicians’ Village is moving more slowly. Shavers says that he doesn’t know one brass band musician who qualified. “Who are the musicians who are getting in?” he asks. “Are they jazz musicians?”

Some are. Out of the six officially accepted musicians, half are traditional New Orleans musicians: bassist Peter Badie, Jr., singer-harmonica player J.D. Hill, and Mardi Gras Indian queen Cherise Harrison-Nelson. The others are musicians from other idioms: Latin bandleader Fredy Omar, world-rock drummer Boyanna Trayanova (from the band Saaraba), and singer Margaret Perez.

To be fair, Habitat has never advertised the project as an “all jazz” village. But to Hot 8 trumpeter Raymond Williams, its concept says jazz. After all, he says, the concept came from jazz musicians Harry Connick, Jr. and Branford Marsalis. Its centerpiece will be a cultural center named for jazz pianist (and Branford’s father) Ellis Marsalis. “If this housing is supposed to be for jazz musicians, why are most jazz musicians not eligible?” asks Williams.

In December, trombonist Corey Henry got a note from Harry Connick, Jr. about the Musicians’ Village. The note came indirectly, through Henry’s girlfriend, Briana Burgau, a waitress and student in New York who had waited on Connick. “Harry left the number for me to get on the list and put down all the info,” says Henry. “So I called the number, but I never got an application.” Habitat says that several other applications disappeared around that time in the then-unreliable New Orleans postal system.

Most musicians first heard about the Village in December, after Connick and Branford Marsalis stood with Mayor Ray Nagin and announced the project. The partnership was a logical one, since Connick has long been a loyal supporter of New Orleans Area Habitat for Humanity. For the past six years, he’s been the organization’s single largest contributor.

Now, several months later, Corey Henry knows that he can’t get into the Musicians’ Village by simply “getting on the list.” He fears that credit checks will eliminate many fellow horn-players. “They know lots of musicians are going to have bad credit,” Henry says. “So I don’t know who’s going to make it in there.”

In general, musicians embrace the idea. “I like the concept, I really do,” says Tanio Hingle, leader of the New Birth Brass Band, who sent in his application a few months ago but hasn’t heard anything. “You could’ve called the Treme neighborhood a Musicians’ Village before it got too expensive,” says Hingle, remembering how musicians would practice in each other’s backyards when he was a youngster. He believes that, if Habitat accepts more musicians, it could easily create a new spot, where musicians and their families would live side by side, socialize, and jam. “This is a tradition that’s been going on for a long time,” Connick told CNN This Morning on Lundi Gras. “That’s how I learned to play, going and sitting in with these guys when I was a little boy. They don’t talk; they just play.”

Cherise Harrison-Nelson grew up in the upper Ninth Ward hearing musicians play and Mardi Gras Indians practice. “That was the Guardians of the Flame’s stomping ground down there,” she says. “On Mardi Gras mornings, my dad, my brother, and my son all came out of the house at 3630 N. Johnson, two blocks away from the Musicians’ Village,” she says. As an adolescent, she attended Kohn school, where she was teased for being an artistic, eccentric kid, she says. She remembers sitting at her bedroom window at the corner of Johnson and Independence and listening for the first bell. Then, and only then would she leave home, arriving at the school just before the second bell, which gave her classmates no time to taunt her.

During that time, Harrison-Nelson spent long hours sitting alone on the school’s bike rack by the corner of Johnson and Alvar. “I would sit there and think, ‘It’s not always going to be like this.’ I could envision something else for myself,” she says. After she signed her paperwork with Habitat, she asked for that corner. Her house will be built there, where the bike rack once stood.

Harrison-Nelson, currently the counsel queen for her late father’s gang, the Guardians of the Flame, believes that musicians and Indians and social and pleasure club members need to hear about the Village in their communities in language they understand. So she organized a housing fair at the Backstreet Cultural Museum on St. Claude Avenue. “We had tables set up for people to talk one-on-one. And in the back, we had beer, chicken, and finger sandwiches,” she says. Habitat got 25 applications, Evans says, although there’s no word yet on how many of those were accepted.

Musicians’ Village houses are designed with two, three, and four bedrooms and—in response to the severe post-Katrina flooding—they are built high off the ground, 5-feet, 7-inches up. On the Kohn site, buildings will be mostly classic New Orleans shotguns and four-bay double shotguns. But the homes will not all look alike. For the Musicians’ Village, Habitat will use a total of seven different traditional New Orleans facades that will sometimes be flipped left to right.

The average mortgage payment is about $500 a month. That’s attractive to Dinerral Shavers, the Hot 8 drummer, who right now is paying “sky-high-ass rent”—$950 a month for a two-bedroom place. That mortgage payment seems reasonable for most working musicians, says Hingle. “The $500 ain’t no issue because most people are paying in that much in rent right now,” he says.

He may be 81, but Peter “Chuck” Badie, Jr. heads down to the Musicians’ Village a few days a week to lay block and frame houses in the hot sun. “It ain’t nothing nice to be laying concrete at my age, and I got to hit the bandstand tonight, sugar,” he says. His first priorities before hitting that stage are a haircut, a nap, and a bath. But he can spare a few minutes to talk about the Musicians’ Village because he’s pleased with Habitat’s emphasis on affordable housing (“A deal like this, you can’t beat it with a baseball bat.”).

Habitat for Humanity’s Sarrah Evans needs advocates like Badie. “Clearly we need a lot more musicians if we’re going to fill 70 homes and we have six,” she says. Lately, she’s been telling musicians to call her if they get a denial letter; she promises to explain step-by-step how to re-apply.

Raymond Williams called her after he was rejected. He then followed her instructions, making an appointment with Consumer Credit Counseling on Jackson Avenue, a nonprofit that works with debt consolidation. They basically told him that he needed to contact his individual creditors and pay them back, he says. However, right now, making extra payments, above and beyond his current bills, is a tough proposition. Musicians like Williams are working, he says, but the work is still unsteady.

“I’m about ready to give up,” says Williams, “because, from what I learned, it’s going to be a long road for me before I can even apply again. By that time, the Musicians’ Village may be over with.”

It’s daunting, says Bill Taylor from the Tipitina’s Foundation. He watched, a few months ago, as Evans gave a PowerPoint presentation at Tipitina’s for the project. “You could feel the room get collectively more gloomy as the presentation went on,” says Taylor. And then the came the handout—the list of the dozen or so required documents, including copies of all paycheck stubs of 1099s for all jobs within the past year, tax returns and W-2s for the past two years, and proof of divorce or marriage. “They went through that list and a handful of musicians walked out,” says Taylor. “It was obvious that they felt they had no way of qualifying.”

Habitat is trying to adjust. For instance, musicians are finding it difficult to confirm their income, since they’re often paid in cash and haven’t always filed tax returns. “Income verification—it’s a disaster,” says Evans. So Habitat is getting “very creative.” For one applicant, Evans photocopied a spiral-bound notebook of upcoming gigs to verify upcoming income.

Habitat can’t, however, get too creative with credit reports. Applicants are denied for bankruptcies within the past two years, federal judgments or tax liens, and outstanding collection accounts. The last criteria has been the real killer for musicians, says Evans.

It’s difficult to say why this many of New Orleans’ brass band musicians would carry bad credit. But they’re not alone. A recent Brookings Institution report, Credit Scores, Reports, and Getting Ahead in America, found that, in general, Southern consumers are more likely to fall behind on payments than borrowers in other parts of the country. Matt Fellowes, the author of that report compared credit scores in counties (parishes) across the country and found “the South just lit up by its low average credit scores.” He also found that, the higher the concentration of minorities in a county, the more likely the average credit scores will be low. The reasons for that aren’t clear. Fellowes speculates that it may be due to lower wages and higher expenses, or maybe it is related to the businesses that finance credit in this region.

Musicians with bad debts wonder if they can get some assistance paying off their bills so that they can become eligible for a house. What, they ask, about the $1.2 million raised for the project from benefit concerts and recordings such as Hurricane Relief: Come Together Now and Our New Orleans: A Benefit for the Gulf Coast? Or the $1.5 million matching grant from the Dave Matthews Band?

That money is already earmarked for housing, to keep the price of the houses low, says Habitat head Jim Pate. But he knows that the application process can be daunting for first-time homebuyers. After all, Habitat has worked with low-income homebuyers in New Orleans for nearly 23 years and they know that most people find the process complex. “Our families are low-income, not low IQ,” says Pate. “Everyone needs to be walked through this process.”

Chuck Badie’s tattooed arm is proof of the three years he spent in the Pacific during World War II, on the U.S.S. Delaware. After returning home, he attended the Gruenwald Music School on the G.I. Bill, then waited lunchtime tables and played music in the city’s finest clubs for $15 a night, then the union-scale wage for black musicians.

In 1953, Badie moved his family into a seven-room house in the Lower Ninth Ward, at Charbonnet and Johnson. By 1977, he’d paid off the mortgage. And it was plush, he says, with a sofa where he often sat to read and a matching sofa chair that he’d only sat on two or three times. Then there were the photographs covering the walls. The 8×10 of his father, Peter Badie, Sr., who played alto sax with Percy Humphrey. And photos of himself and his bass, traveling the world. The one taken in Brussels, Belgium, with Lionel Hampton, whose orchestra he played in for four years. Other shots in other cities with Dizzy Gillespie, Sam Cooke, Roy “Good Rockin’” Brown, Louis Jordan, Dave Bartholomew, and fellow AFO executive Harold Battiste. “To me, they’re pictures I know I’ll never see again. They’re gone—everything’s gone in that house,” says Badie.

A house, he says, is more than just a place to live. When a man owns a house, he puts his heart and soul into it, he says. In 1965, Hurricane Betsy was tough; his house took on eight feet of water. But he dug in and worked and was back there in two months.

This time, he knew he’d never walk inside again. “When I saw the house, I knew it was destroyed,” he says. As he stood there, looking at his house for the first time, a network news crew approached. They wanted to interview him. “I told them, ‘This is what I just lost; I can’t talk about it.’ It was like I had just lost a loved one and someone comes up and asks me how do I feel.’”

Badie knows that his fellow jazz musicians, especially the younger ones, dream of owning homes of their own. But they’re having trouble getting into the Musicians’ Village, he says. “A musician saw me in the club, asked me to put in a good word for him with Habitat for Humanity. I told him, ‘Go up there all the time and hang with them. Stay in their face.’ I pray for him,” says Badie. “I pray for all of them.”