The voice of experience echoes through Silence, a duet recording by saxophonist David Murray and pianist Mal Waldron. Recorded a year before Waldron died in 2002, this is the legend’s last known recording. These senior statesmen of the jazz establish their authority from the first notes on this excellent album. Neither Waldron nor Murray ever [...]
Paul Bley says the subject of his new album is time. I take him at his word. On About Time the 75-year-old jazz pianist offers two solo improvisations: the 33-minute title track followed by a 10-minute “encore.” When we think of time in music, it’s the meter and not the length that matters. Music marks [...]
Once upon a time, the average American lunch menu featured BLTs, patty melts, tuna salad sandwiches and burgers. In these eclectic times, restaurants catering to the mid-day crowd are more likely to serve hummus, vegetarian sandwiches, something called barbecue, and burgers. Stop 9, located in front of the ninth stop of the St. Charles streetcar [...]
Kirk Coco is building a little brewery on Tchoupitoulas. Along with his partner Peter Caddoo, a former brewer at Dixie, the New Orleans native is installing equipment in a warehouse on the corner of 7th Street, picking out the right design for tap handles and perfecting his recipes. In the fall, New Orleans Lager and [...]
The melodic playing of saxophonist Charles Lloyd often drifts lightly from one measure to the next. His ability to make popular jazz in the heyday of the hippie and his years spend teaching mediation add to his ethereal aura. The young pianist Jason Moran is incessantly inventive and deeply intellectual. He never lets us forget [...]
Sit down at MiLa, the glossy new restaurant in the Renaissance Pere Marquette Hotel, and two miniature cast iron skillets arrive with the bread basket. One has the expected dab of butter glistening with grains of salt. The other holds a lima bean purée. The silky purée is earthy with an edge of sourness. It’s [...]
Lu Brow, the bartender at the Swizzle Stick Bar, drops several lime wedges into a cocktail shaker and squeezes the last one to test their juiciness. She arranges her measures and ingredients around the shaker like a chef preparing her mise en place. She adds a precise amount of Cointreau followed by Plymouth gin. She [...]
Buzz has been building in the jazz world about Davy Mooney and his 7-string guitar. The New Orleans-native placed third in the 2005 Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition. After the storm, he moved to New York City and managed to stand out amid the mass of other talented players. Now he’s back home and a [...]
Before the storm, I’m not sure I’d seen a car without scratches and dents in New Orleans. Afterwards, the streets were full of mint automobiles. I’d bet the number of kitchens with marble countertops increased fivefold after Katrina. And before the waters washed through the city, there probably wasn’t a single neighborhood joint like Sammy’s [...]
Keilen Williams perches on the tailgate of his truck, leans into the traffic streaming down Claiborne Avenue and dangles a massive shrimp from a line. He wears a sharp Cabela’s fishing hat, a serious look on his face, a long knife strapped to his belt and white shrimp boots on his feet. “I started making [...]
