Non-profit organizations did as much as anyone to help the New Orleans music community recover. Sweet Home New Orleans (SHNO) formed in 2006, and it was the culmination of that effort, a needs-based organization that coordinated the resources of a number of non-profits to help get the city’s musicians and culture bearers—Mardi Gras Indians and [...]
Mystikal
For hip-hop, a genre even more obsessed with being fresh than pop, six years can be an eternity. Mystikal spent one such eternity in jail on charges of sexual assault and extortion. He’s been away from a fan base that can sometimes forget its favorite acts as soon as the next hot newcomer hits the [...]
Earth, Wind & Fire’s Verdine White
When Earth, Wind & Fire substituted for Aretha Franklin at Jazz Fest this year, the audience likely traded up, whether it realized it or not. Aretha today is not Aretha in her prime, and though EWF isn’t either, it’s a lot closer. Founder Maurice White no longer performs with the band because he suffers from [...]
Patti Smith
“I love the 19th Century amateurs. That’s who I aspire to in photographs,” Patti Smith said. The musician/poet was speaking in the theater at the New Orleans Museum of Art, but her talk was being fed via video to an overflow crowd in the museum’s lobby. The occasion was the opening of a show of [...]
Harold Battiste
[Recently, Harold Battiste finished his autobiography, Unfinished Blues, which tells the story of his life in the music business, including his time with Sam Cooke, AFO Records, Sonny and Cher and the AFO Executives. In this special Backtalk, we present an excerpt from Battiste’s memoir.]
Los Angeles had a large population of New Orleans natives, [...]
Vampire Weekend
Picture the cliché college movie scenario: a professor asking you to look to the left and then the right before intoning “One of you will not make it through this course, and one of you will go on to great things.” If that same formula applies to scrappy little college bands, Vampire Weekend is in [...]
Les Blank
Documentary filmmaker Les Blank has spent much of his life in Louisiana, whether attending university here at Tulane, working as second camera shooting Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider, or capturing communities outside of the American mainstream that had music at their hearts. He shot a series of films on Cajun, Creole and zydeco including 1973’s Dry [...]
Galactic’s Ben Ellman and Robert Mercurio
When Galactic and Theryl “Houseman” DeClouet parted ways in 2004, there were whispers of concern about what the band would become without a vocalist. Rather than replace DeClouet, they recorded From the Corner to the Block, a hip-hop-oriented album that showed Galactic to be harder and more contemporary than their previous albums had suggested. “Second [...]
B.G.
Throughout the late ’90s the Hot Boys set Louisiana and the rest of the nation on fire. Standout members such as Juvenile, Mannie Fresh, and Lil Wayne would all experience major success, but B.G. helped cement the group with the mega-hits “Bling Bling” and “Get Your Shine On”. Since departing from Cash Money Records several [...]
Harry Shearer
It’s easy for New Orleanians to be skeptical under the best of circumstances, and even more so where celebrities are concerned, but Harry Shearer and Judith Owen don’t just have a condo here; they’re connected to the city. Owen records here, and Shearer is outspoken in his criticism of the government— Bush and Obama administrations—in [...]
