The clouds are gathering and darkening over the corner of 2nd and Dryades on Mardi Gras 2013. Rain has been forecast. The streets are crowded, and the once organized but now chaotic spread of the Golden Eagles Mardi Gras Indian Gang is trying to assemble to make their move back to home base on Valence [...]
Walter “Wolfman” Washington’s Spiritual Vibrations
The funky blues guitarist they call the Wolfman only let opportunity pass him by once. One night in the early ’60s, Joe Tex, soul master and fixture of R&B scenes across the South, walked into a tiny club in Thibodeaux called the Sugar Bowl and found the teenage Walter Washington onstage with his group. So [...]
The Roots of Music: Working on a Dream
On April 30, 1803, James Madison and Robert R. Livingston representing the United States and Francois Barbe-Marbois, a finance minister from France, convened upon the Spanish-built Cabildo. Their mission: to sign a document that would double the size of the United States. So it was there at the Cabildo overlooking Jackson Square that the Louisiana [...]
Cheeky Blakk: Queen Be Hustlin’
Any local may be surprised to learn that New Orleans is a more openly sexualized city than its continental counterparts. While not nearly as over the top as the oft parodied Girls Gone Wild vids that make Mardi Gras on Bourbon nigh unbearable, you’d be hard-pressed to have too many conversations without learning some new [...]
Davell Crawford: The Prince of New Orleans
“I tell people that my mom had triplets—she had me, a little baby grand and a microphone,” Davell Crawford says and begins to laugh. His statement isn’t far from the truth. Crawford, now renowned as the “Piano Prince of New Orleans,” sat in front of a keyboard at 2 years old, graduated to a little [...]
The Legends of New Orleans R&B: Best of the Beat 2012 Lifetime Achievement Awards
OffBeat’s Best of the Beat awards show will be recreated during the upcoming fourth season of the HBO series Treme. Ironically, this year’s Lifetime Achievement Award for Music at Best of the Beat will be shared by a collection of New Orleans R&B greats—Clarence “Frogman” Henry, Al “Carnival Time” Johnson, Robert Parker, the Dixie Cups, [...]
The BEAT Goes On: A 25 Year Retrospective of OffBeat Magazine
OffBeat Magazine, the foremost authority on Louisiana music and one of the world’s longest-running jazz and roots music publications, celebrates its 25th anniversary with this issue. Here, we give a pithy history of how the publication grew in tandem with the popularity of the city and state of Louisiana’s music scene as it recaptured the [...]
A Nightingale Takes Flight: Ingrid Lucia Looks Back, Moves Forward
Ingrid Lucia takes a beat from music and motherhood during a rainy Friday lunch at a Mid City taqueria. It’s been almost two years since the New Orleans songstress lost her father, William David “Poppa Neutrino” Pearlman, at the age of 77, and she’s still processing the “wake-up moment” of his passing. “I guess it’s [...]
A Tale of New Orleans: Spencer Bohren’s Storied Blues
Verse 1: Kitchen Music Spencer Bohren and his wife Marilyn are spending a rare day at home in their cozy brick cottage on Esplanade Ridge. It’s a steamy August afternoon and the world seems to move in languid rotation as a huge black and gold monarch butterfly floats and glides amid the drying laundry hung [...]
Adolfo Garcia: The Metamorphosis of New Orleans’ Hungriest Restaurateur
“I felt like I was lip-syncing, like I was Ashlee Simpson on Saturday Nigh Live,” says Adolfo Garcia. Garcia is talking about Rio Mar. More specifically, why, after owning and serving as executive chef at Rio Mar for more than ten years, he up and sold his share to longtime partner Nick Bazan. The nightly [...]
