People kept asking me this year if Jazz Fest has out lived its usefulness to New Orleans culture. OffBeat is even getting letters from longtime fest-goers claiming that the festival is dead and has little reason to include “Jazz” in its name at all. There’s a strange deja vu about the charge that Jazz Fest has [...]
Shannon McNally’s
Bobby Charles Tribute Album
Sees Release
For years the Shannon McNally / Dr. John / Bobby Charles collaboration has been more a rumor than a record. Reports first broke in 2007 that Mac (Dr. John) Rebennack was producing McNally on an album of Charles’ songs, in the interim Charles passed away (from cancer in January 2010) and McNally and Rebennack have [...]
Untangling Al “Carnival Time” Johnson’s Recording Career
Considering the length of Al Johnson’s stop-and-go music career—his first single was recorded during the Eisenhower administration—his obvious talent, and his enormous local popularity, it’s indeed puzzling that his first full-length album Beyond Carnival is only now being released. This can partly be attributed to Johnson’s distrust of some individuals involved in the music business as [...]
Al “Carnival Time” Johnson
Finally Returns to the Studio
Who says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks? At 73, Al “Carnival Time” Johnson is a master of old school R&B. He wrote and recorded his biggest hit—which now may as well be a legal part of his name—in 1960. But that hasn’t stopped Johnson from going back to school both to hone [...]
Tommy Malone Puts It All Back Together
We’ll never know if the federal flood following Hurricane Katrina put a final nail in the subdudes’ coffin, but the band had put together one of its final albums earlier in ’05, the ironically-titled Behind the Levee, and was forced to reconvene amidst the chaos of post-Katrina life in New Orleans. The record was released [...]
Andrews Family Trumpeter
Travis Hill Returns to the Stage
Travis Hill can really blow a horn and hit some remarkably high notes on his trumpet. On hearing Hill as a member of trombonist Corey Henry’s Treme Funktet or sitting in with his cousin trumpeter James Andrews, the response is often, “Hey, who is that?” Someone who’s been on New Orleans scene since back-in-the-day might [...]
Cardinal Sons’ Kinda Cool Folksiness
With any new band, there is an adjustment period. Musicians need time to learn each other’s quirks and reach a level of musical communication bordering on telepathy. But local indie folk trio Cardinal Sons are not a “new band” in the traditional sense of the term. “When you start a band, there’s always give-and-take of [...]
Jazz Fest 2013 Focus:
Martha Redbone
Strong-voiced women doing retro-soul are currently a hot property in the pop world. Strong-voiced women doing Appalachian folk settings of works by the English visionary poet William Blake, not so much. Americana maverick Martha Redbone already had an impressive career going with funky soul albums that were informed by her Choctaw and Cherokee heritage. But [...]
Jazz Fest 2013 Focus: Phoenix
If you’re intrigued to see a European electronic art-pop band in the Jazz Fest lineup, so is the band itself. “People are really surprised when I tell them we’re playing there,” says Thomas Mars, frontman of the French group Phoenix. “We asked to play the festival, I heard about it from my father-in-law. When I [...]
Jazz Fest 2013 Focus:
Christian Winther
“I sat in with Kermit Ruffins and the Rebirth on the street,” Christian Winther, 38, recalls about his first visit to New Orleans when he was 14 and already determined to be a jazz musician. “That was a cool introduction to New Orleans for a young guy.” Winther, who moved here in 1997 and who [...]
