Tonight, Don Vappie performs at Irvin Mayfield’s Jazz Playhouse at 8 p.m. Here he is at the Dew Drop in Mandeville playing “Careless Love” with La Planche à Laver.
Tag Archives: banjo
pLink Floyd, Nickels & Diamonds (Independent)
December 1, 2010 – 12:49 am
In a 1991 interview with OffBeat, Béla Fleck expressed frustration at being constantly credited with “bringing the banjo to jazz.” While much of the world may be ignorant of the instrument’s long history in the genre, it’s not a problem we have here in New Orleans. Stroll down Frenchmen on a random night and you’re [...]
YouTube du Jour: Don Vappie
July 6, 2010 – 10:33 am
Don Vappie plays tonight at Irvin Mayfield’s Jazz Playhouse in the Royal Sonesta. Here’s Vappie in a video package assembled by the Jazz Ascona festival, which takes place yearly in Switzerland.
Don Vappie: Give Me Back My Banjo
November 1, 2008 – 12:01 am
In 2007, the Folk Alliance hosted a concert by three banjo players at Memphis’s Marriott Hotel. The three men sat in a semi-circle of chairs, the drum-like bodies of the banjos in their laps, the thin sticks of their fretboards pointing to two o’clock. It was a historic occasion, for all three men were African-American, [...]
Hearts Full of Soul
May 1, 2008 – 12:01 am
“I’d hear him backstage warming up, and that’s when I heard his voice as a solo artist,” Ben Jaffe says of Carl LeBlanc. LeBlanc plays banjo with the Preservation Hall Brass Band. That led to LeBlanc’s new self-titled solo album on Preservation Hall Records, an album that presents him as “New Orleans’ Seventh Ward Griot.” [...]
Taking Back the Banjo
March 1, 2008 – 12:01 am
If there was a moment where the banjo was branded with a stereotype, it would have to be when Burt Reynolds and Jon Voight went on a canoe trip down the Cahulawassee River in the film Deliverance. Years later, the banjo cannot entirely shake the associations, so it’s thought of first and foremost as a [...]
