From November 8-13, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame will honor Fats Domino and Dave Bartholomew with an installment of their American Music Masters series that they call “Walkin’ to New Orleans.” The schedule is online now and includes a concert with Trombone Shorty and Orleans Avenue, an all-star tribute to Domino and Bartholomew, [...]
Tag Archives: ned sublette
Canal Street Gets the Postmamboist Treatment
October 4, 2010 – 12:29 am
“Postmamboism” is a word you’re probably not familiar with. For writer and historian Ned Sublette, it’s a way of looking at the world. “It’s a term that I made up to describe what I had done in my three books (Cuba and Its Music, The World That Made New Orleans, The Year Before the Flood),” [...]
Free Ned Sublette
November 10, 2009 – 1:39 pm
Writer/musician Ned Sublette grew up in Natchitoches, Louisiana, and his recent book, The Year Before the Flood, documents his time in New Orleans in 2004 and 2005. In it, he works to understand New Orleans’ second line culture and deal with the racial ghosts from his past while researching and writing his book, The World [...]
Nearly the Best?
October 21, 2009 – 3:22 pm
Da Capo Books’ Best Music Writing 2009, edited by Greil Marcus, just came out and OffBeat found itself mentioned if not featured in the book. In the list of “Other Notable Music Writing of 2009″ are Contributing Editor John Swenson for his look inside Pat O’Brien’s, ”The Songs Remain the Same,” Gianluca Tramontana for his history of [...]
A Day in the Year
September 1, 2009 – 12:01 am
In the fall of 2004, writer/musician Ned Sublette got a fellowship from Tulane and moved from New York City to New Orleans. The product of his year here is The World that Made New Orleans, his2008 book examining the role of slavery in shaping New Orleans. Sublette immersed himself in the city’s culture—particularly its second [...]
Iko Iko: In Search of Jockomo
April 1, 2009 – 12:01 am
One afternoon, 1965, the three Louisianan sisters/cousins who gave you “Chapel of Love,” unaware that the studio’s tapes were still rolling, recorded for posterity two minutes of delightful historical intrigue that had been circulating in oral obscurity for generations unknowable. “Iko, Iko,” they called that tune. The English chunks of the record came from an [...]
December 2008 Letters
December 1, 2008 – 12:01 am
VIP PROBLEMS My girlfriend and I paid close to $1,000 for Voodoo Fest LOA (VIP) tickets and we feel, along with many other people that we were ripped off. We have purchased LOA tickets for four years in a row, so we are not just someone who feels they wasted their money and want to [...]
Earl Palmer: Hiding in Plain Sight
November 1, 2008 – 12:01 am
In his 1978 book Rhythm and Blues in New Orleans, writer John Broven quotes Earl King attributing the word “funk” to drummer Earl Palmer. “At the recording sessions, he would say, ‘Look, man, let’s play a little funkier,’ and the word would start going around,” King said. But Palmer’s not known for funk. He was [...]
The Tubes Are Open
August 21, 2008 – 7:00 am
The Internet and I are together again. Sorry for the radio silence, but server issues shut me down for the last week. We’ve been so busy finishing the September issue that I wouldn’t have had much to say anyway – or nothing that didn’t have a place in the pages. Two quick notes: Trouble the [...]
Mandatory Reading
June 8, 2008 – 5:44 pm
This weekend, I chaired a panel at the PotLuck Audio Conference on New Orleans music with Cosimo Matassa, Wardell Quezergue, Harold Battiste, Scott Billington and Mark Bingham. Bingham brought a copy of Ned Sublette’s book Cuba and Its Music, which he considers indispensable for thinking about rhythm, and gave it to Battiste. Recently, Garnette Cadogan interviewed [...]
