MUSIC

MEET THE ZOZO SISTERS

Linda Ronstadt and Ann Savoy�s Adieu False Heart

MUSIC -

Paul Soniat sings the Katrina blues

Paul Soniat, who happens to live on the Uptown Street that bears his name, is a pianist and songwriter grappling with the world remade by Katrina. In his new CD, Below the Waterline, Soniat lays it on with “Red Eyes,” a song from the soul of the...

MUSIC: Norwegian Seamen’s Church … and jazz

On a steamy May morning (before coffee) my phone delivered a producer from CNN: Can you do a satellite interview about the priest in Rome the pope just removed? My last book exposed that reprobate priest. You bet I said yes. We need you downtown in forty-five minutes. I, uh, have to take a bath....

MUSIC: Diaspora Blues

Catching up with the past

Every year in June, several score musicians leave the city for the European concert tour, playing the circuit of festivals from Scandinavia to Nice, France. This diaspora had no great significance in the Old World, pre-Katrina, because the talent pool kept pumping...

MUSIC: Harken to New Orleans – Fats Domino

Rick Coleman had no way of predicting that Antoine “Fats” Domino’s high-profile presence at this year’s Jazz and Heritage Festival would be a harbinger...

PUTUMAYO SWINGS: Retro music with local influences

With 39 definitions of “swing” in one dictionary, we approach this irrepressible idiom mindful of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, who famously said of...

Rethinking the Blues

“Down in New Orleans where the blues was born,” begins that floor-thumper “Mardi Gras Mambo.” Wonderful lines, though history has identified the Mississippi Delta as the blues cradle.

Elijah Wald, a writer and musician who has a home here, performs a dazzling journey...

The Creole Jazz Band

by JASON BERRY

Louis Armstrong’s train ride from New Orleans to Chicago in August 1922 is a pivotal episode in early jazz. The 21-year-old trumpeter leaves the town that...

Family Values

New Orleans' musical Jordans

by JASON BERRY

The centerpiece of the new Louisiana Red Hot Records CD Marlon Jordan Featuring Stephanie Jordan is the...

DIRTY DOZEN

Funeral for a Friend

by JASON BERRY

The Dirty Dozen revolutionized brass-band music in the early 1980s with an infusion of bebop and jump blues rhythms that took the old down-home sound to new thresholds. Veteran saxophonists Roger Lewis and Kevin Harris, trumpeters Gregory Davis and...