[Dixielandjazz] Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans?

[Steve barbone]

Critic's Notebook - NY TIMES - By JON PARELES - February 27, 2006

In the Music of New Orleans, Katrina Leaves Angry Edge

NEW ORLEANS, Feb. 26 ‹ The beat was crisp New Orleans funk, thumping to keep
the crowd dancing at the uptown club Tipitina's. The band onstage,
Dumpstaphunk, was led by Ivan Neville, the son of Aaron Neville and a member
of New Orleans's first family of rhythm and blues.

In Mardi Gras, a City Learns to Party Again  Mardi Gras Gong Show

Big Chief Bo Dollis and the Wild Magnolias, providing some music on Jackson
Square during a Mardi Gras celebration in the French Quarter. More Photos >

Like many top New Orleans musicians, he was back in town for a club date on
the weekend before Mardi Gras, when so many local musicians returned to the
city's clubs that it almost seemed they had never gone away.

In this city that holds so many roots of American song, music is more than
entertainment. It's a ritual and a lifeline.

On the surface of the music scene here, much was familiar. More than 80
nightclubs offered live music, perhaps two-thirds the number before
Hurricane Katrina. The clubs in the French Quarter and uptown, in
neighborhoods spared major flood damage, were booked with New Orleans
all-stars: funk bands like the Radiators and Galactic, brass bands like the
Rebirth Brass Band and the Soul Rebels, jazz musicians like Kermit Ruffins
and Trombone Shorty.

They're still playing New Orleans standards as the drinks flow. But there's
a changed spirit: the tenacity of holding together bands whose members have
been scattered and the determination to maintain the New Orleans style. And
in new songs, an open anger coexists with the old good-time New Orleans
tone. Over a funk beat, Mr. Neville had something to say.

"Talkin' to the powers that be!" he declaimed like a preacher. "A lot of
people got disenfranchised, displaced, and now we got a lot of distrust." He
moved into a song built on the local greeting "Where y'at?" But one verse
listed whereabouts of displaced New Orleanians: "Where y'at? Texas!
Mississippi!" Another asked the federal government: "Where y'at, when we
really needed you?"

In the 21st century, the most commercial New Orleans music has been hip-hop.
Juvenile, a New Orleans rapper, has spent most of his career doing gangta
boasts. But he has just released the single "Get Ya Hustle On," with a video
clip shot in the ruins of the Ninth Ward.

It shows children in masks of President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and
the city's mayor, C. Ray Nagin, wandering through the wreckage as Juvenile
raps lyrics like "We starving, we living like Haiti with no government" and
"I'm trying to live, I lost it all in Katrina." A house he had just built
was destroyed in the hurricane.

There has always been more to New Orleans music than its nonchalant facade.
The city has repeatedly catalyzed American music, as sounds that started in
the streets of New Orleans reached the world as jazz, put the roll into rock
'n' roll and taught new syncopations to rhythm and blues. Within the songs
is the tension and fascination between classes and cultures: African,
European, French, Spanish, Caribbean, Native American, rich and poor.

"They don't all get along," said Nick Spitzer, the host of the Public Radio
International program "American Routes" and one of the authors of "Blues for
New Orleans: Mardi Gras and America's Creole Soul" (Penn Press). "But
they've created an amazing shared culture." New Orleans musicians have long
been able deliver troubled thoughts with a smile, as Louis Armstrong did in
"Black and Blue" and Fats Domino did in "Ain't That a Shame."

When New Orleans musicians play the old songs, what once came across as
easygoing now carries a streak of bravado.

Like other New Orleanians, many musicians have lost their homes, possessions
and sometimes family members, and they are traveling long distances to play
in their old local haunts.

A song like "Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans" now echoes with
the knowledge that some natives of the city will never return. And there are
new, bleaker resonances when a Mardi Gras Indian group like the Wild
Magnolias sings the traditional song "Shallow Water Oh Mama," or when a
brass band picks up the bouncy "It Ain't My Fault."

Vaughan's, a club in the Upper Ninth Ward, is too small for a stage. Mr.
Ruffins, a trumpeter, has returned to his regular Thursday gig there after a
long hiatus imposed by the storm, and he and his band were nearly backed
against the club's wall by the dancing crowd. He was playing and singing old
New Orleans songs like "Mardi Gras Mambo," with a jovial Louis Armstrong
growl. 

Yet no one, onstage or off, has forgotten that the Lower Ninth Ward, still
in ruins, is only a few blocks away.

Mr. Ruffins finished one set with a pop standard once sung by Bing Crosby,
"Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams." Halfway through, in casual New Orleans
style, he handed the microphone to an audience member, who belted the song ‹
with a line about castles tumbling ‹ and then held on to the microphone long
enough to add, "That's for all the people that lost their houses."

Later, Mr. Ruffins agreed. "Those tunes take a whole different meaning now,"
he said. "At one time in the club, we would just be singing them. Now, I
listen to the words."