[Dixielandjazz] Day One at the Mardi Gras.

[Steve Barbone]

Here is the NY Times report about the start of Mardi Gras celebration in New
Orleans. For more information about N.O. Mardi Gras, visit:

http://www.mardigras.com/

As Louis Armstrong said  of the Mardi Gras parade; "When that band starts to
swing, those cats would swing up a mess, no foolin."

Cheers,
Steve Barbone


Mardi Gras Journal - Jon Pareles at Mardi Gras - NY TIMES - Thursday

Old habits die hard in New Orleans, and that's the best hope for the
survival of wonderful, peculiar culture the city flaunts at Mardi Gras.

Last year, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, people who had lost
everything still made themselves a Mardi Gras with costumes, music, ritual
and hedonism--not because their troubles had ended, but because Mardi Gras
was a reason to stay and live through them. This year, in a city that's
still much reduced in population and still has intractable problems, Mardi
Gras remains a matter of local pride and persistence.

It's a little more familiar in one important way: local high-school bands,
which were all but absent last year, are strutting through the parades
again. Even at half strength, they're a sign that a next generation of
musicians is wielding sousaphones and trombones. And the clubs are full of
stalwart local bands, playing their regular weekly club gigs for crowds
slightly swelled by tourists, but full of people who know all the words and
just when to shout them.

Soul Rebels, a brass band, resumed its habitual Thursday-night gig at Le Bon
Temps Roulet as soon as it could after Katrina: commuting from Houston and
Baton Rouge, playing donated instruments to replace those destroyed by the
flood. On Thursday night, the sousaphone bomped and hip-hop chants
punctuated scrappy, freewheeling versions of New Orleans favorites like
"Little Liza Jane" and "Hey Pocky A-Way." The place was so tightly packed
that there was barely room for couples to bump and grind, though that didn't
stop them, while a woman with a bucket for tips snaked her way through the
crowd. After the set, the band plugged its CDs, its website, its next three
gigs in the next few days.

In Tipitina's, another uptown club, the long-running Rebirth Brass Band -- a
name chosen two decades before Katrina -- was also making people dance, with
its more muscular, more richly arranged version of brass-band music, rooted
in soul, funk and Latin music as well New Orleans jazz and parade
traditions: "We gon' hold it on," they insisted in a hip-hop stretch. The
music built to one plateau, made people scream, switched tunes and built
again from there, again and again, thrill upon thrill, until it eased off
with a version Marvin Gaye's "Let's Get It On" as an implicit suggestion for
post-club recreation. Of course, there would be another gig the next night,
and the next; it was the Mardi Gras habit, something to hold on to.