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"Jazz" is an interesting word, almost
certainly of African origin (some etymologists say it means "to ejaculate" in
the Yoruba language). It is sui generis, perfectly twentieth century, and in the early
part of the century New Orleans was the first place that this black word was used to
describe a new form of music. New Orleans is part of the world's mythology mainly because
of Jazz. It might not, strictly, be true that Jazz was born in New Orleans, but it had the
advantage of being born in obscurity and became famous here. New Orleans—a city
worldly enough to produce a sophisticated, urban musical form—seemed the best place
to call home. Jazz combined the musical energy of Africa, the blues (which itself evolved
from African and English folk forms), and used the European marching band's
instrumentation and many of its musical idioms. If Jazz is the perfect word and New Orleans is its immediate connotation, then New Orleans must be close to perfection—well, that's the logic of the place. If you imagine a quasi-mythological place your mind conjures up a thousand phantasms and romantic notions, and New Orleans is made for that. There are Jazz images: Buddy Bolden's never-recorded cornet sounding loud and clear across the big river; Louis Armstrong playing his horn in a coloured waifs' band; Jelly-Roll Morton presiding, as "the piano professor", over the sporting houses of Storyville (some say he moonlighted as a pimp ); the riverboats that took Jazz up the Mississippi for people like Fletcher Henderson, Jack Teagarden and Doc Cheatham (a Cherokee trumpeter from Tennessee who, at the age of ninety, is still playing), to hear. Then there are theatrical-movie images: "A Streetcar Named Desire" (though the remaining streetcars don’t travel up Desire St anymore), Blanche, Stella and Stanley, that mean, sweaty-singleted brute pompously citing the "Napoleonic Code"; wilful Bette Davis redeeming herself by going to the yellowjack island with heroically infected Henry Fonda in "Jezebel"; Elvis gaily singing about crawfish on the balconies of the Quarter in "King Creole". Popular music...you’ve got your "Proud Mary", your "Lady Marmalade", your Bobby McGee and friend thumbing a diesel down, your "Polk Salad Annie", your "Brown Sugar"...Blues songs: Baby please don’t go down to New Orleans. And there are a whole lot of other images that have become as clichéd as trinkets in a Vieux Carré giftshop, but they are no less real for being clichés. Never mind that New Orleans doesn't have a
particularly striking presence—it's not a visual treat like Venice (although it's
almost as watery), or dramatically modern, like New York. I prepared myself for the
prospect of being disappointed in New Orleans before I got there—I'd looked at enough
books and pictures to realise that it's essentially a blue-collar, port city, a working
town, with an undistinguished commercial heart—poor, and not really glamorous. The
city and thousands of square miles of its surroundings are flat—freeway viaducts coil
around and over the prostrate metropolis like Lilliputian ropes entangling Gulliver.
Tourists are drawn to the visual delights, and the "ambience", of the French
Quarter and the Garden District, but these pleasures are not really spectacular—for
me, the music's the thing. The measure of the spell cast by New Orleans is that I came away
from the place with an even deeper sense of its "mythological" status and with
an even deeper fascination that (if finances ever permit), will draw me back. The WWL/RayBan Stage (I’ll refer to it as
"the big stage" from now), had the big-timers including Ray Charles, Joni
Mitchell, James Taylor, B.B. King, Wilson Pickett, Chuck Berry, Al Green and Gladys
Knight. Thousands of punters, and hundreds of performers, cram into the Rhodes Gospel Tent every day (Rhodes is a funeral parlour). There are usually ten acts a day, often with massed choirs. Gospel is very popular in the South and the faithful pack the tent to hear acts like The Humble Travellers, The Dynamic Smooth Family of Slidell, The Sons of Life Choir, Dimensions of Faith, The Blind Boys of Alabama, The Famous Mighty Imperials, The Pilgrim Jubilees, Joe "Cool" Davis, The Heralds of Christ. Black Gospel music is exhilarating and tumultuous, and though it’s intensely religious, atheists like me can still have a great time in the tent—the lyrical sentiments may be up in the clouds but the music and the singing are always earthshaking. It has an interesting history—its spiritual and organisational roots come out of the Southern black Church of God in Christ and the Holiness movement of the Methodist Church; musically it combines English revival hymns and the African song styles of call-and-response, and shouting and moaning. And Soul music came out of Gospel—if you wanted a demonstration of the link between the two, you could spend an hour in the Rhodes tent and then walk fifty metres to see Wilson Pickett, Al Green, Ray Charles or Gladys Knight—the result might be your own little epiphany. Gospel and Soul have a symbiotic relationship, even though the Gospel people initially thought of Soul as blasphemous—almost as bad as the Blues, the "devil’s music". (It would certainly be true that a lot of people in the Gospel community—called by some a doctrinaire and jealous movement—still think this way.) Soul sings of sex, trouble between men and women, and secular melancholy; Gospel would address melancholy as an absence of belief—the Soul singer is lonely because his woman left him, the Gospel singer was lonely before he found salvation in Jesus. When the Soul singers cried out "Good God", as an expression of emotion, it outraged the pious Gospel people. But—hallelujah—the inextricable link between the two fervent styles has finally been manifested and reconciled in a performer named Al Green—a former soul superstar and now a Reverend with his own congregation in Memphis. (Although I found out later that a performance by the Reverend is a passion play, or a mini-exorcism—he acts-out the god/devil dichotomy that exists inside him, and if Jesus ever won it would be a pyrrhic victory, because then we wouldn't have the same Al Green.) The New Orleans Gospel connection is most strongly epitomised by the memory of Mahalia Jackson, who was born here but went to Chicago before she turned twenty, eventually becoming a pivotal figure in the evolution of Gospel (she introduced Jazz and Blues phrasing and stylisms into the music) and is still a local heroine—the Jazz writer Whitney Balliett reckons she never lost her New Orleans "evil", defined as "outrageous perversity, secrecy, suspicion and a high clannishness". Even the person who changed the direction of gospel had a touch of the Devil in her. The Congo Square Stage drew me in immediately, there was a thatched arch leading to the stage area and the surroundings presented a panoply of the African diaspora—markets selling artefacts from Haiti, Jamaica, Ghana, Nigeria; stalls staffed or operated by Africans, Caribbeans, Brazilians and American blacks doing the "back-to-Africa" thing (dressed in gorgeous African-print costume, hair intricately braided, decorated with jewellery, they speak with a black-southern accent, which is the accent retained, in varying degrees, by virtually all black Americans, except for the more-recent immigrants from other slave countries of the Western Hemisphere). Congo Square—downtown, on the northern edge of the Vieux Carré—was originally one of the centres for buying and selling slaves and later became a gathering place for slaves to make music, dance and keep their African religious traditions alive. The Jazzfest's Congo Square featured roots and world-music acts like the Phantoms of Haiti, Cyril Neville, Black Stalin of Trinidad, Olodum, the Wild Magnolias, the Belafon Ensemble of Gambia and Majek Fashek. There were also three or four rap acts who attracted the biggest crowds of young people—black and white. One was a "gansta rapper" called Mystikal, who is very popular locally—all the kids were rapping the words of his hits along with him. (A gansta rapper's trademark are gold-capped teeth, called "gold fronts"; I saw a guy downtown one day, in his early twenties, and all his teeth were gold-fronts. This probably indicated that he was a "bad muthafucka".) You see and hear some interesting things at Congo Square: one day I overheard a black man philosophising with his colleagues, "Y’see, anyone can be black... y’knowwhatI'msaying ...but not everyone can be a nigger." Rap can be great live (but often isn’t), and, in an unfortunate development, they seem to have dispensed with the d.j.—M.C.s still prowl the stage but these New Orleans rappers’ beats and samples came from pre-recorded tapes controlled by the sound technician. The bass is very heavy (rap is nudging its way back to its dub and toasting roots) and the latest craze is M.C.s using the extraordinarily quick Jamaican-style rapping to display their verbal dexterity. (I heard some rap on a local radio station one night that was almost like go go in its sense of fun and communality—a long way from the menacing, murderous, heavy-rhythmed gansta stuff. They had a funky New Orleans shuffle beat playing and the M.C. rapped-along with callers who ad-libbed over the telephone; it was spontaneous and more in the funky-fun New Orleans spirit than the ubiquitous Ganstas' iciness.) WWOZ FM is the best radio station I've ever heard and the acts at the WWOZ Jazz Tent included modern Jazz greats like Sonny Rollins, Joe Henderson, Abdullah Ibrahim, Terence Blanchard, Roy Hargrove, Abbey Lincoln, David Murray, Charles Neville, Archie Shepp, Ellis, Jason and Delfeayo Marsalis and the Mingus Big Band. Being a Jazz fiend, I spent a good deal of time in that tent. The other areas of interest are the Music Heritage Stage, where musicians are interviewed, Cajun and African-American folk-tales are spun, and photography and art are exhibited (including paintings by Miles Davis); and a Kid's Tent, presenting such acts as the New Orleans Free School Performers and N'Kafu Traditional African Dance. (I like kids, but I never did get to the Kid's Tent.) Altogether there are 463 different acts on stage and that doesn't include the parades (of which there are up to four a day). A rough calculation would yield a figure close to 4,000 performers which means plenty of music for everyone—an embarrassment of riches. I wandered around the grounds in a stupefaction. I was enough to merely be there, music was everywhere, and there were a innumerable visual delights, for example, near the entrance there was a group of "totems", as I came to know them. They were free-standing paintings of such luminaries as Satchmo, Miles, 'Fess, Mahalia. If I'd had any friend to meet, this would have been the spot, "Okay, we'll meet at the Satch totem after I see Wilson and you see Katie Webster." I rambled, I drifted, not wanting to focus on any specific detail, being content, instead, to fill myself with the feeling of the event. So it happened that the only acts I clearly remember seeing until Wilson Pickett were Ricky B.—a local rap star with a hit called "Shake it for ya ‘hood"—and the boisterous Beau Jocques and the Zydeco Hi-Rollers. I’d go to one stage, soak-up some music, look at the program and get excited about an act imminently appearing on the other side of the grounds (the program had an alphabetically arranged profile of every performer), traverse the grounds, and so on all day—it was like being in Luna Park or at the Royal Easter Show when I was a kid. Eventually it became time to focus and "wicked
Wilson" was the man to sharpen my perceptions. Wilson Pickett is a power-house
performer with a sublime vocal style; his band was super-bad and super-funky—made-up
of keyboards, bass, two guitars, drums, two trumpets, trombone and sax. Wilson stuck to
his famous repertoire—"Midnight Hour", "Mustang Sally",
"634-5789"—and ended the show with the fever-pitch excitement of "Land
of a Thousand Dances". You marvel at the strength of his vocal chords, although he
stopped at one point and remarked, grinning, "This shit don't get any easier!"
(He’s 54 years old, and there's the heat of New Orleans you see, but more of that
later—it's part of the whole experience.) The crowd became increasingly excited,
especially with the great "ahh help me" ending of "Land of a Thousand
Dances"—that's when I got my first spine-tingles of the Fest—Wilson is
galvanic, a soul genius! His solos go for a long time and he often blows-away other soloists—the trombonist was having a hard time of it and during "the great merengue"—"St Thomas"—Sonny traded eights with the bass player, who didn’t come-off too well in the duel. (It was a quirky choice for Sonny to trade eights with the bass—usually the drummer gets those honours in "St Thomas".) Sonny finds a phrase, a note, or just a sonority, and repeats it, in a score of differently syncopated permutations. A wave of fervour rushed through the audience—people started shouting or cheering. He angled his body from 45 degrees to almost parallel to the stage and, as he repeated a resonating phrase, his body jerked down, up, down, up. His body began to assume the shape of the saxophone. At the end of each piece the crowd cheered wildly. At the end of his set an oceanic roar flooded the tent. His bright orange jacket was sweat-soaked but Sonny looked indefatigable. There was still time to catch the last song of Black Stalin's set over at Congo Square. The crowd around the stage, indeed anywhere in earshot of Stalin, was dancing with abandon. He's a dynamic act from Trinidad, five-time winner of the Calypso Monarch Crown, a Rasta and his style is funky calypso—a groove. This was my first day at Jazz Fest 1995. It was very hot and humid
and I, without hat or sun screen, got sunburnt. My attire—new jeans, shirt and silk
jacket, and carrying a canvas back-pack and camera—certainly wasn’t appropriate
for the heat. But I felt excited and elated as I walked toward the park, the euphoria
tempered slightly by my concern about getting back to wherever it was I had parked the
car. (I knew I should have left a trail of breadcrumbs, though the grey squirrels might
have screwed-up that notion.) I’d memorised a few landmarks on my circuitous route to
the Fest that morning—a mini-baseball stadium about a mile from the carpark, a
golf-course, and I’d walked under a (at best) melancholy, and (at worst)
dangerous-looking viaduct. The sky was turning sanguineous when I was accosted by a pair
of young women. One of them was drunk and leant against me while the other took a
photograph of us. I took a picture of them together and soon began a conversation with the
more sober of the two, who said she’d once lived at Balmoral, in Sydney, for a year,
and was now living in Alabama; she and her friend spent all day in the Gospel Tent. This
was a pleasant diversion but didn’t help my car-finding problem. I walked on in the
twilight until I recognised the gate leading to the carpark. Serendipity be
praised!—I’d found it. On Sunday I got organised before I left the motel and slipped into a
routine that I maintained for the rest of the Fest. I breakfasted on bran flakes, grits,
scrambled eggs, wheat toast with fruit jelly and a cup of wonderful American tea. My
advice to travellers is to plot your course and dress for the occasion. I zipped over the
River, got off the freeway at the Carollton Avenue exit and drove down that thoroughfare
until I got to the Beauregard Monument (a statue of a Confederate arsehole on a horse),
and turned left into the City Park. There’s free parking near the Art Gallery and
it’s only about ten minutes walk to the Fest. You walk past the St Louis Cemetery (a
vast city of the dead) and on to the Fairgrounds. You should wear a wide-brimmed straw
hat, sunglasses, white or light-coloured t-shirt or a loose-fitting short-sleeved,
light-coloured shirt, shorts and sandals or sandshoes. Drink at least three glasses of
water before you leave and apply sunblock liberally to any unprotected area of your body.
Drink camel-like draughts of free water from the bubblers (or drink-fountains as they call
them in America—they’d squish their faces into odd expressions of incredulity if
you asked "Where are the bubblers?"), at regular intervals during the day. If
you don’t take these simple precautions you could die. I discovered the Fest’s parades on Sunday and they are truly wondrous things—like Mardi Gras parades, except you can join in the second line (it's probably too crowded and chaotic to do that at the Mardi Gras). The marching bands are an aural treat—the music fascinating for an amateur musicologist like me because they play original New Orleans Jazz, a concoction that was on the boil while Armstrong was still a waif. Academic musicologists call this style New Orleans polyphony: "trombone-clarinet-trumpet rhythm playing syncopated riffs and antiphonal passages broken by short solos." Nowadays the only difference to the classic early-Jazz lineup is the paucity of clarinetists. There are always trumpets, trombones and saxophones; huge tubas or sousaphones provide bass-lines that seem implausibly funky and the rest of the rhythm section contains a snare drummer, who carries a loopy shuffle beat (I kept watching the snare drummers to try and catch their technique—they don't use a backbeat, just a really groovy shuffle, as I said), a bass drummer, who bangs the drum with one hand and usually plays a tambourine or cymbal with the other, plenty of tambourines and a cowbell or two. The tunes are simple, funky riffs, based on chants. In the first parade I saw, the two trumpeters were blowing tandem exaltations, weaving the notes around the more simple trombone lines and tuba riffs. Other groups march with the bands: the Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs—with grandiose banners proclaiming, for example, "Original Prince of Wales Social Aid and Pleasure Club, inc August 13 1883 New Orleans LA"— and the Wild Indians: Seminoles, Wild Magnolias, Mohawks, Black Eagles, Wild Tchoupitoulas. They're African-Americans not American Indians, though many of them would lay claim to Choctaw, Seminole or even Cherokee roots, and they dress-up in hallucinatory feathered and sequined outfits—bright yellows, purples, blacks, greens. Sometimes they stage mock battles during the parade. On Sunday morning the White Eagles were on stage at Congo Square and they were a revelation. Behind a phalanx of costumed Indians old men led the crowd in pre-Jazz, pre-blues, call-and-response chants—"Hey Pocky Way", "Iko Iko", "Shoo Fly Don't Bother Me", "Li'l Liza Jane" and "Big Chief Got a Golden Crown". "Pocky Way" went for about 20 minutes—the African roots laid even barer by the rhythm of booming bass drums and other percussion. I klomped over to the big stage for another
quintessential New Orleans experience: a performance by Allen Toussaint. He’s an
underrated artist (possibly because of the lack of urgency in his light-tenor voice), a
great song writer and a fine pianist. At this Fest he fronted a very tight big band and
performed his classic songs including "Fortune Teller", "Yes We Can",
and "Working in a Coal Mine". He doesn’t do handstands like DJ Ready Teddy,
or throw roses to the audience like Al Green, but he does play piano in the style of
Professor Longhair and the band does a lot of tricky hooks and turnarounds that sound real
good. Abbey Lincoln was understated and a little lukewarm (this was the first time I became aware of the threat of ambient noise affecting Jazz performers in the Jazz Tent; a lot of people at the Fest seem more interested in idle conversation than in listening to music, there’s also noise seeping-in from performances at Congo Square). Chuck Berry was better than expected (though expectations have sunk to a very low low); the great piano playing of Johnnie Johnson and a good rhythm section firmed Chuck’s genial on-stage sloppiness. There were low moments (the appalling ‘My Ding-a-Ling’, his biggest hit) and sublime moments, but there’s no denying that those bent notes on ‘Johnny B-Goode’ have become sonic archetypes—how strange that that tiny bit of a musical phrase can evoke America itself! Ray Charles, like Chuck Berry, is sui generis—and one of the great musical figures that you feel you have to see. He rarely disappoints—he’s not ‘mercurial’ in the way Chuck Berry can be (the opposite is the case—he’s as slick as satin—some people would think he has become a trifle Vegas-ised) and his voice is something to be heard. With his band and the Raylettes there’s twenty one people on stage, and when they get down things really move—"What I Say"and "Hit the Road Jack" are super-groove workouts. He involved the audience in a call-and-response that started simply and gradually the phrasing that he offered became impossible for anyone else to emulate; this was funny, the audience got the joke and took it well (in ‘What I Say’ the exchange of "Ohhh—Ohhh...Yeahh—Yeahh," grew to Ray pouring out phrases like, "Oohhyeahhheeohohoo-oo-ooooo, " his voice ranging from falsetto almost to bass with no discernible passagio). He uses the soul devices of broken voice and not-quite attaining the pitch of a high note (deliberately) to increase the overall emotional impact. (I know about this because I've read Charlie Gillet's "Sound of the City".) You love Ray Charles because he connects. His blindness doesn’t hinder him from linking with forty thousand people who love him—he’s another American icon. (I remembered the comic Flip Wilson’s routine, where Columbus persuades Queen Isabella to fund his trip with the clincher, "If you don’t let me discover America, there ain’t gonna be no Ray Charles".) Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday were no-Fest days. On Monday I drove into New Orleans, parked in a shabby little city car-park and decided to stroll around downtown. The New Orleans CBD is not a special place—big office blocks make it look like just another ugly city. The Big Easy is not immediately beautiful like San Francisco or Sydney, because it's flat and covered in freeways. Still, you don’t have to venture far from the office towers to find the older parts of town, much of them gothically decaying. (How can you help it that these images keep getting dredged-up like silt out of the river?) There are, apparently, many illustrious old well-kept houses in the Garden District, which is another "must see" place in New Orleans (I usually avoid anything the guidebooks say you must see. I avoided Alcatraz and Pier 39 in San Francisco. Pier 39 is billed as "the second-most popular tourist destination in the United States", though God knows why—it really has nothing remarkable about it, except the sea lions that flop up onto the floating piers and loll about, sunning themselves and making barking sounds.) But in large areas of the city the old homes are in a state of decay. They still have charm and a certain grandeur, but the image of the "decadent South"—best evoked by Williams and Faulkner and made clichéd by a thousand melodramatists—is always present. The decaying feel is as much to do with the weather as any legacy of New Orleans's corrupt past (and present?): muggy, no breeze (except when the hurricanes come flying in) and usually hot. In the early mornings the city is drowned in fog and if you get up early, you find your car swathed in heavy dew. The fog mixes with car fumes and emissions from the jungle of petrochemical plants further upriver to make a miasma. I’ve thought a bit about the heat of New Orleans and I have decided that it's an interesting thing. Our image of a place is shaped by media clichés and so a fat, sweaty, red neck has become a symbol of the Deep South and racial hatred, intolerance of long-hairs, insanely corrupt policemen, etc. But in a New Orleans summer any overweight white man, racist or not, would most likely be red-necked (because of sunburn), and would be wiping the sweat away with a vengeance (or a handkerchief). Some people theorise that the civil rights situation finally reached some sort of stasis because of the advent of air-conditioning, "No telling how long that mess would have gone on if we hadn't all started getting air-conditioning. Everybody got comfortable and cooled down." A pinhead’s theory, no doubt, and perpetuated mainly by "Southern white folks", but air-conditioning certainly destroyed In-the-Heat-of-the-Night-images of bloated bigots, shirts sweat-stained, grinning half-witted, tobacco-wad grins in rooms where overhead fans cast sinister shadows. In spite of all this, there’s no air-conditioning at the Fest, and I'm glad because the heat, as I said, adds to the feel, so in the Gospel Tent the crowd fan themselves with programmes, hats and handerchiefs as they cry "Hallelujah!" A member of a local rock group called the Iguanas was quoted in the magazine Rhythms, "The climate is our secret weapon. We play those sleazy medium and slow tempos—it's hot down here and you don't want to wear anybody out." (Yeah...but why is Zydeco so fast?—The "hot weather-slow music" theory is smashed by other fast music styles like samba, north-eastern Brazilian music, calypso, African stuff, even New Orleans Jazz, for that matter.) During a Fest-parade I watched a tuba-player, known locally as "Tuba Fats" (he must weigh-in at over 200 kilos—without the tuba). He was obviously in some distress, puffing out notes through a river of sweat as the band progressed from the entrance down to the oak tree near Omar’s Pies ("Closed on Saturdays for religious reasons"). Suddenly he caught sight of the Sno-Cone stand and made a bee-line for it, tuba still attached to his abundant body—nothing could stop him, he ignored the pleas of his compatriots to get back with the marching band. As you come out of the Fairgrounds people are selling "fresh water, only a dollar a glass"—tap water, straight out of the pristine Mississippi—I wondered if anyone bought it (you can’t take drinks into the Fest). I quickly got into the habit of buying an icy drink and holding big chunks of ice in my mouth to cool my head down. The air in New Orleans is oppressive and the breeze that comes off the river doesn't seem to cool things down. The smell of the city during Fest-time: privet and magnolia flowers—a rich, sweet smell that adds to the tropicality and those archetypes of decay and delicious voluptuousness—becomes the smell of heat. Norman Mailer thinks the heat changes the behaviour of the inhabitants: "perhaps it is the permissiveness offered by sub-tropical heat (that makes) people in the Big Easy take it for granted that humankind is a spiritual house of cards built on flimsy, and therefore is full of contradiction and ready to collapse. Opposites in oneself, consequently, are given equal welcome." There’s the heat...and there’s water. Water bounds and shapes New Orleans and its exigencies dominate the city. New Orleans is the unofficial gateway—the uvula of the river's mouth, which opens wider and wider for 150 miles until it enters the Gulf of Mexico. The Mississippi flows from the north after passing through a procession of place names that the mind stews-up into a gumbo of vivid images and evocative figures, real and imagined. The course the river takes through New Orleans is but a microcosm of its crazy weave from the Minnesota source. Angling and winding south until Baton Rouge, it turns south-east and arrives in Orleans Parish as it flows south again after an elbow-shaped bend. There’s an abrupt turn to the east and on the eastern side Tchoupitoulas Street backs onto the docks. Then it turns north and at the next bend is the Vieux Carré with Decatur and the other streets of the Quarter in a grid stretching northward. (The shape that the river determined for New Orleans gave it another name—the Crescent City.) The river then casually meanders south south-west for another 150 miles of bayous, lakes and forests and then flows into the Gulf, having drained a third of the United States in the process. Most of the city is below sea level and levees hold back the river. (There's no basements in New Orleans houses and the dead are interred above ground.) I stood on the levee just near Decatur Street in the Vieux Carré and watched the container ships plying the river, while contemplating just exactly what it is that boats do when they ply. On Monday I wandered around the Quarter for about three hours. On its fringe is Riverside Walk, a touristy place with about as much appeal as the Darling Harbour Markets in Sydney. The city’s riverfront is a tangle of docks; huge container ships glide by. Upriver there are hundreds of petrochemical plants spewing chemical fumes into the air and dumping waste into the River (the area between Baton Rouge, the state capital, and New Orleans is often called "Cancer Corridor". Baton Rouge is a bit like Port Kembla without the charm.) The Vieux Carré is a strange and beautiful mixture of tourist traps and genuinely run-down old French and Spanish-style houses on streets with names like Bourbon, Royal, Decatur, Orleans and Chartres. In the middle of the Quarter is Jackson Square, a nice interlude, with buskers and sidewalk artists and St Louis cathedral providing a splendid backdrop. It's all a little bit like the Rocks, but more seedy and authentic. (Despite the tourist shops selling tacky t-shirts and other useless paraphernalia—they’re like any shops in the Rocks or Darling Harbour or Fishermans Wharf.) The place has a certain air of melancholy, especially on a Monday morning, and it's fringed by some miserable and apparently dangerous (crime-ridden) housing projects. Things must heat up at night, there’s hundreds of bars and thousands of people come down to the Quarter to get drunk—not really a place for a non-party guy like me. You also stand a worse (or better) chance of being mugged or rolled if you're drunk, so I think I'd be a bit uneasy getting drunk or stoned and being alone. Louis Armstrong Park is just outside the Quarter, near Congo Square but the tourist guidebooks warn that it is "extremely dangerous at any time." (I’ve found out since my stay that a lot of places I went to are classed as "extremely dangerous at any time". The guidebook, "Essential New Orleans", warns visitors, "you should go with a group, rather than alone, to visit the cemetaries"—and I, alone, with camera, wandered for an hour through the large St Louis cemetary off Esplanade Avenue. The cemetary was deserted, which suited me. Also: "at night, avoid Esplanade Avenue and City Park"—I wasn’t thrilled about being lost in the Park after dark but neither was I seized with a morbid fear; Esplanade seemed sedate—I walked down that street many times, though never at night—the streets running off that long stretch looked like scenes from a "generic ghetto". Tuesday, and serendipity persuaded me to drive to Natchez, Mississippi, and who am I to argue with her?. The causeway across Lake Pontchartrain, the huge body of water that forms the northern boundary to the city, is the world's longest bridge—approximately forty kilometres—it takes about twenty-five minutes to drive over it. I read later that only out-of-towners take this causeway: the one that divides the lake in two (there’s another forty kilometre causeway on the fringe of the lake), because the locals know that a sudden storm would drown the road, which appears to be only a few feet above the lake...oh well. The road to Mississippi is straight and pancake-flat. You drive through bayou country: an emerald-green forest of cypress and oak with water glistening beneath the trees. The main wildlife I saw was poor dead armadillos and turtles, killed as they tried to cross the freeway. Natchez is on the Mississippi and the river is more beautiful here than in New Orleans—wider (almost a mile wide) and the banks are steep and thick with trees. I wandered aimlessly around the town, a place encapsulating the cliché "when it's sleepy time down south". I walked down back streets, where oak trees spread their branches and dappled the undergrowth with sunlight, wandered down cool little creepered valleys, passed people’s backyards where dogs barked laconically from behind fences or screen doors, but I didn’t see anyone. I drove back to New Orleans along Highway 61, also known as "Blues Alley"—birthplace of the Delta blues—but I didn't go down to the crossroads or see any old or young blues musicians—rap is where-it's-at for young black people all across the States, and the Mississippi radio stations only play country and western. On Wednesday I went on what I call an "epic walk", something I do whenever I travel—my only objective is to see as many interesting things as I can, and I keep walking until I’m exhausted. (Then I have to walk back. In San Francisco I covered over twenty five miles, going across the Golden Gate, through the Presidio, onto Sunset Beach, into the Golden Gate Park, and then I crossed a panoply of distinct suburbs culminating in the explosion of Haight-Ashbury.) On The New Orleans walk I started from the Art Museum, in the park, and went to the St Louis Cemetery where I slowly passed hundreds of marble sarcophagi that stretched in long lines. The place was deserted and I searched for famous names, like some of the New Orleans’ "Witch Queens", or a great Jazz musician. Most of the names of the dead were French, and whole families were kept in those reliquaries. Then I headed down De Saix and Gentilly Boulevards because I wanted to check-out a record shop recommended in 'Offbeat' magazine. De Saix is a fairly nondescript suburban street and Gentilly is like the worst parts of Parramatta Road. The record shop was disappointing so I walked back to the park and then set-off to walk all the way down Esplanade Avenue—the long, straight street that goes from the Park to the centre of the Vieux Carré. At the beginning of Esplanade I asked a street vendor if there were any dangerous areas ahead, he told me to "watch out for the ones with tans—the ones with really deep tans—and tails—they look like big monkeys". This was the first racist comment I'd heard in the United States and it was strangly, malicously circuitousness. New Orleans has one of the highest homicide rates in America and is also supposed to be the third-poorest city (after Laredo and Detroit, though how statisticians measure a city's poverty I don't know). It's a blue-collar town, with plenty of poor people but less of a range of rich and poor, so it doesn’t seem as inequitable as the poverty in San Francisco, where first-time visitors are often distressed or saddened by the panhandlers and homeless people on Market Street. Because San Francisco glitters like a jewel at first look, the discrepancy appears worse than in New Orleans, which never "looks" rich. In New Orleans "crime" and "the projects" are talked-about synonymously. St Bernard Project, just north of Gentilly Boulevard, has been fenced-in, a model police solution (they're proud of it)! The Desire Housing Project in the south-east is particularly notorious, the name itself ironically oxymoronic. Desire St is long—running all way from the riverfront—and streets coming off it include Treasure, Abundance, Humanity, Pleasure, Hope, Art, Music, Industry and Agriculture. You could say that in New Orleans, Piety is parallel to Desire, because Piety Street runs beside Desire. (A list of street names in New Orleans could sound like a litany in a sermon, or the synopsis of a steamy thriller.) I set-off down the tree-lined, leafy, cathedral-like Esplanade Avenue. A street full of interesting houses that were once stately (many are now being renovated). As you look to the right and to the left you see side streets that look like a photojournalist’s encapsulation of "the ghetto": dilapidated houses with people sitting on the steps, and lots of younger people playing basketball in the street, or "just chillin". I walked past an all-black school at school-out time. Junior high kids came tumbling out—ebullient, chattering, teasing, laughing. A variety of cars drove past, many of them epitomising a "new-young-black-thing" viz., driving a Jeep with hip-hop blasting from the car's stereo, the bass booming across ten blocks. At a corner half-way down Esplanade is a plaque commemorating Edgar Degas—"Degas’ mother was born in New Orleans and the artist frequently visited the city." (His aunts and uncles lived in these streets.) Eventually you get to the Vieux Carré. I had another look around and took a couple of photographs but didn't really get a great vibe—nothing bad, just indifferent. A man asked me for a dime, "so’s I can get a cup of coffee", I gave him a quarter and said thanks—I don’t know why I said thanks, I wanted to give him more. (There were more panhandlers in San Francisco than in New Orleans, one man had a very depressed routine—standing outside the San Francisco City Library, holding out a plastic cup and repeating the words, "Excuse me, I’m a human being too.") Thursday started hot and sultry and I decided that this would be a serious Jazz day at The Fest, so I headed straight for the Jazz Tent. The first act was the George Fontainette Quintet. The leader plays flugelhorn and there's sax, piano, bass and drums; it was good hard bop with a great sound balance—enjoyable and cerebral. George Fontainette has a real Creole look, with skin and hair almost orange and, like a lot of local performers, he has a Creole name. He was followed by Steve Masakowski and Friends, a "post-fusion" band. The leader plays seven-string guitar and the sound was good, not as impressive as the George Fontainette Quintet, but good music nonetheless. Next on the bill was Charles Neville & Diversity. Charles plays sax of course—alto and tenor and there was another alto and soprano sax player, a pianist, double bass player, drummer, bassoonist, classical harpist, steel drummer and vocalist. It was quite pleasurable though slightly off in some spots—Charles Neville is a good sax player, especially for Nevilles' stuff, but he's not really a Jazz cat. Surprisingly the bassoonist was very good, this being the first time I've heard that instrument blown hard in a Jazz style; he got a good bass tone and made the instrument scream beautifully. The harpist did very little ensemble work, and her only solo was a haphazard version of 'Autumn Leaves', which was like the curate's egg. She was obviously classically trained and had no Jazz chops. Still, the audience vibe was good, although frankly the audience at the Fest is generally too noisy for good, quiet (mostly acoustic), serious Jazz—there’s too much talking and to-and fro-ing because once you're in the Fairgrounds you're free to move about between acts. When it comes to Jazz I'm as serious about listening as I am at a classical concert—the audience should keep quiet, except to applaud, cheer or whatever and not yap to each other about their stupid lives (I'm aware that I sound misanthropic here)—I just don't want to hear inane talk over music. I left the Jazz Tent and hopped over to the Fox stage to catch Alex Chilton, the Box Tops' original singer. He was okay (the best number was a Furry Lewis song), but didn't live-up to the hype (he's touted as being a mysterious, erratic and sometimes brilliant performer), so I left early to catch the Golden Eagles, another Indian tribe. It was a marvellous spectacle but the chants, percussion and overall chemistry were not as good as they'd been for the White Eagles last Sunday. It was getting hotter and ominously cloudy and then the rain came—slow at first but it quickly built to a torrential downpour with lightning and alarmingly loud thunder. I took refuge in the Arts and Crafts Tent; Louisiana storytellers were competing in their soft voices with the noise of the storm, the rain kept pouring down and started coming into the tent. Outside it was like Woodstock, with people sliding through the mud, inside I was soaked and cold with drenched shirt. The deluge lasted for over one and a half hours. During a break in the weather I made it back through the mud to the Jazz Tent to catch David Murray and Archie Shepp. The ground inside the tent was very muddy and as I leapt over a small creek flowing through the tent, the band were beginning to wail as only a free-Jazz band can. David Murray plays tenor sax and bass clarinet, Archie Shepp plays tenor sax and does a bit of singing; there was also a great pianist and rhythm section. This wild, unfettered Jazz was marred slightly by loud ambient noise coming from the adjacent Congo Square area and from people crowded at the back of the tent to get out of the rain. David Murray is an underrated artist—he's a remarkable player who really tears a place apart (a New Yorker writer said Murray can "topple buildings" with his sound, and now I know what he meant). Archie Shepp is harder to assess. In spite of his credentials I'm not sure if he is one of the greats—his honking, screeching style seems clumsy rather than abandoned (maybe he is just very idiosyncratic). Surprisingly, he’s a good soulful singer and did an unrestrained version of "Ain't Misbehaving" and a Last Poets-style piece which was intensely polemical and oratorical, although unfortunately I couldn't hear the words clearly over the rain and the noise. The audience was enthusiastic and even demanded an encore, but the M.C. said there was more lightning and thunder on the way. It rained heavily on the way back to the car and I got soaked again. I hoped tomorrow would bring back the hot muggy weather, because, with all its discomforts, it seems to be good for sound—no wind, and the thick air carries the bass frequencies well and fits into the "New Orleans thing"—the sultriness (maybe that's partly to account for the special feel of New Orleans music which really doesn't record well—most C.D.s fail to capture the warmth or the heat. The locals would say that New Orleans music is like gumbo—it only really works in New Orleans (they say New Orleans gumbo tastes better than other gumbos because it’s cooked below sea level). On Friday it was hot and muggy again, and, as I walked around the Fairgrounds, I suddenly realised I'd become slightly jaded. The first day of the Fest was one of the greatest musical and sensory experiences I've ever had—but now the novelty, the great novelty of last Saturday and Sunday, had lost some lustre. There’s so many people, and you wonder how many of them are real music fans. The wide range of acts presented means that virtually every taste (except heavy-metal and classical) is catered-to. And you can’t pass judgement on all the other punters, a heavy gospel cat might amble into the Jazz tent, find the music boring and strike-up a conversation with a friend or another disinterested spectator—you can’t put signs at the front of the tent saying, "If you’re not really interested in Jazz we would prefer if you didn’t come inside." (A variation of the signs outside some of the gay pubs in Darlinghurst.) The first Fest was in 1970, when a couple of thousand people turned-up at the real Congo Square to see mainly local performers. Since then it has grown every year—it was only a couple of years old before they decided to move to the Fairgounds to accommodate the bigger crowds. A lot of locals think it has become a victim of its own success and the worst part of that success is the crowds. But it has presented virtually every great musician alive in America since 1970, and when you read about Fests of yore you see so many great names that are now gone: Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Mahalia Jackson, George Landry, Danny Barker, Professor Longhair, Roland Kirk, Thelonious Monk. I started-off at the Jazz Tent. The sound was good and I had a choice position near the front but there were too many of those niggling little distractions I’d noticed the day before. The first act was Larry Seiberth and Band, with a beautiful local vocalist named Betty Shirley who cut a striking figure with her hair woven in intricate African braids. Black lipstick made her look even more Nubian. She and the band did fine versions of "Take the A-Train", "Caravan", and other standards. I trundled over to Fox to catch Milton Batiste's Major 7ths with special guests Ernie K-Doe and Jessie Hill. The highlight of the set was a song by Jessie Hill called "Won't Stop Crying". It was all good rhythm and blues in the home-grown New Orleans style with plenty of showmanship, especially from DJ Ready Teddy, a WWOZ stalwart, who did grandstanding handstands and shouted plenty to compensate for the fact that he's not as musically talented as Ernie K-Doe or Jessie Hill. On the way back to the Jazz tent I stopped at Congo Square again and got sucked-in by the jubilant atmosphere of the South African Children's Peace Crusade—about fifty cute kids, mainly black with some white and some Indian. They were led by a white woman with a clipped English-South-African accent who was a pretty good guitarist in the South African style. The band was impressive but the whole thing turned into a "colourful extravaganza" with about a hundred and fifty kids eventually crammed onto the stage (the rest were New Orleans youngsters who'd workshopped with the South Africans)—a spectacle that verged on being sappy (never let kids or dogs on stage, is that the maxim?) I had to decide now whether to make a move to the Jazz Tent to see Joe Henderson—I was worried that the place would be filling up with people wanting to get out of the oppressive sun, but I wanted to see Olodum because they're from Bahia and I love Brazilian music. They were disappointing however—the drumming and vocals were good but an horrendous psychedelic guitar marred the sound. I waited for a while to see if things were going to improve but they didn’t so I hurried over to the Jazz Tent. Clyde Kerr Junior & Univision were playing and the place was nearly full—it was so hot that people were cramming in just to get away from the heat rather than listen to the music. There were so many loud-mouthed people milling around that in my desperation I started to feel like Jean-Paul Satre ("hell is other people"). All these people yelling so they can hear their inane conversations over the music—why are they here?—Why don't they sit still and listen?—Am I becoming a choleric old misanthropist? Joe Henderson's performance, which I had really looked forward to, was affected by all this movement—there was not as much talking now because people had come to see a "star" (a star, that is, in the small Jazz universe), but there were too many people coming in and out—I don't want to see the doltish faces of people as they search for friends or a seat—I want to see the band as well as hear them. (I should have got up closer before but there were too many distractions.) The Joe Henderson Quintet had "the legendary" Joe Henderson on tenor sax and George Mraz on bass, there was also a good pianist, a drummer and Oscar Castro-Nueves (who played for about half the set) on nylon stringed guitar. Henderson and Mraz seemed particularly affected by the heat—Henderson didn’t speak to the audience (maybe he never does) and seemed to lack puff. He frequently reached for a big white towel to wipe his face clear of perspiration and it looked as if he was slowly wilting, like a flower without water. They played some tunes from the "Lush Life" album, the title song done rubato but not as a solo (which was a shame because Mraz’s playing was superfluous). Henderson wasn't playing loudly enough and he sure isn’t as heat-proofed as David Murray or Sonny Rollins, those two other tenor titans. Oscar Castro-Nueves, the Brazilian guitarist, was the only one to keep his cool.—he looked urbane and crisp, dressed in black, and really enjoying himself as he played voluptuous Brazilian-style guitar—those groovy, chromatic chord changes. (The temperature today was 92 degrees with 81% humidity.) I worked my way through the crowd, the mud and mush from yesterday's storm, and the rubbish—a sea of cans, plastic bottles, and drunk, unconscious humans spread out against the crepuscular sky like etherised patients, the alcohol and heat getting the better of them—to get to the big stage for the Reverend. Al Green—a real showman in the soul tradition, like Wilson Pickett and James Brown. He's a screamer and acts as if he's playing out a drama involving alternate possession by God and the Devil. He’s unpredictable and even quixotic, throwing bunches of roses into the audience. He convinced us that he desperately wanted to be "with the people" and eventually he did just that—much to the consternation of the security men, he jumped down into the crowd. This was dramatically funny, like James Brown's cape routine. The first couple of songs were Gospel, then he went on to his secular hits: "Let's Stay Together", "Take Me to the River" and versions of "Dock of the Bay" and "To Love Somebody". He was supported by a big band: three female singers, pianist, two guitars, bass, drums, sax, trumpet, trombone and Hammond organ with classic Leslie sound. The band was funky and loud, with the bass and the kick drum vibrating through your viscera. Another great show. Saturday was my last "real" day in New Orleans. I had hominy grits and eggs for breakfast, drove straight to the Fairgrounds and made my way to the Jazz Tent. Neslort, a local Jazz-Rock band were first on the bill. All the playing was good except for some tedious heavy-rock guitar soloing. Next came Germaine Bazzle, a home-grown scatting Jazz vocalist accompanied by a band made up of "promising young local performers" (and though callow, they were really good.) Bazzle is a classy, professional performer who sang some of my faves, like "Secret Love", (up-tempo) and Roger and Hart’s "Where or When". Her scatting was impressive. Delfeayo Marsalis and band were disappointing—I was expecting Modern Jazz excitement but they never seemed to ignite. They played in the modern "post-hard bop" or "neo-Classical" idiom and Marsalis's compositions could be the problem: they're overreaching and their structural ambitions failed to support the soloists, who looked uncomfortable when they attempted to show-off their chops. Finally I gave-up my four-rows-from-the-front possie after their set finished to check out Michelle Shocked over at Fox. There was a big crowd waiting and when she finally appeared it was as if a mini-tornado had visited the stage. She's a born entertainer and a highly spirited performer, who totally connects with her audience. A real Texas cutie (living in the Big Easy now), with a winning grin and flowing hair, she jumps up and down, and from side to side, and has a terrific time on stage. Most of the songs are in a rock-boogie style, although sometimes she uses a straight rock beat. She does quite a few monologues while the music plays and is very political and radical in that good old American style of radicalism—she’s pro choice, anti-police-violence and anti-racist. I recall two monologues: one was the story of her sudden realisation, after many years, that the song "Cotton-Eyed Joe"—a fiddle tune her father often played when she was little—is actually about abortion. (Although I can’t quite remember how she reached that denouément, it made sense at the time, which is a testimony to her oratorical skills.) The other one had a civil-rights message, about a black prisoner who was allegedly strangled to death by police. It turned out that the coroner "lost" the crucial pieces of evidence—the victim’s eyes—that would have determined he’d had been killed in this manner! Michelle told this story with a chillingly ironic detachment ("they—lost—his—...eyes"). At another point she got the whole audience involved in a huge square dance and had everyone turn and say, "Howdy stranger," to the person next to them. The icing on the cake came as I was leaving—the ReBirth Brass Band got up on stage with her and blew the place apart. I went back to the Jazz Tent to see Abdullah Ibrahim. Once again, there were problems with ambient noise, especially from the Congo Square stage (Charmaine Neville was there, doing an hilarious Satchmo impersonation) and from a plethora of fuckwits talking in the Tent. Straw was still on the ground, soaking-up the remains of Thursday's deluge and, with the steamy heat, the air was starting to feel like an agricultural pavilion at the Royal Easter Show. I slowly crept forward when opportunities arose. The band included flute/soprano sax, baritone, and tenor sax, trombone, acoustic bass, and drums. They got into an African/Coltrane modal groove and were impressive, even though I couldn’t hear the piano clearly enough. Outside, things were mildly chaotic. There were about eighty thousand people there on that day and by five o’clock the scene that presented itself to me, as I emerged for the last time from the Jazz Tent, was Boschian—huge drums of rubbish overflowing, long lines of people waiting for another strawberry lemonade, piles of reddish-purple crawfish shells left at the scene of a feast, cans, cans everywhere almost covering hundreds of prostrate bodies. It was time to see Joni Mitchell over at the big stage. Joni was running late, and then had trouble adjusting her guitar—a rock-style solidbody connected to a complex effects rack, a new device for her (I’d seen her on Letterman the week before and she played a steel-stringed acoustic), which at first sounded shrill and quite incongruous. (Although it suited the song she started with—"Sex Kills", which is lyrically bleak and musically strident). She began playing with her idiosyncratic guitar style: bass-lines played with thumb and chords hit with long-nailed upstrokes, usually on the off-beat—an old folk style (and a classical technique too) that you hear on all her recordings; the upstrokes sounded very penetrating on the guitar she used. Besides the fact that she’s another "American music legend", her stage-presence relies purely on her musical craft: her great voice, her unique guitar style, her body of work. There’s no showmanship antics here, and by appearing solo she further bares her soul—in her songs, in her singing, and when she talks to the audience in an unrehearsed and intimate way. (She prefaced one of her new songs with the information that it was about her mother's disapproval of her having a boyfriend while still married to another.) In songs like that her concerns can sound almost insignificant, or trite, but when she sings about a deep subject—as in the "Magdalene Laundries"—the effect can move you to tears. Her voice is magnificent—everything you'd expect or hope it to be and the volume at the big stage was so high it drowned out all the audience talk—her voice and guitar reverberated through my chest. She did a few new songs, some songs from Turbulent Indigo ("Yvette in English", "Sex Kills" "The Magdalene Laundries") "Night Ride Home", and a lot of numbers from Hejira ("Song for Sharon", "Amelia", "Refuge of the Road"). She stopped halfway through "Song for Sharon" and said, giggling, "Gee this song has a real lot of words!"—and it does. She giggles a lot, but it’s not an irritating giggle. Just from the sheer joy of recognition, the audience applauded certain lyrical passages: "All I really wanta do is...find another lover" (cheers and applause)—"eighteen bucks went up in smoke" (cheers and applause). She stayed on stage until almost 7.30 and the audience lapped it up—no-one, except perhaps the organisers, wanted her to finish. I’d gradually worked my way fairly close to the stage and my last romantic image of New Orleans is of Joni Mitchell, wearing a black dress, her long yellow-golden hair flowing out of a straw hat and her face beatific, singing those beautiful songs while the pale sky slowly faded to a muted blue. Sunday could have been a day of romantic images. There was still another day of Fest, with performers like B.B. King, Buckshot LeFonque and the Neville Brothers (who closed the show—I can’t think too much about that or, like Madame Bovary, I’ll be "carried away by a boundless melancholy"), but I had to spend the day at New Orleans airport because of a itinerary cock-up. The rented car was due back at Hertz at seven in the morning, and I’d re-scheduled my flight so I could go straight to Sydney via Los Angeles. Suffice it to say that my last day in New Orleans was mainly boring, though interspersed with some excitement: Determined to get the car back on time (in case Hertz charged me for an extra hour), I let serendipity persuade me that the Huey P.Long Bridge would be the quickest way across the Mississippi and on to the airport. Need I say that I got lost again? I cursed and swore my bad luck and poor judgement as I sped down a Sunday-morning-deserted Jefferson Parish road, my preoccupation with my troubles abruptly jolted by the sight of a phalanx of cars, in the distance but heading directly toward me. After driving over a thousand miles in America, I’d lapsed into the left lane on my last day in the country! I made the fastest U-turn I’d ever executed—serendipity had had his joke so now he led me to Amelia Earhart Boulevard and the airport. I had eleven hours to kill, not an easy feat to accomplish at New Orleans airport, but I managed to get through by reading "Cannery Row", having a snooze, wandering up and down the terminal, terminally bored. The flight to L.A. was marked by the plane skirting a massive storm, with clouds towering a thousand feet above, which later hit New Orleans, causing major floods and a number of deaths. Landing at L.A. at night was thrilling, and then it was on to Sydney and back to real time after ten days of compressed experience in the Big Easy. |
In my febrile imagination New Orleans
always appeared as a reverie, a boundless place possessing a multitude of semi-mythologies
made indubitable because so many had testified to their voluptuous delights. And the event
known as "The Fest": The New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival—a
transcendent, ten-day event of musical bliss—described itself in my mind as the
apotheosis of everything that really excited me about the fabled city at the Mississippi's
mouth. I'd dreamt about going to the Fest for many years but it seemed an impossible
dream, almost a crazily irresponsible idea.