It’s a beautiful New Orleans morning and I’m sitting on a bench in the heart of the Musicians’ Village. The streets are empty but for a lone car crawling slowly round and round the block, like a scene from a film. On the third lap, the driver gets out of the car and walks over. “Excuse me, sir,” he says. “I’m looking for the first house they built on this lot after Katrina.”
The Musicians’ Village, in the city’s Upper Ninth Ward, one of the areas worst hit by Katrina, is a community of 72 affordable houses for musicians who lost their homes to the storm (or had lived in poor housing prior to it) and remained displaced in its aftermath. It was built by thousands of volunteers, including the guy in front of me. I can’t help him with his search but he’s determined to find it.
“I just want to take a look at it,” he says, his voice now quivering with emotion and pride. “I came down here as a volunteer after Katrina and helped build that house. I didn’t plan on staying but I fell in love with this city and I’ve lived here ever since.”
Now this really does feel like a movie – with a perfectly delivered line illustrating not only how the city has been rebuilt, but also the love it inspires and why, in the 10 years since Katrina struck, tens of thousands of people have relocated here and are proud to call New Orleans home.
The Musicians’ Village was conceived by New Orleans-raised musicians Harry Connick Jr and Branford Marsalis the week after Katrina, as the pair were driving from the city to Houston to play a benefit concert.
“It was to help the musicians who had made our careers possible,” says Marsalis. “But for them, we wouldn’t be who we are and the city wouldn’t be what it is. It was a way of saying thank you to the people who represent a lot of what makes New Orleans special.”
Music is so integral to New Orleanian culture that some have argued that if the musicians hadn’t returned – a real fear immediately after the disaster – and the city had lost its musical heritage, it would have been a disaster for tourism, as visitors simply cannot imagine the city without music.
Marsalis agrees with this up to a point, but says, “I knew the musicians would move back because there’s nowhere else for them to go. I cannot imagine the Olympia Brass Band permanently residing in Phoenix. You’re never going to hear a school in Phoenix saying, ‘Our basketball team won the championship! Let’s hire a brass band and have a street parade!’ That happens in New Orleans but not anywhere else. It’s unlike any other city in the US.”
At the heart of the Musicians’ Village is the Ellis Marsalis Center for Music, named after Branford’s (and his brother Wynton’s) father, the patriarch of the city’s most famous musical family. Its main aim is to help keep traditions in this uniquely musical city alive through education and development in the local community. There is also a recording studio for use by local musicians (and to generate income) and an impressive concert hall, where tickets for regular Tuesday-night concerts cost just $3. In the past few years, trumpeter Leroy Jones, Harold Battiste with Jesse McBride, Germaine Bazzle, Sharon Martin and John Boutté are among the names who have played here.
As I’m leaving the centre, I ask one of the music teachers whether the project is publicly funded.
“No,” she shoots back, “and that’s why it works!”
I don’t think she’s taking a pot shot at my next stop, the new New Orleans Jazz Market , but if she was, she’s hit the bullseye. The building is the new home of the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra, led by trumpeter Irvin Mayfield, who is also its founder and executive director. It opened in the Central City neighbourhood in April, but a month later was mired in a corruption scandal involving Mayfield – a multi-Grammy-award-winner and one of the city’s poster boys – and his business partner.
Conceived by Mayfield as “a monument to the greatest achievement that New Orleans has ever accomplished – the creation of jazz”, it’s a highly ambitious and impressive project. There’s a cool open bar named after jazz pioneer Buddy Bolden (who lived five blocks away); on the walls are 25 iconic, instantly recognisable original black and white photos by the great Herman Leonard; and a 440-seat concert hall, one of only a handful in the world acoustically optimised for a jazz, as opposed to a symphonic, orchestra – and there’s even a bar and small dancefloor at the back of the hall. Yet on the Thursday night I visit the huge bar, there are only five other people listening to the solo pianist.
Was it due to the ongoing scandal, or is it just in the wrong part of town? All the bad press certainly hasn’t helped, and it would be a tragedy if this forward-looking project, which is also supposed help to kickstart the rebirth of a poor but historically important neighbourhood, turns into a white elephant tainted by the whiff of old-style Southern corruption – the sort of thing the city was notorious for but has strived to shake off post-Katrina.
And even if the Jazz Market is the talk of the town at the moment, it’s easy to forget about it in a city where almost everywhere you turn the music is so goddam good or, as Branford Marsalis more eloquently puts it, “brings a level of excitement to a room that you will not find anywhere else, and a level of energy that a DJ simply can’t replicate”.
When Marsalis is in town (he now lives in North Carolina), he likes to drop in to Vaughan’s Lounge in the Bywater district. Trumpeter Kermit Ruffins’ Thursday night set was such a legendary show that music critic Jay Mazza wrote a book called Not Just Another Thursday Night: Kermit Ruffins and Vaughan’s Lounge.
“Katrina didn’t flood Vaughan’s,” Mazza told me, “and Kermit returned from exile in Houston to play the Thursday night gigs while the rest of the city was still mostly under water. The first show was one of the most moving performances I have ever been to. The crowd was almost entirely recovery workers since most of the residents were still gone.”
Ruffins no longer plays at Vaughan’s – a classic, ramshackle American dive bar with a low ceiling, low lighting and cheap beer – but someone tips me off that Corey Henry and the Treme Funktet are playing when I’m in town. They are the kind of modern brass band, more funk than jazz, that has come to define the New Orleans sound, and the inimitable excitement and energy to which Marsalis referred is so palpable that I dance non-stop for an hour. The brilliant 10-piece band is so funky that by the end of the show I’m drenched in sweat and actually screaming at the ceiling.
One of the best gigs I’ve ever seen cost just $10, but even that raises an eyebrow these days; entry to many gigs in the city is now free, to pull in visitors. The greatest concentration of music clubs is on Frenchman Street, just outside the French Quarter, a strip that has been promoted by the city and has boomed since Katrina. Choose carefully and you can see world-class blues, funk and jazz any night of the week at clubs such as Cafe Negril, DBA, the Spotted Cat and the Blue Nile, all without paying.
The club owners have used Katrina to retrench and, as in other sectors, there has also been an infusion of out-of-towners. Like music lovers, young musicians see New Orleans as a holy grail and many are happy to play here for tips, which means the pay has gone down for the older local players who carried the torch.
Branford Marsalis’s other favourite club is Snug Harbor, the oldest club on Frenchman Street (number 626) and the first to reopen after Katrina. It is also one of only two that still operates a cover charge. It’s a wonderfully intimate venue with excellent sound quality, where people come to listen to some of the city’s, indeed the US’s, best jazz musicians (including Branford’s father and brothers), rather than to party. The big fear is that Frenchman Street is morphing into a second Bourbon Street, New Orleans’ alcohol-fuelled Mardi Gras Disneyland.
Snug Harbor’s owner, Jason Patterson, says: “The death of Frenchman Street will come when they pedestrianise it, like Bourbon Street, and everyone is just drinking outside rather than actually coming into the clubs to listen to the music.”
But even if Frenchman Street’s star is on the wane, there is so much great music here that it will surely (hopefully) just move somewhere else … even if it is on to the street.
On my last night, as I walk through the French Quarter in the small hours, I’m stopped in my tracks by the hauntingly beautiful sound of a lone street musician finger-picking his metal Resonator guitar. It’s impossible to categorise his music [he describes it as kind of like flamenco, ragtime and indie rock] but it is so rich it fills the sultry air like an orchestra.
A couple are dancing, floating over the pavement, one guy is lying down, blissed out on the music, while another is, like me, moved to tears (proving, I hope, that it’s not just the booze and my Nola high that’s making me weep). A beautiful young singer, as humbled as everyone else watching, asks if she can join the guitarist and sings a couple of standards. The guitarist’s name is Chris Christy, and he’s a shy, self-taught musician from Los Angeles. If you’re lucky, you’ll find him playing late at night on Decatur Street.
It’s all so dreamy that, not for the first time this week, I feel like I’m in a movie – one that could only be made in New Orleans. The city has changed rapidly since Katrina – and for the better according to almost everyone I’ve met on my two visits. But at what price?
Though most of the musicians have returned, many thousands of their neighbours from the old black communities where the music evolved have been lost to other US cities. Many fled to and have stayed in conservative Texas, which may be the opposite of loose and liberal New Orleans culturally, but has much better schools and higher wages. This, combined with the huge influx of outsiders, has led to a fear that the city’s heritage will dissipate.
Neither Christy nor Grace – the young singer who, somewhat inevitably, is here to put a band together and record an album – is from New Orleans. But won’t the influx of talent just add to the musical gumbo pot?
Branford Marsalis thinks so: “Now there’s all kinds of people here, and this is not a bad thing. The jazz scene is now way more dynamic than when I was a kid, and they have brought their own thing and are fusing it with the New Orleans heritage.”
Let’s hope he’s right. I cannot imagine a scene this magical happening anywhere else.
• Flights were provided by Netflights (01772 394466, netflights.com, which has returns from Heathrow to New Orleans, via a US hub, from £723. Accommodation was provided by The Old No. 77 Hotel & Chandlery (+1 504 527 5271, old77hotel.com), which has doubles from $109 plus tax a night, room-only. For visitor information see neworleanscvb.com
