NolaFunk Lagniappe

Henry Butler Brings New Orleans to NPR

Pianist Henry Butler started playing music as a child in the New Orleans housing projects. Blind since birth, he went on to study at the Louisiana State School for the Blind, learning classical piano scores in Braille.

At Southern University, he majored in voice and minored in piano. Classical, jazz and blues music all filter into his playing. Butler has a new album out called PiaNOLA Live. He recently spoke with Melissa Block and played the grand piano in NPR's Studio 4A.

He Still Loves New Orleans, and Now He’s Mad

Mac Rebennack, the 67-year-old New Orleans pianist, guitarist and songwriter better known as Dr. John, carries the city’s lore in his fingers, his scratchy voice and his memory. He has lived in New York City and on Long Island since the 1980s, but when he revisits his birthplace it’s as if he never left. New Orleans culture, he said in his ever-surprising vocabulary, has “wacknosity” — things only New Orleanians do.

Overheated Magnolias, Refusing to Droop

Most of the band members who first brought the troupe fame in the '70s are no longer in the Magnolias, but the current participants made the outfit's catalogue of classic funk feel fresh, especially when the necklace-throwing, tambourine-shaking Indians arrived halfway through the set. Despite recent health problems, longtime leader Big Chief Bo Dollis performed several songs, including "Hey Pocky Way," adding his chanting Big Easy drawl atop the rhythm section's syncopated, deep-toned beats.

ERNIE K-DOE / “Certain Girl”

Burn, K-Doe, Burn. Good gracious, my man could dance like James, could handle up on a microphone like James, could sing like James—actually could do all that better (according to K-Doe) than James. I’d give the edge to James as a dancer, they both could whip a microphone chord and make the mike stand dance and twirl and fall perfectly into the palm of their hand when they did a split and let out a scream as they hit the floor, but as a singer, hey, I know I’ve got some home town chauvinism but in his youth K-Doe could croon, K-Doe could scream, K-Doe could whoop, holler and growl like as if he really was “the emperor” of R&B, an honorific he vociferously claimed in his later years.

Fierce Swing, Deep Grooves and Even a Little Singing

Growing up in a jazz family in New Orleans, the trumpeter Nicholas Payton absorbed a host of lessons about melody, rhythm and the implicit arrangement between an artist and his audience. And over the last decade or so he has weighed those lessons against the modernist imperative of open-ended abstraction. Now, in his mid-30s, Mr. Payton still seems to be seeking an arable middle ground, the zone where post-bop evasiveness mingles with soulful reassurance.

Jazz Saxophonist Kidd Stays In the Picture

Even people who aren't sure they've heard of Kidd Jordan have probably heard him. Now 73, the tenor saxophonist has been playing since the early 1950s. And since Mr. Jordan's spirited adolescence coincided with the dawn of rock 'n' roll and the explosion of new sounds coming out of New Orleans' fertile rhythm-and-blues scene, the Crescent City native was at the right place at the right time.

see also: For Jazz’s Avant-Garde, an Annual Gathering and a Little Competition

During his youth, the New Orleans tenor saxophonist Kidd Jordan worked with some of the brightest lights of soul and R&B. “You name the genre, I’ve done it,” Mr. Jordan, 73, said this week from Baton Rouge, La., his temporary home since shortly after Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005. “But when I was playing in all those other genres, I wasn’t satisfied with what I was doing. I always was one of them who would search, and keep searching.”

John Ellis: Wide Angle(a Q&A)

Saxophonist John Ellis is a hybrid of New Orleans funk, New York modernity, Presbyterian sanctification and good ol' performing skills.
Living in New Orleans, you hear a lot of tuba music. I always thought about trying to make some kind of tuba record that would be my personal spin. I've been thinking about this for years, actually. The logistics of getting everyone together can be difficult, especially with guys as busy as these guys. So I was thinking about this for several years. Initially I was thinking tuba and accordion on the whole record—a band that could play in the street.

Eldridge Holmes Sells "The Book"

Eldridge Holmes was one of New Orleans' great soul/R&B vocalists. Period. Had he gotten the opportunity to record as much as the smoother, more formal Johnny Adams did over as many years, he would be at least as well-known and spoken of in the same reverential tones.

Ned Sublette

By the time Louisiana became the 18th state in 1812, New Orleans was a city we would recognize. We don’t know what Congo Square sounded like. We don’t have recordings. But I suspect that if I were dropped down in Congo Square, I might not find it any stranger than if I were dropped down in Vienna to hear Mozart play his own cadenzas. I think we can find musics today that provide models for at least some of what was going on at Congo Square, but what was going on at Congo Square was diversity. And I really do believe that something new was created at Congo Square; an African American music was being formed.