July 27, 2013 The New Orleans band exists as a vehicle for the powerhouse songs of singer-songwriter Alynda Lee Segarra, whose gigantic voice conveys the grit of bluesy soul while still fitting within the realms of rootsy folk and country. Hear Hurray for the Riff Raff perform as part of the 2013 Newport Folk Festival.
HEAR THE FULL SET HERE
The Stooges Brass Band got its start when members of two rival high-school marching bands in New Orleans decided to join forces. Today, the group mixes hip-hop, funk and R&B in its thrilling live performances. Hear the group recorded at Webster Hall in New York City.
Though it's the year's premier "world music" event, GlobalFEST embraces many homegrown sounds — and the 2013 roster was full of North American artists. A case in point: The Stooges Brass Band, a New Orleans brass band for the 21st century. It's got that unmistakeable sound of its hometown, but hip-hop, funk, R&B and soul are all in the group's DNA. Introducing great party bands to wider audiences has become a signature element in globalFEST's programming (just think of Red Baraat and Debo Band), and this year's entry in that category was The Stooges. "World music" or not, the group definitely got the room jumping.
Just inside a room on the second floor of the Louisiana State Museum's Presbytere, there's a large baby doll dress, big enough for a woman to wear. And one did.
The costume and the baby bottle next to it belonged to 85-year-old Miriam Batiste Reed, who was known as a baby doll and one of the first women to parade in Mardi Gras. The bottle and the dress are part of a new exhibition, They Call Me Baby Doll: A Mardi Gras Tradition.
"The baby dolls are a group of African-American men and women carnival maskers," says Kim Vaz, dean at Xavier University. "They would dress up on Mardi Gras day in short satin skirts, with bloomers, and they would have garters."
Vaz, who has written a new book about the baby dolls, says the tradition dates back to 1912, when Jim Crow was the law of the land in the South. It all started in New Orleans' red-light district, which itself was divided along racial lines. The Storyville area, where the sex industry was legal, was for white customers; black customers had to go a few blocks away where prostitution was illegal, but allowed.
"[It was] another manifestation of how Jim Crow worked to disenfranchise black people, even in the most sordid of industries," Vaz says.
Between these two red-light districts, there was a kind of rivalry. One year the women in the black district heard that their counterparts in Storyville were going to dress up for Mardi Gras; they decided they needed to come up with some good costumes to compete.
"And they said, 'Let's just be baby dolls because that's what the men call us. They call us baby dolls, and let's be red hot,' " Vaz says.
Calling a woman "baby" had just made its way into the popular lexicon, with songs like "Pretty Baby" written by New Orleans native Tony Jackson. There was, however, something subversive about black sex workers dressing this way.
"At that time, baby dolls were very rare and very hard to get," Vaz says. "So it had all that double meaning in it because African-American women weren't considered precious and doll-like."
Just the fact that these prostitutes were masking and going out into the street at all was a big deal. Women just did not do that then. And as sex workers, these women were already taboo. Vaz says they just kept piling on by appropriating males behaviors like smoking cigars and flinging money at the men. "If you went to touch their garter, they would hurt you," she says.
The baby dolls carried walking sticks they would use in their dances, as well as to defend themselves. It was about fun, Vaz says, but it was a kind of laughter to keep from crying.
"At that time ... residential segregation was practiced, job discrimination was practiced [and] women didn't have the right to vote," she says. "The one way that they could make a statement was through their dance and their dress and their song. It's when you've exhausted all your legal remedies that you have to use the culture to make a statement and express yourself."
They came up with their own dance step they called "walking raddy." Pretty soon, women in more "respectable" neighborhoods started masking baby doll. But desegregation in the 1950s allowed black New Orleanians to do more on Mardi Gras.
Then Interstate Highway 10 was built directly through the neighborhood where African-Americans gathered to celebrate carnival, disrupting many traditions. The baby dolls faded, until several years ago.
Born out of New Orleans club culture, bounce music isn't just best experienced in person — it's almost impossible to understand in the abstract. But Big Freedia (pronounced "free-duh"), one of the style's biggest stars, says the music does have a few defining features.
Bounce is based in hip-hop. It favors punchy tempos, heavy bass and call-and-response vocals. Many of the songs are structured around a handful of samples, most notably a snippet from "Drag Rap," a 1986 track by the New York rap group The Showboys.
"We use those beats in a lot of our music," Freedia says. "We know how to flip it a million and one ways — and the producers, they know what to do with it to make the crowd jump."
That's another thing: Bounce is party music, hypersexual and made to be danced to. (The more your butt is moving, the better). Freedia says that's why the lyrics are usually kept simple: "You've gotta leave room for the bass and the boom and the knock," she says, "and for people to be able to just free themselves and express themselves through dance."
Big Freedia is the stage name of Freddie Ross, a New Orleans native who, in the late 1990s, helped usher in a wave of openly queer bounce performers. Today, she's one of the few bounce artists with national exposure, and her profile is about to get bigger: a documentary about her life, a dance instruction DVD and her first proper full-length album are all in the pipeline. To hear her conversation with NPR's Robert Smith, click the audio link on this page.
On paper, it doesn't sound terribly eventful: A 71-year-old New Orleans pop and soul legend records a straightforward album of doo-wop covers. But, while Aaron Neville's My True Story wallows unapologetically in the past — namely, in the stretch of '50s and early-'60s R&B that first fueled the singer's passion for music — it's really setting the Wayback Machine to "all of the above." With the aid of producers Don Was and Keith Richards (!), as well as studio aces like Benmont Tench and Greg Leisz, My True Story is painstakingly engineered to transcend trends; it's not trying to make doo-wop sound contemporary so much as dislodge it from its time capsule and free it to drift across eras.
Neville lends his distinctively floaty tenor to a handful of unavoidable and unimpeachable standards on My True Story — "Be My Baby," "Tears on My Pillow," "Under the Boardwalk," "This Magic Moment" — but he also shines a light on less ubiquitous past hits. Neville has been singing the praises of The Clovers' 1952 smash "Ting a Ling" at every opportunity for years now, and his version practically oozes appreciation for the chance to do it justice.
It's that unmistakable affection, dispensed with a sweet voice that's lost none of its considerable luster, which makes My True Story resonate as more than a mere footnote in Neville's half-century of music. It's a labor of love, to be sure, but the singer and his cohorts try something bold, too: They celebrate these relics in ways that make them feel relevant to the future.
Originally from Sweden, Anders Osborne left his home in Uddevalla at 16 to hitchhike through Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Eventually finding his way to the U.S., the singer-songwriter and guitarist settled in New Orleans in 1984. The Crescent City clearly came to inspire Osborne's music, which ranges from muddy backwater blues to upbeat country-rock, and fills in many of the gaps in between.
Osborne has been featured on albums with the likes of Keb' Mo', and his song "Watch the Wind Blow By" earned country star Tim McGraw a No. 1 hit. In May, Osborne returned with a new album, Black Eye Galaxy. Here, he sits down with World Cafe host David Dye to discuss the benefits of sobriety on his general state of mind during the recording process and his performances.
"I can tell a little better when [a recording is] translating during a performance, and when I get into a control room and listen back," Osborne says. "Even during the actual performance, I can feel myself being aware of my vocal performance much better than I used to be."
Glen David Andrews, the New Orleans trombonist and singer and regular on HBO's Treme, surfs the crowd at the 2010 New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival.
Gluttony. Yeah, it's a sin. And I don't have the professional excuse for enthusiastic food consumption that I do for constant musical intake. But it doesn't take much for a social media addict like myself to convince herself that indulging in can be a public service. Since my Chowhound-devoted husband and I arrived in New Orleans two and a half weeks ago, I've been regaling (the hungry say torturing) my Facebook friends with pictorial documentation of our gustatory journeys as we move — like those fish who never close their mouths — through this irresistibly tasty city.
The Gluttony Series in my Mobile Uploads folder features my shaky iPhone snaps of the duck confit Po'Boy from Crabby Jack's; the oysters, broiled and on the half shell, at Borgne; Cochon Butcher's amazing house-cured meats; the famous Godzilla crab at Jacques-Imo's, a crème brulee to die for at Herbsaint; and my personal favorite, the squid and Pimenton sausage sandwich at Maurepas. (Okay, I'll stop! I'm making myself jealous now.) We've spent our daughter's college fund contributing to the local restaurant economy, but at least I can fool myself into thinking I've given friends a useful guide for their next trip down the Mississippi.
As I dug into the shrimp and cabbage salad at Pho Tau Bay yesterday, however, I realized that my cuisine quest was even threatening to overshadow the amazing musical immersion NOLA has also granted me. I'm a glutton for sound, too, and dancing, and the convivial crush of bodies in a crowded club. I need to share these indulgences too. So here's the Gluttony Series, Part Two: a selective playlist of some of the best sounds I sampled in the city where everything's worth a listen.
Thanks to all the YouTube pioneers who recorded other version of what I saw and heard.
When he was around 13, Robert Charles Guidry began singing with a band around his hometown of Abbeville, La., deep in the Cajun swamps. The group played Cajun and country music and, after he passed through town and played a show, Fats Domino's music. It was a life-changing experience for the young man, and he found himself with a new ambition: to write a song for Fats.
One night as he left a gig, Charles said to his friends, "See ya later, alligator," and one of them yelled back, "In a while, crocodile." Charles stopped in his tracks. "What did you say?" he asked. The friend repeated it. At that moment, as would happen countless times in the future, the song "See You Later, Alligator" came to him, fully formed.
Fats didn't want the song, and told the young man he didn't want to sing about alligators. Somehow, though, the kid wound up singing the song over the phone to Leonard Chess, whose Chess Records in Chicago was the hottest blues label in town. Chess didn't hesitate: He sent the kid a ticket, and when Charles showed up at his office, Chess said something I can't say on the air. The sentence ended with the word "white" and a question mark, though.
Chess recorded him, though, and put the song out, changing Guidry's name to Bobby Charles; almost immediately, Bill Haley grabbed it for himself. Haley's record was one of the best sellers of 1956, and both Chess and Charles made some decent money from it. They tried follow-ups called "Watch It, Sprocket," which wasn't something people actually said, and "Take It Easy, Greasy," which was, but the record was a little too, well, greasy to be too popular. Charles recorded for Chess until 1958, but his records only sold locally. Along the way, though, he seems to have pioneered a genre called swamp pop.
He also got to realize a dream. One evening, Fats Domino played Abbeville, and Fats invited Charles to a show in New Orleans. The young singer said he had no way to get there. "Well," the fat man said, "you'd better start walking." And sure enough, a song popped into Charles' head: "Walking To New Orleans."
Bobby Charles signed with Imperial, Fats' label, but again, nothing hit. He admitted freely that he was part of the problem. He didn't enjoy touring, and he had a jealous wife who didn't like him leaving town. He continued writing and selling songs, and recorded for some local Louisiana labels. He and his wife parted company, and then, in 1971, he got busted for pot in Nashville. Rather than risk jail, he disappeared; he wound up in upstate New York, and saw the name Woodstock on a map. He'd never even heard of the famous festival, but the name appealed to him.
Arriving in town, he asked a real-estate agent about a place to rent and wound up in a house shared with two other musicians. They introduced him around, and Albert Grossman, who'd managed Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin and many others, got interested. The next thing he knew, Charles was back in the studio with members of The Band, Dr. John and lots of other Woodstock musicians. The resulting album has some truly memorable moments.
It didn't sell, though. Charles focused on songwriting, but he wasn't comfortable in Woodstock, and in the end he went back to Abbeville, where he disappeared from public view for an entire decade. He had a good income from his songs, but a run of bad luck: His house burned down, and then his next house blew away in a hurricane. He kept writing songs, and he entertained visitors who came to Abbeville to meet him — people like Bob Dylan and Neil Young and Willie Nelson. His record label, Rice 'N' Gravy, put out several homemade albums, which mixed his old and new songs.
At 70, Bobby Charles was diagnosed with cancer, and he died in January 2010, unknown to most of the world he'd enriched with his songs.
The Dirty Dozen Brass Band makes its sixth appearance on Mountain Stage, recorded live in Charleston, W.V. Widely credited with revitalizing the sound of New Orleans jazz, the band blew down musical barriers by combining its love of traditional sounds with funk and bebop. Built around the idea of jazz as a constantly evolving organism, the group has shared the stage with Grateful Dead, Elvis Costello, Miles Davis, David Bowie, 2 Live Crew and The Black Crowes.
In celebrating 35 years together, The Dirty Dozen Brass Band kicks off this set with the dark grooves of "Blackbird Special," the lead track from its first album, My Feet Can't Fail Now. But the remainder of this set is drawn from the new Twenty Dozen — including "Jook," which wasn't heard on the radio broadcast of this show.
Every day in New Orleans, Lily Keber rolls out of bed and walks to a flat, minor office building to meet her muse. Keber makes a cup of coffee with chicory, hooks up her computer and waits for what sounds like a dozen spiders to crawl across a piano.
Keber is making Bayou Maharajah, a documentary about the black, gay, one-eyed junkie, James Booker, the "Piano Prince of New Orleans." Booker, who tutored Dr. John and Harry Connick Jr., was the first to call his fingers "spiders on the keys."
"James Booker was one of our country's greatest piano players," Keber says. "You can find musicians who are good at classical, and you can find musicians who are good at street music. But it's a special breed who can master both."
A classical-music prodigy as a child, Booker grew up to originate a style of piano playing that few can emulate. Everything from his delivery of Chopin's "Minute Waltz" to his rendition of "Black Night" highlighted his talent: spiders on the keys, heart on his sleeve.
But in a town where soul queen Irma Thomas stands next to you at the dry cleaner and Dr. John turns up at the grocery store, people often take their musical legends for granted. Sometimes it takes an outsider like Lily Keber to remind everyone that genius is rare. Keber was born in North Carolina and schooled in Georgia. She moved to New Orleans just a few years ago.
"I knew Dr. John, I knew Irma Thomas, I knew The Meters. I knew the big names. And I didn't know James Booker at all. I had never heard the name," Keber says. "So when it eventually started to dawn on me that he was a real guy and he really did play this amazing music that's coming out of the jukebox, that sort of floored me."
Perhaps the biggest challenge to Keber's project is that James Booker is unavailable for comment. He died almost 30 years ago, before Keber was born.
"Many people have described him as a great conversationalist. And he loved people," Keber says. "But then, if I ask them, 'What was his family like?' They don't know anything. 'How did he learn how to play piano?' They don't know anything. He could talk about anything in the world, except himself."
So far, Keber has been able to unearth more than anyone ever has, including eyewitnesses and film footage from concerts in Europe. It might help that Keber comes from a family of both academic researchers and coal miners. She's not afraid of tumbling head-first down a rabbit hole.
"Booker has this song, 'Papa Was a Rascal,' and the song is very autobiographical," Keber says. "The problem is it is also very poetic, so deciphering what he's actually saying in it is very tricky. There's one line, 'When I was a young boy at the age of 9 / I met a sweet Russian woman and I made her mine.' Now, what does that mean?
"When Booker was a kid, he was hit by an ambulance and dragged down the street; he broke his leg. They gave him morphine for the pain, and he always pointed to that to being the beginning of his addiction," Keber says. "Luckily, I actually found an interview where he says precisely that. He was listening to this song and he says, 'This line, I was hit by an ambulance, I got addicted to heroin from that.' That's the 'sweet Russian woman.'"
Some of the best interviews in the documentary explain how Booker could play the way he did. Even to a trained ear, the man sounded like he had three hands. His former students tell it best. Dr. John, for instance, learned organ from Booker. Harry Connick Jr. also took lessons.
"There's nobody that could even remotely come close to his piano-playing ability. It can't be done," Connick says. "I've played Chopin Etudes, I've done the whole thing, but there is nothing harder than James."
Booker was also a sideman for Aretha Franklin, The Doobie Brothers, Ringo Starr and Lloyd Price. But apart from some childhood recordings, he released only three albums in his lifetime. His addictions — heroin, cocaine, alcohol — got the better of him.The one-eyed junkie called his fingers "spiders on the keys."
"Booker wanted to be famous, but he didn't behave like someone who really wants to be well known," Keber says. "He didn't show up for gigs. And if he did show up, would he be in the mood to play? He really was frustrated by the fact that he couldn't make it, but he didn't do himself any favors."
David Torkanowsky, a jazz pianist and bandleader, says Booker's habits were extreme.
"I remember there was a regular Tuesday night Booker solo at Tipitina's. Finally, the lights dim and Booker walks out to the middle microphone on stage. He was wearing nothing but a huge diaper with a huge gold pin holding up the diaper," Torkanowsky says, "and from behind the diaper he pulls out a .357 magnum, puts it to his own head and announces to the audience, 'If somebody doesn't give me some [expletive] cocaine right now, I'm going to [expletive] pull the trigger. It went from 'Can't wait to hear him play' to 'Oh my God.'"
Keber is still trawling for more photographs and concert film footage, but she says there are parts of Booker's story that died with him.
"I could spend the rest of my life researching Booker and learning about him, and I would never know what it was like to walk in Booker's shoes," Keber says. "He was a mystery to the people who knew him best. But I feel like it must be some combination of being intensely intelligent, a child prodigy, very gifted, but then living a life that was a constant exercise in struggle."
Keber is wading through 45 hours of tape and hopes to finish the film this year, but she's raised less than half of the money she needs to digitize, edit and color-correct the picture. She also has to pay all the licensing fees for the music. She's under enormous pressure to, as Dr. John wrote her, "bring Booker back from the dead."
"The audience I worry about the most and feel the most beholden to is the one here in New Orleans," Keber says, "because they are going to know most whether I did my job or not. And I also know that they won't hesitate to tell me. That night on the red carpet could be wonderful, or terrible. I'll know pretty quick."
If Keber comes through, she'll have restored the Piano Prince of New Orleans to his throne and perhaps brought him the national audience that eluded him in life. Then he wouldn't be just a black, gay, one-eyed, junkie piano player. He'd be golden.
Horns run quickly up and down a semi-chromatic scale, sounding faded and ghostly, as if they're blowing in a juke joint back in the 1920s. Then the volume rises, the pace slows a bit — like a not-too-fast, not-too-slow, shoulder-shimmying sashay down a New Orleans street late at night. A familiar voice begins to sing, loud and strong; it's the unmistakable growl of Dr. John. The song is "Big Shot," from the new Locked Down, in which Dan Auerbach, singer and guitarist for the blues-rock band The Black Keys, aims to give the good Doctor a modern spin. Auerbach and Dr. John count among the song's many co-writers.
Dr. John always sounds exactly like Dr. John: a singer with heart and swagger in his gravelly drawl and magic powers in his piano-thumping fingers. In the 1970s, when he burst into national fame, he was totally outrageous — dressing like a befeathered voodoo king and calling himself the "Nite Tripper." Today, he's a bit of an elder statesman, singing old classics and penning mournful paeans to Katrina-battered New Orleans.
Auerbach makes 71-year-old Mac Rebennack sound fresh and intimate by connecting him to his vital musical past. The horns pump up the song, just the way they'd enliven a funeral march in the Big Easy. The backing McCrary Sisters are gospel-flavored and swathed in reverb, while Dr. John himself sounds as if he's having a heap of fun with the self-promoting lyric. He slurs words with New Orleans insouciance, toys with the beat, injects just the right amount of ego and attitude, and proves that now, as always, he's the ruler of American roots music.
It is said of Shannon Powell that he's part of New Orleans' musical DNA — that he knows things only local drummers know.
Powell, 49, is the A-list drummer in town. He's played with Dr. John, Harry Connick Jr., Nicholas Payton, R&B guitarist Earl King and Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra.
He got his start as a teenager with the legendary banjo player and guitarist, Danny Barker. Powell has also toured with jazz vocalist Diana Krall and jazz musicians John Scofield and Marcus Roberts. Currently, he fronts a contemporary jazz band called Powell's Place, with Jason Marsalis, of the Marsalis dynasty, on vibes.
Sitting at the drums in his shotgun house in the Treme neighborhood, Powell demonstrates the basic New Orleans beat: "New Orleans drummers accent on the four. One-two-three-four." He's playing what he's saying: "one-two-three-four."
He switches to a seductive samba beat. "African rhythms, Brazilian rhythm, calypso," he says. "It's all related."
Perhaps that's the genius of Shannon Powell: It's all related.
Source Material
They say drumming is an essential part of the language of New Orleans. The beat resides at the core of all New Orleans music — the jazz, the funk, the R&B, the funeral parades. Even beyond that, kids walk home from school with drumsticks beating on the sides of buildings or pounding on cardboard boxes during parades.
Powell does that, too. Like the early New Orleans drummers, he spends a lot of time off the skins, throwing in rimshots and hitting woodblocks and cowbells.
Like most New Orleans drummers, Powell is upstaged by trumpeters, clarinetists and trombonists. But he is one of the greatest drummers this musical city has ever produced.
Powell lives in the heart of one of the most famous musical precincts in America: the Treme, which gave its name to the HBO series. His house faces what's now called Louis Armstrong Park, where two centuries ago African slaves gathered every Sunday in Congo Square to drum and dance.
Around the corner was the Caldonia bar, where the great blues pianist and songwriter Professor Longhair lived in an apartment upstairs.
"I used to pass by there on my way going to school," Powell says from his front porch, where he is hanging out with his uncles. "I could hear Professor Longhair upstairs on the piano playing. And then, right in this block here before you get to the corner, there was a building — it was a house where Allan Toussaint had a studio and The Meters was in there recording."
Gospel music wafted out the door of the church next to Powell's house. Jazz funeral processions passed by on the street, on their way from the burial ground to the bar.
"See, I was surrounded by all this music," Powell says. "Like my uncle says, I'm part of the source." He indicates his uncle, Charlie Gabriel, a well-known clarinet and saxophone player, who agrees with his nephew: "He [is] the source. That's what he is."
Traditions
In terms of style, Shannon Powell would place himself staunchly among the traditionalists — in food as well as music.
He's having lunch at Willie Mae's Scotch House in the Treme; its succulent, cayenne-battered fried chicken is considered some of the best on earth. He orders red beans, white-meat chicken and unsweetened tea. He seems to know everyone in the dining room.
The drummer is known as something of a curmudgeon when it comes to new New Orleans music. He complains about everybody from Trombone Shorty to the Rebirth Brass Band. The latter just won its first Grammy, for Best Regional Roots Album.
"They playin' one style of music and callin' it something else," Powell says. "Don't say we playin' traditional New Orleans music if you playin' rock 'n' roll, that's what I'm sayin.'"
"He's not the only person in the history of New Orleans jazz that has said there needs to be the continuity of the tradition," says Nick Spitzer, a folklorist, New Orleans resident and host of the public radio program American Routes. "Continuity is wonderful, but to keep a tradition alive you have to create new songs, sounds, styles.
"I would say Shannon is right there, at the center of the rear guard, kicking the bass, playing the snare and pushing everybody forward," Spitzer adds. "That's a good role for Shannon to play. He's good at it. He does it with a smile on his face."
The Sound Of Humidity
The house is packed at Preservation Hall in the French Quarterhttp://www.npr.org/blogs/ablogsupreme/2012/02/25/147369865/shannon-powell-new-orleans-rhythm-straight-from-the-source, the cathedral of traditional jazz in New Orleans. Tourists have filled every square inch on the creaky old wooden floor.
Powell sits at his drum kit, a great beneficent presence with his black beret and gap-tooth grin. He leads the band here every Tuesday night.
Though Powell plays every style of New Orleans music, this is where he says he feels most at home. He's an old-fashioned showman on the drums, like Louie Bellson or Buddy Rich. Powell calls the tunes, cracks the jokes, picks the soloists and mesmerizes the crowd — especially when he picks up a tambourine and testifies on it the way he learned from the sanctified church ladies.
"Shannon Powell, what can I say, man, he is the embodiment of every great drummer that I love," says Dave Torkanowsky, a renowned local jazz pianist who has played with Powell for 25 years.
"He is the living history. He's the last of his kind. This town is the beachhead of African culture in America, and he is a direct uncut descendant from that. I mean, the humidity is in his playing."
Shannon Powell will be playing at this year's New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival in late April, and his band, Powell's Place, has a new album coming out soon. If you listen carefully, you can hear the humidity.
In New Orleans, jazz is a building block, a musical foundation. Troy Andrews, aka Trombone Shorty, fully embraces the future-funk and grimy rock backbeats which bring crowds to their feet. But at his core, he's also a phenomenal jazz trombonist and singer from the Tremé neighborhood. Stardom awaits with the upcoming release of For True; here, Trombone Shorty and Orleans Avenue preview their headlining Newport Jazz Festival set with this more intimate Quad Stage show.
Personnel: Trombone Shorty, trombone/trumpet/voice; Tim McFatter, tenor saxophone; Dan Oestreicher, baritone saxophone; Peter Murano, guitar; Michael Ballard, bass; Robert Peebles, drums; Dwayne Williams, percussion.
New Orleans multi-instrumentalist Renard Poché is a true musician's musician. The short list of his collaborators includes Crescent City musical royalty Allen Toussaint, Irma Thomas, Joseph "Zigaboo" Modeliste, and Dr. John.
Poché's work isn't confined to New Orleans. He's also teamed up with Herbie Hancock, Bono, and Peter Gabriel. And as bandleader, his most recent release 4u 4me is a delectable mix of funk and soul, fused with jazz, Latin, rock and hip-hop.
At this year's New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, Poché, along with fellow musicians Leslie Smith and Terrin "Greezy" Gren, played a captivating acoustic set at the Allison Miner Stage. Afterwards, Poché headed for the food area, where he shared some Jazz Fest memories and favorite food picks with independent radio producer Diane Bock.
Chris Graythen/Getty ImagesTrumpeter Shamarr Allen, who has recorded both as a leader and sideman for Threadhead Records-funded projects, plays at the 2009 New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival.
The Botanical Gardens in New Orleans City Park is a small jewel hidden behind a black iron fence. Statues of flutists and fauns stand beneath dripping Spanish moss, and walkways are lined with flowers in bloom.
On April 28, the doors to the Gardens were thrown open for Threadhead Thursday, a free concert on the night before this year's New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. The show featured some of Threadhead Records' top acts: Paul Sanchez, Shamarr Allen, the New Orleans Nightcrawlers, Ensemble Fatien and Alex McMurray. The event marked the arrival of the four-year-old company as one of the top record labels for New Orleans music today.
That arrival is all the more remarkable for being driven by a non-profit group of volunteers. They started as fans, basically — fans from all over the world who shared a love for New Orleans music and who met in the message boards on www.nojazzfest.com. As they sustained long online comment threads, they began to call themselves Threadheads, and made arrangements to meet in person at New Orleans' annual Jazz Fest.
But these were unusually proactive fans.
They weren't content to accept the shows that local promoters put together; they wanted to put on their own concerts. So in 2005, they hired the bands they wanted to hear and ordered the food they wanted to eat for the first annual Threadheads Party. After Katrina, the private party morphed into a fundraiser for the New Orleans Musicians' Clinic.
Having solved the problem of getting the shows they wanted to see, the Threadheads turned their attention to making the records they wanted to buy. At the 2007 party, after a knock-out set by Sanchez, a singer-songwriter, and jazz vocalist John Boutte, Threadhead Chris Joseph asked when the duo was going to release these songs on an album.
"It was an innocent question," Joseph said, chuckling at his own naiveté then about the record business. "Paul said, 'We would if we had the money.' This light bulb went off in my head, and I said, 'How much would it take?' I expected him to say $100,000, but when he said $10,000, I told him, 'I could raise that.' I knew all the Threadheads had been touched by the show, and I figured if they had enough money to go to Jazz Fest, which is not a cheap vacation, they would kick in some money for this."
It worked. The Threadheads raised enough money to make possible Boutte's Good Neighbor and Sanchez's Exit to Mystery Street, both released in 2008. Three years later, Threadhead Records has released 40 albums, including titles by Susan Cowsill (of the Continental Drifters and Cowsills), Glen David Andrews (of Trombone Shorty's Andrews family) and the Honey Island Swamp Band.
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The New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival begins Friday, and music fans from all over the world will flock to the city's racetrack for seven days of music. A lot of things make New Orleans a one-of-a-kind music town, but one is the tuba, the monstrous brass instrument worn like a python squeezing its victim. When jazz began there after WWI, the tuba supplied the rhythmic bottom. As the music spread to Chicago, New York and beyond, the tuba spread with it, but was soon replaced by the more precise double bass. The hard-to-control (but easy to parade with) tuba soon disappeared from jazz almost everywhere, but not in the music's birthplace.
In New Orleans, even today, having a tuba in the band remains standard operating procedure. It's used not only in the city's countless parades (any excuse will do), not only in the trad-jazz outfits that still flourish there, not only in the new-wave brass bands that mix funk and hip-hop into the old carnival parade music, but also in rock bands such as Bonerama and the Anders Osborne Band and in contemporary jazz bands led by John Ellis and Kermit Ruffins.
Most tuba players in New Orleans play the sousaphone, a kind of tuba designed by John Philip Sousa himself to be easier to carry, with a wider bore for warmer sound and a forward-facing bell for better projection. Music sounds different when it's anchored by a sousaphone rather than an acoustic or electric bass. Because it's a wind instrument rather than a string instrument, the tuba gives New Orleans music a bottom that bubbles rather than twangs. Here are five examples of how the tuba makes its mark on the city's music.
5 New Orleans Songs Featuring The Fat Horn
Tuba Fats
After the heyday of traditional New Orleans jazz had passed, tuba music was kept alive in New Orleans by Allan Jaffe — who led the aptly named Preservation Hall Jazz Band — by Walter Payton (father of modern jazz star Nicholas) and by Tuba Fats. Anthony "Tuba Fats" Lacen (1950-2004) played with many of the city's top parade ensembles (the Young Tuxedo, Treme, Olympia and Chosen Few Brass Bands) and he showed the way to the tuba's embrace of funkier, bluesier music. You can hear that in this 1985 version of Professor Longhair's carnival standard, "Mardi Gras in New Orleans."
The Dirty Dozen Brass Band
It's hard to overestimate the impact of the Dirty Dozen Brass Band on New Orleans music. When a group of young and unknown horn players and marching drummers started playing weekly gigs in the late '70s at Daryl's and the Glass House, they expanded the brass-band repertoire beyond the old warhorses to include everything from James Brown to Thelonious Monk, as well as vigorous originals. They played with a muscular funk that was largely propelled by Kirk Joseph's sousaphone. The band convinced a generation that brass-band music was cool and inspired the Rebirth Brass Band, the Soul Rebels Brass Band, the New Birth Brass Band and dozens more. But none of the younger groups had the jazz chops that the Dozen had, as you can hear in this 1985 medley of Monk's "Blue Monk" and T-Bone Walker's "Stormy Monday." The Dirty Dozen Brass Band plays the Jazzfest on May 1.
Rebirth Brass Band
The most prominent of the Dirty Dozen's heirs was the Rebirth Brass Band, co-founded in 1982 by three teenagers: trumpeter (and future Treme star) Kermit Ruffins, bass drummer Keith Frazier and tuba player Philip Frazier. They were too young to have sophisticated jazz chops or tastes; they were out to create a distinctive form of New Orleans dance music. They did just that, thanks in large part to the rolling bass lines that rumbled and tumbled out of Frazier's tuba. They summed up their philosophy in this 1989 recording, "Feel Like Funkin' It Up." The Rebirth Brass Band plays the Jazzfest on May 8.
Bonerama
Bonerama gets its name from the fact that four-sevenths of the band are trombonists. But the band's bottom is held down by sousaphonist Matt Perrine, whose ability to play eighth notes and triplets on his unwieldy instrument is showcased here in his 2007 composition, "Bayou Betty." Unlike most of the city's brass bands, Bonerama emphasizes rock 'n' roll over jazz and R&B, giving songs by Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix and The Beatles an unexpected Mardi Gras flavor. Bonerama plays the Jazzfest on May 6.
Anders Osborne
Kirk Joseph, the Dirty Dozen's original tuba player, later played for years with Anders Osborne, the Swedish-born blues singer who settled in New Orleans at age 19 and became one of the city's musical fixtures. With the zeal of a convert, Osborne adopted the local habits, including the use of the tuba to give his blues a percolating feel that one would never hear in nearby Mississippi, much less Sweden. You can hear how he and Joseph feed off each other in this 2001 Osborne original, "Stoned, Drunk and Naked." Osborne plays the Jazzfest on May 1.
When New Orleans R&B singer Irma Thomas arrived for her studio session with KPLU, we knew she was ready for any song request we might throw at her. We knew this, because she brought her Book with her.
Hear The Full Session From Jazz24
The Book is something Thomas takes to every performance, and it contains the lyrics to all the songs she's recorded in her 50-year career. She uses it when her fans call out requests for songs she might have forgotten, or songs she recorded years ago but never included in her ongoing live repertoire. Thomas wants to give her fans what they want, and if that means that she and her band have to do an impromptu arrangement of a song she hasn't sung in years, so be it. Thomas will give it a try. And the amazing thing is, she always pulls it off.
As it turned out, she didn't need her Book during her time with us. She started with one of her classics, which she wrote and recorded in 1964: "I Wish Someone Would Care." That was followed by "Let It Be Me" from her latest release, The Soul Queen of New Orleans — 50th Anniversary Celebration. And, after a little conversation about her lifelong connection with New Orleans and the great musicians she's worked with in that city (including Dr. John, Allen Toussaint and Eddie Bo), she closed her set with a song she's never recorded: a terrific version of Bill Withers' "The Same Love That Made Me Laugh."
Singer, songwriter and pianist Mac "Dr. John" Rebennack has been at the heart of New Orleans funk and R&B since the 1950s, so when he paid a visit to the KPLU/Jazz24 studio for a solo performance, we were sure we'd get a good dose of the Crescent City.
We certainly did. He began by treating us to two songs from his most recent CD, Tribal. "Potnah" and "Change Of Heart" were written by Dr. John and southwest Louisiana singer-songwriter Bobby Charles (writer of such classics as "See You Later Alligator" and "Walkin' To New Orleans").
As Dr. John tells interviewer Kevin Kniested, Tribal was initially meant to be a collaboration between Rebennack and Charles. Unfortunately, in the early stages of the project, Charles passed away, so Dr. John finished it himself as a tribute to his old friend.
Dr. John also talked about the ongoing plight of the residents and refugees of southern Louisiana, five years after Hurricane Katrina and in the aftermath of the BP oil spill. He concluded by performing one more song, "Dorothy," a touching piano piece written for his mother.
By the end of the session it was clear Dr. John is a man with a mission. Wherever he goes, he takes the musical pleasures and emotional pain of New Orleans with him. He wants us to enjoy the music while never forgetting that his beloved hometown is a long way from being healed.
Anders Osborne's music may get filed under blues or possibly rock, but the New Orleans-based guitarist has an astonishing range; he seems equally at home as an acoustic singer-songwriter and in guitar-hero mode. Osborne's ferocious electric solos have earned him a following on the jam-band scene, but his last record — the unplugged and breezy Coming Down — featured a sousaphone rather than bass guitar. In fact, his love of Louisiana's traditions prompted him to make a record (Bury the Hatchet) with the Mardi Gras Indian "Big Chief," Monk Boudreaux.
For a performer who gives of himself so thoroughly, both on stage and in the studio, Osborne is somewhat reserved in person, not eager to talk about his recent (successful) stint in rehab. He's also reluctant to volunteer the stories behind his songs of redemption and heartbreak, but clearly, he's a man with many stories to tell and all the talent it takes to tell them in the genre of his choosing.
Osborne's latest record, American Patchwork, covers plenty of musical territory. But it remains cohesive, tied together with skillful songwriting and expressive, pitch-perfect vocals — and that comes through in this session.
