It’s Snowing in New Orleans!

My wife just called me to give me the news……and it is news!

It hardly ever snows in N.O. but it is today!

Here’s some pics of the city. Canal Street and the Superdome as its rarely seen.

New Orleans Named Best City for Dining and Live Music

New Orleans Named the Best City in the United States for Dining and Live Music by CNN Headline News and Travel + Leisure “America’s Favorite Cities” Survey 2008

125,000 travelers select New Orleans as number one for destination restaurants, food/dining and live music

NEW ORLEANS, /PRNewswire/ — New Orleans has been named the best city to dine in the United States, taking top honors for the “Destination Restaurant” category and best in overall “Food/Dining” in CNN Headline News and Travel + Leisure Magazine’s annual “America’s Favorite Cities” survey.

New Orleans also was honored as the best place in the country for live music, and ranked second nationally for nightlife.

An online survey appeared on travelandleisure.com and was accessible via cnn.com from March 7, 2008, to June 15, 2008. Respondents were asked to rate their choice of one or more cities from across the country in 45 different categories on culture, shopping, people, food and other characteristics.

New Orleans was voted best in the following subcategories:

* Live music/bands
* Destination restaurants
* Ethnic food/cheap eats
* Vintage stores/flea markets

Other top five finishes for New Orleans include:

* Cafes/coffee bars
* Spring Break
* Cocktail hour/lounge scene
* Late-night/club scene
* Singles/bar scene
* Diverse
* Affordability
* People-watching
* Antique stores
* Wild weekend

New Orleans beat world-famous culinary capitals such as San Francisco, Chicago and New York.

“We are proud that our city’s two most dominant brands – food and music – were named as the best in America by so many discerning travelers,” said J. Stephen Perry, President and CEO of the New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau. “In New Orleans you will find exquisite fine dining from some of the world’s best chefs, as well as the best seven-dollar-meal you’ll ever eat with delicious specialties such as oyster po-boys. Being recognized as the best in so many categories such as people-watching, antique stores and affordability, reinforces the richness of our culture and the strength of the overall experience for visitors.”

Visit www.travelandleisure.com/afc for full survey results and the bracket game where people can select America’s Favorite City overall. New Orleans and other Favorite Cities winners will be featured in Travel + Leisure magazine’s October issue, on newsstands September 23.

These rankings are the latest accomplishments in a string of awards bestowed on New Orleans in 2008. In July, Yellow Tail wines announced New Orleans was voted by online surveyors as “America’s Most Sparkling City.” The 2008 PlanetOut Travel Awards recognized New Orleans as one of the best U.S. cities for gay travel in May, and in April TripAdvisor honored New Orleans in the categories of Top 100 World and Top 25 United States for the “2008 Travelers’ Choice Destinations Award.”

New Orleans was chosen as one of the top 10 places to go in 2008 by Sherman’s Travel, and StudentUniverse.com, an online travel agency specializing in trips for college students, chose New Orleans as one of its top 10 domestic spring break destinations of 2008.

Consistently recognized as one of the top five convention and visitor bureaus in the United States, The New Orleans Convention & Visitors Bureau is the driving force behind New Orleans’ most important industry, tourism.

Today the cultural riches, sensual indulgences and unparalleled service that define the New Orleans experience continue to flourish, as they have for centuries. The most celebrated and historic core of the city – including the French Quarter, Central Business District, Warehouse and Arts District, Magazine Street, the Faubourg Marigny and Garden District – are thriving. In 2007 New Orleans welcomed 7.1 million visitors, nearly double the amount of visitors in 2006. For more information, visit www.neworleanscvb.com

From The Mouthpiece On Back

Gustav

My wife is from New Orleans. Our daughter is from New Orleans.

Her parents, brothers and all of her relatives are from there.

Her parents evacuated on Saturday morning and are staying with us. One of her brothers is staying near us with his family and her other brother headed off to Atlanta.

We’ve been watching since Friday, coverage of the latest hurricane on the local television stations where we live and also on the WWL TV station (a New Orleans TV station) website.

As she’s told me many times, evacuating from hurricanes is a fact of life for anyone who lives in N.O. and it was no different for her and her family throughout their lives. Of course, they never experienced anything like Katrina until that tragedy happened. Even though she no longer lives there the memories of Katrina are still fresh on her mind and its been a very difficult time these last few days as we anxiously await. Sadness and a gloomy sense of impending doom has gripped us as we prepare for what this latest hurricane will unleash upon Louisiana.

To make matters even worse my wife’s parents house is on the West Bank and its being predicted that that part of the city will suffer very heavy damage, more than in Orleans Parish. There are no levees in place to protect the West Bank.

I can’t imagine devastation on the level of Katrina. At least, I’m not allowing myself to think in those terms. It seems to me that kind of cruelty is just simply not possible again or at least not so soon after what happened 3 years ago.

My wife’s parents lost so much in Katrina and only in the last year and a half have they finally finished rebuilding their house and their own lives.

It’s unbearable to contemplate that they might experience such devastation and heartbreak once again.

Its only hours now before Gustav descends upon Louisiana.

I’m thinking of everyone that I know that is from New Orleans. I’m thinking of New Orleans. A city that I love. A culture and people that I love.

It can not be washed away. It can not happen. It will not happen.

3 Years

Trouble The Water

Dr. John and the Lower 911’s City That Care Forgot

I’m so looking forward to this record. Besides the fact that it’s Dr. John, who I’m a huge fan of, he’s made some deeply political music here, speaking out about the social conditions in New Orleans and the other war going on in Iraq.

villagevoice.com

Dr. John and the Lower 911’s City That Care Forgot

Crucial, caustic postcards from New Orleans
by Larry Blumenfeld

“This record ain’t mad as it coulda been,” Dr. John told me recently, sitting in his Harlem office. Fan-pleasing funky grooves aside, City That Care Forgot seems angry enough—more a connected set of rants than a collection of songs. But it’s easy to underestimate the depth of outrage in New Orleans, the breadth of indignity and injustice endured in his beloved birthplace. Locals gave knowing nods and approving hollers when Dr. John tried out some of this material at this year’s Jazz & Heritage Festival.

Taken in full, these 13 tracks might incite more widespread outcry: He channels post-Katrina fury as capably as rappers like Juvenile have, and lays out relevant issues—local, national, and global—in ways that, say, Nancy Pelosi simply hasn’t. If elected leaders lack Dr. John’s political will, they also don’t have his magnetic drawl or the bristling power of his Lower 911 band. Plus, he’s built a strong coalition of the concerned here, including Eric Clapton, Willie Nelson, Ani DiFranco, Terence Blanchard, and a number of local-hero New Orleans players.

“If ya wonder how we doin’/Short version is we gettin’ there,” Dr. John sings at one point, then changes up the lyric: “If ya wonder how we doin’/Short version is we gettin’ mad.” “Promises, Promises” sounds like a revival-tent version of “Down by the Riverside,” its sing-song refrain nonetheless cynical: “The road to the White House is paved with lies.” “Black Gold” takes on the oil-industry greed fueling everything from environmental catastrophe in the Gulf to endless war in Iraq. “Say Whut?” demands accountability for the botched Katrina response, and bites hard: “Say it’s a job well done/Then you giggled like a bitch/Hopped back on the Air Force One.” In “Dream Warrior,” Dr. John imagines himself as an avenging samurai “sleeping with my sword” and proffers a conspiracy theory: “Lemme explain/About the second battle of New Orleans/Not about the loss, not even the devastation/About it was done with intention.” Beneath this beats a bamboula rhythm, bedrock of local resistance music for centuries.

It’s not all national headlines, though. “My People Need a Second Line” is a pointed response to an ongoing culture war over the brass-band-led funeral processions that define New Orleans musical tradition. It specifically references a moment when 20 police cars converged in Tremé (the oldest black neighborhood in the city), and two musicians were led away in cuffs. Dr. John explains the meaning of the jazz funeral via a doleful melody; then a snare-drum snaps and the tempo speeds up, signaling the second-line. “It’s something spiritual/Ought to be kept out of politics,” he chants as trumpeter James Andrews and trombonist Troy “Trombone Shorty” Andrews—older and younger brothers of a storied Tremé lineage—play soaring variations on a hymn. Such songs, directed at us all, are dedicated to families like these.

Music and Politics Mingle in New Orleans

Jazz Fest ’08: Homecoming on Muddy Ground

By Larry Blumenfeld

Above all else it was a homecoming: The Neville Brothers performed at the annual New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival for the first time since Hurricane Katrina. More good news: The event returned to its full pre-Katrina seven-day schedule. Still more: Though the heavy rains of the first weekend made a muddy mess of the Fair Grounds infield, they didn’t dampen spirits or attendance much. According to event officials, nearly 400,000 people attended the festival, held April 25-27 and May 1-4.

Given the emotional heft of their return, the Nevilles were the big story. Their presence built throughout the fest’s final weekend: first Art, in his debut solo set, inviting Aaron up to the stage at one point; then, Aaron, bringing many in a packed gospel tent to tears, his saxophonist brother Charles at his side; finally, all four—Art, Aaron, Cyril and Charles—together on the Acura stage to close the festival’s final day.

Before that last performance, producer Quint Davis spoke of “families being torn apart, brothers separated from brothers all over New Orleans.” “The Neville family’s coming back together,” Art said from the stage. The crowd roared. The four then reprised the three decades of hits that made them such beloved stars in the first place.

It was an important symbol, no doubt. Though Charles has lived in Massachusetts for more than a decade, Aaron, Art and Cyril all lived in New Orleans before Katrina. These brothers in fact became separated from each other—and from the city that identified so powerfully with them. I remember being struck by Aaron’s son, Ivan Neville, on “Sing Me Back Home,” a CD by displaced all-star musicians recorded in Austin, Texas, six weeks after the storm: Covering John Fogerty’s Creedence Clearwater Revival hit, Ivan snarled, “I ain’t no fortunate son!”—and meant it. (If a Neville wasn’t entitled by birth, I recall thinking, who in New Orleans was?)

The effects of the floods that followed the levee failures are deep and lasting enough to strain even the Nevilles’ relationship with their hometown.

Full Article

Louis Armstrong’s mix tapes

In a typical year, Louis Armstrong spent more than three hundred days on the road, bringing his music to audiences around the world. He always traveled with a steamer trunk designed to house two reel-to-reel tape decks and a turntable, and he carried a stash of music for his own listening pleasure, to while away the hours he spent in hotels and dressing rooms before and after each gig.

Tapes being less fragile than LPs, and possessing longer recording capacity, he ultimately transferred much of his collection to seven-inch reels. He also made mix tapes of his favorite tunes. He liked musicians who prized melody, and his selections range from Glenn Miller to Jelly Roll Morton to Tchaikovsky. Occasionally he added commentary over the music or played along, and he made copies of his own recordings, to which (unlike many musicians) he enjoyed listening.

Full Article

A flood of Katrina songs

nytimes.com

A Flood of Emotion in a Song
By GEOFFREY HIMES

IN the nearly three years since the levees failed during Hurricane Katrina, you haven’t had to wait very long at a Louisiana festival or nightclub before a singer croons, “What has happened down here is the winds have changed.” That’s the opening line of “Louisiana 1927,” which has become the state’s unofficial anthem in the wake of the 2005 tragedy.

Written by Randy Newman in the mid-1970s about a flood that covered a good deal of Mississippi, Arkansas and Louisiana half a century earlier, the song climaxes with its plaintive, singalong chorus, “Loo-eez-ee-ann-a, they’re tryin’ to wash us away.”

The song’s lament of being battered once by nature and again by a callous government had resonated with flood-ravaged audiences from New Orleans to Lake Charles well before 2005. Then Katrina came, and Mr. Newman seemed downright clairvoyant.

“For a long time after Katrina,” said Marcia Ball, a Louisiana-born blues singer, “there just wasn’t a dry eye in the house when I did that song.” While Katrina inspired many songs, she said, this one became the anthem because it has “one of those simple, irresistible Randy Newman melodies and lyrics that were so real. In truth, so many people did get washed away.”

“Louisiana 1927” is more than an anthem, however; it’s also a modern-day folk song that gains new lyrics as singers adapt it to new circumstances.

Ms. Ball tweaked the lyrics for her 1997 version, which she will perform on Saturday at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival.

Before the weekend is done, other interpretations of the song should also be sung by the Wild Magnolias, John Boutté and, in their first Jazzfest appearance since Katrina, the Neville Brothers. And on Thursday afternoon Mr. Newman himself will return to the festival to sing his original words.

“It’s a New Orleans tradition that you can take any music and mess with it,” said Bruce Boyd Raeburn, the curator of the Hogan Jazz Archive at Tulane University. The key lyric is “They’re tryin’ to wash us away,” he said, because it is applicable to most periods of New Orleans history. “It captures that feeling that you’re trying to cling on to your culture, to your life, in the face of this wave of indifference, of racism, of malevolence and of water itself.”

Mr. Newman, 64, may be closely associated with his hometown, Los Angeles (he wrote the tongue-in-cheek tribute, “I Love L.A.”), but he has roots in Louisiana. His mother grew up in New Orleans, and he lived there over several summers and while his father was in the Army during World War II.

“There were these horrendous things — those signs with ‘Colored’ on one side and ‘White’ on the other,” he said in a recent phone interview. “But I always loved the pop music. I was so influenced by Fats Domino that it’s still hard for me to write a song that’s not a New Orleans shuffle.”

His fascination with Louisiana led him to books about the state’s legendary governor Huey Long, known as the Kingfish, who used the 1927 flood to stoke rural resentment against the big-city bosses and to win his first term the next year.

As John M. Barry wrote in “Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America” (1997), the most powerful businessmen in New Orleans illegally dynamited levees to make sure the city stayed dry.

Mr. Newman’s research led to “Louisiana 1927″ (as well as “Kingfish”) on his 1975 album, “Good Old Boys” (Reprise). He delivered the story with an understated detachment, as if he were a hard-bitten newspaperman or a fatalistic farmer.

Aaron Neville, who was born and raised in New Orleans, heard about the song from his frequent duet partner Linda Ronstadt, a longtime friend of Mr. Newman’s. He recorded the tune for his 1991 album, “Warm Your Heart” (A&M), and his approach was anything but understated.

Backed by an orchestra and a gospel choir, he sang with all the drama of someone standing in water up to his thighs. Because he has a much better vocal instrument than Mr. Newman, Mr. Neville could exploit the melodic rise of “Louisiana, Louisiana” in the chorus and the melodic collapse of “They’re tryin’ to wash us away.”

And because he was closely identified with New Orleans in a way that Mr. Newman never was, he gave that chorus a first-person authenticity.

“When I watched the Katrina coverage on CNN,” he said, “I’d see people on the roofs that I knew. I said: ‘Damn, when’s the cavalry coming? The cavalry comes every time, why not now?’

‘When I used to sing that song, it was about something that happened a long time ago. Now when I sing it, it’s about something that happened to me and my family, so it’s a lot more real.”

He predicts that “Louisiana 1927” will be the emotional peak of the Neville Brothers’ festival-closing set on May 4.

Gradually Mr. Neville’s version of the song became a standard among the black residents of New Orleans. In 1996 Bo Dollis & the Wild Magnolias recorded “Louisiana 1927” for their album “1313 Hoodoo Street.”

The Wild Magnolias, who perform May 4 at Jazzfest, are Mardi Gras Indians, that New Orleans tradition of African-Americans who dress in elaborate costumes of feathers and beads. Mr. Dollis changed the lyrics to “River had busted clear down the canal line, six feet of water on the streets of the Lower Nine.”

That’s a reference to the Lower Ninth Ward, the neighborhood that was famously demolished in Katrina but which also suffered serious flooding from Hurricane Betsy in 1965. Mr. Dollis had lived through Betsy, and he asked his band’s manager, Glenn Gaines, help him write a new version about that flood.

They even added a verse contrasting the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. with Vic Schiro, the city’s segregationist mayor at the time. “Bo started describing to me how the water came through like a freight train, how in a matter of minutes people lost what they’d worked for their whole lives,” Mr. Gaines said. “Of course, it was the poor black folks who suffered the most. That’s why we put Martin Luther King in there.”

The Wild Magnolias’ recording was the first hint that “Louisiana 1927” was becoming a folk song. And since Katrina the song has been recorded by Willie Nelson, the British folk singer Martin Simpson, the zydeco accordionist Terrance Simien, the R&B singer Howard Tate and the jam band the String
Cheese Incident.

Mr. Newman himself re-recorded the song with the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra for the post-Katrina benefit album “Our New Orleans 2005″ (Nonesuch).

But the song’s most dramatic recasting was by Mr. Boutté during his memorable set at Jazzfest in 2006. Backed by horns and a rhythm section and wearing a straw hat with the front brim turned up, he sang Mr. Newman’s lyrics straight through once, then changed things around.

The line “Clouds roll in from the north” became “Clouds rolled in from the Gulf.” The line “President Coolidge come down in a railroad train/with a little fat man with a notepad in his hand” became “President Bush flew over in an aeroplane/with about 12 fat men with double martinis in their hands.”

“The city had been empty, but the whole world would be coming for Jazzfest,” Mr. Boutté recalled. “We’d have a soapbox to talk about our loss and about the unconcern others had for us. But I had to find the right song.”

His friend Paul Sanchez of the rock band Cowboy Mouth suggested “Louisiana 1927.” As Mr. Boutté rehearsed it, he unconsciously changed “crackers” to “Creoles” and “what the river has done” to “what the levee has done.” When they realized what was going on, the two men decided to rewrite the song.

Mr. Boutté saved it for last at his Jazzfest set, and when he started dropping local references into the lyrics, older women rose from their plastic folding chairs, waving their hands over their heads and egging him on as if they were in church.

“First the women started crying,” recalled Mr. Boutté, who performs at Jazzfest on Friday. “Then the men started crying. Then the children started crying because their parents were crying. Then I started crying. I can’t sing that song too often because it takes too much out of me. It reminds me of the needless loss — and the loss never seems to end.”