New Orleans Musicians

One easy way to know if you've found a place with culture---an un-manufactured place, breathing on its own---is to listen for its music. There has been a lot of music played in New Orleans, some of it entirely the product of the place and found in its true form nowhere else. The rauccus neighborhood brass bands, for example, existing for decades with ever-changing membership, could not have come from any place but New Orleans.

Many will think of jazz and blues, even Afro-Caribbean music as emplematic of New Orleans. Zydeco can be heard blaring from the too-bright tourist shops in the French Quarter, although Cajun country is far to the west of New Orleans and its native music relatively new to the city. But I never knew, until I knew some locals of a certain age, that much of our 50s and 60s rock-and-roll and soul music had its roots in the Crescent City. My favorite example, still living and playing, and a survivor of Hurricane Katrina, is the Fat Man himself---Fats Domino---who until a few months ago lived in a big, pink, wood-sided house in the Ninth Ward.

I had the great pleasure a few years back to share a po-boy with Fats.

Well, OK: Technically we were both eating po-boys at Steve Favalora's deli in Arabi one day. My friend Tom hit me in the shoulder and nodded to the bar where Domino was holding court over his shrimp sandwich. I saw a surprisingly small fellow (not so fat these days, Fats) in a dapper black cap and leather jacket. A few barflies where chatting him up and he, graciously, engaging them. Tom asked, smiling, "You know who that is?"

I'll admit to you, but only you, that I did not. But now I know, and so...

Back to the music. A fact only slightly less made-up than my sharing lunch with Fats Domino is that I was once a New Orleans musician, too. If you're a baseball fan, a serious backlot duffer, and you ever had a chance to throw out a pitch in a Minor League game, you know what kind of New Orleans musician I have been. I'm lucky to know and even call friends a couple of long-time players and the various characters who make up their entourage. I have been in that entourage myself, dancing and drinking with the crowd of a Saturday night, and for a few shining moments making a very minor hero of myself. Maybe some of you know what it means, to hear (in New Orleans), "Hey, is Matt in the house? Come on up and play on this one."

There was a long time I wouldn't travel to the city without at least one blues harp, just in case.

Now, literally in the wake of a devistating flood, New Orleans is struggling to maintain so vibrant a music scene that even hacks like me might hope to sit in for a song or two. In this story by Billboard's Todd Martens, we see a kind of charity that might represent the best possible return for anyone's dollar there ever was. Bethany Bultman, able to leave her city behind but unwilling to, writes checks to New Orleans muscians as needed. And they are needed.

"Bultman inscribes upwards of 70 per week, each for $100, each given to a New Orleans musician. To date, her efforts have been funded largely by donations from Pearl Jam and nonprofit organization Jazz Aspen Snowmass; she recently was promised $250,000 from MusiCares, the Recording Academy's charitable arm.

"The checks Bultman writes are allocated only to those who work, which these days in New Orleans can mean performing at a club in front of a handful of Federal
Emergency Management Agency workers.

"On many nights, money from the door is minimal or nonexistent. Bultman hopes her $100 subsidy is enough to dissuade someone from taking a gig in another city. If instruments and artifacts from the city's musical heritage were washed away, then New Orleans' soul -- the musicians who define it -- must stay."

Two weekends ago, my friends and I made another trip to the city of a Saturday night. Along Frenchman Street, at an edge of the Quarter the tourists rarely reach, we saw some of the old gang. We drank a bit and ate well and left large tips for the band.