Back To Louisiana

As previously mentioned, the recent trip to New Orleans included a wallet-crushing visit to the Louisiana Music Factory. The Factory is part of an amazingly vital music scene, all the more so since Katrina drove so many musicians away from the Crescent City. Everything I review here is a new release; hopefully, it provides a hint of the breadth and depth contemporary Louisiana music.

Exit To Mystery Street, Paul Sanchez. Currently No. 1 on the Citizen K. hit parade! A contagious blend of party rockers ("Hoob-a-Joob" is destined to be a New Orleans classic) and ballads of layered intent, Mystery Street is the New Orleans experience writ large: Enjoy life as it is, because it can come to an end at any time. In Sanchez' New Orleans, brass band musicians and Dixieland horns keep the feet tapping from the onset, a Mexican drinking song appears out of nowhere, then a contemplative trumpet and an acoustic guitar engage the emotions. And when he sings with apparent insouciance that "I don't care who knows/I love you from your head to your toes," he's talking about the great city itself. A wonderful CD from beginning to end. Highly recommended.


La Louisiana Sessions, Roddie Romero And The Hub City All-Stars. Think of a zydeco version of Los Lobos. Roddie Romero hasn't reached those exalted heights yet, but the ambition is there in this 2-CD set of trad, rock, blues, and R&B delivered with a Cajun flavor. The bands jumps nimbly and energetically from one tune to the next, unified by Romero's accordion and slide guitar.


If Dreams Come True, Ann Savoy & Her Sleepless Knights. Savoy sets zydeco aside for this engaging set of Parisian bistro jazz. She and her light-fingered quartet breath new life into familiar tunes by Benny Goodman, Django Reinhardt, Rodger and Hart, and Jerom Kern, among others. Bewitching, yes, but hardly bothersome or bewildering: When Savoy sings "Reaching For The Moon," she finds its ephemeral light.


Good Neighbor, John Boutte. One of New Orleans' premier jazz vocalists, Boutte show-stopping performance of Randy Newman's "Louisiana 1927" at the 2006 JazzFest updated the lyrics of the song that has become the unofficial anthem of post-Katrina New Orleans. Good Neighbor comprises covers of Neil Young and Johnny Mercer, plus 11 original songs written by Boutte and Paul Sanchez (who produced the album at the same time he recorded and produced Mystery Street). The originals include the title track, which revives a New Orleans tradition: The jazz booty-call song. Sanchez favors light arrangement supported by Todd Duke's acoustic guitar and Herlin Riley's percussion. And, really, that's all Boutte's beautiful tenor requires.


Cedric Watson, Cedric Watson. Fiddler, accordianist, and vocalist Watson brings a subtle African-American touch to traditional Cajun music. While there's nothing overt, the CD's fifteen original and trad numbers have a bit more swing here, a touch of blues there, and dabs of soul all over. The 23-year old Watson shows terrific talent, so much that you can't help but look forward to his future.


Peace, Love, & Understanding, Big Sam's Funky Nation. Big Sam, the former trombonist for The Dirty Dozen Brass Band, leads the Funky Nation through a whirlwind set of brass band jazz-funk fusion. The core group driven by Alvin Ford Jr.'s drumming powers through eight instrumentals featuring excellent solos and ensemble work before guest vocalists like Ivan Neville join them for the closing four rave-ups. These guys must put on an awesome live show, but this will do just fine until I can see them.

V-I-C-T-O-R-Y

Watch this. You owe it to the Winter Soldiers and to the people they killed...

George Bush is a pathetic fantasist as well as a dangerous and incompetent leader. Were he but younger and unemployed, he says, he'd work in Afghanistan to help the "young democracy" there succeed. Why? Because it would be "fantastic" and "romantic." Whatever is happening in Afghanistan, it is by most accounts not succeeding and it's certainly not romantic. Personally, I've never heard of an evolving democracy that depended on the heroin trade for 33% of its Gross National Product. And, uh, George? When you were young and unemployed you had a chance to serve in romantic Vietnam and passed on it...

Fred Kaplan explains that Bush's delusions so convolute the definition of "success" in Iraq that nobody knows what it means. As naive and far-fetched as it seems, the original idea was to oust Saddam Hussein and install a democracy in Iraq that would quickly inspire the other Arab nations in the Middle East to do the same. Bush himself lowered expectations two years later, when he said that victory in Iraq would come "when the terrorists and Saddamists can no longer threaten Iraq's democracy, when the Iraqi security forces can provide for the safety of their own citizens, and when Iraq is not a safe-haven for terrorists to plot new attacks on our nation."

(Note the implication of this last assertion: Not only was there no safe haven in Iraq for terrorists prior to 2003, by his own words Bush created one when he invaded. Now to achieve peace, American soldiers must die to undo Bush's own monstrosity.)

Today, all of a sudden, a victory will lay "the foundations for peace for generations to come," a goal that -- if anything -- is more distant than before the war. It's certainly nothing that Barack Obama or even John McCain will sign up for. And, as Kaplan points out, we are no closer to "victory" as defined by the Administration than we were in 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, or 2007. No wonder John McCain thought that it might take a hundred years...

While perusing the internet to see if anyone besides BeauSoleil had recorded the Cajun waltz "Plus Tu Tourne," I stumbled across and downloaded a real beauty: Adieu, False Heart, by Linda Ronstadt and the Cajun traditional singer Ann Savoy (2006). Absolutely gorgeous, and I can't describe it any better than MusiciansNews.com does here...I wonder if Gnarls Barkley's new CD (The Odd Couple) is as good as Joan Ackerman of the Boston Globe says it is. I'll let you know tomorrow...

Daniel Gross reminds us that FDR's New Deal still works for us despite the right's fervent efforts to dismantle it. In fact, without it, the mortgage would even worse.