OffBeat Magazine February 2016 by OffBeat Magazine

LOUISIANA MUSIC, FOOD & CULTURE

CARNIVAL TALES FACES OF MARDI GRAS MICHAEL CERVERIS FEBRUARY 2016

MESCHIYA LAKE BEST OF THE BEAT WINNERS DAVID BOWIE

Free In Metro New Orleans US $5.99 CAN $6.99 £UK 3.50

Bruce “Sunpie” Barnes of the North Side Skull & Bones Gang, Eva “Tee-Eva” Perry of the Baby Dolls, Margie Perez of the Krewe of Red Beans and Rice and Acerria “Angel” Dollis of the Wild Magnolias Mardi Gras Indians wish you a ...

HAPPY MARDI GRAS!

All On a Gras

New Orleans’ carnival

LETTERS

Mardi Day unique traditions.

FROM TOMMY TO PIETY

MOJO MOUTH

Michael Cerveris’ grand struggle between theater and music.

FRESH

IN THE SPIRIT

OFFBEAT EATS

REVIEWS

JAM CRUISE

REWIND

STARS WITHIN REACH

Dan Willging rewinds Buckwheat Zydeco’s On a Night Like This with producer Ted Fox.

The winners of the Best of the Beat.

Ronald Lewis’ lifetime journey in New Orleans’ African-American cultural traditions.

LISTINGS

Lesseps Street Block Party is Plan A.

BACKTALK 28

Meschiya Lake and the Little Big Horns, Michael Cerveris, Jason Marsalis, Bionica, Tyler Kinchen and the Right Pieces, Confetti Park Players, Seth Hitsky and Black Dragons and more.

Sam D’Arcangelo’s tales from the high seas.

Musicians tell their favorite Mardi Gras stories.

Andrew Wiseman of the Guardians of the Flame is In the Spot at Casa Borrega and Peter Thriffiley reviews Black Label Icehouse.

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CARNIVAL TALES

By Bunny Matthews, March 2003

Jonathan Shock at Loa mixes up Something Beautiful for Trombone Shorty.

OBITUARIES Jimmy Glickman Anthony "Tony" "Oulaboula" Bazley

MYSTERIES AND MAGIC

"Zulu’s Big Shot"

Page 34

Five Questions with Joe Lauro, producer-director of The Big Beat: Fats Domino and the Birth of Rock ’n’ Roll; The Aaron Neville no ballad playlist; My Music with Marc Paradis of Johnny Sketch and the Dirty Notes; Five Questions with Phil Collen, guitarist with Def Leppard, the coming Jazz Fest lineup, Faces of Mardi Gras—a photo exhibit featuring the work of Marc Pagani and more.

BLAST FROM THE PAST

John Swenson’s long lost 1971 interview with David Bowie.

Armand Richard, 2003's Big Shot, picks up the mantle (and the cigar): “One of the slogans Zulu has is 'Once a Big Shot, Always a Big Shot.' I’m Big Shot for 2003, but I will always be a Big Shot of Zulu for the rest of my life.” To read more, this issue can be purchased at www.offbeat.com/ shop/2003/offbeatmagazine-march-2003/.

FEBRUA RY 2016

Letters

“There will never be another band quite like the Rads. We all have our tales of epic nights, shows that we wished would never end, seeing familiar faces from all over the country…” —Jim Tomasino, Long Beach, New York

CONFEDERATE MONUMENTS

BE THE CULTURE

I am not a passionate advocate of tearing down Confederate statues, though I understand all the sensitivities that one can feel on this subject. I am a passionate advocate of civil rights however, and I would like to propose that if the statue of Robert E. Lee is to be taken down (and I’m not considering that this is yet a fait accompli), I think it’s really important that something really special be erected in its place. What I’d like to propose is that Lee Circle should be named Plessy Circle, and that the statue of Lee should be replaced by one of Homer Plessy, a man who’s not only a historically significant New Orleanian, but someone who can fairly be considered a founding father of the modern civil rights struggle, and a man who has never really been accorded the respect that he deserves, either in New Orleans or anywhere else for that matter. I think the Beauregard statue also needs a suitable replacement. In keeping with the equestrian motif, I’d suggest it be replaced by a statue of either Calvin Borel or Eddie Delahoussaye atop one of their legendary steeds, racing in the direction of the Fairgrounds. Then again, if we should need more memorials to African Americans (which I think we need), I think a skillfully executed memorial to Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman or Sojourner Truth would do just fine in this location. As for the statues of Jefferson Davis, and that White League abomination, I think these guys could disappear in the dark of night, and really never be missed. —Pete Simoneaux, Langdon, New Hampshire

I truly enjoyed Laura DeFazio’s story on Jonathan Freilich. I love the way he thinks about our New Orleans culture. I just want to say that we should not just go see the culture, we should be the culture. —Annie Lousteau, New Orleans, Louisiana

CYRIL’S POEM I would like to thank Cyril Neville for his Christmas poetry, “The Night Before Funkmas.” You can read it and you can see yourself there. I also love the song Cyril wrote years ago on the Neville Brothers CD Brother’s Keeper called “Jah Love.” I got to meet Cyril and his son Omar at the Crabfest in Lacombe. After I got my picture made with them they signed my Neville Brothers book. They are so nice and I hope to see them again. —Ella L. Bourgeois, Folsom, Louisiana

TOME LIKE Quite a well-deserved salute, nearly tome-like, to a quintessential New Awlinz’ band [The Radiators, January 2016]. —Rosie Rosato, New Orleans, Louisiana

FISH HEAD FOREVER My old friend of 40-plus years, Jay Mazza, turned me on to a live tape of the Radiators in 1985. We in turn went to the original Lone Star Café in New York City and caught three amazing sets! Eye opening to say the least, 30 years later and countless shows. A Fish Head then, now, and forever! Thank you! —Michael Fisher, Aberdeen, New Jersey

EPIC NIGHTS There will never be another band quite like the Rads. We all have our tales of epic nights, shows that we wished would never end, seeing familiar faces from all over the country, all convening for one reason: to leave the mad world outside and shake it loose with the Radiators. Too stupid to stop, indeed! —Jim Tomasino, Long Beach, New York

WHERE’S REGGIE? Why isn’t Reggie [Scanlan] on the cover? —Dennison Wolfe, Ithaca, New York Reggie Scanlan had a medical emergency on the day we did the OffBeat cover shoot and was not able to be included on our cover. His photo and thoughts are included in the piece. We regret this, but Reggie’s health is more important.—Ed

TOUSSAINT A great article on Allen Toussaint. At French Quarter Fest I couldn’t get near him for the crowds, but certainly enjoyed it. —James Loeffler, Worthington, Ohio

OffBeat welcomes letters from its readers—both comments and criticisms. To be considered for publication, all letters must be signed and contain the current address and phone number of the writer. Letters to the editor are subject to editing for length or content deemed objectionable to OffBeat readers. Please send letters to Editor, OffBeat Publications, 421 Frenchmen St., Suite 200, New Orleans, LA 70116.

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Louisiana Music, Food & Culture

February 2016 Volume 29, Number 2 Publisher and Editor-in-Chief Jan V. Ramsey, janramsey@offbeat.com Managing Editor Joseph L. Irrera, josephirrera@offbeat.com Consulting Editor John Swenson Food Editor Elsa Hahne, elsahahne@offbeat.com Listings Editor Katie Walenter, listings@offbeat.com Contributors Sam D’Arcangelo, Laura DeFazio, Frank Etheridge, Robert Fontenot, Elsa Hahne, David Kunian, Tom McDermott, Brett Milano, John Swenson, Peter Thriffiley, Dan Willging, John Wirt, Geraldine Wyckoff Cover Elsa Hahne (special thanks to Marc Pagani) Art Director/Food Editor Elsa Hahne, elsahahne@offbeat.com Web Editor Sam D'Arcangelo, sam@offbeat.com Videographer/Web Specialist Noé Cugny, noecugny@offbeat.com Advertising Sales Quay Frazier, quay@offbeat.com Advertising Design PressWorks, 504-944-4300 Business Manager Joseph L. Irrera Interns Loren Cecil, Laura Kokernot, Jacqueline Kulla, Phil Rached, Clare Welsh Distribution Patti Carrigan, Doug Jackson OffBeat (ISSN# 1090-0810) is published monthly in New Orleans by OffBeat, Inc., 421 Frenchmen St., Suite 200, New Orleans, LA 70116 (504) 944-4300 • fax (504) 944-4306 e-mail: offbeat@offbeat.com, web site: www.offbeat.com facebook.com/offbeatmagazine twitter.com/offbeatmagazine Copyright © 2016, OffBeat, Inc. No part of this publication may be reproduced without the consent of the publisher. OffBeat is a registered trademark of OffBeat, Inc. First class subscriptions to OffBeat in the U.S. are available for $45 per year ($52 Canada, $105 foreign airmail). Back issues are available for $10, except for the May issue for $16 (for foreign delivery add $6, except for the May issue add $4). Submission of photos and articles on Louisiana artists are welcomed, but unfortunately material cannot be returned.

MOJO MOUTH

All Philosophical Assumptions Aside…

find myself getting into a lot more philosophical discussions these days, with people I barely know. I’ve developed into quite a pontificator in my old age, but there’s some Mardi Gras knowledge that only age and time on the planet provide: experience. So: Don’t climb up the poles on Bourbon Street to try to get to a balcony. They are likely to be greased with Vaseline or some other noxious slimy substance to keep you from doing same, slipping down and cracking your head open. A slide down is also likely to mess up your costume or shred your beads. Do not miss early morning on Bourbon Street. That’s when all the really great costumes are out and

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By Jan Ramsey

about, and before the general crowds are too rowdy to mess them up. Do not miss the 52nd Annual Bourbon Street Awards, starting at noon on Saint Ann and Dumaine. Categories of costumes to be paraded at the awards include “Best Drag,” “Best Leather,” “Best Group” and “Best of Show,” with first, second and third cash prizes in all categories. To continue to party throughout the day, trade off your Hand Grenade with a big fat glass of water. If you don’t, you’ll regret it. Please do not pee in public (dudes, bring your own jug if you have to). Believe it or not, the NOPD is more sensitive to this infraction of the rules, and will bust you easier than if they catch

you in a cloud of pot smoke. (By the way, the NOPD has my utmost respect, especially during Mardi Gras. What other police force could handle the crowds and general craziness?) Please leave all your weapons at home. All we need are some knuckleheads fighting over turf, women, drugs or what-have-you during Mardi Gras when crowds abound. You’re much more likely to cause yourself damage than be able to “defend” yourself. Please. Head to Frenchmen Street postclosing of Bourbon at midnight, but give all us music-lovers a big break and save your puking and bonfires. Can we please get over the “Show your tits” line? If you really must bare your beautiful (NOT)

breasts at Mardi Gras for a string of less-than-a-cent plastic beads, well, girlfriend, you have issues. And remember that someone, somewhere, will be snapping a lewd photo of you to post to social media. Just remember that the next time you interview for a job or a promotion. The days of privacy are over. You flash ’em, you live with the ignominy forever. And then there’s Jazz Fest. The day we went to press, they announced the initial lineup. It’s gotten earlier and earlier, and as can be expected there are some real winners in the pack. We posted online immediately, but we have a few comments from our web editor, Sam D’Arcangelo, we’d like to share on page 13. O

www.OFFBEAT.com

FRESH

OffBeat.com

Five Questions with Phil Collen, guitarist for Def Leppard

SWEET TWEETS

ef Leppard released its latest album in October. It’s the band’s first album in seven years. What was the studio atmosphere like during the recording sessions at lead singer Joe Elliott’s home studio in Dublin? We had so much fun making the album. Honestly, it was the easiest album we’ve ever made and probably the most inspired. I do think Hysteria is our most important album, but this one, it was like making a first album. We didn’t do it for any kind of business reason. There was no record company executive or manager saying, “Okay, we need these kind of songs.” We did it for the love of doing it. You joined Def Leppard just in time to participate in sessions for the band’s breakthrough 1983 release, the 10 million–selling Pyromania. Did you feel as if you’d won the lottery when the band you’d only recently joined became one of the most popular hard-rock bands in the world? Def Leppard wasn’t that big when I joined, actually. They were playing half-empty theaters and big clubs and opening up for larger bands. It blew up when MTV started playing “Photograph.” That was the moment that changed everything. We all felt like we’d won the lottery. It was like nothing we’d experienced before. How has Def Leppard sustained such a long and successful career? I put part of it to British working-class resolve. And some bands fold up because of the most amazingly egotistical nonsense. We don’t have that. It’s partly that. And it’s partly that we’re not finished yet. The new album obviously proves that. We’ve still got something to say. Still got places to play. Still got people to impress. And we’re having a great time doing it. Why did you suggest to your Def Leppard bandmates that the band’s 11th album be self-titled? We’d never had an album called that before. It’s a little selfish, but this album is all about us. It wasn’t even supposed to be an album. It’s just a collection of fun. It’s expressive, it’s pure. So, hence the title. After your 34 years with Def Leppard, are you still excited about performing? I don’t think it gets any better than this. When I was a kid, my dream was to sing and play like I do now. It’s such an amazing thing. Almost like spiritual enlightenment. It’s not an ego thing, but it is wonderful to have a goal and achieve it. That’s what we’ve done as a band as well. That’s why it’s easy for us to carry on. —John Wirt The British classic-rock band plays February 3 at the Cajundome in Lafayette.

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@RevMelanieNOLA (M. Morel-Ensminger) What does “New York values” even mean? Do we have “New Orleans values”? I know we have distinct culture, but values? @jameskarst Never thought I’d say it, but maybe Mike Huckabee should stick to music. @JeremyDavenport If you haven’t ordered my famous king cake scented signature fragrance, there’s still some available. Check my website for details. @jonclearymusic Waiting to go on and play a set at a masqued carnival ball at the Orpheum. Ball gowns, big wigs and cleavage... And that’s just the bouncers. @BettyBowers If you find yourself mocking someone crying over murdered children, it’s Jesus’ way of letting you know you’re a sociopath. #StopGunViolence @MardiGrasTours Is anything cuter than the Krewe of Barkus? The only all-pet #MardiGras krewe to #parade through the #FrenchQuarter!

www.OFFBEAT.com

Photo: jeffrey dupuis

The David Bowie secondline drew huge crowds to the French Quarter

SOUNDCHECK

FRESH

MY MUSIC

Marc Paradis

“H

ow would I describe my music? The shorthand answer is ‘eclectic funk rock.’ Really anything people can dance to. Anything that makes people have fun at a live show. That includes everything from Baltic music and klezmer to reggae. Caribbean music is a big influence on me—and African music, definitely. I love African music. I grew up studying classical music and rock, and some of the other guys were more into jazz-influenced stuff. I don’t know if we’ve ever tried very hard to categorize ourselves. Andre [Bohren], Dave [Pomerleau] and I are the original three guys [of Johnny Sketch and the Dirty Notes]. And then Omar [Ramirez], our trumpeter, has been with us for six, seven years. We’ve had different saxophone players. We originally started in Loyola. We were entering Battle of the Bands. We were all seniors in college. At that time, we started it just for laughs; it wasn’t meant to be a serious project. Once it started—we won the Battle of the Bands, by the way—we realized we were onto something, I guess. We have a certain chemistry that you get from playing together for a long time. I think we all have a good professional work ethic. We all prioritize things like rehearsal, showing up to gigs on time, showing up sober, being polite to people we work with. All those things sound pretty basic, but they have a big impact on longevity. As someone very dear to me in the music industry told me once, ‘Everyone else is at the party. You’re at work.’ We all know that, and we all treat our job that way. And we all just really enjoy what we’re doing. And I think if you have those two things together, you can kind of go indefinitely. I love the cello. I love the way it sounds, I love what it’s capable of. I didn’t play cello in the band for the first six years. But when the violin player left, we had a gap where we’d had that string element that people always really liked. So I bought my first electric, and I got it up on a stand, which is a different feeling, playing an instrument sitting down. It was a slow process introducing it to the band. I don’t know any other funk-rock-whatever bands with a cello in them! It’s not an instrument traditionally used this way. Me personally, being onstage—there’s nothing else in my life that’s ever been as satisfying. It’s not like an ego thing, or an attention thing. I think of it more the other way around—like, trying to turn the focus onto the crowd. Just to see people get inspired by what we’re creating, I feel like I’m creating a moment for people. It’s such a satisfying feeling.” —Laura DeFazio www.OFFBEAT.com

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AARON NEVILLE: THE NO-BALLAD PLAYLIST

Five Questions with Joe Lauro, producer-director of The Big Beat: Fats Domino and the Birth of Rock ’n’ Roll

E Photo: haydee ellis

SOUNDCHECK

merican Masters is presenting the broadcast premiere of your Fats Domino documentary on February 26, his 88th birthday. Why is the PBS series a good spot for The Big Beat? American Masters is this country’s most serious and focused documentary series. My goal was to give Fats Domino the place in history that he deserves. I can’t do that singlehandedly, but having the film be part of this prestigious series makes people beyond New Orleans look at Fats differently. Everybody in New Orleans gets it, but the rest of the world doesn’t. Also on February 26, Shanachie Entertainment is releasing the film’s 90-minute DVD director’s cut. How different are the two versions? For American Masters, the documentary functions just fine as a 52minute film. I trimmed performances, cut some stuff about Fats’ childhood, but we still tell the story. People who want to see the version I showed at the New Orleans Film Festival in 2014 can get both versions on the DVD. The Big Beat contains footage from a 1962 concert in Juan-lesPins, France. The performance features Domino, his producer and bandleader, Dave Bartholomew, and their great band. You didn’t know this concert footage existed until 2007. What was your reaction upon seeing it for the first time? I had been thinking about making a film about Fats for some time. But it didn’t take long to realize that there wasn’t enough vintage film on Fats. If you wanted the ’70s and later, no problem. But everybody had seen that stuff. So when the French National Archives material turned up, I couldn’t believe it. There’s the original band at its peak. Unlike many music films, the Domino documentary features interviews with his local musician peers but no stars such Robert Plant or Keith Richards. Why did you go the non-star route? Trying to get stars is an art unto itself. If I had felt it was necessary, I would have pursued them. But why is Keith Richards’ perception better than somebody who was Fats’ contemporary or neighbor in the 9th Ward? What was the experience of having Domino attend the world premiere of The Big Beat in 2014 in New Orleans? I didn’t expect it. Fats hadn’t been seen in public in a long time. But right in the front row, there was Fats, Dave and Dr. John sitting between them. After the film was over, I said, “I don’t care if the critics hate it. If you guys think I did a good job, I don’t need anything else.” And they did like it. It was a great moment for me. —John Wirt

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verybody knows that Aaron Neville sings a ballad like nobody else, but some casual fans think that’s all he ever does. The rock ’n’ roll and funk tracks are a little rarer in his catalogue, yet those include some of his finest work. To celebrate his 75th birthday on January 24, we present an Aaron Neville playlist without a single slow dance on it. “Hercules”: Have to put this mid-’70s funk masterpiece up top, as everything about the record is perfect: George Porter, Jr.’s bass riff, the Meters’ coiled-up-tight playing, the streetwise sentiments of Allen Toussaint’s lyric, Neville’s intuitive vocal. Quite simply a contender for the single greatest New Orleans R&B record. “Over You”: Neville’s very first record is a long way from his later romantic image. In this fierce rocker, he tells his love just what’ll happen if she ever strays: “Dig a hole about six feet deep… Into a pine box and down you go.” How does he feel about these socially incorrect statements nowadays? The answer perhaps is that he never plays the song anymore. “Humdinger”: Perhaps the silliest thing Aaron ever recorded, and that’s a compliment; turning one old joke (“You take a bumblebee and match him with a doorbell, and what you got? Humdinger!”) into novelty gold. “I’m Waiting at the Station”: Another early classic, this sounds like a jubilant rocker until the sad surprise turn at the end, when she doesn’t come home after all. Extra points for the baritone sax that puts the capper on every verse. “Space Man”: Doo-wop influence meets freaky late-’60s ambience, as Neville recounts an afternoon getting high with some little green men. Surprisingly, this out-there gem was on the follow-up single to “Tell It Like It Is.” “Mojo Hannah”: Aaron gets into the voodoo realm on this track, with more stellar Meters backup and an infectious call/response chorus. Brother Art recorded a separate and equally solid version around the same time. One of the few older deep tracks that he still sings live on occasion. “The Roadie Song”: Hidden on the ballad-heavy Grand Tour album was this rocker, really a Neville Brothers track in disguise. Put it on the short list of great roadie songs, right next to Motörhead’s “(We Are) the Road Crew.” “Angola Bound”: Neville drew on his tough early years for this song—originally written as “Jailhouse” in the ’70s, then reworked with Linda Ronstadt on Warm Your Heart. Both versions include the best line: “I got lucky last summer when I got my time/ My buddy got a hundred, I got 99.” “Ain’t That Peculiar”: The production can get a little too slick on Aaron’s latter-day albums. Not the case on this track from his soul tribute album Bring It On Home, where he personalizes the oft-recorded Marvin Gaye number with a funkier slant. He sings mainly in his deeper register, with one perfect jump into falsetto on the last chorus. “Work with Me Annie”: Another out-of-character turn, this raunchy Hank Ballard number is a highlight of his recent returnto-doo-wop album, My True Story. From the “whoo!” at the opening, it’s three minutes of pure joy. —Brett Milano www.OFFBEAT.com

Photo: golden g. richard, III

FRESH

NEW ORLEANS JAZZ & HERITAGE FESTIVAL

Hard Choices

he New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival will bring another stacked lineup to the Fair Grounds for seven days between April 22 and May 1. Now in its 47th year, the iconic event will feature headlining sets from out-of-town stars Stevie Wonder, Neil Young & Promise of the Real, Paul Simon, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Pearl Jam, Steely Dan, Beck, Van Morrison, Nick Jonas and Snoop Dogg. They will be joined by other big names like Elvis Costello & the Imposters, Bonnie Raitt, My Morning Jacket, Tedeschi Trucks Band, Janelle Monae, Gary Clark Jr., Ms. Lauryn Hill, J. Cole and Gov’t Mule. Of course, the usual bevy of Louisiana acts will also be on the bill, including local favorites Irma Thomas, Aaron Neville, Galactic, Anders Osborne, Kermit Ruffins, Terence Blanchard, Preservation Hall Jazz Band, Dumpstaphunk (with Art Neville), Hurray for the Riff Raff and current festival closers Trombone Shorty & Orleans Avenue, among many others. This year’s fest will feature a few newcomers like funk-rock titans the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and hip-hop superstars Snoop Dogg, J. Cole and Flo Rida, while other returning artists will put a special twist on their set. Arlo Guthrie, for instance, will celebrate the 50th anniversary of his anti-war anthem “Alice’s Restaurant” and rockers Los Lobos will perform all of their 1988 album La Pistola y El Corazon. Jazz Fest will also honor past performers—and all-around music legends—Allen Toussaint and B.B. King with separate tribute sets that will feature their respective backing bands. Both groups, the Allen Toussaint Band and the B.B. King Blues Band, will be joined by a number of special guests that have not yet been revealed. There’s no telling who those surprise artists will be, but it’s worth noting that 2016 Jazz Fest performers Paul Simon, Elvis Costello and Boz Scaggs all paid tribute to Toussaint in New Orleans in recent months. With its excellent 2016 lineup, Jazz Fest has once again lived up to its reputation as one the world’s premier festivals. Yet great lineups breed unfortunate scheduling conflicts, and a cursory glance at the day-by-day bills points to a few tough choices on the horizon. Do you see Pearl Jam or Van Morrison? Red Hot Chili Peppers or Herbie Hancock & Wayne Shorter Duo? Tedeschi Trucks Band or Elvis Costello? Only time will tell which way people go, but these are the tough decisions most people don’t mind making. —Sam D’Arcangelo www.OFFBEAT.com

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FRESH

MY PHOTOGRAPHY

Marc Pagani Capturing the crazy of carnival.

hotographer Marc Pagani's first fine art solo show, "Faces of Mardi Gras," is currently on view at the Guy Lyman gallery on Magazine Street. Mostly known for documenting adventure travel around the globe—be it underwater with Cape fur seals in South Africa, from a hillside in the French Alps during Tour de France (he decorates his Treme apartment with various bicycles, when he's not out riding them) or via helicopter over Mount Everest (once his back finally gave out)—Pagani enjoys capturing all the cultural antics as well as the deeply rooted traditions of his home town. "Living in New Orleans, I still feel like I’m in an exotic locale when I’m shooting a second line, or Super Sunday, or Mardi Gras day," he says. "It’s such a pleasure to document the amazing costuming that locals partake in here around carnival." About half of the show consists of Mardi Gras Indian portraits from various tribes, shot one Super Sunday six years ago. Pagani brought along a lighting assistant and a Profoto battery-powered studio strobe—the same lighting he uses at home—making the costumes appear as if they were shot in a studio. The rest of the images were taken either on Mardi Gras day or at one of the various parades around town leading up to the big day throughout the 13 years Pagani has been living in New Orleans. —Elsa Hahne “Faces of Mardi Gras” will be on display at Guy Lyman Fine Art at 3645 Magazine Street until Valentine's Day, February 14. Some proceeds from print sales will benefit the Backstreet Cultural Museum to help it run smoothly and continue educating people about the Mardi Gras Indian traditions.

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Photo: kate gegenheimer

IN MEMORIAM

Jimmy Glickman (1964–2016)

immy Glickman, owner of the New Orleans Music Exchange, passed away in January at the age of 52. Glickman was a mainstay of the New Orleans music scene, responsible for helping many musicians and venues grow. Glickman worked for Uptown Music before he went out on his own with the New Orleans Music Exchange. Glickman was known throughout New Orleans for his generosity and his commitment to the community. He helped many musicians who lacked funds to acquire equipment for their gigs by providing sliding-scale pricing and a generous layaway program. His store was the recipient of 14 OffBeat Best of the Beat Awards for Best Music Store, as well as four additional awards for Best Pro Audio Store. He was also a frequent contributor to the Tipitina’s Foundation’s annual Instruments A Comin’ benefit event, and was supportive of many local musicianoriented non-profits, such as the New Orleans Musicians’ Clinic. “Jimmy was just wonderful and supported us in anything we did,” said Bethany Bultman of the Clinic. “He told me many times, ‘Your money’s no good here. Anything you need, just let me know.’ It’s such a tragedy that he’s gone, as so many people

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depended on him, including the staff at the Music Exchange.” He and International Vintage Guitars owner Steve Staples combined efforts about a year ago when International Vintage Guitars moved its inventory and business operations into the New Orleans Music Exchange building at 3342 Magazine Street. “He was my friend. He helped save my business by offering me space in his store when I was struggling. Even when we were competitors we tried to help each other and got along,” said Staples. “He had a wonderful zany sense of humor and a really sharp business sense. He constantly held out his hand to help others. I liked him a great deal and feel deeply sad about him being gone.” George Porter Jr. wrote on his Facebook page: “Once again New Orleans musicians have lost a great friend and owner of New Orleans Music Exchange music store. The days of the little guy with a neighborhood music store is just about gone here in the city—I think he was the only one. Rest in peace Jimmy Glickman. Uptown will miss you.” Services were held on Sunday, January 17, 2016 at Touro Synagogue. Glickman is survived by two former wives and his children Jonathan and Nicole. —Ed. www.OFFBEAT.com

Photo: demian roberts

IN MEMORIAM

Anthony “Tony” “Oulaboula” Bazley (1934–2015)

“I

consider myself a bebop drummer,” Tony “Oulaboula” Bazley once accurately declared. “In Europe they call me the gumbo drummer—like gumbo, it’s a concoction.” Bazley’s career took him from his hometown of New Orleans to Los Angeles, to Europe, Canada and the Caribbean. A fine drummer, a talented folk artist with an inquisitive personality, Tony Bazley died in Toronto at the age of 81. “He was always the adventurous type,” says trumpeter Richell Ison, who performed with Bazley decades ago at small nightspots like Club 77 and Colt 45. “He was adventurous in his drumming and he didn’t have too many limits.” “He was one of those drummers who came out of Booker T. Washington High School like Edward Blackwell and June Gardner,” notes pianist Ellis Marsalis. At Booker T., Bazley studied with the influential music educator Yvonne Busch. In 1952, Bazley joined the U.S. Air Force and performed with the Special Services Band based in California. Bazley’s time on the West Coast was important to his development, especially his year playing behind legendary saxophonist Eric Dolphy. “That’s where I really learned my jazz,” Bazley declared. He made some significant recordings including guitarist Wes Montgomery’s 1958 album Far Wes, vibraphonist Roy Ayers’ 1963 West Coast Vibes and saxophonist Teddy Edwards’ and keyboardist Les McCann’s 1959 release, It’s About Time. www.OFFBEAT.com

It wasn’t until 1989 that Bazley returned to his hometown. He led his own band and could be heard on jazz sets with the likes of saxophonist Earl Turbinton and pianists Ed Frank and Ellis Marsalis. Bazley was playing with Marsalis when Delfeayo Marsalis first heard him and soon the drummer did some gigs with the trombonist. “His playing was similar to his personality,” Delfeayo says. “He was laid-back and cool but he had a very positive spirit.” Bazley worked with artists outside of modern jazz including saxophonist David Lastie, and on the street with clarinetist Doreen Ketchens. In 1995, the drummer made his first trip to Europe; he also made frequent sojourns to the island of St. Lucia, where he played with saxophonist Luther Francois. “He liked playing kind of out,” remembers Ellis Marsalis of Francois. Canada was also a destination for Bazley, who would often leave New Orleans after Jazz Fest to spend his summers there. “He was well-traveled,” Ellis Marsalis notes, “and I think he enjoyed his life.” Bazley, who played pure, no frills, bebop during his set at the 2008 Jazz Fest, retired as a musician, though he never stopped producing his creative pen-and-ink and watercolor artwork. There’s a consensus among friends and fellow musicians that Bazley simply came up with his nickname, Oulaboula. The handle boasts the rhythm, imagination and amusing nature of the great Tony Bazley himself. —Geraldine Wyckoff FEBRU A RY 2 016

JAM CRUISE

A Festival Junkie’s Dream PHOTOS: JEFFREY DUPUIS

There really is no place like Jam Cruise.

am Cruise is essentially Jazz Fest on a boat. Or maybe it’s Mardi Gras on boat. Or Frenchmen Street on a boat. No matter how you look at it, Jam Cruise is a festival junkie’s dream. It’s a one-of-a-kind event that distills the most enjoyable aspects of the festival experience into one delicious spirit and then dumps barrels of it onto a magnificent cruise ship in the middle of the Caribbean Sea. That Jazz Fest comparison isn’t just superficial. Take one look at the 2016 Jam Cruise lineup and you’ll notice three acts with the strongest possible ties to the Crescent City sitting at the top

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of the bill: Dr. John & the Nite Trippers, Trombone Shorty & Orleans Avenue and Galactic. That’s before you even get to local favorites like Anders Osborne, Dumpstaphunk, Johnny Vidacovich, Leo Nocentelli and Johnny Sansone, or out-of-town Jazz Fest staples like Karl Denson’s Tiny Universe, Lettuce, Soulive and the New Mastersounds. The Mardi Gras comparison is equally appropriate, as a carnival atmosphere pervades the entire boat. Costume-clad, often inebriated revelers scurry from one stage to the next, most of them donning outfits that reflect By Sam D’Arcangelo

a designated nightly theme. One night it was video games (think Mario or Pac-Man) while another night saw hundreds of music lovers dressed to the nines for what can only be described as a Great Gatsby–inspired Jazz Age ball. The party took place aboard the MSC Divina, a massive Italian cruise liner with charming amenities like a water slide, a discotheque, a sparkling atrium and poolside soft serve ice cream machines. The voyage included daylong stops at the underdeveloped Mexican beach town of Costa Maya (a planned stop at nearby Belize City was

cancelled), and the overdeveloped Mexican island of Cozumel, before making its way back to the Port of Miami. Most importantly, the ship featured plenty of music. And damn good music at that. Dumpstaphunk was the first act up, with the funk powerhouse delivering a rousing set on the outdoor pool deck stage as the ship sailed out of American waters. In an unexpected move, the group veered into rootsier territory than their repertoire normally allows when Cris Jacobs and Levon Helm’s daughter Amy Helm joined them for a crowd-pleasing cover of The Band’s “Don’t Do It.” www.OFFBEAT.com

If the collaborative ethos, carnival atmosphere and New Orleans–heavy lineup weren’t enough to remind you of a night out in the Crescent City, then perhaps the cafeteria’s food offerings were able to do the trick. That collaboration ended up being the first of many musical surprises that would take place aboard the MSC Divina. Jam Cruise has developed something of a reputation for its odd artist pairings—the kinds of collaborations that have a way of coming together when you pack a few hundred musicians on a boat for a few days—and this year did not disappoint. Trombone Shorty’s first performance was one of many that lived up to the reputation, with Ivan Neville, James Brown/PFunk trombonist Fred Wesley and percussionist Weedie Braimah joining in for a set that included covers of Louis Armstrong’s “On the Sunny Side of the Street” and The Meters’ “Ain’t No Use.” Galactic also welcomed plenty of guests during their two shows, from Leo Nocentelli, Vernon Reid and Will Bernard to Mike Dillon, Ron Holloway, Skerik, Eric Bloom and more. Even Dr. John’s otherwise run-of-the-mill first set featured an improvisational sit-in from guitar wizard Stanley Jordan, who also showed off his chops during a memorable turn with Snarky Puppy on the cruise’s final night. But the collaborative spirit of Jam Cruise was displayed most prominently in the ship’s Jazz Bar and its Black and White Lounge, where a series of curated late-night jam sessions brought eclectic groups of musicians together for one-off bouts of inspired improvisation. Bernard Purdie, Lettuce’s Eric Bloom and Adam Smirnoff, Dumpstaphunk’s Nick Daniels and the New Mastersounds’ Eddie Roberts were among the hosts for these all-star jams, with each artist inviting a rotating cast of 20 to 30 musicians to join them on stage each night. www.OFFBEAT.com

CRU AM

ISE

Top: Troy "Trombone Shorty" Andrews performs at the main stage. Center: Chris "Shaggy" Davis boils up some seafood. Bottom: Anders Osborne and Johnny Sansone sign posters for fans.

If the collaborative ethos, carnival atmosphere and New Orleans– heavy lineup weren’t enough to remind you of a night out in the Crescent City, then perhaps the cafeteria’s food offerings were able to do the trick. One night’s menu— whipped up by Chris “Shaggy” Davis (a.k.a. the NOLA Crawfish King)—showcased classic Louisiana dishes like jambalaya, cochon poboys and red beans and rice that provided a welcome respite from the standard buffet fare of pizza and hamburgers. That’s not to say that Jam Cruise is all New Orleans, all the time. The boat has plenty of love for the city that care forgot, but it is first and foremost about the music. Whether it’s a Grateful Dead tribute act like Joe Russo’s Almost Dead, electronica-infused outfits like Lotus and Electron or the bluegrass stylings of bands like the Infamous Stringdusters, a wide variety of approaches are on display—as long as they deliver the jams. Yet the MVPs of any Jam Cruise are really the fans. You’d be hard pressed to find a kinder, more fun-loving bunch at any musical event out there, let alone one on the high seas. These folks know how to throw a party, but they’re not the JV squad that one finds stumbling around Bourbon Street on any given Friday night. These are the pros. For most of those on board, concerts aren’t an occasional distraction; they’re a way of life. And for five days each year they flock down south to let the good times sail. O FEBRU A RY 2 016

BEST OF THE BEAT

Stars Within Reach illustration: l. steve williams

The winners at Best of the Beat.

Jon Cleary wins big

he Best of the Beat Awards, honoring Louisiana musicians, were held on January 21 at Generations Hall. Nominees in over 50 categories attended, not only hoping to be recognized for their work in 2015, but to join in the celebration. As our readers may know, the Best of the Beat Awards started as a private party for the Louisiana music community. Although we now sell tickets to the general public, the party is for Louisiana musicians.

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The big winner of the evening was Jon Cleary, who captured four awards: Artist of the Year; Songwriter of the Year (named now for the late, great Allen Toussaint); Song of the Year, for “Boneyard”; and Best Piano/ Keyboardist. Hopefully this will signal Recording Academy members to give a nod to Jon Cleary’s album GoGo Juice, which is nominated for a Grammy award. The evening included performances by Walter

“Wolfman” Washington & the Roadmasters (who took home two awards, Best Blues Artist and Best Guitarist); the Young Fellaz Brass Band; ROAR!; Roddie Romero and the Hub City Allstars; A Tribute to Allen Toussaint featuring Tony Hall, Cyril Neville, Davell Crawford and David Torkanowsky; and Johnny Sketch and the Dirty Notes paying homage to the Radiators; plus an after-party featuring Quickie Mart, Klutch and C-LaB.

Many of the city’s finest restaurants, including Barcadia, Bratz Y’all, Bittersweet Confections, Gumbo Shop, Custom Catering, Dat Dog, Fulton Alley, Creole Cuisine Concepts, Restaurant Rebirth, Praline Connection, Nola Foods & Whoodoo BBQ, The Norwegian Seaman’s Church, Whole Foods, Purloo, Milkfish, Belize, Susan Spicer’s Mondo and Tee-Eva’s served up a grand smorgasbord of Louisiana favorites. Once again, this year’s award trophies were designed by www.OFFBEAT.com

T EA HE B T F O ST BE

Louisiana glass artist Ginger Kelly. Ginger is a glass-blower and giftware designer. The Best of the Beat Awards are presented by the OffBeat Music and Cultural Arts Foundation. The Foundation was developed to create opportunities that support Louisiana artists in leading sustainable creative lives. The OffBeat Music and Cultural Arts Foundation merges education, advocacy, community engagement and creative collaboration to foster and uplift Louisiana music, arts and culture. Without further ado…

MUSIC AWARDS Artist of the Year Jon Cleary Album of the Year Galactic: Into the Deep (Provogue) Best Emerging Artist New Breed Brass Band Song of the Year “Boneyard” by Jon Cleary Best Blues Performer Walter “Wolfman” Washington Best Blues Album Sonny Landreth: Bound by the Blues (Provogue) Best R&B/Funk Artist George Porter Jr. Best R&B/Funk Album George Porter Jr.: It’s Time to Funk (Independent) Best Rock Artist The Revivalists Best Rock Album The Revivalists: Men Amongst Mountains (Wind-up) Best Rap/Hip-Hop Artist Dee-1 Best Rap/Hip-Hop Album/ Mixtape Lil Wayne: Sorry 4 The Wait 2 (Be Music) Best Bounce Artist Big Freedia Best Traditional Jazz Artist Kermit Ruffins www.OFFBEAT.com

Best Traditional Jazz Album Kermit Ruffins & the Barbecue Swingers: #imsoneworleans (Basin Street Records) Best Contemporary Jazz Artist Terence Blanchard Best Contemporary Jazz Album Terence Blanchard: Breathless (Blue Note) Best Brass Band Rebirth Brass Band Best Cajun Artist Steve Riley Best Cajun Album Steve Riley & the Mamou Playboys: Voyageurs (Independent) Best Zydeco Artist Dwayne Dopsie and the Zydeco Hellraisers Best Zydeco Album Dwayne Dopsie and the Zydeco Hellraisers: Calling Your Name (Sound of New Orleans) Best Roots Rock Artist Papa Mali Best Roots Rock Album Papa Mali: Music Is Love (429 Records) Best Country/Folk/SingerSongwriter Artist Kristin Diable Best Country/Folk/SingerSongwriter Album Kristin Diable: Create Your Own Mythology (Speakeasy Records / Thirty Tigers) Best Gospel McDonogh #35 High School Gospel Choir Best Cover Band Bucktown All-Stars Allen Toussaint Songwriter of the Year Jon Cleary Best Female Vocalist Susan Cowsill Best Male Vocalist John Boutté Best Bass Player George Porter Jr. FEBRU A RY 2 016

BEST OF THE BEAT Best Guitarist Walter “Wolfman” Washington Best Drummer Stanton Moore Best Saxophonist Donald Harrison Best Clarinetist Dr. Michael White Best Trumpeter Kermit Ruffins Best Trombonist Troy Andrews

Best Tuba/ Sousaphonist Matt Perrine Best Piano/Keyboardist Jon Cleary Best Accordionist Steve Riley Best Violin/Fiddle Player Amanda Shaw Best DJ DJ Soul Sister Best Other Instrument Johnny Sansone (Harmonica)

Best Music Video Jermaine Quiz, Director, for “That’s It!” Lyrics Born featuring the Preservation Hall Jazz Band

MUSIC BUSINESS AWARDS Best Club Chickie Wah Wah Best Radio Station WWNO

Best Large Festival French Quarter Festival Best Festival Outside New Orleans Bogalusa Blues & Heritage Festival Best Neighborhood Festival Bayou Boogaloo Best Recording Studio The Parlor Recording Studio Record Label of the Year Louisiana Red Hot Records Producer of the Year Eric Heigle Best Record Store Louisiana Music Factory Best Instrument Store C & M Music Centers Best Studio Sound Engineer Chris Finney Best Booking Agency White Oak Best Manager Adam Shipley (Hep Cat Entertainment) Best Music Attorney Ashlye M. Keaton Best Club Owner or Manager Dale Triguero, Chickie Wah Wah Best Concert Promoter Scott Aiges, New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation Bourbon Street Award Earl Bernhardt and Pam Fortner (Tropical Isle) Musician Resource Award Tipitina’s Music Office Co-Op Best Use of Music or Musician in Local Advertising City Park and Peter A. Mayer Advertising for “#iheartcitypark” Music Business of the Year Center Staging Community Music Award Trombone Shorty Foundation

LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARDS Lifetime Achievement in Music The Radiators Heartbeat Award Catherine Lasperches, New Orleans Musicians Clinic (NOMC) Lifetime Achievement in Music Business Roland and Mary Von Kurnatowski Lifetime Achievement in Music Education Germaine Bazzle

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www.OFFBEAT.com

RONALD LEWIS

Mysteries and Magic

hrough the decades, Ronald Lewis has played numerous roles in the New Orleans—and particularly his Lower Ninth Ward—community. He’s masked Indian and skeleton, second lined out the door with social aid and pleasure clubs, taken photographs, curated his museum, The House of Dance & Feathers, and authored a book of the same name. Though these might seem to be somewhat disparate activities, he sees them as being of “one world” derived from this city’s African-American communities. Lewis’ warm smile is probably almost as renowned as his reputation for his insights into the mysteries and magic of the New Orleans black cultural traditions. Throughout his 30 years of working as a streetcar track repairman with the New Orleans Regional Transit Authority, Lewis, 64, continued to remain socially and politically active in representing his black heritage. These days, he shares his cumulative knowledge by offering tours of his museum that specializes in Mardi Gras Indians, Skull & Bones gangs and social aid and pleasure clubs. First established in 2003 and later resurrected after its demise following Hurricane Katrina, the museum is located in a small building behind his home on Tupelo Street, in, of course, the Lower Ninth Ward. Lewis has been recognized for his endeavors beyond his “across the canal” neighborhood. In 2008 he reigned as the King of the Krewe du Vieux with his wife, Queen Charlotte “Minnie” Hill, who is part of the musical Hill-Lastie-Andrews family, by his side. Lewis has also been a member of the Krewe du Jieux since its formation in 1996. “They gave me the title of the Big Macher [Big Shot] of the krewe,” says Lewis. “I’ve made a few things for them—little umbrellas and

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addiction. You never stop. You might stop making suits but you’re going to find some way to be involved. Now, my thing is telling our story. Why did you leave the Yellow Pocahontas to form the Choctaw Hunters? Me and Edgar Jacobs Jr. formed the Choctaw Hunters in 1990. Our Big Chief is Edgar. I was a spyboy but that was temporary because I started masking my son, Richard “Fat” Lewis. He had the title of gang flag with the gang. At the time down here [in the Lower 9th Ward] they had Rudy with the Ninth Ward Hunters and they had the Ninth Ward Flaming Arrows but they slowed down some so we sort of filled the void. We reactivated the tribes in the community. Now you’ve got the Ninth Ward Hunters, you’ve got the Comanches, Red Hawk, the Ninth Ward Navajo Hunters, the Ninth Ward Seminoles and the Choctaw Hunters.

things like that, though I’m more of a consultant.” During Lewis’ lifetime journey in New Orleans’ African-American cultural traditions, he hasn’t wavered in his dedication no matter his role. As the co-founder and president of the Big Nine Social Aid and Pleasure Club for 20 years, his enthusiasm for its annual parade remains as strong as ever. “To me, when you get to the top of that bridge [the St. Claude Avenue Bridge], the most powerful and embracing sight to see is when your whole community is there to greet you.” You have been involved with so many different By Geraldine Wyckoff

organizations in the black community. Which came first? Mardi Gras Indians. That’s my first love. I got involved with the culture when I was about 12 or 13 and I learned to sew from Ricky [Gettridge] who was a spyboy for the Yellow Pocahontas under Chief Tootie Montana. And everything just went on from there. I didn’t mask when I first got involved. I got involved through sewing. Up to today, my passion is seeing a suit made. It doesn’t have to be for me; it’s just the idea of seeing that creativity come to life. Once you get involved in the Mardi Gras Indian culture, you’re always going to be involved—it becomes a part of you. Like I tell people, that’s a cultural

You are presently the President of the Big Nine Social Aid and Pleasure Club. What made you decide to move from the Indian to the parade tradition? It’s one world because we make up that world. From the AfricanAmerican community these events arrive. What we end up doing is at some point cross-culture. So you might say, ‘I’m tired of masking [Indian], I’m going to parade.’ It’s made up of the same community under different titles. Me, Ricky Gettridge, Edgar Jacobs Jr., Peter Alexander, Robert Starks and Artie Anderson [all members of the Choctaw Hunters] formed the Big Nine in 1995. What happened was we were part of the Double Nine Social Aid and Pleasure Club but I didn’t feel they were active enough in doing the [community] outreach. So I www.OFFBEAT.com

photo: elsa hahne

Ronald Lewis’ lifetime journey in New Orleans’ African-American cultural traditions.

RO N AL

D LE

WI S

stayed there a couple of years and started the Big Nine. Having sewed Mardi Gras Indian suits must have helped you in designing and creating items like sashes, umbrellas, baskets and the like for the Big Nine. It truly do. It’s an all-hands experience. So it just transfers over to parade regalia—that’s simple for me. It’s not as in-depth as sitting down with that thread and needle and creating a design and whole [Indian] suit from head to toe. It’s very intense. You get to this time of year, and there are sleepless nights and you’re thinking, ‘Where am I going to find more money and everything else that goes into making a Mardi Gras Indian suit?’ The sewing that I do now is for exhibit at The House of Dance & Feathers. Is walking out the door at the start of the Big Nine’s anniversary parade day similar to taking the street as a Mardi Gras Indian? It’s all connecting with the people. That’s the true experience and the response of the people to what you’re doing. It’s an adrenaline rush. You’re on top of the world. It’s like ‘Look at me—look what I have done.’ That’s a tremendous feeling for you, your friends and family and everyone. I think every Mardi Gras Indian or parader feels that way. For a parader when you walk out the door and you show off those fancy shoes and you’ve got a big cigar in your mouth, it’s ‘Bam, here I am. I’m the Big Macher’—that’s the Jewish term for the Big Shot. I got that from being a part of Krewe du Jieux. That’s another part of my extended family. It seems like coming out with the Black Indians on Carnival Day might be more spiritual in nature. Both of them are spiritual. Before the parade, you have a parade

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photo: kim welsh

It’s an adrenaline rush. You’re on top of the world. It’s like ‘Look at me—look what I have done.’

Ronald Lewis (right) and friend at the Grandstand at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival

banner and you either go to the church or have someone come to the start-up location to bless your parade. You have to understand that the social aid and pleasure club history is derived from the benevolent societies of the African-American church. You’re also a member of the North Side Skull & Bones gang. Since they come out of the Backstreet Cultural Museum in the Treme, that kind of takes you out of your Lower Ninth Ward neighborhood on Mardi Gras. I started with the gang in 2003 under the leadership of the great Al Morris. I asked Al [if I could join], that’s how the tradition goes. If you want to be a part of a Mardi Gras Indian tribe you ask. It’s always been like that. So I was hanging around the Backstreet in 2002 when I was getting ready to retire from the transit system and I said, ‘This looks like fun and it won’t take a lot to do.’ So one day I asked Chief Al if I could join and be his Gatekeeper.

And he said yes and we bonded and came together from there. I’m a people’s person. By being a people’s person I have friends across the city. Being good friends with Sylvester [curator Sylvester Francis] at the Backstreet gave me the opportunity to meet some very interesting people. Is the Gatekeeper a regular position with a bone gang? Did anyone ever hold that position before? It was my idea—to be the one who takes care of the house when the tribe is gone—and Chief Al accepted it. I wasn’t physically sound so being the Gatekeeper compensated for it. I can dance but I can’t dance no long distance. Just like the day of a [Big Nine] parade, I can come out that door and go one or two blocks and then I jump into a convertible. What’s the most fun about being a skeleton? Did Al teach you to build the outfit?

Interaction with the people. I’d be in front of the Backstreet, I’m taking pictures with people and children and everything. That helps you make you enjoy your stay. The whole thing that we do is about the people. I have my visual. That goes back to the involvement with the Mardi Gras Indians. I have my vision and bring it to life. You have also been a photographer. When did that start? I’m the master of the $10 camera. That is my way of documenting what was around me. I think I started sometime in the mid to late 1980s. When I look at a Mardi Gras Indian suit, I know what I’m looking at. Compared to a professional photographer, he’s looking at the beauty of the work but he doesn’t have the inner knowledge of what it took for that person to make that suit. The pictures that I take is like, ‘Wow, that guy really did his homework. I’m going to take his picture.’ O www.OFFBEAT.com

CARNIVAL TALES

Carnival Tales Musicians tell their favorite Mardi Gras stories.

ith Carnival season approaching, we’ve once again asked some musicians to tell us their favorite Mardi Gras stories. The stories we got range from the heartwarming to the fanciful to the downright raunchy; we wouldn’t expect anything else. And all are, of course, absolutely true—but then, who can really tell at this time of year?

INGRID LUCIA

illustration: monica kelly

“11 a.m. Mardi Gras day. I’m parked in Bywater for the long walk to Frenchmen Street with my mom, ex-husband and my three-year-old daughter, all dressed in honor of Frida Kahlo. On an industrial, elevated, exposed large sunlit concrete slab attached to the warehouse by the railroad tracks, were two young beautiful utterly naked bodies making the most beautiful love like a stage set. She had long hair and he was handsome and passionate on top of her fucking. They were oblivious to the world. I was awed at the beauty of vicariously watching them be so raw, and horrified for my daughter’s memory bank to protect. I hope they remembered to restrain for Ash Wednesday.”

Carlo Nuccio

“The one that always sticks in my mind is a drug-laced tale; at least it was on my part. At the little house I used to have on Conti, it was known that I would take in friends and friends of friends. The one that sticks in my mind is Lester—just Lester, because I’ll never remember his last name. He just knocks on my door one day and said he was a friend of Matt Piucci’s, who I’d been playing with in Rain Parade, and that Matt had told him he could stay there through Mardi Gras. Turned out that Lester was the first Deadhead that I ever got close

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to. One thing leads to another and he pulls out a sheet of acid. We got blasted to the brains, and ended up in my father’s bar on Bourbon Street. We stopped at Acme Oyster House first, and wound up with these oysters that we carried back to the bar, just holding them in our hands. I hadn’t realized that there are some things you just don’t do when you’re on LSD and you’re from somewhere else, and eating oysters is one of them. So I look at Lester and he’s walking around By Brett Milano

to my left, and around to my right, and just getting this look of horror—his LSD mind just couldn’t comprehend the idea of eating raw things out of a shell. So finally he said, ‘Look, what if we just split one?’ And I said, ‘Man, you don’t want me cutting into that thing and you seeing what’s inside.’ So that’s not something that happens in most peoples’ lives—a Deadhead wanting to split an oyster with you. I was in the car with Dayna Kurtz the other night and she said, ‘This year I’m going to be a local and do

Mardi Gras right.’ And I had to tell her that’s an unachievable goal— you never do it right. The problem with a three-ring circus is that your attention is always focused somewhere, and Mardi Gras is like a 75-ring circus. So it’s like Jimmy Ford says: ‘You always get it right next year.’”

Marc Stone “One of my more interesting Mardi Gras experiences was actually on the road. I was out with Terrance Simien in Park City, Utah for Mardi Gras 2002. www.OFFBEAT.com

ES AL AL T V I RN CA

“The noise of retching is as ubiquitous as any other sound during Mardi Gras."

It was while the 2002 Olympics were going on and of course a few months after 9/11. The town was completely flooded with people from the Olympics but also under lockdown. An intense atmosphere and everything was closed in the evenings except one all-night bar. It felt like a nice chill hideaway, the one place that was open all night. So I stayed there all night, and I knew I wasn’t going anywhere in the morning—I had been given a free ticket to see Picabo Street blast downhill, but there was no transportation. So there I was stuck and tired, and I went back to our condo house. I was sleeping in an upstairs loft and a couple hours after I crashed out, smoke filled the room. I’ve had no sleep, been out all night, the smoke alarm’s going on, and I’m starting to panic—good God, the place is on fire! Turns out Terrance was making a gumbo for Mardi Gras day. The smoke from the room nearly killed me but when I finally woke up a couple hours later I think that gumbo might have saved my life.”

Beth Patterson

“The noise of retching is as ubiquitous as any other sound during Mardi Gras. But I have to say that this was the only time that there were distinctly divine overtones, like a chorus of angels or something. Even the ensuing splatters on the rocks held some sort of holy mystery. It was Mardi Gras of 1994, and I was on a break from my typical 12-hour shifts of playing at O’Flaherty’s Irish Channel Pub. There was no place I could wander to get any real peace, but a short jaunt to the Moonwalk at least held the promise of some peaceful water to stare at, insofar as gazing at the Mississippi could be. And that’s when I saw the nauseated guy crouched on www.OFFBEAT.com

the rocks. He looked as though his toga party had completely deserted him, since he was clad in a flowing white bedsheet. The poor hippie wannabe—with his long hair, beard and sandals— clearly couldn’t deal with the revelry going on around him. I didn’t want to be rude, so I handed him my water bottle. ‘Um, dude... you can use this to rinse out your mouth if you want.’ The man looked up and gave me a weak, watery-eyed smile. Even as he tried to sniff the last of the bile back up his nose, his eyes looked at once so peaceful and so worldweary that I decided I needed to help him out a little bit. ‘I’ll be all right,’ he said at last. ‘Let’s just say that I’ve been through worse. But... those evangelists in Jackson Square make me sick. Seriously. They make me throw up every year.’ As he reached for my water bottle, I noticed his hands. You could have dropped an M&M through the holes in them. I discreetly looked in my purse to see if I had any Neosporin. He told me his name, but I quickly forgot it. It was some name I’d commonly heard whenever I played in Central America. He seemed like a really smart fellow, so I don’t know why he was coming to Mardi Gras every year if the religious nut jobs made him barf all the time. And just like that, he bid me goodbye and wandered off, right across the surface of the river. I felt bad that the guy couldn’t even swim. I swear, some people just can’t handle reality.”

Mark Mullins “Some of my favorite Mardi Gras memories include my dad taking us down to Canal Street to see Bacchus. We lived in the suburbs. I remember

seeing Glen Campbell ride by one year and my dad was a huge fan. That was in ’74 and he had to sneak us in a bar to use a bathroom. In junior high I put together a little traditional Dixieland band with some guys in my middle school, which was John Quincy Adams Middle School in Metairie. I asked the band to give me the numbers of the parade captains, and the first one I called was Anna Marie Soto who led the Krewe of Rhea in Metairie. I was so nervous picking up the phone to dial—those seven numbers, just to say ‘We’d like to know if you’d consider having us play your parade.’ The first question she asked was ‘How old are you and what’s your fee?,’ which was something I wasn’t ready for. There were six of us in the band, I said $75 and she said ‘Consider yourself booked.’ So all of a sudden I got a paying gig for the band; we’re only in middle school and we get to ride in the back of a Cadillac convertible. We only knew three songs, so we just played them, over and over. And during the parade I met a guy named Bruce Hirstius, who was standing there folding his arms and saying, ‘My daughter wanted me to come hear you play, you sounded pretty good. I have a little Dixieland band and you should come see us rehearse.’ So that was my first chance to get a paying gig, then go in and see how the rehearsal process goes and see how people figure out songs and how musicians deal with each other in a respectful way—that all came out of Mardi Gras and Bruce was the same guy who directs the Saints band in the Superdome, and I wound up doing parades with him for many years after that.”

Joe Krown “One year we were playing d.b.a., and this was before Frenchmen Street was the iconic music spot that it is now. There was basically d.b.a., Snug Harbor and Spotted Cat, not much else, and it hadn’t become the spot that all the tourists know about. We had a show there before Katrina, I believe the year was 2000, when there was a blackout during our set. The power went out all over Frenchmen Street and stayed out for about an hour and a half. And as soon as it happened, people spilled out onto the street and started partying. I remember looking out and it looked like Bourbon Street on a Saturday night, which was something you just didn’t see on Frenchmen Street yet. There were so many people in costumes that we hadn’t seen, because we were all in the clubs— people just took the party out into the street. Then the lights came back on and we went back into the set, and everybody went back to what they were doing. Just singing and drinking and carrying on.”

Colin Lake “It has been exactly seven years since I arrived in New Orleans and moved into a shared house on Montegut Street with the one friend that I had made here on a visit the previous spring. What struck me about my first Mardi Gras is the seemingly infinite number of ways that folks celebrate the holiday and the season that leads up to it. There simply is no adequate way to describe the diversity of activity and celebration taking place throughout the city on Mardi Gras Day: the big uptown parades, the Indians at Second and Dryades, the ceaseless Lundi Gras shows, the Bourbon Street Awards, the revelry of St. Anne in the Marigny. FEBRU A RY 2 016

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What also struck me is how eager New Orleanians are to share their Mardi Gras with outsiders and locals alike. I cannot count the number of balconies and galleries, courtyards and front yards that I have found myself on or in, after being graciously invited by someone I met only minutes or hours earlier. There are myriad ways to do and see Mardi Gras, and I am lucky enough to have experienced the holiday from several different angles already. One year I played an afternoon show with the band Cha Wa to a packed audience who just could not get enough... they never stopped dancing so we never took a break. Undoubtedly the longest set I ever played. Another year we stalked the Indians as they emerged from Sportsman’s Corner and then made our way to St. Charles to catch a glimpse of Rex for the first time. But it was my first Mardi Gras that set the baseline for all that followed. My now wife—who was still living in Texas at the time—had come to visit for what would also be her first Mardi Gras. We woke up early to the sounds of horns blowing and the occasional one or two bars of drums beating as band members and costume-clad revelers made their way to gather with the Society of St. Anne. We headed toward the corner of Royal and Kerlerec Streets outside of the R Bar, where we would join the most joyous, colorful gathering of humans I’ve ever witnessed. All the stories, myths and legends that I had heard about, Mardi Gras could not have prepared me for what we had just stumbled upon—and become a part of. This was not mindless

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partying or a drunken caricature of a tradition whose meaning had been long lost. This was pure, palpable, positive energy and we couldn’t get enough.”

Banu Gibson

“Here are my favorites. Playing banjo while riding on top of Rex’s Streetcar float as Tom Saunders with this sousaphone had to duck getting knocked off the float by tree branches from overhead. Marching in the Krewe of Clones in the 1970s where we pushed my three-year-old daughter dressed as Baby Ignatius in a grocery cart as we threw out plastic hot dogs. My husband dressed as Ignatius’ mother. For one of my Mardi Gras costumes the ’80s I had sewn brown satin donuts to a white Grecian flowing frock with a long scarf around my neck. The only person who got who I was is Becky Allen. I went as ‘Isadora Duncan Donuts.’ My musical friends Barry Foulon (banjo) and Danny Rubio (tuba) formed a marching club in the ’70s and dressed as red beans and rice. They called themselves the Krewe of Pharts! Come to think of it, there was one story while I was playing banjo and singing at the old Houlihan’s on Bourbon Street during Mardi Gras. We were performing in the bar/oyster bar area. The group was a quartet with Barry Foulon on banjo, Maynard Chatters on trombone and Neal Tidwell on tuba. A college age girl came in with a friend, collapsed to the floor with her back to the brick wall right next to me and proceeded to throw up all over herself as we played ‘Who’s Sorry Now?’ I even took a picture of her! I must admit no one ordered the oysters for the rest of the night!” O www.OFFBEAT.com

MICHAEL CERVERIS

From Tommy to Piety Michael Cerveris’ grand struggle between theater and music.

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photo: zack smith

ast year, when Michael Cerveris won for Best Actor in a Musical at the Tony Awards, he got up in front of the New York theatrical establishment and began his acceptance speech by saying, “For all my friends in New Orleans: WHO DAT!” It was a signature moment for the 55-year-old actor and musician, who has become a fixture on Broadway but keeps a large portion of his creative life in New Orleans, commuting from his Chelsea apartment to his house in Treme. “I’m glad I had the presence of mind to remember my friends in New Orleans,” laughs Cerveris, who won the award for his role as Bruce Bechdel in Fun Home, the genre-busting musical based on Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel about her family. During his first break from Fun Home, Cerveris was back in New Orleans doing a victory lap with friends. One stop was Kajun’s Pub on St. Claude, the bar owned by New Orleans’ celebrity transsexual, JoAnn Guidos, whose story is central to the Paul Sanchez/ Colman deKay musical adaption of the book Nine Lives. Cerveris played the Guidos part in the original New Orleans performance of the story and the recorded version made at the legendary Piety Street studio under the direction of producer Mark Bingham. Cerveris is currently hot property on Broadway, where his second Tony caps an impressive run of critically acclaimed performances, dating back to the starring role in the Broadway production of Tommy in 1993, and running through featured roles in Titanic (1997); as Giorgio in the 2002 Kennedy Center revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Passion; a Tony-

winning role as John Wilkes Booth in Assassins (2004); the title role in the 2005 revival of Sweeney Todd; the role of Kurt Weill in LoveMusik (2007); and Juan Perón in the 2012 revival of Evita. Though Cerveris is well known for his accomplishments as an actor, many of his fans would be By John Swenson

surprised to find out that he’s a gifted singer/songwriter/guitarist as well. That’s about to change with his new album, Piety. Cerveris was drawn to New Orleans in part because the city allows him to concentrate as much on his music as his theater instincts. He’s always been torn

between the two identities, and New Orleans gives him the best opportunity to indulge them both to the fullest creative ends. Cerveris grew up in Huntington, West Virginia. His mother, Marsha, was a dancer. His father, Michael, was a music professor at the University and also worked www.OFFBEAT.com

MICHAEL CERVERIS

as a community theater director. “When they needed a little kid in a show, I was the little kid,” Cerveris recalls. “At the same time I was starting a rock band, Ukiah, and playing baseball and doing what everybody else was doing. This was ’72, ’73, we were playing Kiss, BTO, Deep Purple, blues metal stuff. I was playing guitar.” Cerveris went on to study theater at the Phillips Exeter Academy and Yale University and managed to combine his interests in acting and music for the first time when he was cast in the TV series Fame. During that time he hung out on the Los Angeles music scene while acting in various productions. “I auditioned for a role at the La Jolla in a musical based on The Who’s Tommy. I went out there with my guitar and played ‘Young Americans,’ not even knowing what role I was auditioning for. I got called back a couple of times and got the role as Tommy. There was no script and it wasn’t until I got down there and I did the readthrough and started singing some parts that I realized it was going to be historic. The irony was having spent my teenage years and my 20s having parallel lives as an actor and a rock kid, all of a sudden there was an opening for someone who was passionate about both things. “After we did Tommy at La Jolla I had to re-audition for the Broadway part. I had just been really sick and I lost my voice during the audition. By the time it came to ‘Sensation’ it was my worst nightmare, I was just blowing it. Later we were talking and Pete Townshend started saying ‘I want you to come over to London and see my studio, and the places where we played our first shows, introduce you to some of the kids that I grew up with, I just want you to have a real sense www.OFFBEAT.com

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“Part of the experience of going down to New Orleans was realizing that growing up in West Virginia, the country music of Appalachia found its way inside of me...”

of my childhood and my early days with The Who.’ Then finally he says, ‘I just think it’s great that we saw a couple of thousand people for this show and we’re going to give the role of Tommy to the guy who did the absolute worst audition.’ That’s when I realized I had the job. So I went to London and Pete told me, ‘I can’t teach you how to act but I can teach you how to be a rock ‘n’ roll star.’ I had to feel some sense of ownership and some right to stand up there and sing these songs. We went to the studio and he had just completed the rough mixes for the Psychoderelict album. He sat me down at the console and told me to listen to the songs and write down my thoughts on a pad and paper. Here I was I was sitting in Pete Townshend’s writing studio listening to Pete Townshend’s rough mixes and taking notes.” After finishing his run with Tommy on Broadway, Cerveris took the role to Germany before returning to New York, where he got the role in Titanic. Meanwhile he’d become friends with Bob Mould, and decided to take an offer to tour with Mould’s band. Cerveris is on the live recording BobMouldBand:LiveDog98. “I gave notice to Titanic that I was gonna quit to do this rock tour,” he explained, “which really confused my agents.” Before going out with Mould, Cerveris did something even stranger, taking over the lead role in the original Hedwig and the Angry Inch from creator John Cameron Mitchell. “I’d gone to see John doing Hedwig when he first started doing it,” said Cerveris. “At that time it seemed like he would be the only Hedwig. I was a huge fan and I saw it a bunch of times. Here it all is, a great rock band playing

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stand-alone rock songs but with a great story. “John was exhausted and he wanted to take a month off and he asked me to do it. I simultaneously said yes and felt sick to my stomach. So I left Titanic to go to this hole in the wall theater, did Hedwig for a month, went on tour with Bob for a month, then came back and John was ready to be done with it so I did it for another nine months here, then in London. “For me it was another opportunity to marry these two roles of mine and now for the second time I found my way to a real crossroads of rock and theater. I started hanging out with and going to see drag acts. I started to understand what a weirdly empowering thing it is, crossdressing, it’s like wearing a suit of armor. On New Year’s Eve 2000 going into 2001 Hedwig was the opening act for Boy George at Radio City Music Hall. People didn’t really know who we were. We were just some weird tranny glam band. You can really hear hecklers in Radio City and there were all these people shouting stuff at the beginning. If it had been me in my band I would have just shriveled and crawled off the stage, but I was Hedwig so I had all these witty comebacks for everything. I was running up and down the aisles. We owned the place and got a big ovation at the end.” Cerveris eventually returned to Broadway, but found another way to integrate his two lives in New Orleans. During a film shoot in 2007, Cerveris saw Paul Sanchez perform at the House of Blues and became a fan. He went down to d.b.a. and sat in with Paul. They became friends, and when Paul was working on the song cycle

for Nine Lives he asked Cerveris if he’d like to play a role. “Before you say yes,” Cerveris recalls Sanchez saying, “you need to know that the character began life as John Guidos and had an operation and now is JoAnn.” I said, “You may not be aware of my history performing in dresses but trust me when I tell you this is not going to be a problem for me. “Paul played me some demos and even in his demos I could hear the theatricality of his writing. When I had seen him what struck me was the storytelling, characterdriven aspect of his songs, so I could see a theatrical heart there.” Piety came directly out of the Nine Lives sessions. “Mark Bingham asked me if I wanted to make a record. I sent him some of the things I’d recorded, some of my demos. He picked a bunch of songs and said ‘Let’s forget all the other versions and start fresh.’ So he and Paul and I sat down and did three guitar demos of the things. We listened to those for a while and Mark brought Jimbo Walsh in to do some string arrangements. He wanted it be largely acoustic and he wanted to fill it with strings, and that sounded kind of interesting. It was the first time I’ve allowed a producer to make a lot of those decisions and that was really fun for me.” Cerveris brought in Kimberly Kaye, his creative partner and colead singer in the alt-country band Loose Cattle, to sing background vocals. “The songs cover a long period. The oldest song, ‘Tenth Grade,’ I wrote in Los Angeles in the ‘80s. Some of them were written during the sessions so it covers a wide period of my songwriting development. We did a lot of dramaturgy during preparations for

Tommy and read from your book about the Who (Headliners: The Who by John Swenson, Ace,1979) and I learned a lot of stuff I didn’t know before about the origins of rock ’n’ roll. Nobody thought about having a career in rock ’n’ roll because there was no such thing. You did singles and then you did an album, which was separate from the singles. I think I inherited that idea of an album being a like a document, the experience of the people who are involved in it and the time you spend doing it together. And so the record took its own shape, reflecting Mark’s interests at the time, and my own rediscovery of my youth. Part of the experience of going down to New Orleans was realizing that growing up in West Virginia, the country music of Appalachia found its way inside of me and it became a reminder of how much time as a teenager I spent listening to what’s now called Americana. That’s what I was thinking going into it and that was translated through Mark’s thing and I started doing that instinctively because I’d grown up listening to Leonard Cohen and Dan Fogelberg. So it became like my ’70s album.” The result of this effort is a remarkable record that offers a grace note to the end of an era of New Orleans music (see review in this issue) and the debut of a local artist who seems destined to become a major player in the city’s cultural reawakening. The grand struggle between theater and music in Cerveris’ creative life now seems completely resolved. “When I look backwards,” he concludes, “I can trace the pathway from one thing to another, but at the time looking forward I could never see any of it. Looking backward it all makes sense.” O www.OFFBEAT.com

New Orleans' unique carnival traditions. By John Swenson and Frank Etheridge Photography by Elsa Hahne

Mardi Gras coming and it won’t be long!!! Dead Man walking gonna sing his song. I don’t wear no feathers. I ain’t got no crown. I’m Big Chief Bone Man from the hole in the ground… —Bruce “Sunpie” Barnes

ll across New Orleans, from the barrooms of Mid-City to the back rooms of the Lower Ninth Ward, preparations for some of the most colorful Mardi Gras traditions have been underway for months. Though the institutions of the Mardi Gras Indians, Skull & Bones gangs and the Baby Dolls have been steeped in generations of practice, a new wave of New Orleanians who were not born here but have moved to the city over the last three decades have added additional layers of cultural identity to the concept of Mardi Gras masking. Whether they were born to it or drawn to it, though, the maskers and merrymakers of Mardi Gras bring everything they have to bear on this wonderful tradition. The Mardi Gras Indians, groups of African-American men (and more recently, women) masking as Native Americans, date back to the nineteenth century. They mask in Native American “suits” with elaborate beaded designs in honor of the indigenous people of Louisiana who offered help to escaped African slaves. The gangs come from all parts of the city and parade through their neighborhoods on Mardi Gras day, singing and chanting as they walk their routes and interact with other Mardi Gras Indian gangs and the general public. A good place to find Mardi Gras Indians on Fat Tuesday is the corner of Second and Dryades, where many of the gangs stop before returning to the home of the Big Chief for closing ceremonies. Laurita Dollis, Big Queen of the Wild Magnolias, raised her son Gerard “Little Bo” Dollis in the tradition alongside her husband, Big Chief Bo Dollis. Now Laurita is helping to prepare Gerard’s daughter, her 2-year-old grandchild Acerria, for a lifetime as a Mardi Gras Indian. The Skull & Bones gangs wear death masks, ghoulish black skeleton costumes and butcher aprons emblazed with warnings like “You Next” and “The End Is Near,” and carry bloody, nasty, raw bones for emphasis. They knock on the doors of Treme at dawn on Mardi Gras Day to wake people up and remind them of their ultimate fate. Bruce “Sunpie” Barnes, Big Chief of the North Side Skull & Bones gang, offers some insight into what to expect and what not to expect from these bonesmen. The two most likely places to run into them are in front of the Backstreet Cultural Museum early on Mardi Gras morning and the Mother-in-Law Lounge at the end of the day. Musician Margie Perez moved to New Orleans in 2004. Her family roots in Cuba prepared her for the Caribbean culture that sustains New Orleans, and she quickly became an integral part of the music scene and several cultural institutions. Perez has found her Mardi Gras mojo as part of the Red Beans and Rice krewe, which gathers in the Marigny on Lundi Gras, close to her home in the Musicians’ Village. But her most important connection to Carnival begins when the parades end and her recycling-conscious organization, the Arc, begins rescuing beads from their destiny as trash and redistributing them to future Mardi Gras organizations. —John Swenson DECEMBER FEBRU A RY 2 016 015

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“I go out to the spirits in the cemetery. I call the spirits home and I take them with me on Mardi Gras day.” —Bruce “Sunpie” Barnes

Tee-Eva, born Eva Louis Perry in St. John the Baptist Parish, greets a steady stream of customers at Tee-Eva’s Old Fashioned Pies and Pralines. At 81 and retired since 2000, Tee-Eva watches as her granddaughter and niece run the 22-year-old business, now located at 5201 Magazine Street, eight blocks upriver from its original location. Despite her loss of that artistically adorned address—along with all personal mementos—during Katrina, the cozy corner store’s walls are covered in tributes and photos documenting Tee-Eva’s decades of success as a culinary entrepreneur and her passion for being a beautiful Baby Doll. —Frank Etheridge

Bruce “Sunpie” Barnes (North Side Skull & Bones Gang) “I get up early on Mardi Gras day. I’m up at three-thirty a.m. I start up from my house. I go out to the spirits in the cemetery. I call the spirits home and I take them with me on Mardi Gras day. That’s probably what I concentrate on when I go out the door at Carnival. I keep in mind the family spirits, let them have their walk. When I meet the rest of the gang we sing songs to call the spirits together and we go out the door in one spirit, one mindset. There’s usually some people waiting for us. So about five-thirty, six o’clock, I’m out the door. When we come out we sing and we dance and we knock on the doors as well and greet the new Carnival season, greet the world. We are still scary. We represent part of that thing that people remember so we do scare some of them. I got involved with the gang through Albert Morris, who was my Big Chief. He invited me, asked me if I wanted to join the gang with him. I told him I’d think about it. I’d been invited to be a Mardi Gras Indian many times by very good friends but it didn’t seem like it was exactly my thing. I knew people like Donald Harrison Sr., Big Chief of the Guardians of the Flame, the Cheyennes, other Indians, but it wasn’t my thing for whatever reason. The Skull & Bone gang was more what I wanted to do. I joined in 2000. The only Big Chief I’ve known is Al. Big Arthur Regis passed away before I had a chance to meet him. His son is here somewhere in the city. I’ve met some older skeletons who were masking back to the 1930s. A few guys like James Andrews Sr., “Big 12.” Tootie Montana masked as a skeleton, I don’t think he was in the North Side, but he may have been. It was the only big gang downtown that’s been consistent. There’s not that many gangs from that era. There’s people that mask in skeleton suits now. The Redbone Skull & Bone gang, they were masking. There were some uptown, some downtown. I don’t know of any specific rivalries but that’s what happens on the streets of the city. You never know. My approach is we’re not Indians. We’re a Skull & Bone gang. The songs I sing are the ones I created. We use ’em all for the North Side Skull & Bone gang and we might pass them on. They’re songs like ‘Too Late,’ songs about what speeds you to the ultimate demise. What gets you in the ground the fastest. Look at all the gun violence that’s going on right now, in the city and around the world.

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photo: Elsa Hahne

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There were 162 deaths from guns last year in New Orleans. In other cities one or two deaths might be big news but in New Orleans it happens all the time. We were down to three members in 2005. That was one of the things that I wanted to do when I got with Al was to build it back up. At one point it was just the two of us, Al and I. Now it’s up to about 10. It might be more. It does fluctuate. People ask me to join all the time but we don’t take everybody. It’s been an AfricanAmerican male tradition. The gang that I’m in that’s what it’s always been. So I try to leave it as it has been, it’s confusing to young folks but I’m just trying to leave it as it was given to me. If everyone who wanted to do it was part of it there’d probably be a thousand. But I just try to do it in the tradition that was passed along. Of course it’s Carnival; you can do anything you want to with masking, that’s what I believe. That’s the whole idea of masking at Carnival. You can be anything you want to other than your natural self. When people don’t like how it’s done then they go and start one themselves. Do it yourself. That’s the beauty of it. Skeletons and Mardi Gras Indians, they might meet each other and they might roll together on carnival day because they’re in the same neighborhood. We’re only led by the spirit of the day. We don’t have a route. We roam randomly through the streets. I can say we start in the Sixth Ward right there where the old Blandin funeral home is, that’s the Backstreet Cultural Museum now. But when we come out the door we’re going to go in whatever direction the spirit leads us to go. There are some gangs that I’m tight with like Fi Ya Ya, Donald Harrison Jr., his gang. As for Baby Dolls, that started with www.OFFBEAT.com

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me meetin’ Baby Dolls back in 2002 with Antoinette K-Doe, back then every year we would meet down by the Mother-in-Law Lounge. We’d be passing by there and then before you knew it we were walking with the Baby Dolls. So we’d take a stroll up the Avenue to the Claiborne overpass with the Baby Dolls and it became something that people enjoyed I guess. The people will let you know if you’re doing it right. And they’ll sure let you know if you’re doin’ it wrong. So we have fun with that part of it for sure. That’s generally later on in the afternoon. But we wake up people on Mardi Gras morning. We wake ’em up out of bed! That’s part of it. We make so much noise that people get p-d off and mad but it is Carnival Day. I got my fingers crossed about the weather. I’m looking forward to it and I always get up for it. Get them suits and aprons together and I’ll be ready.”

Laurita Dollis and the Wild Magnolias (Mardi Gras Indians) “I’m not from a Mardi Gras Indian family. The only member of my family who was really into Mardi Gras was my grandfather Harold Dejean, who was the leader of the Olympia Brass Band, so I do come from a musical family. My grandfather raised me. He bought me a clarinet when I was in elementary school. I was in the school band. So I always had music around me. Then band members would come over to our house and practice there. When I was a little girl his whole band would be in the front room practicing. On Sunday evenings my grandfather would play at Preservation Hall and he’d take me along and I’d sit there and listen to the band. Bo was my introduction to the Mardi Gras Indians. Back in 1976 I was working at Maison Blanche on Canal Street. A co-worker of mine told me about Indian practice. I didn’t know what that was and he was trying to explain it to me. So I mentioned it to a girl friend of mine and she said ‘Let’s go see what it’s all about.’ So we pulled up in front of the H&R, which was next to where Handa Wanda is now, and there were so many people we didn’t go

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in. But we went back to Second and Dryades the day after Mardi Gras, went to Sportsman’s Corner and Bo and a friend of his was in there. My co-worker was in there and he introduced me to Bo. We were socializing and I think he kind of liked me. He walked me to my car and he said ‘You remember my name?’ and I said ‘Yes, Bo Diddley.’ He said ‘No, Bo Dollis.’ It seemed like he was upset about it. From there he kind of introduced me to Indian culture and what it was all about. I had the completely wrong idea about Indian culture. Bo taught me the spiritual side of it. We had our son, Gerard, and he started masking when he was six years old in 1988. I started to mask Indian in 1990. Even before Gerard started masking we had a truck and he was with me in the truck, and we used to follow Bo like that. When Gerard started to mask I still drove the truck. I wanted to only mask for one year, just to experience how it feels to wear an Indian suit. I always helped them all those years to make their Indian suits—I wanted to make one for myself. When I put it on that year it was so spiritually overwhelming that I’ve never stopped since then. I started www.OFFBEAT.com

“This year is a tribute to Big Chief Bo Dollis. He died January 20. I buried him January 30. Right after was Mardi Gras.” —Laurita Dollis getting other women to join the Wild Magnolias and it grew since then. I’ve got seven Queens this year. We have signal practice, we do that on Sundays, we have sewing practice which we do at my house, and we enjoy teaching the songs and what they need to be knowing on Mardi Gras day when they’re on the street with their Indian suits. Acerria will be three on February 26. This will be her third year. She don’t come out on St. Joseph’s night but she do come out on Mardi Gras day and on Super Sunday. Her dad, Little Bo (Gerard) makes her costume. She likes to sew. She’ll take a needle and some beads and a canvas board, and she’ll sit there with her dad and don’t stick herself and she’ll do exactly what she sees him doing. I didn’t realize it until I had a grandchild, but culture runs through the bloodline. Just to see her sit there for that amount of time and put that needle through that canvas board, putting those little bitty beads on the needle and then run it through the canvas, it’s amazing. She’ll walk some and we have a wagon that we decorate for her. We can’t carry her because our Indian suits will scratch her. It’s definitely in her. She remembers her grandpa, Big Chief Bo Dollis. She looks at his picture and says, ‘Where’s pawpaw?’ It’s in her bloodline.

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On Mardi Gras day we plan to get up at six o’clock. The whole gang is gonna come over to my house and have breakfast together. We’re going to pray together before we go out on the street, our ritual morning prayer, which is not ‘Indian Red,’ just a prayer to ask God to watch over us while we’re in the street, to protect us and to bring us all back home safe. We plan on leaving the house at eight o’clock and we’ll be at Sportsman’s Bar at Second and Dryades by nine o’clock. That’s our first stop. This year is a tribute to Big Chief Bo Dollis. He died January 20. I buried him January 30. Right after was Mardi Gras. We masked, but it was a hard year to mask. So what we’re doing is the Wild Magnolia gang, we’re all wearing black, as a tribute to him, and everybody that’s with the Wild Magnolias is wearing some part of him on their Indian suit. Acerria is totally aware of Bo Dollis. I don’t think she’s aware that he’s not with us. I think she just thinks he’s not here, that he’s at the hospital maybe, or that he just hasn’t come home yet. When he first died she used to go to the room that he used to sleep in and she’d ask for him. Now she looks at his pictures but she’s not going into that room looking for him. Years from now she can look back on this and say, ‘Oh, this is what I did!’ Her dad, Little Bo, was always around Indians because of his

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“Last year there was a sub theme: Follow the Yellow Bean Road. I was Dorothy. I used red beans with glitter...” —Margie Perez

dad. He started masking when he was six years old, but she’s involved even younger than that. And she’s able to handle it, that’s why I’m saying it’s embedded in her, because when she be around Indians she don’t cry. When she’s out among the crowd on Mardi Gras and Super Sunday she don’t cry. When the music starts playing she starts dancing. No fear of it at all. It’s in her soul and she’s going to grow up with that. Even if she grow up and don’t put on an Indian suit, don’t do what we doing, it’s still a comfort to me because she has a legacy she can look back on. What her grandfather was about, and the man that he was, that’s embedded in her. It fills me to see the things that she do, the things

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that she say, the facial expressions that remind me of Big Bo. She did something last night with her face that me and Little Bo just started laughing because it looked so much like him. Her eyes, and the way she twists her mouth. It’s him. We truly miss Big Bo. It’s been hard these holidays but we try to get through it and it’s gonna be a beautiful Mardi Gras in his honor. He truly truly loved his grandbaby, Acerria Angel Dollis, and it just makes me so happy that he was able to see her and spend two years with her before he passed.”

Margie Perez (Krewe of Red Beans and Rice) “My first Mardi Gras was in 2005. It was an active day following Zulu, crossing Canal

during the Rex parade, down to Frenchmen, then over to the Backstreet Cultural Museum. It was so magical there at the end of the day. The sun was setting. Victor Harris, the Chief of Fi Yi Yi, he was the last Indian there. There were barely any more people at Backstreet. My friend was really tall and he was wearing a full clown suit with a rainbow wig and he was carrying a trombone. Victor looked over and said ‘Blow man, blow!’ We followed Victor to his house and he served us all hot dogs. I have masked as a Baby Doll and it was a wonderful privilege to be invited to do it. It takes a lot of time. I did it for three years before I hung up my parasol two Mardi Gras ago.

I’m part of the Red Beans krewe and on Lundi Gras we all have our annual parade. This is our eighth year. We use red beans and rice on our suits. We start on Lundi Gras in front of Mardi Gras Zone at Port and Royal at two o’clock. We stop at Buffa’s and the Candlelight and we end at the Backstreet Museum. The Treme Brass Band is always our band and Al ‘Carnival Time’ Johnson is our grand marshal for life. A few years ago Camellia Brand found out about us and asked to sponsor us so all our beans are sponsored by Camellia Brand. Instead of sewing our costumes like the Mardi Gras Indians we use glue guns. Last year there was a sub theme: Follow the Yellow Bean Road. I was Dorothy. I used red beans with glitter,

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COVER STORY glittered up my shoes and used a little stuffed animal to be my Toto. I see a whole different side of Mardi Gras day. I love the parades, the marching bands, the krewes. But the waste of the plastic is terrible. I work for the Arc. We collect beads, sort them throughout the year, then sell them to people riding in parades the following year. I watch the parades but I don’t fight with grandma for the beads. She can catch them and then donate them to the Arc afterwards. We provide a place where people can donate the beads year round.”

Miss Miriam told us how she and her sister would be lonely at home on Mardi Gras day, closed up in the house while everyone was out having fun. They wanted something to do so they started making outfits and becoming Baby Dolls. They came out with their little brother, [the late “Uncle”] Lionel Batiste. He was a Baby Doll, too! The Baby Doll tradition goes way back before our time. Miss Miriam told us they were companions

to the Bone Man [predecessor to today’s Skull & Bones Gangs]. See, the Indians, they have people around them. The Big Chief, he has his spyboy. He’s got his Wild Man. He’s a got a Queen. But the Bone Man, he’s a lone person, out there all by himself. Miss Miriam said she thought it’d be nice if we would be companions now, so we go up and meet Sunpie [Bruce Barnes, leader of North Side Skull & Bones] on Mardi Gras morning.

I don’t know how it all has been labeled from back in the years, but I do know that we do what our parents do. I have three generations of Baby Dolls. It’s a feeling that gets down in your soul, like music. The Baby Dolls, we like to get together and have a good time. Here come the Baby Dolls! Here comes the music and you go out and have fun. It’s fun being a Baby Doll.” O

Tee-Eva (Baby Dolls) “I grew up on a plantation until I was eight years old. The sugar cane, the pecan trees in our front yard, that’s what inspired me to do pralines. That was everyday candy for us as children. After my kids grew up, my marriage of 25 years was getting shabby and I decided to move on and make a better life for myself. When I was living in California, I placed a one-page advertisement in the Valley Times, saying, ‘Creole and Cajun Foods, From My Kitchen to Yours.’ My phone started ringing the next day and hasn’t stopped ringing ever since. I’m part of the Ernie K-Doe Baby Dolls. We’re all professional ladies, each successful with our own business. Miss Antoinette [K-Doe’s widow] started it as a way to keep Ernie alive. We march downtown. We meet up at Kermit Ruffins’ Mother-in-Law Lounge then head to the Backstreet Museum and then meet the Zulu at Orleans and Claiborne and follow them up to their place on Broad Street. When we started out in 2005, we had 25 Baby Dolls. Before we started up, you couldn’t find a Baby Doll anywhere in the city! It had really died out. But now you see Baby Dolls in every neighborhood in town; everybody wants to be a Baby Doll, they’re starting to come out of the woodwork. Miss Miriam Batiste taught us how to be Baby Dolls. She’d sit up with us and tell us how to design the dresses and about the history going all way back to the 1700s. www.OFFBEAT.com

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EATS

photos: Elsa Hahne

Jonathan Shock/Loa

“I

spent some time thinking about the musician I wanted to do this for, and my first inclination—which is always your best one—was Trombone Shorty. He was my first exposure to modern New Orleans music. I was living in Seattle at the time and went to a music festival in Montreal and he played there and was one of my favorite acts. What I really enjoy about his music is that he takes a lot of quintessential New Orleans music, from jazz to rock ’n’ roll to funk, and blends it all together in really interesting ways. I wanted to do the same with my cocktail for him, where I took some of my favorite cocktails and found ways to tie them all together in a way that would actually work. I wanted to take the best parts of a Vieux Carré and a Sidecar—my two favorite classic cocktails. Also,

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I wanted to do something hyperlocal and seasonal and I have Meyer lemons growing in my front yard right now, perfectly ripe. I thought about using satsuma instead of Meyer lemon, but when an ingredient grows in your front yard, you really can’t pass it up. I wanted something full and rich and bright—I also thought of hibiscus— but ultimately I wanted this to be like a real sense-of-place cocktail; I wanted it to taste like New Orleans. While I was formulating and coming up with this drink, my brother-in-law texted and asked me about the Beautiful cocktail, which is equal parts cognac and Grand Marnier, and since my drink happened to have that and one of my favorite Trombone Shorty songs is “Something Beautiful,” that became the name.

By Elsa Hahne

I made this drink for my friend yesterday, and I shook it, because a drink with citrus you’d normally shake, but I couldn’t taste anything but the lemon in it. And it doesn’t even have that much lemon. So I made another version with even less lemon and that then ended up being too sweet. But in the time it took me to make it, my friend and I returned to the first one and were both like, ‘Ah, this is actually really good.’ It’s just that when it’s cold, the lemon dominates. As it sits, the cognac comes out. It was a good exercise in temperature and technique. When I’m off work, I gravitate towards neat spirits and cheap beer. Miller High Life is my go-to. But I always love a daiquiri, so simple and refreshing, yet you never get the same drink twice.”

Something Beautiful 1 ounce Sazerac Rye Whiskey 1 ounce Park Cognac 1 ounce Grand Marnier 1/4 ounce Bénédictine liqueur 1/2 ounce Louisiana cane syrup 1/2 ounce Meyer lemon juice 1 dash Abbott’s bitters Stir with ice. Serve over fresh ice with a lemon twist. www.OFFBEAT.com

FRENCH Café Degas: 3127 Esplanade Ave., 945-5635 La Crepe Nanou: 1410 Robert St., 899-2670

GERMAN Jaeger Haus: 833 Conti, 525-9200

ICE CREAM/CAKE/CANDY Aunt Sally’s Praline Shop’s: 2831 Chartres St., 944-6090 Bittersweet Confections: 725 Magazine St., 523-2626 La Divina Gelateria: 3005 Magazine St., 3422634; 621 St. Peter St., 302-2692 Tee-Eva’s Praline Shop: 4430 Magazine St., 899-8350

INDIAN Nirvana: 4308 Magazine St., 894-9797

AFRICAN Bennachin: 1212 Royal St., 522-1230.

AMERICAN Barcadia: 601 Tchoupitoulas St., 335-1740 Brown Butter Southern Kitchen: 231 N Carrollton Ave., 609-3871 Poppy’s Time Out Sports Bar & Grill: 1 Poydras St., 247-9265 Port of Call: 838 Esplanade Ave., 523-0120 Primitivo: 1800 Oretha Castle Haley Blvd., 881-1775

IRISH The Irish House: 1432 Saint Charles Ave., 595-6755

JAPANESE/KOREAN/SUSHI/THAI

COFFEE HOUSE

LOUISIANA / SOUTHERN

Café du Monde: 800 Decatur St., 525-4544 Morning Call Coffee Stand: 56 Dreyfous Dr., (504) 300-1157, 3325 Severn Ave., Metairie, 885-4068

Fulton Alley: 600 Fulton St., 208-5593 Mondo: 900 Harrison Ave., 224-2633 Praline Connection: 542 Frenchmen St., 943-3934

CREOLE/CAJUN

MEDITERRANEAN

DELI Stein’s Market and Deli: 2207 Magazine St., 527-0771

FINE DINING Bombay Club: 830 Conti St., 586-0972 Broussard’s: 819 Conti St., 581-3866 Commander’s Palace: 1403 Washington Ave.,

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Byblos: 3218 Magazine St., 894-1233 Mona’s Café: 504 Frenchmen St., 949-4115

MEXICAN/CARIBBEAN/SPANISH Barú Bistro & Tapas: 3700 Magazine St., 895-2225 Juan’s Flying Burrito: 2018 Magazine St., 569-0000 El Gato Negro: 81 French Market Place, 525-9846

MUSIC ON THE MENU Banks Street Bar & Grill: 4401 Banks St., 486-0258 Buffa’s: 1001 Esplanade Ave., 949-0038 Chickie Wah Wah: 2828 Canal St., 304-4714 Dmac’s Bar & Grill: 542 S Jefferson Davis Pkwy, 304-5757 Gattuso’s: 435 Huey P Long Ave., Gretna, 368-1114 Hard Rock Café: 125 Bourbon St., 529-5617 House of Blues: 225 Decatur St., 412-8068

PIZZA Midway Pizza: 4725 Freret St., 322-2815 Pizza Delicious: 617 Piety St., 676-8482 Slice Pizzeria: 1513 St. Charles Ave., 525-7437 Theo’s Pizza: 4218 Magazine St., 894-8554; 4024 Canal St., 302-1133; 1212 S Clearview, 733-3803

SEAFOOD Basin Seafood and Spirits: 3222 Magazine St., 302-7391 Crazy Lobster Bar & Grill: 1 Poydras St. 569-3380 LeBayou Restaurant: 208 Bourbon St., 525-4755 Pier 424 Seafood Market: 424 Bourbon St., 309-1574 Royal House Oyster Bar: 441 Royal St., 528-2601

SOUL Praline Connection: 542 Frenchmen St., 943-3934

STEAKHOUSE La Boca: 870 Tchoupitoulas St., 525-8205

VIETNAMESE Namese: 4077 Tulane Ave., 483-8899

WEE HOURS Buffa’s Restaurant & Lounge: 1001 Esplanade Ave., 949-0038 Clover Grill: 900 Bourbon St., 523-0904 Mimi’s in the Marigny: 2601 Royal St., 872-9868

Andrew Wiseman hits the

Adolfo’s: 611 Frenchmen St., 948-3800 Little Vic’s: 719 Toulouse St., 304-1238

The Joint: 701 Mazant St., 949-3232 Whoodoo BBQ: 2660 St Philip St., 230-2070

Cochon: 930 Tchoupitoulas St., 588-2123 Cornet: 700 Bourbon St., 523-1485 Galatoire’s: 209 Bourbon St., 525-2021 Gumbo Shop: 630 St. Peter St., 525-1486 K-Paul’s Louisiana Kitchen: 416 Chartres St., 524-7394 Mulate’s: 201 Julia St., 522-1492 New Orleans Creole Cookery: 508 Toulouse St., 524-9632 Restaurant Rebirth: 857 Fulton St., 522-6863

Biscuits and Buns on Banks: 4337 Banks St., 273-4600 Cake Café: 2440 Chartres St., 943-0010 City Diner: 3116 S I-10 Service Rd E, 8311030; 5708 Citrus Blvd., 309-7614 Cowbell: 8801 Oak St., 298-8689 Dat Dog: 601 Frenchmen St., 309-3362; 5030 Freret St., 899-6883; 3336 Magazine St., 324-2226 Parkway Bakery and Tavern: 538 Hagan Ave., 482-3047 Phil’s Grill: 3020 Severn Ave., Metairie, 324-9080; 1640 Hickory Ave., Harahan, 305-1705 Sammy’s Food Services: 3000 Elysian Fields Ave., 948-7361 Tracey’s: 2604 Magazine St., 897-5413 Ye Olde College Inn: 3000 S. Carrollton Ave., 866-3683

ITALIAN

Chiba: 8312 Oak St., 826-9119 Mikimoto: 3301 S. Carrollton Ave., 488-1881 Seoul Shack: 435 Esplanade Ave., 417-6206 Sukho Thai: 4519 Magazine St., 373-6471; 1913 Royal St., 948-9309 Wasabi: 900 Frenchmen St., 943-9433

BARBECUE

NEIGHBORHOOD JOINTS

Warehouse Grille: 869 Magazine St., 322-2188

[of Guardians of the Flame]

Spot

What did you order today? A vegetarian quesadilla with cheese and vegetables, and rice and beans on the side. It was so nice. What do you like about Casa Borrega? I just love the environment, looking at some of the deities in the background. It just has good energy.

I take it you've been here before? Absolutely. The first time we were a group of percussionists and we played and the owner came out and joined us on guitar and sang Spanish songs. Also, Big Queen Cherice Harrison-Nelson and I have come here for breakfast. I had some oatmeal and they brought condensed milk, which I really enjoyed. Spiritually, for me, food is very important. It can break you down, or help you. Each food has its own energy. That's why I became a Casa Borrega vegetarian 25 years ago. Sometimes I have a 1719 Oretha Castle piece of cake when I'm socializing, and that has Haley Blvd eggs in it. Just once in a while... (504) 427-0654 —Elsa Hahne www.OFFBEAT.com

Photo: ELSA HAHNE

899-8221 Kingfish: 337 Chartres St., 598-5005 Mr. B’s Bistro: 201 Royal St. 523-2078 Restaurant R’evolution: 777 Bienville St., 553-2277

Howlin’ Wolf’s Wolf Den: 907 S. Peters St., 529-5844 Le Bon Temps Roule: 4801 Magazine St., 895-8117 Little Gem Saloon: 445 S. Rampart St., 267-4863 Maison: 508 Frenchmen St., 289-5648 Mid City Lanes Rock ‘N’ Bowl: 4133 S. Carrollton Ave., 482-3133 Palm Court: 1204 Decatur St., 525-0200 Rivershack Tavern: 3449 River Rd., 834-4938 Southport Hall: 200 Monticello Ave., 835-2903 Snug Harbor: 626 Frenchmen St., 949-0696 Three Muses: 536 Frenchmen St., 298-8746

DINING OUT

Black Label Icehouse Damian Brugger first gained notoriety for his barbecue during a pop-up stint at Barrel Proof. But the Texas native’s barbecue roots are firmly planted in the southeastern and central areas of his home state, where his low and slow education began at the side of his father and other family members during whatever occasion justified firing up the pit. After graduating high school and serving four years in the Marine Corps, Brugger moved to New Orleans. He eventually grew his hobby into a small business, and the success of his tenure at Barrel Proof was the catalyst for opening his own brick and mortar shop this past fall. True to his Texan roots, Brugger’s best work is tasted in the slow-smoked brisket, which displays a penetrating smoke ring encased in a crust bark aggressively seasoned with black pepper. The Cowboy from Hell combines slices of brisket, raw onion and pickled jalapeños (aptly named Wicked Pickles) all on Bunny Bread Texas toast. Brisket is available by the pound, as is the

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tender pulled pork, otherwise paired with cole slaw in sandwich form in the Old Dixie. St. Louisstyle pork ribs are served either dry with rub or wet with a basting of pork fat. Flintstone-sized beef ribs, rarely seen on menus in the city, are a complete meal on a single bone. All meats and sandwiches are served with a side of the house Black Label Barrel Sauce, a tomato and vinegar elixir flecked with black pepper that packs a sweet and spicy kick. Complementing the standard barbecue fare is a short list of barbecue-influenced bar snacks, including smoked chicken wings and When Pigs Fly Fries tossed in smoked Himalayan salt and black pepper. Crack Poppers are strips of jalapeño smeared with cream cheese, wrapped in candied bacon and smoked. Black Label Icehouse is situated at the corner of Dryades Street and Seventh Street in a lowslung building that’s long been a watering hole for its surrounding Central City neighborhood. The main room is anchored by a 30-foot bar with more than a dozen taps pouring Louisiana, Mississippi and (of course) Texas craft beers. In true pitmaster form, Brugger personally oversees all aspects of the barbecue, with a full menu served only Thursday through Sunday. Other nights feature pop-up dinners and specials such as Frito pies made with

Photo: renee bienvenu

EATS

brisket chili and the weekly rib-eye special every Wednesday. Just three blocks from the Uptown parade route, expect the curbside pit to be smoking non-stop during Carnival season. Even a Texan knows that it’s easy to catch beads in one hand while holding a rib in the other. —Peter Thriffiley 3000 Dryades Street; (504) 875-2876; Mon– Fri: 4p-’til, Sat-Sun: 11a-’til; blacklabelbbq.com

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REVIEWS

Reviews When submitting CDs for consideration, please send two copies to OffBeat Reviews, 421 Frenchmen Street, Suite 200, New Orleans, LA 70116

CDs reviewed are available now at 421 Frenchmen Street in the Marigny 504-586-1094 or online at LouisianaMusicFactory.com

Powerful, Expressive and Seductive

Meschiya Lake and the Little Big Horns Bad Kids Club (Independent) Before the critics and marketers started using the term rock ’n’ roll (the phrase itself goes back to the earliest days of vernacular music), what was rock ’n’ roll? Just like there was gravity before Isaac Newton defined it, what was rock ’n’ roll before it was defined? What was the music of gleeful rebellion and celebration of vice and good times? A lot of times it sounded like Bad Kids Club, the excellent new record by Meschiya Lake and the Little Big Horns. This is party, dancing music (instead of song lengths on the CD, it comes with beats per minute ratings so dancers know whether to step it fast or grind it slow), with the right amount of sauce, slink, sleaze and desperation. The band carries on with a careless, fun attitude and a bluesy swing. There are odes to reefer, Scotch, Peruvian snuff and other good time themes. Lake, one of the most powerful, expressive and seductive singers working today, is at her best. She’s precise and exacting in the way she hits the notes and the emotion and attitude behind them. She’s as believable trying to find a man on “Woman Seeking Man” or sassing a woman trying to take hers on “You Ain’t Woman Enough.”

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And finally the band has gotten the tour de force performance of Bessie Smith’s “L’Ectric Chair Blues” on wax. Both Lake and band build a serious, simmering beat on this before leaving it all in the studio by the end. With that cut and the many other fantastic songs on Bad Kids Club, Meschiya Lake and the Little Big Horns show how they are hitting their prime and leaving 99 percent of the swing and traditional bands currently out there drinking the dregs from their drained lowball glasses. —David Kunian

Michael Cerveris Piety (Low Heat Records) Producer Mark Bingham shuttered the Piety Street studio two and a half years ago, long enough to reflect on the range and breadth of music that was made there, the most important New Orleans recording studio of its era, and one that ranks in history with the remarkable body of work that emerged from Allen Toussaint’s SeaSaint and from Cosimo Matassa’s J&M before that. The recordings made at Piety—from Morning 40 Federation’s Ticonderoga to The Voice of the Wetlands All-Stars, Bingham’s own What If William Blake Had Gone to New Orleans?, Dr. John’s N’Awlinz Dis, Dat, or D’Udda, Allen Toussaint and Elvis Costello’s The River in Reverse and essential records by Brother Tyrone, Bonerama, Dr. Michael White, Rob Wagner, Happy Talk Band, James Blood Ulmer, Jon Scofield, Kermit Ruffins, James Singleton, Helen Gillet, Nicholas Payton, OK Go, Alex McMurray, The Iguanas, Marianne Faithfull, Dirty Dozen Brass Band, Coco Robicheaux, Ray Davies and

many more—document an entire era of New Orleans music, the time beginning with the emergence of a new idea of the city’s music and culture in the new millennium and the destruction and rebirth of that culture following the inundation of 2005. Every time I think the legacy of Piety Street has been capped, another record made in its final days emerges to remind me of the significance of the work Bingham did there. Piety, the remarkable album that introduces actor Michael Cerveris as a New Orleans recording artist, may well be the final release of importance to emerge from the studio. Cerveris chose his time for the drop carefully, tweaking the package with help from former Piety Street manager and visual artist Shawn Hall. Bingham himself lingered on the production with the touch of an artist who doesn’t want to part with his creation. The breathtaking product reminds me of classic recordings by Leonard Cohen and Nick Drake, dreamscapes illuminated by whispered accompaniment from fallen angels in a choir of lost hope and defiant acceptance. Images of light suffuse the album, which is full of references to the sun, both shining and occluded, and the light of human energy as it waxes and wanes. The songs cover the range of Cerveris’ writing career, from the 1980s, when he played a British rocker on Fame and wrote the high-school reminiscence “Tenth Grade,” to the recent rediscovery of his rural American roots in New Orleans, where the inspired “Evangeline” was written. Like the great actor he is, Cerveris has a genius for working with others, knowing when to surrender control to his compatriots in a

project. Bingham’s greatest strength is that he is as much of a musician as a producer, so when he becomes involved with a project he helps shape the contours of the creation’s concept and often plays on it as well. Cerveris has been on several records before, including his own first solo album, a live recording of his alt-country outfit Loose Cattle, a live album with Bob Mould and various soundtracks, including Nine Lives. His collaboration on the latter with Bingham and songwriter Paul Sanchez led directly to Piety, which began with Cerveris, Sanchez and Bingham playing the songs on acoustic guitar and gradually filling out the contours of the record with a host of New Orleans musicians. Sanchez even co-wrote one of the songs on the album with Cerveris, “Lost in New Amsterdam.” Anders Osborne plays a beautiful slide part at the start of the album’s first song, “How Many Times,” which has a textured, Beatlesque glory, and a poignant Shamarr Allen trumpet solo. Allen also adds a memorable, almost “Penny Lane”like solo to the brooding “Better.” The lighthearted “Tenth Grade” gets a sprightly guitar solo from Alex McMurray. Kimberly Kaye, who partners with Cerveris in Loose Cattle, adds gorgeous backing vocals along with Kendall Meade. Bassist Dave Anderson, drummer www.OFFBEAT.com

REVIEWS Eric Bolivar, multi-instrumentalists Rod Hodges, Karal Winton and several others make contributions, but the album’s unifying element is provided by Jimbo Walsh, who wrote great string arrangements for these pieces, and Matt Rhody, Helen Gillet and Jack and Sam Craft, who perform those arrangements brilliantly. The album closes with the anthemic “Phoenix,” one of several songs about New Orleans after the flood. Steve Gleason, the Saints player whose fight against ALS has been part of the mythology of postKatrina New Orleans, was at the point where he was barely able to speak as he recited the last line on the record: “Rise up/ Wise up/ Rise and shine.” As inspirational as that moment is, especially taken together with its companion piece, “Crescent,” the one song I keep coming back to is

“Evangeline,” a beautiful melody with an unforgettable chorus. The song’s heartbreaking sentiment is carried along on the singer’s voice, a sepulchral banjo accompaniment from Al Tharp, and Linzay Young’s haunting violin solo. Cerveris recasts this quintessential American story of oceanic displacement, religious persecution and the never-ending search for identity in the New World as a fairy tale whose agonizing history is quieted by the fabulous image of the lost lovers reunited as the Mississippi and Atchafalaya rivers and the delta they create together. The haunting chorus is underpinned by the most moving of Walsh’s string arrangements: “Evie, leave the light on/ I’ll be back to make you mine/ Evie leave the light on/ My Evangeline.” —John Swenson

A More Perfect World Confetti Park Players We’re Going to Confetti Park (Independent) Often childrens’ records suffer from two problems: They are either too cute and cloying or too hip. This new kids’ record from the Confetti Park Players and director Katy Hobgood Ray mostly maintains a good balance between the two. Lyrically it is earnest and easy to sing along with. Musically it is simple enough for children to follow. What stands out on this record is Ray’s pretty voice supervising the children’s chorus, the Confetti Park Players, who handles their singing with a great combination of enthusiasm and skill. The songs are all originals with New Orleans subjects. They serve well both to educate kids about New Orleans history, characters and traditions while joining in with the record. There are great songs that caution about not following the Feufollet, chasing the Roman Candy Man and deciding which snowball flavors to try. Of course, a New Orleans–based kids’ compilation is not complete without a dose of the Okra Man, who sings on the track with his name. These songs are marches, waltzes and ballads with modern touches like the easy going hip-hop of “Choctaw Choo Choo” and the second line chant perfect for hand jive, jump rope or hopscotch of “The Clapping Song.” Ray culled musicians from the best New Orleans has to offer, including baritone saxophonist Roger Lewis, drummer Johnny Vidacovich, sousaphonist Matt Perrine, keyboardist Brian Coogan, and clarinetist Evan Christopher. Greg Schatz (whose songs sometimes sound like kids’ songs for grownups) contributes a track. But forget about what I think. My kids were singing along by the second time they heard this CD, with their favorites being both odes to pirates. So the kids will like it and the adults will not get sick of it. In that, the existence of the Confetti Park Players’ new CD makes this a more perfect world. —David Kunian www.OFFBEAT.com

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REVIEWS proclaimed “Wandering Jew” is at least keeping one house in the home of acid jazz. —Robert Fontenot

Tyler Kinchen & the Right Pieces Acoustic Disdrometer (Independent)

Seth Hitsky and Black Dragons Rain all Day (Independent) Even for a twenty-first century NOLA transplant, Seth Hitsky took a strange path here, moving from Detroit’s rock clubs to playing jazz, cabaret piano and world music in Chicago. Then he somehow landed at Cafe Negril with these guys, waxing (okay, encoding) about 80 minutes of cool improvisational jam in just one rainy-day session and holding everything down with just an electric piano and some slightly buzzsaw synth. A compact disc’s worth of music split up into two CDs, the Black Dragons’ debut only rains about half the time: The four songs on the first disc serve as sort of a suite, chronicling the weather as it deceptively snuck in (the title track), churned up impressively (“Will It Ever Stop”), faked its own death (“Casters Through Puddles”) then finally faded slowly (“Gray Light and Light Rain”). The second disc feels a little like leftovers, but in a fun way—less dramatic, more lighthearted and playful, almost domestic. Throughout it all, Hitsky keeps order—drummer Walt Lundy threatens to break out of the groove on purpose at any moment, though everyone else seems content to wait his turn. The MVP of a great horn section is the trumpet of Ryan Robertson, backed and occasionally assisted by the dual trombones of Jon Ramm and Jimmy Brinkman (one in each channel!). The Dragons may or may not be just a side project for someone as broadly talented as Seth, but it’s nice to know the self-

F E B R U A RY 2 0 1 6

Tyler Kinchen is a talented guy. The leader of the Right Pieces, a group hailing from Ponchatoula, Louisiana, Kinchen boasts a compelling voice and as a lyricist, the soul of a poet. Judging from the material on this oddly named album, Acoustic Disdrometer, one thing Kinchen does not have to worry about is being pigeonholed into a specific genre. Kinchen opens with danceready soul/funk number “Turn It On (Electricity Bill),” complete with horn interjections. “Dancin’ Partner” suggests a reggae rhythm accentuated by the congas of Michael Doss and topped by Harry Morter’s trumpet solo. Then the disc moves into a more pop/ contemporary rhythm and blues mode on “Love of My Life.” New Orleans’ own saxophonist Clarence Johnson adds a tinge of jazz when he steps out to blow. As a singer and songwriter, Kinchen has a penchant for romance. That side of his musical personality becomes more prominent later in the disc on tunes such as “A Thousand Nights Abroad,” on which his voice is simply accompanied by the guitar of Dylan Torrance. In a similar realm, the album ends with “Dreamer,” made lush with the addition of a violin. It’s easy to enjoy Tyler Kinchen, though because of the stylistic diversity demonstrated on Acoustic Disdrometer, it might be somewhat difficult to get to know him musically. Sometimes a pigeonhole really ain’t a bad thing. —Geraldine Wyckoff

Lil’ Nathan & the Zydeco Big Timers Face 2 Face - Nate the Great (Cha Cha Records) Though the title of Lil’ Nathan Williams’ 9th CD could be interpreted as chest-thumping

braggadocio, it’s really more about self-understanding before portraying yourself to others. Many of his dubbed “hype” originals are honest testaments to his well-deserved success in a highly competitive scene. He questions those who discount his achievements (“Get Yo’ Money Up”) and vows to stay on course (“On My Grind”) while riding out life’s ups and downs (“Can You Handle It”). “Zydeco Man” has all the trappings of a hook-laden, radioready single while mature audiences will likely appreciate the silky “Bangin’” and the guilty pleasures of “We Shouldn’t Be Doin’ It.” Five tracks come from interesting, perhaps overlooked sources such as

the jaunty “Objection Overruled” by reggae star Gregory Isaacs and the electro-funky “She’s a Bad Mamma Jamma” from ’80s soulster Carl Carlton. Williams gives John Delafose’s “Broken Hearted” a beefier workout than the original.

Passing On Traditions Jason Marsalis Heirs of the Crescent City (ELM Records) From the drums’ opening cadence and the joyful exuberance of the music, it’s immediately evident that New Orleans is at the core of Heirs of the Crescent City. The music, by drummer and vibraphonist Jason Marsalis, stands as the soundtrack for Sascha Just’s documentary Heirs, which is presently being screened at film festivals. Marsalis was a good choice for the task as his encyclopedic knowledge of music and ability to play in many styles allows him to investigate this city’s roots and follow the thread to the present day. As a member of the renowned musical Marsalis family, which includes, on his mother’s side of the family, clarinetist Alphonse Picou, Jason is, of course, one of the heirs that the film and album address. Naturally jazz—both classic and modern—is highly represented on the disc, though other styles that have relied upon the passing on of traditions from family to family, from musician to musician, come into play. A rendition of the Mardi Gras Indian prayer “Indian Red” truly captures the spirituality of the song, with the horns of trumpeter Ashlin Parker and saxophonist Joe Goldberg soulfully replacing the vocals. Next up is a funky number, “Mardi Gras at the Carnival Ball.” Marsalis’ drumming takes off on this fun tune. He switches to vibraphones on the quietude of “The South Is Asleep,” which, it is explained, is based on the harmonies of Louis Armstrong’s “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South.” In a similar vein, he calls in pianist Marcus Roberts, with whom he has partnered for decades, for a Thelonious Monk–inspired “Didn’t Monk Ramble,” a solo take on the classic, romping “Didn’t He Ramble.” Heirs of the Crescent City can certainly stand on its own as an album of good music played by good musicians. As a soundtrack, it also entices one to check out the documentary to get the complete picture. —Geraldine Wyckoff www.OFFBEAT.com

REVIEWS As expected, the musicianship is top notch throughout. Williams is fluid on both the triple row and single row accordions while the arrangements are densely layered with background vocals, rhythms and a soft ambience of keys swirling around accordion lines. While Williams penned 11 of these 16 tracks, amazingly, younger teenage brother Naylan produced and arranged every original, suggesting that another Williams talent is waiting in the wings and ready to fly when the time is right. —Dan Willging

Bionica Future Settlers (Independent) At first blush, Bionica seems like any other jazz-rock outfit with a clear-throated, clear-headed, and somewhat winsome female lead vocalist, but whoops, here comes the vocoder: This quintet’s actually made a name for itself as quite the progressive electrojazz

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act, and if they happen to break into a galloping 4/4 romp or some proggish breakdown these days, so much the better. Jazz and EDM could both use a little air. Attacking experimental music with a punkish energy, chill atmosphere and reassuring vocals is a difficult trick to pull off, and as fascinating as it can be, there are times on Future Settlers where it feels like the formula isn’t perfected yet. Lead singer Jenna McSwain’s grounded advice, social awareness and openhearted worldview can sometimes get compromised by the shifting

dynamics and raw electronics, but when the lines all intersect, it can be magic: “Our Town” is some sort of Cranberries-Sundays nexus polished to a twenty-first century sheen, while “Ghosts” sounds like Ben Folds, Aphex Twin and Yes all happening at once. There’s even a little rock-god guitar on the closing “Bionic Takeover.” In the end, only the title track seems tied down to the complex ambiance they became noticed for on their 2010 EP Take Your City, but that’s both ironic and unimportant: The very phrase “future settlers” implies they’re not done roaming. —Robert Fontenot

Bob Malone Mojo Deluxe (Delta Moon Records)

Aaron West 504 Soul (Independent) Living in New Orleans one has regular opportunities to meet

international players making a pilgrimage. Some visit to slip in the scene for a while and cop a gig if they can; others come to record with the locals; the New Orleans music brand is strong. Category A includes Bob Malone. Talent alone won’t always get you entree into the scene, and his calling card is holding down the keyboard chair in the John Fogerty Band. I first heard him at a WWOZ piano night years ago; his combination of piano skills, witty original songs and lunatic stage energy was totally winning. Mojo Deluxe is a different experience; except for the accordion-and-strings backed “Paris,” this is hard-edged rock ‘n’ roll with New Orleans flourishes (“Chinese Algebra,” the only piano instrumental, is a quirky delight). Catch Malone in whatever format you can. Aussie Guitarist Aaron West falls into Category B. I’m not sure he did much live playing while he was here in 2014–15, but “504

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REVIEWS

Buckwheat Zydeco’s longtime manager and producer Ted Fox reflects on launching zydeco’s first major label release.

Buckwheat Zydeco On a Night Like This (Island Records)

“I

was a senior editor [at Audio magazine] and I started getting into zydeco. Audio sent me to Louisiana and I wrote an article about zydeco and Cajun music. I met Buck and it was obvious that he was, by far, the most talented musician. We struck up a friendship over a year or two. We were like twins separated by birth, even though he was a black Creole guy and I was this New York Jew. Then I did an interview with Chris Blackwell [of] Island Records (Bob Marley, Traffic, U2) and had a couple of hours left at the end of the interview. I started telling him about Louisiana. ‘Man, it’s incredible,’ I said. ‘You got to get into this guy Buckwheat Zydeco.’ So I made him a mix tape and sent him the cassette. He owned Compass Point Studio in the Bahamas and I started hearing from people that they were playing the cassette at Compass Point. Whenever a session would start to lag, they would put on the tape and revive the session. I sent him a note and said, ‘Look, I hear your people are playing my Buckwheat cassette so I know you must be into this. Why don’t you consider making a record with Buck?’ About two to three days later, I get a call from Blackwell and he said ‘I want to sign him to a five-record deal and I think you ought to manage and produce him.’ I had never done any of this stuff before, but this was the opportunity to be the first-ever major label zydeco record. The technical end of producing is not really important. The important part is understanding your artist, the material and getting the feeling across. With an artist like Buckwheat Zydeco and a genre like zydeco, it’s really about the performance. We went to this little club in Sunset called Paul’s Playhouse. I would sit on the pool table with a pool cue in my hand like I was Mitch Miller conducting the orchestra and we just ran through the songs that

we were going to do on the album. And Buck would figure out all the cool things he could do. We knew we were going to have some guys from the Dirty Dozen come in as the horn section and Buck would be like ‘Oh yeah, I could do this cool little arrangement on the horns here and those guys come in.’ I wanted to keep Blackwell involved because I knew that the key to getting Island to take this seriously and not look at it as another one of Blackwell’s follies was to keep Chris involved personally. If he was interested and excited, he would make things happen. I told Chris, ‘Look man, here’s what we should do. We should make the record in between the two weekends of Jazz Fest. We’ll have the press in on the final day for a record release party.’ We also wanted zydeco to become something that was approachable, so the concept was to have the greatest zydeco songs ever—‘Ma ‘Tit Fille,’ ‘Buckwheat’s Special’ and ‘Hot Tamale Baby’—and also have the songs like ‘On a Night Like This’ (Bob Dylan) and ‘Marie Marie’ (The Blasters). We tracked the whole thing in four days. Then [Island engineer] Rob [Fraboni], Buck and I did an overnight 18-hour mix session on Thursday night because the next day at noon I arranged to have a listening party in the main studio. We had 30–40 journalists coming in from all the major outlets and newspapers. As people were starting to walk in, we finished the mix. And I said ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I want to present a record we are very proud of and hope you like it.’ And I put on ‘Ma ‘Tit Fille’ and I am not exaggerating: Literally everyone stopped like they were statues. You could just see jaws dropping and people were like, ‘What the?’ Everybody listened. It sounded like a million bucks coming out of the studio speakers. And the song finished and there was this little micro-pause and then the whole place just burst into applause. People were applauding and cheering. It was great.” —Dan Willging

“You could just see jaws dropping and people were like, ‘What the...?’”

F E B R U A RY 2 0 1 6

Soul,” the CD he recorded here (and finished Down Under) is a bracing surprise. In a way, it’s a Jon Cleary and the Monster Gentlemen disc without Jon. The gents—Jellybean Alexander on drums, Cornell Williams on bass and vocals, and Derwin “Big D” Perkins on guitar/vocals—are clearly enjoying themselves here; what a memorable rhythm section they are! Aaron’s guitar is terser than Big D’s but perfect for the music, and his vocals veer very close to Cleary’s when he feels like it. Joe Ashlar plays the keys in his own brilliant way. A horn section, presumably added back in Australia, adds spice and another layer of authenticity to the mix. Also two more keyboardists including the Kiwi Wil Sargisson, who’s startled people at three NOLA piano nights over the last 20 years. It’s an album of new songs in a retro style: 12/8 NOLA R&B, shuffles and more. 504 Soul reminded me sometimes of Roland Stone’s magnificent endof-career CD on Orleans Records, Remember Me, and I mean that as a compliment. The Monster Gentlemen are a quite underrecorded unit: This album is worth having for that fact alone. —Tom McDermott

Charlie Musselwhite I Ain’t Lyin’… (Henrietta Records) You really do have to be a living legend—supposed harp heir to Sonny Boy Williamson I, inspiration for Elwood Blues, and last living remnant of the Chicago blues scene of the ’50s and ’60s—to get the kind of sweet deal Charlie Musselwhite has in his (far from) declining years. You might catch www.OFFBEAT.com

REVIEWS him spicing up INXS’ “Suicide Blonde,” lending his considerable cred to the Black Snake Moan soundtrack, or taking home Grammy gold with a Ben Harper duets album, but when Memphis Charlie wants to get back to the basics, he just uses his own Henrietta label and plays singer, songwriter, and master blues harp man all at once. The results are usually refreshing, and immediate. Musselwhite doesn’t deliver on I Ain’t Lyin’… quite like he did on his last Henrietta releases, Juke Joint Chapel and Darkest Hour, but that’s because there’s not nearly as much on the line. Having finally conquered his demons (read: addiction), Charlie is just out for a sober good time, and except for Elmore James’ “Done Somebody Wrong,” he provides the subtext himself, nine originals that carom between endless variations of the I-IV-V, including smooth St. Louis strolls, Texas shuffles, Delta laments, and at least one genuine two-step in “My Kinda Gal.”

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No surprises here at all, in other words, just a master at work—and Charlie’s harmonica sounds hotter than ever, perhaps because of his new focus. This may also be why he revisits what is arguably his signature song, a closing take on the track that first got him noticed in 1967, a version of Donald Byrd’s “Cristo Redentor.” It’s a little slower but even more self-assured, his tone stronger than ever but tempered by lessons hard won. The juke joint was always a chapel for Charlie, but as he enters his seventies, his confessionals feel more like feast days. Good for him. —Robert Fontenot

So Long Storyland So Long Storyland (Independent) You can’t beat a great backstory. Andrew deBuys, a.k.a. Rathbone, was an aspiring songwriter teaching at a girls’ private school in post-K New Orleans when he took on a new

pupil and equally aspiring vocalist named Sophia Preston. Sophia is all of 13. This did not stop them from collaborating. That’s right: This folk-pop duo comes by its twee honestly. Together they’ve crafted a longish yet surprisingly not mawkish EP about the aftereffects of Katrina, which destroyed Andrew’s family home and which Sophia probably doesn’t remember all that well, having been three. The combination works, but probably not for the reasons you’d figure; yes, she sounds as if she’s reassuring the child in him on “Rathbone’s Nightmare #2,” and her innocence seems to prop up his weariness on “We Will Live Again #3,” just as his father figure urges her to let change happen in its own time. Yet Sophia, who is nevertheless blessed with a remarkably clear and angelic instrument, neither looks nor sings her age. No fake world-weariness, either; she simply remains unselfconscious about what the world wants innocence

to sound like. As a result, “We Will Live Again” and “Cassidy” are uptempo and polished enough to make the indie pop charts, but they sound genuine for all that—there are times on the tellingly named So Long Storyland where you can hear the death of the old city and the birth of the new one at the same time. Bittersweet doesn’t really describe it; the music’s quiet, brave acceptance of change sounds like it comes from an ancient time. Like the face of their home, it’s going to be equally interesting to see how this new construct works out. —Robert Fontenot

FEBRU A RY 2 016

Find complete listings at offbeat.com—when you’re out, use offbeat.com/mobile for full listings on any cell phone.

Listings

EXPRESS

These listings are abbreviated. For complete daily listings, go to offbeat.com. These listings were verified at the time of publication, but are of course subject to change. To get your event listed, go to offbeat.com/add-new-listings or send an email to listings@offbeat.com.

AF African AM Americana BL Blues BU Bluegrass BO Bounce BB Brass Band BQ Burlesque KJ Cajun CL Classical CR Classic Rock CO Comedy CW Country CB Cover Band DN Dance DX Dixieland DB Dubstep EL Electro FO Folk FK Funk GS Gospel GY Gypsy HH Hip-Hop HS House IN Indian Classical ID Indie Rock IL Industrial IR Irish JB Jam Band

MJ Jazz Contemporary TJ Jazz Traditional JV Jazz Variety KR Karaoke KZ Klezmer LT Latin MG Mardi Gras Indian ME Metal RB Modern R&B PO Pop PK Punk RE Reggae RC Rockabilly RK Rock RR Roots Rock SS Singer/ Songwriter SK Ska PI Solo Piano SO Soul SW Spoken Word SP Swamp Pop SI Swing VR Variety ZY Zydeco

MONDAY FEB 1

30/90: Perdido Jazz Band (JV) 5p, New Orleans Super Jam (VR) 9p Banks Street Bar: Lauren Sturm’s Red Beans and Rice Piano Night (JV) 7p, South Jones (RK) 10p Bombay Club: Josh Paxton (PI) 8p Buffa’s: Arsene DeLay (VR) 5p, Antoine Diel (JV) 8p Chickie Wah Wah: Alexis and the Samurai (ID) 8p Crazy Lobster: the Insta-Gators (VR) 5p d.b.a.: Glen David Andrews (JV) 10p Funky Pirate: Mark and the Pentones (BL) 4p Gasa Gasa: Bully, Diet Cig, Feverish (PK) 9p Hi-Ho Lounge: Bluegrass Pickin’ Party (BU) 8p, Instant Opus Improvised Series (MJ) 9p Kerry Irish Pub: Claire Cannon and Kenna Mae (FO) 8p Maison: Chicken and Waffles, Aurora Nealand and the Royal Roses, Crooked Vines (VR) 4p Maple Leaf: George Porter Jr. Trio (FK) 10p Morning Call: Valerie Sassyfras (VR) 10a Nunemaker Auditorium (Loyola University): Mardi Gras Forum: the Music of Mardi Gras (MG) 5p One Eyed Jacks: Dazed on Toulouse (VR) 10p Ooh Poo Pah Doo: James Andrews with the Crescent City All-Stars and Bobby Love (VR) 8p Preservation Hall: Preservation Hall Jazz Masters feat. Leroy Jones (TJ) 8p the Saint: Motown Mondays with DJ Shane Love (SO) 10p Snug Harbor: Charmaine Neville Band (JV) 8 & 10p Spotted Cat: Sarah McCoy and the Oopsie Daisies (JV) 4p, Dominick Grillo and the Frenchmen St. All-Stars (JV) 6p, Jazz Vipers (JV) 10p Three Muses: Washboard Rodeo (JV) 7p Tropical Isle Bayou Club: Cajungrass Duo (KJ) 4p, Cajun Drifters (KJ) 8:30p

F E B R U A RY 2 0 1 6

Tropical Isle Bourbon: Rhythm and Rain (RK) 5p, Way Too Early (RK) 9p

TUESDAY FEB 2

30/90: Bayou Saints (VR) 5p, Ed Wills and Blues4Sale (BL) 9p Banks Street Bar: Simple Sound Retreat (VR) 9p Blue Nile: Open Ears Music Series feat. Plunge (MJ) 10:30p Bombay Club: Davy Mooney (PI) 8p Checkpoint Charlie: Jamie Lynn Vessels, Domenic (BL) 7p Chickie Wah Wah: Jon Cleary (VR) 8:30p Crazy Lobster: AC and the Heat (VR) 5p d.b.a.: Treme Brass Band (BB) 9p Funky Pirate: Blues Masters feat. Big Al (BL) 8:30p Gasa Gasa: Graveyard, Spiders (ME) 9p Hi-Ho Lounge: Spaghetti Western Show (VR) 7p, Free Spirit Brass Band (BB) 10p House of Blues: Dave Mason’s Traffic Jam (RK) 8p Howlin’ Wolf (the Den): Comedy Beast (CO) 8:30p Kerry Irish Pub: Jason Bishop (FO) 8:30p Little Gem Saloon: Justin Donovan (SO) 7p Little Tropical Isle: Mark Pentone (RK) 5p, Frank Fairbanks (RK) 9p Maison: Swinging Gypsies, Gregory Agid, TK Groove (JV) 4p Maple Leaf: Rebirth Brass Band (RK) 11p Old U.S. Mint: Matt Hampsey and Down on Their Luck Orchestra (JV) 2p Preservation Hall: Preservation Hall-Stars feat. Shannon Powell (TJ) 8p Republic: Naughty by Nature (HH) 9p Snug Harbor: Stanton Moore Trio (JV) 8 & 10p Spotted Cat:Andy J. Forest (JV) 4p, Meschiya Lake and the Little Big Horns (JV) 6p, Smoking Time Jazz Club (JV) 10p Tropical Isle Bayou Club: Cajungrass Duo (KJ) 4p, Cajun Drifters (KJ) 8:30p Tropical Isle Original: the Hangovers (RK) 5p, Jay B. Elston Band (RK) 9p

WEDNESDAY FEB 3

30/90: Justin Donovan Trio (VR) 5p, Mutiny Squad (VR) 9p Banks Street Bar: Vanessa Siberman (JV) 8p, Major Bacon (BL) 10p Bombay Club: Kris Tokarski (PI) 8p Buffa’s: Open Mic Night with Nattie Sanchez (SS) 7p Chickie Wah Wah: John Rankin (JV) 6p Circle Bar: the Iguanas (RK) 6p, Mason Ruffner (BL) 10p Crazy Lobster: Ken Swartz and the Palace of Sin (VR) 5p d.b.a.: Tin Men (BL) 7p, Walter “Wolfman” Washington and the Roadmasters (BL) 10p Dragon’s Den: Reggae Night feat. Yogoman (RE) 10p Eiffel Society: Society Salsa (LT) 7p Funky Pirate: Blues Masters feat. Big Al (BL) 8:30p Hi-Ho Lounge: We Love Vinyl (VR) 6p, Shamarr Allen, DJ Chicken (FK) 9p House of Blues (the Parish): Jet Lounge (HH) 11p Kermit’s Mother-in-Law Lounge: Spodie and the Big Shots (JV) 6:30p Kerry Irish Pub: One Tailed Two (FO) 9p Little Gem Saloon: Lynn Drury (FO) 7p Little Tropical Isle: Jay B. Elston (RK) 5p, : Reed Lightfoot (RK) 9p Maison: the Organettes with Jenna Winston, Jazz Vipers, Willfunk (JV) 4p Maple Leaf: Pirate’s Choice (VR) 9p Morning Call: Valerie Sassyfras (VR) 10a Old U.S. Mint: Dr. Michael Torregano (JV) 2p Preservation Hall: Preservation Hall All-Stars feat. Mark Braud (TJ) 8p Siberia: Sword and Backpack Gamenight (VR) 6p, Miss Martha and the Goodtime Gang (CW) 9p Snug Harbor: Uptown Jazz Orchestra (JV) 8 & 10p Spotted Cat: Chris Christy (JV) 4p, Shotgun Jazz Band (JV) 6p, Antoine Diel and the New Orleans Power Misfits (JV) 10p

Three Muses: Leslie Martin (JV) 5p, Hot Club of New Orleans (JV) 7p Tropical Isle Bayou Club: La Maniere des Cadiens (KJ) 4p, Brandon Moreau and Cajungrass (KJ) 8:30p Tropical Isle Bourbon: Jezebels Chill’n (RK) 5p, Debi and the Deacons (RK) 9p Tropical Isle Original: Debi and the Deacons (RK) 5p, Late As Usual (RK) 9p

THURSDAY FEB 4

30/90: Andy J. Forest (VR) 5p, Smoke N Bones (VR) 9p Bombay Club: Kris Tokarski Duo with Meryl Zimmerman (JV) 8p Buffa’s: Alexandra Scott and Josh Paxton (VR) 5p, Tom McDermott and Aurora Nealand (JV) 8p Chiba: Keiko Komaki (PI) 8p Chickie Wah Wah: Phil DeGruy (VR) 6p, Pirate’s Choice (VR) 9p Circle Bar: Rik Slave’s Country Persuasion (CW) 6p, Rocket Vinyl, Jack Oblivian and the Sheiks, Chicken Snake (RK) 9p Crazy Lobster: the Spanish Plaza 3 (VR) 5p Dragon’s Den: Dave Easley (VR) 7p, the Ill Vibe with DJ Matt Scott (VR) 10p; Upstairs: Hound, Gandhi Castle, Donde Wolf (PK) 9p Funky Pirate: Marc Stone Duo (BL) 4p, Blues Masters feat. Big Al (BL) 8:30p House of Blues (the Parish): Candyland (EL) 9p House of Blues: Dustin Lynch, Chris Lane, Tyler Rich (CW) 8p Howlin’ Wolf (the Den): Comedy Gumbeaux (CO) 8:30p Kerry Irish Pub: Lynn Drury (FO) 9p Le Bon Temps Roule: Soul Rebels (BB) 11p Little Tropical Isle: Allen Hebert (RK) 5p, Mike Berger (RK) 9p Maison: Jon Roniger, Sweet Substitute, Dysfunktional Bone (VR) 4p Maple Leaf: the Trio feat. Johnny Vidacovich and special guests (FK) 11p Old U.S. Mint: Roland Guerin Band (JV) 2p Palm Court Jazz Club: Duke Heitger and Tim Laughlin with Crescent City Joymakers (JV) 8p Preservation Hall: Preservation Hall All-Stars feat. Lucien Barbarin (TJ) 8p Prytania Bar: Lost Bayou Ramblers, Coyotes, Next Level Midriff (VR) 9p Republic: Mardi Gras Bounce feat. Big Freedia, DJ Jubilee, Lucky Lou, Walt Wiggady, DJ Lil Man (BO) 9p Rock ‘n’ Bowl: Geno Delafose (ZY) 8:30p Siberia: Debauche, Johnny Angel and Helldorado (VR) 9p Snug Harbor: John Mooney and Uganda Roberts (JV) 8 & 10p Spotted Cat: Sarah McCoy and the Oopsie Daisies (JV) 4p, Miss Sophie Lee (JV) 6p, Jumbo Shrimp (JV) 10p Three Muses: Tom McDermott (JV) 5p Tropical Isle Bourbon: Miss Maggie Trio (RK) 5p, Debi and the Deacons (RK) 9p Tropical Isle Original: the Hangovers (RK) 6p, Late As Usual (RK) 9p Vaughan’s Lounge: Corey Henry and the Treme Funktet (FK) 10p Verret’s Lounge: Calvin Johnson and Kirk Joseph present Chapter:SOUL (SO) 9p

FRIDAY FEB 5

30/90: the Little Things (VR) 2p, Noggin (VR) 5p, the Business CD-release party (VR) 8p Banks Street Bar: Egg Yolk Jubilee (BB) 10p Bombay Club:Tom McDermott and Russell Welch (JV) 6:30p Buffa’s: Ben Fox Trio (JV) 5p, Ashley Blume and the Time Machine (JV) 8p, Swamp Kitchen (JV) 11p Carver Theater: Krewe du Lune presents Cirque de So Lune feat. PYMP, Meschiya Lake, King James, Bate Bunda, Quickie Mart and others (VR) 9p

Chickie Wah Wah: Michael Pearce (BL) 6p, Jimbo Mathus (VR) 9p Club Caribbean: 71st Earthday Celebration of Nesta Robert Marley feat. DJ Ray and Selector P (RE) 9p Crazy Lobster: Ken Swartz and the Palace of Sin (VR) 5p d.b.a.: Hot Club of New Orleans (JV) 6p, New Orleans Suspects (FK) 11p Dragon’s Den: Toonces (JV) 5p, Loose Marbles (JV) 7p; Upstairs: Comedy Fuck Yeah (CO) 8p, Latin Night (LT) 11p Funky Pirate: Marc Stone Duo (BL) 12p, Mark and the Pentones (BL) 4p, Blues Masters feat. Big Al (BL) 8:30p Hi-Ho Lounge: Roar, Doombayala (FK) 10p House of Blues (the Parish): Luke Wade (RK) 9p House of Blues: the Revivalists (RK) 10p Howlin’ Wolf: Rebirth Brass Band (BB) 11p Kermit’s Mother-in-Law Lounge: Guitar Slim Jr. (BL) 9p Kerry Irish Pub: Paul Ferguson (FO) 5p, Mark Hessler and Joe Tullos (FO) 9p Maison: Dinosaurchestra, Royal Street Winding Boys, Shotgun Jazz Band (VR) 1p, Jesse Smith Project, Big Easy Brawlers (FK) 10p Morning Call: Valerie Sassyfras (VR) 10a Old Point Bar: Rick Trolsen (PI) 5p, Jamie Lynn Vessels (RK) 9:30p One Eyed Jacks: Sweet Crude, Motel Radio (VR) 10p Palm Court Jazz Club: Lucien Barbarin and Palm Court Jazz Band (JV) 8p Preservation Hall: Preservation Hall Brass Band feat. Daniel Farrow (TJ) 8p Prytania Bar: Johnny Sketch and the Dirty Notes, Hipnosis (VR) 10p Republic: TRAP feat. Caked Up, CRWNS, SFAM, DeathTouch (EL) 10p RF’s: Lynn Drury (FO) 6p, Right Reverend Soul Revue (RB) 9p Rock ‘n’ Bowl: Supercharger (VR) 9:30p Saint Hotel: Creole Sweet Tease Burlesque Show (BQ) 9p Snug Harbor: Herlin Riley Quartet (JV) 8 & 10p Spotted Cat: Andy J. Forest (JV) 4p, Washboard Chaz Blues Trio (BL) 6p, New Orleans Cottonmouth Kings (JV) 10p Three Muses: Royal Roses (JV) 5:30p, Glen David Andrews (JV) 9p Tipitina’s: Morning 40 Federation, Bottomfeeders, Gary Wrong (RK) 11p Tropical Isle Bayou Club: Brandon Miller and Louisiana Inferno (KJ) 5p, T’Canaille (KJ) 9p Tropical Isle Bourbon: Way Too Early (RK) 1p, Jay B. Elston Band (RK) 5p, Debi and the Deacons (RK) 9p

SATURDAY FEB 6

30/90: Ainsley Matich Band (VR) 2p, Bayou Saint Funk (VR) 5p, Billy Iuso (VR) 8p, Domino (VR) 11p Banks Street Bar: the Contrabandits (FK) 1p, Zander (RK) 2:30p, Burris (RB) 6p, the Conglomerate (RK) 8p, Hazy Ray (FK) 10p, Porch 40 (FK) 11:59p Blue Nile: Washboard Chaz Blues Trio (BL) 7p Bombay Club: Tom McDermott and Dave Boswell (JV) 8:30p Buffa’s: Red Hot Jazz Band (JV) 11am, Chip Wilson (VR) 5p, the Royal Rounders (VR) 8p, David Hull (JV) 11p Crazy Lobster: the River Gang (VR) 11a, the Neon Shadows (VR) 4p Creole Cookery: Mark Weliky Trio (JV) 11a Dragon’s Den: Matt Babineaux (RK) 5p, Afro Cube (AF) 7p, DJ Heather and others (VR) 10p; Upstairs: Talk Nerdy to Me (BQ) 8p Funky Pirate: Marc Stone Duo (BL) 12p, Mark and the Pentones (BL) 4p, Blues Masters feat. Big Al (BL) 8:30p Hi-Ho Lounge: Hustle feat. DJ Soul Sister (FK) 11p House of Blues: the Devil Makes Three, Parker Millsap, Graveyard Jaw (BU) 9:30p

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LIVE LOCAL MUSIC Howlin’ Wolf: Rebirth Brass Band, Naughty Professor (FK) 10p Jazz National Historical Park: Royal Players Brass Band (BB) 12p Joy Theater: Madeon, Skylar Spence, Slaptop (VR) 10p Kermit’s Mother-in-Law Lounge: Neisha Ruffins (JV) 8:30p Kerry Irish Pub: Patrick Cooper (FO) 5p, Roux the Day (FO) 9p Little Tropical Isle: Jay B. Elston (RK) 5p, Reed Lightfoot (RK) 9p Maison: Chance Bushman and the Ibervillainaires, Roamin’ Jasmine, Smoking Time Jazz Club (JV) 4p, Kumasi, Street Legends (VR) 11p Maple Leaf: Sexual Thunder Mardi Party (FK) 10:30p Morning Call City Park: Billy D. Chapman (JV) 10a One Eyed Jacks: Low (VR) 10p Republic: the Saturday Social feat. Mannie Fresh, DJ Spin, Kidd Love (HH) 10p Rock ‘n’ Bowl: No Idea (VR) 9:30p Siberia: Agent Orange, In the Whale, the Bills (PK) 9p Snug Harbor:Topsy Chapman & Solid Harmony (JV) 8 & 10p Spotted Cat: Antoine Diel and Arsene DeLay (JV) 2p, Panorama Jazz Band (JV) 6p, Dominick Grillo and the Frenchmen St. All-Stars (JV) 10p Three Muses: Chris Peters (JV) 5p, Shotgun Jazz Band (JV) 9p Time Out: Andre Bohren (RR) 11a Tipitina’s: Galactic (FK) 11p Tropical Isle Bayou Club: La Maniere des Cadiens (KJ) 1p, Brandon Miller and Louisiana Inferno (KJ) 4p, T’Canaille (KJ) 8:30p Tropical Isle Bourbon: Way Too Early (RK) 1p, Rhythm and Rain (RK) 5p, Debi and the Deacons (RK) 9p

SUNDAY FEB 7

30/90: Revival (VR) 2p, Greg Schatz (VR) 5p, Barry’s Pocket (VR) 9p, Full Orangutan (VR) 11:59p Banks Street Bar: Kenny Triche (SS) 4p Bombay Club: David Boeddinghaus (PI) 8p Buffa’s: Some Like It Hot! (TJ) 10:30a, Steve DeTroy and friends (VR) 10p Crazy Lobster: the Gator Baits (VR) 11a, Poppy’s All-Stars (VR) 4p Cutting Edge Side Yard: Ultimate Louisiana Party presents Mardi Gras in the Treme (VR) 12p d.b.a.: Palmetto Bugs Stompers (SI) 6p, Funk and Chant with John “Papa” Gros and Big Chief Monk Boudreaux (MG) 11p Dragon’s Den: Open Jazz Jam with Anuraag Pendya (SS) 7p, Church (EL) 10p Funky Pirate: the Pentones (BL) 6p Generations Hall: Bacchus Bash feat. Flow Tribe, Category 6, the Topcats, Eskei 83, Mannie Fresh (VR) 12p Hi-Ho Lounge: Joystick, I’m Fine, Vapo Rats, Donovan Wolfington (VR) 8p Howlin’ Wolf (the Den): Hot 8 Brass Band (BB) 10p Howlin’ Wolf: Dumpstaphunk (FK) 10p Kermit’s Mother-in-Law Lounge: Kermit Ruffins and the BBQ Swingers (JV) 5:30p Kerry Irish Pub: Paintbox with Dave James and Tim Robertson (FO) 9p Le Bon Temps Roule: Soul Rebels (BB) 11p Little Tropical Isle: Frank Fairbanks (RK) 5p, Mark Parson (RK) 9p Maison: Luneta Jazz Band, Rhythm Wizards, Swinging Gypsies (JV) 1p, Dirty Bourbon River Show, Musical Expression (VR) 11p Maple Leaf: Joe Krown Trio feat. Russell Batiste and Walter “Wolfman” Washington (FK) 10p Morning Call City Park: Billy D. Chapman (JV) 10a One Eyed Jacks: High Maintenance Party (VR) 10p Prytania Bar: Big Freedia, Quickie Mart, Sexy Dex and the Fresh (VR) 9p Republic: Must Die, Laxx, Skism, Eptic, Blitz (VR) 9p Snug Harbor: Reggie Houston (JV) 8 & 10p Spotted Cat: Pfister Sisters (JV) 2p, Kristina Morales and Bayou Shufflers (JV) 6p, Pat Casey and the New Sound (JV) 10p Three Muses: Raphael et Pascal (JV) 5p, Linnzi Zaorski (JV) 8p Tipitina’s: 9th Annual Bacchus Bash feat. Trombone Shorty and Orleans Avenue () 11p Tropical Isle Bayou Club: Brandon Moreau and Cajungrass (KJ) 4p, Brandon Miller and Louisiana Inferno (KJ) 8:30p Verret’s Lounge: Calvin Johnson and Kirk Joseph present Chapter:SOUL (SO) 9p

MONDAY FEB 8

30/90: Perdido Jazz Band (JV) 5p, Jamie Lynn Vessels and Jamey St. Pierre (VR) 8p, New Orleans Super Jam (VR) 11p

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Bacchanal: Raphael Bas (JV) 12p, Helen Gillet (JV) 7:30p Banks Street Bar: Lauren Sturm’s Red Beans and Rice Piano Night (JV) 7p, South Jones (RK) 10p Bombay Club: Josh Paxton (PI) 8p Buffa’s: Dr. Sick (JV) 5p, Antoine Diel (JV) 8p, Sturmlandia (VR) 11p Café Istanbul: Lundi Gras Love 5: An Evening with Blair Dottin-Haley feat. Natalie Stewart “the Floacist of Floetry” (SW) 8p Civic Theater: Down, Mountain of Wizard (ME) 9p Crazy Lobster: the Insta-Gators (VR) 5p Cutting Edge Side Yard: Ultimate Louisiana Party presents Mardi Gras in the Treme (VR) 4p d.b.a.: Glen David Andrews Lundi Gras Bash (JV) 11p Dragon’s Den: the Dragon’s Denizens Ball (VR) 1p Funky Pirate: Mark and the Pentones (BL) 4p Hi-Ho Lounge: Bate Bunda, Rusty Lazer, Valerie Sassyfras, Love Bomb Go Go (VR) 8p Howlin’ Wolf: George Porter Jr. and his Runnin’ Pardners, Sexual Thunder (FK) 10p Kerry Irish Pub: Roux the Day (FO) 9p Little Tropical Isle: Frank Fairbanks (RK) 5p, Reed Lightfoot (RK) 9p Maison: Noay Young Trio, Chicken and Waffles, Aurora Nealand and the Royal Roses (VR) 1p, Pinettes Brass Band, Naughty Professor (VR) 10p Maple Leaf: Nth Power Lundi Gras Party (FK) 10p Morning Call: Valerie Sassyfras (VR) 10a One Eyed Jacks: Quintron and Miss Pussycat (VR) 10p Ooh Poo Pah Doo: James Andrews with the Crescent City All-Stars and Bobby Love (VR) 8p Palm Court Jazz Club: Palm Court Jazz Band (JV) 8p Prytania Bar: Rebirth Brass Band, Big Nasty, Captain Green (VR) 9p Republic: 8th Annual Lundifest feat. Mystikal, Hot 8 Brass Band, Doon, DJ G (VR) 9p the Saint: Motown Mondays with DJ Shane Love (SO) 10p Siberia: Big Freedia, Katey Red, Magnola Rhome, HotHouseGruv, Da Dangers Boys, DJ Westbank Redd (BO) 9p Snug Harbor: Charmaine Neville Band (JV) 8 & 10p Spotted Cat: Chris Christy (JV) 2p, Sarah McCoy and the Oopsie Daisies (JV) 4p, Dominick Grillo and the Frenchmen St. All-Stars (JV) 6p, Jazz Vipers (JV) 10p Three Muses: Zazou City (JV) 5p Tipitina’s: Galactic (FK) 11p Tropical Isle Bourbon: Rhythm and Rain (RK) 5p, Way Too Early (RK) 9p Tropical Isle Original: Graham Robertson (RK) 5p, Whiskey Bay (RK) 9p

TUESDAY FEB 9

30/90: Smoke N Bones (VR) 12p, Cha Wa (MG) 5p, Troy Swayer and the Elements (VR) 9p Banks Street Bar: Groovy Tuesday (FK) 9p Bombay Club: Josh Paxton (PI) 5:30p Buffa’s: Davis Rogan (VR) 2p, Sherman Bernard and the Ole Man River Band (VR) 5p, Michael Liuzza (VR) 8p, Keith Burnstein’s Kettle Black (VR) 11p Checkpoint Charlie: Suplecs (RK) 5p Circle Bar: Kia Cavallaro and friends (FO) 6p, Valerie Kuehne and the Wasps Nests (VR) 10p Crazy Lobster: AC and the Heat (VR) 5p Cutting Edge Side Yard: Ultimate Louisiana Party presents Mardi Gras in the Treme (VR) 10a d.b.a.: New Orleans Klezmer All-Stars (GY) 3p, Treme Brass Band (BB) 9p Dragon’s Den: the Dragon’s Denizens Ball (VR) 1p Funky Pirate: Blues Masters feat. Big Al (BL) 8:30p Hi-Ho Lounge: Spaghetti Western Show (VR) 7p, Cakewalk (FK) 10p Howlin’ Wolf (the Den): Comedy Beast (CO) 8:30p Jazz Café: the Key Sound (JV) 7:30p Kerry Irish Pub: Patrick Cooper (FO) 7:30p Little Tropical Isle: Mark Pentone (RK) 5p, Frank Fairbanks (RK) 9p Maison: Smoke N Bones, Street Legends, Fat Ballerina, Doombalaya (VR) 12p, Big Easy Brawlers, Mojoflo, Soul Project (VR) 7p Maple Leaf: Rebirth Brass Band (RK) 11p Saenger Theatre: 2Chainz, Migos (HH) 8p Siberia: OBN III’s, Heavy Lids, Giorgio Murderer, Planchettes, Castro Clones, Black Abba (PK) 4p Siberia: Mars, Space Cadaver, Knight (ME) 8p

FEBRU A RY 2 016

LIVE LOCAL MUSIC Spotted Cat: Jazz Band Ballers (JV) 10a, Andy J. Forest (JV) 2p, Meschiya Lake and the Little Big Horns (JV) 6p, Smoking Time Jazz Club (JV) 10p Three Muses: Loose Marbles (JV) 12p Tropical Isle Original: the Hangovers (RK) 5p, Jay B. Elston Band (RK) 9p

Tropical Isle Bourbon: Miss Maggie Trio (RK) 5p, Debi and the Deacons (RK) 9p Vaughan’s Lounge: Corey Henry and the Treme Funktet (FK) 10p Verret’s Lounge: Calvin Johnson and Kirk Joseph present Chapter:SOUL (SO) 9p

WEDNESDAY FEB 10

FRIDAY FEB 12

30/90: Justin Donovan (VR) 5p, Sam Price Band (VR) 9p Banks Street Bar: Major Bacon (BL) 10p Bombay Club: Kris Tokarski (PI) 8p Buffa’s: Open Mic Night with Nattie Sanchez (SS) 7p Chickie Wah Wah: John Rankin (JV) 6p Crazy Lobster: Ken Swartz and the Palace of Sin (VR) 5p d.b.a.: Tin Men (BL) 7p, Walter “Wolfman” Washington and the Roadmasters (BL) 10p Davenport Lounge (Ritz-Carlton): Jeremy Davenport (JV) 5:30p Dragon’s Den: Reggae Night (RE) 10p Eiffel Society: Society Salsa (LT) 7p Funky Pirate: Blues Masters feat. Big Al (BL) 8:30p Hi-Ho Lounge: We Love Vinyl (VR) 6p, Shamarr Allen, DJ Chicken (FK) 9p House of Blues (the Parish): Jet Lounge (HH) 11p Kermit’s Mother-in-Law Lounge: Spodie and the Big Shots (JV) 6:30p Kerry Irish Pub: Vincent Marini (FO) 8p Little Gem Saloon: Lynn Drury (FO) 7p Little Tropical Isle: Jay B. Elston (RK) 5p, Reed Lightfoot (RK) 9p Maison: Jazz Vipers, Mutiny Squad (VR) 6:30p Maple Leaf: That’s My Cole (VR) 9p Morning Call: Valerie Sassyfras (VR) 10a Preservation Hall: Preservation Hall All-Stars feat. Mark Braud (TJ) 8p Rock ‘n’ Bowl: Swing-A-Roux (SI) 8p Snug Harbor: Uptown Jazz Orchestra (JV) 8 & 10p Spotted Cat: Chris Christy (JV) 4p, Shotgun Jazz Band (JV) 6p, Antoine Diel and the New Orleans Power Misfits (JV) 10p Three Muses: Leslie Martin (JV) 5p Tropical Isle Bayou Club: La Maniere des Cadiens (KJ) 4p, Brandon Moreau and Cajungrass (KJ) 8:30p Tropical Isle Original: Debi and the Deacons (RK) 5p, Late As Usual (RK) 9p

THURSDAY FEB 11

30/90: Andy J. Forest (VR) 5p, Smoke N Bones (VR) 9p Banks Street Bar: Emma Eisenhauer (SS) 9p Bombay Club: Kris Tokarski with Alex Trampas (JV) 8p Buffa’s: Alexandra Scott and Josh Paxton (VR) 5p, Tom McDermott and Aurora Nealand (JV) 8p Chiba: Charlie Dennard (PI) 8p Chickie Wah Wah: Phil DeGruy (VR) 6p, Erica Falls (VR) 9p Columns Hotel: Marc Stone (BL) 8p Crazy Lobster: the Spanish Plaza 3 (VR) 5p d.b.a.: Otra (LT) 10p Dragon’s Den: Dave Easley (VR) 7p, the Ill Vibe with DJ Matt Scott (VR) 10p Funky Pirate: Marc Stone Duo (BL) 4p, Blues Masters feat. Big Al (BL) 8:30p Howlin’ Wolf (the Den): Comedy Gumbeaux (CO) 8:30p Kerry Irish Pub: Mark Parsons (FO) 9p Le Bon Temps Roule: Soul Rebels (BB) 11p Little Gem Saloon: Marc Stone Duo (BL) 7p Little Tropical Isle: Allen Hebert (RK) 5p, Mike Berger (RK) 9p Maison: Jon Roniger, Loose Marbles, Dysfunktional Bone (VR) 4p Maple Leaf: the Trio feat. Johnny Vidacovich and special guests (FK) 11p Ogden Museum of Southern Art: Helen Gillet (MJ) 6p Old Point Bar: the One Percent Nation (RK) 8p Palm Court Jazz Club: Leroy Jones and Katja Toivola with Crescent City Joymakers (JV) 8p Preservation Hall: Preservation Hall Legacy Band feat. Gregg Stafford (TJ) 6p, Preservation Hall All-Stars feat. Lucien Barbarin (TJ) 8p Republic: Unknown Mortal Orchestra, Lower Dens (VR) 9p Rock ‘n’ Bowl: Lil’ Nathan (ZY) 8:30p Snug Harbor: Jason Marsalis (JV) 8 & 10p Spotted Cat: Sarah McCoy and the Oopsie Daisies (JV) 4p, Miss Sophie Lee (JV) 6p, Jumbo Shrimp (JV) 10p Three Muses: Tom McDermott (JV) 5p Tropical Isle Bayou Club: Cajun Drifters (KJ) 4p, Brandon Moreau and Cajungrass (KJ) 8:30p

F E B R U A RY 2 0 1 6

30/90: the Little Things (VR) 2p, Jon Roniger Gypsyland (VR) 5p, Marc Stone (BL) 8p, Waterseed (VR) 11p Banks Street Bar: Sheer Terror (PK) 10p Bombay Club: Steve Pistorius (TJ) 8:30p Buffa’s: Commander-in-Chief with Ben Flood (JV) 5p, the Honeypots (VR) 8p, Cole Williams (VR) 11p Chickie Wah Wah: Michael Pearce (BL) 6p, Paul Sanchez (RR) 8p, Sirius Plan with Louis Michot (KJ) 10p Circle Bar: Natalie Mae (CW) 6p, Jonas Wilson (RK) 10p Crazy Lobster: Ken Swartz and the Palace of Sin (VR) 5p d.b.a.: Tuba Skinny (TJ) 6p, Corey Ledet and his Zydeco Band (ZY) 10p Dos Jefes: Panorama Jazz Band (JV) 10p Dragon’s Den: Zobin Baygan (VR) 5p, Loose Marbles (JV) 7p; Upstairs: Comedy Fuck Yeah (CO) 8p, Latin Night (LT) 11p Frenchy’s Gallery: Piano Paint and Spoken Word with Tom Worrell, John Sinclair and Frenchy (PI) 7:30p Funky Pirate: Marc Stone Duo (BL) 12p, Mark and the Pentones (BL) 4p, Blues Masters feat. Big Al (BL) 8:30p Hi-Ho Lounge: Speakerbox Experiment, Casme (SO) 10p Kermit’s Mother-in-Law Lounge: Guitar Slim Jr. (BL) 9p Kerry Irish Pub: Mark Appleford (FO) 5p, Rubin/Wilson Folk-Blues Explosion (FO) 9p Le Bon Temps Roule: Dave Reis (PI) 7p Little Gem Saloon: Nayo Jones Experience (JV) 8p Little Tropical Isle: Reed Lightfoot (RK) 5p, Mike Berger (RK) 9p Maison: Too Darn Hot, Ramblin’ Letters, Shotgun Jazz Band (VR) 1p, Musical Expression, Soul Company (VR) 10p Maple Leaf: Funk Monkey feat. members of Bonerama (FK) 10:30p Morning Call: Valerie Sassyfras (VR) 10a New Orleans Museum of Art: Bruce Daigrepont (KJ) 5:30p Palm Court Jazz Club: Lucien Barbarin and Palm Court Jazz Band (JV) 8p Preservation Hall: Preservation Hall Brass Band feat. Daniel Farrow (TJ) 8p Rock ‘n’ Bowl: Contraflow (RK) 9:30p Saint Hotel: Creole Sweet Tease Burlesque Show (BQ) 9p Smoothie King Center: Chris Brown, Omarion, August Alsina (HH) 7:30p Snug Harbor: Ellis Marsalis Quintet (JV) 8 & 10p Spotted Cat: Andy J. Forest (JV) 4p, Washboard Chaz Blues Trio (BL) 6p, New Orleans Cottonmouth Kings (JV) 10p Three Muses: Matt Johnson (JV) 5p, Glen David Andrews (JV) 9p Tropical Isle Original: Down River (RK) 1p, the Hangovers (RK) 5p, Late As Usual (RK) 9p UNO Lakefront Arena: New Jack Swing Valentine Love Jam (SI) 8p

SATURDAY FEB 13

30/90: call club (VR) 2p, Bayou Saints (VR) 5p, Soul Brass Band (BB) 8p, Otra (LT) 11p Banks Street Bar: the N’awlins Johnnys (VR) 10p Blue Nile: Washboard Chaz Blues Trio (BL) 7p Bombay Club: Tim Laughlin (JV) 8:30p Buffa’s: Swamp Donkeys (JV) 11am, Jon Roniger (VR) 5p, Isla Nola (VR) 8p, the Little Things (VR) 11p Chickie Wah Wah: Hunger for Music National Tour Kickoff Party (VR) 9p Crazy Lobster: the River Gang (VR) 11a, the Neon Shadows (VR) 4p Creole Cookery: Mark Weliky Trio (JV) 11a d.b.a.: John Boutte (JV) 8p, Little Freddie King (BL) 11p Dragon’s Den: Matt Babineaux (RK) 5p, Swinging Gypsies (JV) 7p; Upstairs: Talk Nerdy to Me (BQ) 8p, Sadder Days with R3GAL (VR) 10p Funky Pirate: Marc Stone Duo (BL) 12p, Mark and the Pentones (BL) 4p, Blues Masters feat. Big Al (BL) 8:30p Hi-Ho Lounge: Brown Improv (CO) 8p, Hustle feat. DJ Soul Sister (FK) 11p House of Blues (the Parish): Bad Girls of Burlesque (BQ) 9p

House of Blues Voodoo Garden: Big Al and the Heavyweights (BL) 1p, Bricks in the Wall: the Sight and Sound of Pink Floyd (CR) 9p Howlin’ Wolf (the Den): Bayou Dread Reggae Band, Empress Soul (RE) 10p Jazz National Historical Park: Royal Players Brass Band (BB) 12p Kerry Irish Pub: Speed the Mule (FO) 5p, One Tailed Three (FO) 9p Little Gem Saloon: Kermit Ruffins and the BBQ Swingers (JV) 7 & 9p Little Tropical Isle: Jay B. Elston (RK) 5p, Reed Lightfoot (RK) 9p Louisiana Music Factory: Michael O’Hara (VR) 2p, John Sinclair and Carlo Ditta (VR) 3p Maison: Chance Bushman and the Ibervillainaires, Leah Rucker, Smoking Time Jazz Club (JV) 1p, Big Easy Brawlers (BB) 10p Maple Leaf: John “Papa” Gros Saturday Night Special (VR) 10:30p Morning Call City Park: Billy D. Chapman (JV) 10a Old Point Bar: Diablo’s Horns (RK) 9:30p Ooh Poo Pah Doo: Koubion (RB) 8p Palm Court Jazz Club: Brian O’Connell and Palm Court Jazz Band (JV) 8p Preservation Hall: Preservation Hall All-Stars feat. Mark Braud (TJ) 8p Republic: Martin Sexton, Brothers McCann (RK) 8p Rock ‘n’ Bowl: the Boogie Men (VR) 9:30p Snug Harbor: Christian Scott Quintet (JV) 8 & 10p Spotted Cat: Shotgun Jazz Band (JV) 2p, Panorama Jazz Band (JV) 6p, Jazz Vipers (JV) 10p Three Muses: Chris Peters (JV) 5p, Debbie Davis (JV) 6p, Shotgun Jazz Band (JV) 9p Time Out: Andre Bohren (RR) 11a Tropical Isle Bayou Club: La Maniere des Cadiens (KJ) 1p, Brandon Miller and Louisiana Inferno (KJ) 4p, T’Canaille (KJ) 8:30p Tropical Isle Bourbon: Way Too Early (RK) 1p, Rhythm and Rain (RK) 5p, Debi and the Deacons (RK) 9p

SUNDAY FEB 14

30/90: Revival (VR) 2p, Ted Hefko (VR) 5p, T’Canaille (VR) 9p Banks Street Bar: Johnny Angel and Helldorado (CW) 7p Bombay Club: David Boeddinghaus (PI) 8p Buffa’s: Some Like It Hot! (TJ) 10:30a, Jazz Youth Showcase with Bruce Menesses (JV) 4p, Bryce Eastwood Group (JV) 7p Chickie Wah Wah: Sweet Olive String Band (JV) 6p, Meschiya Lake and the Little Big Horns (JV) 8p Circle Bar: Micah McKee and Little Maker, Blind Texas Marlin (FO) 6p, the City Lights, DJ Pasta (CW) 9:30p Crazy Lobster: the Gator Baits (VR) 11a, Poppy’s All-Stars (VR) 4p d.b.a.: Palmetto Bugs Stompers (SI) 6p, Shamarr Allen and the Underdawgs (FK) 10p Dragon’s Den: Open Jazz Jam with Anuraag Pendya (SS) 7p, Church (EL) 10p Funky Pirate: the Pentones (BL) 6p Hi-Ho Lounge: NOLA Comedy Hour Open Mic (CO) 8p Howlin’ Wolf (the Den): Hot 8 Brass Band (BB) 10p Kermit’s Mother-in-Law Lounge: Kermit Ruffins and the BBQ Swingers (JV) 5:30p Kerry Irish Pub: Patrick Cooper (FO) 8p Little Gem Saloon: Jon Roniger (JV) 10a, Ingrid Lucia and Charlie Miller (JV) 6:30p Little Tropical Isle: Frank Fairbanks (RK) 5p, Mark Parson (RK) 9p Maison: Royal Street Winding Boys, Luneta Jazz Band, Too Darn Hot, Soul Project (VR) 1p Maple Leaf: Joe Krown Trio feat. Russell Batiste and Walter “Wolfman” Washington (FK) 10p Morning Call City Park: Billy D. Chapman (JV) 10a Ooh Poo Pah Doo: Koubion (RB) 8p Orpheum Theater: Trixie Minx Productions presents Cupid’s Cabaret (BQ) 6:30p Palm Court Jazz Club: Lucien Barbarin and Sunday Night Swingsters (JV) 8p Preservation Hall: Preservation Hall Legacy Band feat. Gregg Stafford (TJ) 6p, Preservation Hall All-Stars feat. Wendell Brunious (TJ) 8p Rock ‘n’ Bowl: the Boogie Men (VR) 5:30p Siberia: Alexandra Scott’s Lonely Hearts Club Band: A Valentine’s Day Sing-along of Sad Love Songs (VR) 6p

Snug Harbor: Cindy Scott (JV) 8 & 10p Spotted Cat: Yvette Voelker and the Swinging Heathens (JV) 2p, Kristina Morales and Bayou Shufflers (JV) 6p, Pat Casey and the New Sound (JV) 10p Three Muses: Raphael et Pascal (JV) 5p, Linnzi Zaorski (JV) 8p Time Out: Live music (VR) 12p Tropical Isle Original: the Hangovers (RK) 5p, Late As Usual (RK) 9p

MONDAY FEB 15

30/90: Perdido Jazz Band (JV) 5p, New Orleans Super Jam (VR) 9p AllWays Lounge: Shine Delphi and friends (GY) 8p Bacchanal: Raphael Bas (JV) 12p, Helen Gillet (JV) 7:30p Banks Street Bar: Lauren Sturm’s Red Beans and Rice Piano Night (JV) 7p, South Jones (RK) 10p Bombay Club: Josh Paxton (PI) 8p Buffa’s: Arsene DeLay (VR) 5p, Antoine Diel (JV) 8p Chickie Wah Wah: Alexis and the Samurai (ID) 8p Crazy Lobster: the Insta-Gators (VR) 5p d.b.a.: Glen David Andrews (JV) 10p Funky Pirate: Mark and the Pentones (BL) 4p Hi-Ho Lounge: Bluegrass Pickin’ Party (BU) 8p, Instant Opus Improvised Series (MJ) 9p House of Blues (the Parish): Irontom (RK) 8p Little Tropical Isle: Frank Fairbanks (RK) 5p, Reed Lightfoot (RK) 9p Maison: Chicken and Waffles, Aurora Nealand and the Royal Roses, Crooked Vines (VR) 4p Maple Leaf: George Porter Jr. Trio (FK) 10p Morning Call: Valerie Sassyfras (VR) 10a One Eyed Jacks: Dazed on Toulouse (VR) 10p Ooh Poo Pah Doo: James Andrews with the Crescent City All-Stars and Bobby Love (VR) 8p Preservation Hall: Preservation Hall Jazz Masters feat. Leroy Jones (TJ) 8p RF’s: Monty Banks (JV) 7p the Saint: Motown Mondays with DJ Shane Love (SO) 10p Siberia: Warbringer, Enforcerer, Cauldron, Exmortus, Desecrator (ME) 8p Snug Harbor: Charmaine Neville Band (JV) 8 & 10p Spotted Cat: Sarah McCoy and the Oopsie Daisies (JV) 4p, Dominick Grillo and the Frenchmen St. All-Stars (JV) 6p, Jazz Vipers (JV) 10p Three Muses: Joe Cabral (JV) 7p Tropical Isle Bourbon: Rhythm and Rain (RK) 5p, Way Too Early (RK) 9p Tropical Isle Original: Graham Robertson (RK) 5p, Whiskey Bay (RK) 9p

TUESDAY FEB 16

30/90: Bayou Saints (VR) 5p, Ed Wills and Blues4Sale (BL) 9p Bacchanal: Raphael Bas (JV) 12p, Mark Weliky Trio (JV) 7:30p Banks Street Bar: Simple Sound Retreat (VR) 9p Blue Nile: Open Ears Music Series feat. Dave Rempis, Jeff Albert, James Singleton and Doug Garrison (MJ) 10:30p Bombay Club: Matt Lemmler (PI) 8p Checkpoint Charlie: Jamie Lynn Vessels, Russian Girlfriends (VR) 7p Chickie Wah Wah: Lynn Drury (VR) 8:30p Circle Bar: Kia Cavallaro and friends (FO) 6p, Fever Dreams, Midnight Returns (ID) 10p Columns Hotel: Paul Sanchez and John Rankin (JV) 8p Crazy Lobster: AC and the Heat (VR) 5p d.b.a.: Treme Brass Band (BB) 9p Dos Jefes: Tom Hook and Wendell Brunious (JV) 9p Funky Pirate: Blues Masters feat. Big Al (BL) 8:30p Hi-Ho Lounge: Spaghetti Western Show (VR) 7p, Free Spirit Brass Band (BB) 10p House of Blues: Led Zeppelin 2: A Tribute to Led Zeppelin (CR) 8p Howlin’ Wolf (the Den): Comedy Beast (CO) 8:30p Jazz National Historical Park: Richard Scott (JV) 12p Kerry Irish Pub: Jason Bishop (FO) 8:30p Little Tropical Isle: Mark Pentone (RK) 5p, Frank Fairbanks (RK) 9p Maison: Swinging Gypsies, Gregory Agid (JV) 4p Maple Leaf: Rebirth Brass Band (FK) 11p Old U.S. Mint: Matt Hampsey and Down on Their Luck Orchestra (JV) 2p Preservation Hall: Preservation Hall-Stars feat. Shannon Powell (TJ) 8p

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LIVE LOCAL MUSIC Snug Harbor: Stanton Moore Trio (JV) 8 & 10p Spotted Cat:Andy J. Forest (JV) 4p, Meschiya Lake and the Little Big Horns (JV) 6p, Smoking Time Jazz Club (JV) 10p Tropical Isle Bourbon: Jay B. Elston Duo (RK) 5p, Jezebels Chill’n (RK) 9p Tropical Isle Original: the Hangovers (RK) 5p, Jay B. Elston Band (RK) 9p

WEDNESDAY FEB 17

30/90: Justin Donovan Trio (VR) 5p, Mutiny Squad (VR) 9p Banks Street Bar: Major Bacon (BL) 10p Bombay Club: Kris Tokarski (PI) 8p Buffa’s: Open Mic Night with Nattie Sanchez (SS) 7p Chickie Wah Wah: John Rankin (JV) 6p Circle Bar: the Iguanas (RK) 6p, Carl LeBlanc (RB) 10p Crazy Lobster: Ken Swartz and the Palace of Sin (VR) 5p d.b.a.: Tin Men (RK) 7p, Walter “Wolfman” Washington and the Roadmasters (BL) 10p Dragon’s Den: Reggae Night (RE) 10p Eiffel Society: Society Salsa (LT) 7p Funky Pirate: Blues Masters feat. Big Al (BL) 8:30p Hi-Ho Lounge: We Love Vinyl (VR) 6p, Beacon (VR) 9p Kerry Irish Pub: Tim Robertson (FO) 8:30p Little Gem Saloon: Lynn Drury (FO) 7p Little Tropical Isle: Jay B. Elston (RK) 5p, Reed Lightfoot (RK) 9p Maison: Jazz Vipers, WillFunk (VR) 6:30p Maple Leaf: Gov’t Majik (VR) 9p Morning Call: Valerie Sassyfras (VR) 10a Neutral Ground Coffeehouse: Kelcy Mae (SS) 9p Old U.S. Mint: Mitch Woods (JV) 2p, Charmaine Neville (JV) 7p Palm Court Jazz Club: Lars Edegran and Topsy Chapman with Palm Court Jazz Band (JV) 8p Preservation Hall: Preservation Hall All-Stars feat. Mark Braud (TJ) 8p RF’s: Tony Seville (JV) 7p Rock ‘n’ Bowl: Mitch Woods and his Rocket 88s (SI) 8p Snug Harbor: Uptown Jazz Orchestra (JV) 8 & 10p

www.OFFBEAT.com

Spotted Cat: Chris Christy (JV) 4p, Shotgun Jazz Band (JV) 6p, Antoine Diel and the New Orleans Power Misfits (JV) 10p Three Muses: Leslie Martin (JV) 5p, Schatzy (JV) 7p Tropical Isle Bayou Club: La Maniere des Cadiens (KJ) 4p, Brandon Moreau and Cajungrass (KJ) 8:30p

THURSDAY FEB 18

30/90: Andy J. Forest (VR) 5p, Smoke N Bones (VR) 9p Banks Street Bar: Darci Carlson (VR) 7p, St. Claude Serenaders (BU) 9p Bombay Club: Kris Tokarski with Connie Jones (JV) 8p Buffa’s: Alexandra Scott and Josh Paxton (VR) 5p, Tom McDermott and Aurora Nealand (JV) 8p Chiba: Tom Worrell (PI) 8p Chickie Wah Wah: Phil DeGruy (VR) 6p Circle Bar: Rik Slave’s Country Persuasion (CW) 6p, Gal Holiday and the Honky Tonk Revue (CW) 10p Crazy Lobster: the Spanish Plaza 3 (VR) 5p d.b.a.: Dave Jordan and the NIA (RR) 10p Dragon’s Den: Dave Easley (VR) 7p, the Ill Vibe with DJ Matt Scott (VR) 10p Funky Pirate: Marc Stone Duo (BL) 4p, Blues Masters feat. Big Al (BL) 8:30p Hi-Ho Lounge: Stripped Into Submission (BQ) 9p Howlin’ Wolf (the Den): Comedy Gumbeaux (CO) 8:30p Kerry Irish Pub: Paintbox with Dave James and Tim Robertson (FO) 9p Little Tropical Isle: Allen Hebert (RK) 5p, Mike Berger (RK) 9p Maison: Jon Roniger, Roamin’ Jasmine, Dysfunktional Bone (VR) 4p Maple Leaf: the Trio feat. Johnny Vidacovich and special guests (FK) 11p Ogden Museum of Southern Art: Chris Thomas King (BL) 6p Palm Court Jazz Club: Tim Laughlin and Crescent City Joymakers (JV) 8p Preservation Hall: Preservation Hall Legacy Band feat. Gregg Stafford (TJ) 6p, Preservation Hall All-Stars feat. Lucien Barbarin (TJ) 8p

Rock ‘n’ Bowl: Wayne Singleton and Same Ol’ 2 Step (ZY) 8:30p Snug Harbor: Tom Saunders and Tom Cats (JV) 8 & 10p Spotted Cat: Sarah McCoy and the Oopsie Daisies (JV) 4p, Miss Sophie Lee (JV) 6p, Jumbo Shrimp (JV) 10p Three Muses: Tom McDermott (JV) 5p, Luke Winslow King (JV) 7:30p Tropical Isle Bayou Club: Cajun Drifters (KJ) 4p, Brandon Moreau and Cajungrass (KJ) 8:30p Tropical Isle Bourbon: Miss Maggie Trio (RK) 5p, Debi and the Deacons (RK) 9p Vaughan’s Lounge: the Heart Attacks (JV) 10p Verret’s Lounge: Calvin Johnson and Kirk Joseph present Chapter:SOUL (SO) 9p

FRIDAY FEB 19

30/90: the Little Things (VR) 2p, Brother Tyrone and the Mindbenders (VR) 8p, Dave Jordan and NIA (RR) 11p Banks Street Bar: NOLA County (FO) 10p Bombay Club: Duke Heitger (JV) 8:30p Buffa’s: Marc Stone (BL) 5p, Davis Rogan (VR) 8p, Lynn Drury (VR) 11p Chickie Wah Wah: Paul Sanchez (RR) 8p Crazy Lobster: Ken Swartz and the Palace of Sin (VR) 5p d.b.a.: Linnzi Zaorski (JV) 6p, Ike Stubblefield Trio (FK) 11p Dragon’s Den: Zobin Baygan (VR) 5p, Loose Marbles (JV) 7p; Upstairs: Comedy Fuck Yeah (CO) 8p, Latin Night (LT) 11p Funky Pirate: Marc Stone Duo (BL) 12p, Mark and the Pentones (BL) 4p, Blues Masters feat. Big Al (BL) 8:30p Hi-Ho Lounge: Mahayla, Baby Bats (ID) 10p Jazz National Historical Park: Johnette Downing (FO) 11a Kermit’s Mother-in-Law Lounge: Guitar Slim Jr. (BL) 9p Kerry Irish Pub: Mark Appleford (FO) 5p, Hurricane Refugees (FO) 9p Little Gem Saloon: Nayo Jones Experience (JV) 8p Little Tropical Isle: Reed Lightfoot (RK) 5p, Mike Berger (RK) 9p

Maison: Rhythm Wizards, Dinosaurchestra, Shotgun Jazz Band (JV) 1p, Los Po-boy-citos, Big Easy Brawlers (VR) 10p Maple Leaf: Terence Higgins’ Swampgrease (FK) 10:30p Morning Call: Valerie Sassyfras (VR) 10a Old Point Bar: Rick Trolsen (PI) 5p, Isla Nola (LT) 9:30p Old U.S. Mint: Lil’ Buck Sinegal (ZY) 7p Ooh Poo Pah Doo: Just Judy (RB) 8p Orpheum Theater: Gluzman Plays Prokofiev (CL) 7:30p Palm Court Jazz Club: Lucien Barbarin and Palm Court Jazz Band (JV) 8p Preservation Hall: Preservation Hall Brass Band feat. Daniel Farrow (TJ) 8p Rock ‘n’ Bowl: the Wiseguys (JV) 9p Saint Hotel: Creole Sweet Tease Burlesque Show (BQ) 9p Snug Harbor: Ellis Marsalis Quintet (JV) 8 & 10p Spotted Cat: Andy J. Forest (JV) 4p, Washboard Chaz Blues Trio (BL) 6p, New Orleans Cottonmouth Kings (JV) 10p Three Muses: Royal Roses (JV) 5:30p, Glen David Andrews (JV) 9p Tropical Isle Bayou Club: Brandon Miller and Louisiana Inferno (KJ) 5p, T’Canaille (KJ) 9p UNO Lakefront Arena: Big Easy Festival of Laughs with Mike Epps (CO) 8p

SATURDAY FEB 20

30/90: Jamie Lynn Vessels (VR) 8p, Dana Abbott (VR) 11p Banks Street Bar: Clockwork Elvis (RK) 10p Blue Nile: Washboard Chaz Blues Trio (BL) 7p Bombay Club: Matthew Shilling (JV) 8:30p Buffa’s: Red Hot Jazz Band (JV) 11a, Swamp Kitchen (VR) 5p, Food for Friends Benefit with Freddie Blue and friends (VR) 8p, the Salt Wives (GY) 11p Chickie Wah Wah: the Batture Boys with Tommy Malone and Ray Ganucheau (VR) 9p Columns Hotel: Andrew Hall (JV) 6p Crazy Lobster: the River Gang (VR) 11a, the Neon Shadows (VR) 4p Creole Cookery: Mark Weliky Trio (JV) 11a

FEBRU A RY 2 016

LIVE LOCAL MUSIC d.b.a.: Jon Boutte (JV) 8p, George Porter Jr. and his Runnin’ Pardners (FK) 11p Dragon’s Den: Matt Babineaux (RK) 5p, Dinosaurchestra (JV) 7p, DJ Kidd Love (VR) 10p; Upstairs: Sadder Days with R3GAL (VR) 10p Funky Pirate: Marc Stone Duo (BL) 12p, Mark and the Pentones (BL) 4p, Blues Masters feat. Big Al (BL) 8:30p Hi-Ho Lounge: Drunktoons (CO) 7p, Hustle feat. DJ Soul Sister (FK) 11p Kerry Irish Pub: Speed the Mule (FO) 5p, Lynn Drury (FO) 9p Little Tropical Isle: Jay B. Elston (RK) 5p, Reed Lightfoot (RK) 9p Louisiana Music Factory: New Orleans Steamcog Orchestra (VR) 2p, Joey Van Leevnen (VR) 3p, Michael Torregano Jr. (VR) 4p Maison: Chance Bushman and the Ibervillainaires, Loose Marbles, Smoking Time Jazz Band (JV) 1p, the Essentials, Street Legends (VR) 10p Maple Leaf: BasiNola: 1970s Brazil Samba/Funk/Rock (VR) 10:30p Morning Call City Park: Billy D. Chapman (JV) 10a Old Point Bar: Gal Holiday and the Honky Tonk Revue (CW) 9:30p One Eyed Jacks: Ty Segall and the Muggers, CFM (VR) 10p Ooh Poo Pah Doo: Koubion (RB) 8p Palm Court Jazz Club: Brian O’Connell and Palm Court Jazz Band (JV) 8p Preservation Hall: Preservation Hall All-Stars feat. Mark Braud (TJ) 8p Rock ‘n’ Bowl: call club (BL) 9p Snug Harbor: Ike Stubblefield Organ Trio (JV) 8 & 10p Spotted Cat: Russell Welch’s Mississippi Gypsy (JV) 2p, Panorama Jazz Band (JV) 6p, Meschiya Lake and the Little Big Horns (JV) 10p Three Muses: Chris Peters (JV) 5p, Hot Club of New Orleans (JV) 6p, Shotgun Jazz Band (JV) 9p Time Out: Andre Bohren (RR) 11a Tropical Isle Original: Down River (RK) 1p, the Hangovers (RK) 5p, Late As Usual (RK) 9p

SUNDAY FEB 21

30/90: Revival (VR) 2p, Vivaz (VR) 5p, Derrick Freeman (VR) 9p Banks Street Bar: Kenny Triche Band (SS) 7p Bombay Club: Tom Hook (PI) 8p Buffa’s: Some Like It Hot! (TJ) 10:30a, Panorama Jazz Band Family Concert (JV) 4p, Marla Dixon Trio (JV) 7p Chickie Wah Wah: Sweet Olive Duo (JV) 6p Crazy Lobster: the Gator Baits (VR) 11a, Poppy’s All-Stars (VR) 4p Creole Cookery: Live music (JV) 11a d.b.a.: Palmetto Bugs Stompers (SI) 6p, Mikey B3 Trio (FK) 10p Dragon’s Den: Open Jazz Jam with Anuraag Pendya (SS) 7p, Church (EL) 10p Funky Pirate: the Pentones (BL) 6p Hi-Ho Lounge: NOLA Comedy Hour Open Mic (CO) 8p, Ryan Floyd and Dreaming Dingo (FO) 9p Howlin’ Wolf (the Den): Hot 8 Brass Band (BB) 10p Kermit’s Mother-in-Law Lounge: Kermit Ruffins and the BBQ Swingers (JV) 5:30p Kerry Irish Pub: Chip Wilson (FO) 8p Little Tropical Isle: Frank Fairbanks (RK) 5p, Mark Parson (RK) 9p Maison: the Asylum Chorus, Loose Marbles, Leah Rucker, Corporate America (VR) 1p Maple Leaf: Joe Krown Trio feat. Russell Batiste and Walter “Wolfman” Washington (FK) 10p Morning Call City Park: Billy D. Chapman (JV) 10a Palm Court Jazz Club: Lucien Barbarin and Sunday Night Swingsters (JV) 8p Preservation Hall: Preservation Hall All-Stars feat. Wendell Brunious (TJ) 8p Snug Harbor: Ted Ludwig Trio (JV) 8 & 10p Spotted Cat: Giselle Anguizola Trio (JV) 2p, Kristina Morales and Bayou Shufflers (JV) 6p, Pat Casey and the New Sound (JV) 10p Three Muses: Raphael et Pascal (JV) 5p, Linnzi Zaorski (JV) 8p Tropical Isle Original: the Hangovers (RK) 5p, Late As Usual (RK) 9p

MONDAY FEB 22

30/90: Perdido Jazz Band (JV) 5p, New Orleans Super Jam (VR) 9p

F E B R U A RY 2 0 1 6

Banks Street Bar: Lauren Sturm’s Red Beans and Rice Piano Night (JV) 7p, South Jones (RK) 10p Bombay Club: Josh Paxton (PI) 8p Buffa’s: Arsene DeLay (VR) 5p, Antoine Diel (JV) 8p Chickie Wah Wah: Alexis and the Samurai (ID) 8p Crazy Lobster: the Insta-Gators (VR) 5p d.b.a.: Luke Winslow King (JV) 7p, Glen David Andrews (JV) 10p Funky Pirate: Mark and the Pentones (BL) 4p Hi-Ho Lounge: Bluegrass Pickin’ Party (BU) 8p, Instant Opus Improvised Series (MJ) 9p Kerry Irish Pub: Will Murray (FO) 8p Maison: Chicken and Waffles, Aurora Nealand and the Royal Roses, Musical Expression (VR) 4p Maple Leaf: George Porter Jr. Trio (FK) 10p Morning Call: Valerie Sassyfras (VR) 10a One Eyed Jacks: Dazed on Toulouse (VR) 10p Ooh Poo Pah Doo: James Andrews with the Crescent City All-Stars and Bobby Love (VR) 8p Preservation Hall: Preservation Hall Jazz Masters feat. Leroy Jones (TJ) 8p the Saint: Motown Mondays with DJ Shane Love (SO) 10p Snug Harbor: Charmaine Neville Band (JV) 8 & 10p Spotted Cat: Sarah McCoy and the Oopsie Daisies (JV) 4p, Dominick Grillo and the Frenchmen St. All-Stars Little Freddie (JV) 6p, Jazz Vipers (JV) 10p King Three Muses: Bart Ramsey (JV) 5p Tropical Isle Original: Graham Robertson (RK) 5p, Whiskey Bay (RK) 9p

TUESDAY FEB 23

30/90: Bayou Saints (VR) 5p, Ed Wills and Blues4Sale (BL) 9p Banks Street Bar: Nicole Ockman (VR) 9p Blue Nile: Open Ears Music Series feat. Matt Booth Quartet (MJ) 10:30p Bombay Club: Matt Lemmler (PI) 8p Checkpoint Charlie: Jamie Lynn Vessels (BL) 7p Chickie Wah Wah: Lynn Drury (VR) 8:30p Crazy Lobster: AC and the Heat (VR) 5p d.b.a.: Treme Brass Band (BB) 9p Funky Pirate: Blues Masters feat. Big Al (BL) 8:30p Hi-Ho Lounge: Spaghetti Western Show (VR) 7p, Free Spirit Brass Band (BB) 10p House of Blues (the Parish): Pell, Daye Jack (HH) 8p House of Blues: Daley (SO) 8:30p Howlin’ Wolf (the Den): Comedy Beast (CO) 8:30p Kerry Irish Pub: Jason Bishop (FO) 8:30p Little Tropical Isle: Mark Pentone (RK) 5p, Frank Fairbanks (RK) 9p Maison: Swinging Gypsies, Gregory Agid, TK Groove (JV) 4p Maple Leaf: Rebirth Brass Band (FK) 11p Preservation Hall: Preservation Hall-Stars feat. Shannon Powell (TJ) 8p Snug Harbor: Jason Marsalis (JV) 8 & 10p Spotted Cat: Andy J. Forest (JV) 4p, Meschiya Lake and the Little Big Horns (JV) 6p, Smoking Time Jazz Club (JV) 10p Tropical Isle Bayou Club: Cajungrass Duo (KJ) 4p, Cajun Drifters (KJ) 8:30p

WEDNESDAY FEB 24

30/90: Justin Donovan Trio (VR) 5p, Circular Time (VR) 9p Banks Street Bar: Major Bacon (BL) 10p Bombay Club: Davy Mooney (PI) 8p Buffa’s: Open Mic Night with Nattie Sanchez (SS) 7p Chickie Wah Wah: John Rankin (JV) 6p Circle Bar: the Iguanas (RK) 6p, Carl LeBlanc (RB) 10p Crazy Lobster: Ken Swartz and the Palace of Sin (VR) 5p d.b.a.: Tin Men (BL) 7p, Walter “Wolfman” Washington and the Roadmasters (BL) 10p Dragon’s Den: Reggae Night (RE) 10p Eiffel Society: Society Salsa (LT) 7p French Market: National Park Service Centennial Jazz Band (JV) 3p Funky Pirate: Blues Masters feat. Big Al (BL) 8:30p Gasa Gasa: Protomartyr, Spray Paint, Black Abba (PK) 9p Hi-Ho Lounge: We Love Vinyl (VR) 6p, Shamarr Allen, DJ Chicken (FK) 9p Kerry Irish Pub: Chip Wilson (FO) 8:30p Little Gem Saloon: Lynn Drury (FO) 7p Little Tropical Isle: Jay B. Elston (RK) 5p, Reed Lightfoot (RK) 9p Maison: Royal Street Winding Boys, Jazz Vipers, Mutiny Squad (VR) 4p

Maple Leaf: Full Orangutan (VR) 9p Morning Call: Valerie Sassyfras (VR) 10a Orpheum Theater: Melissa Etheridge (FO) 8p Palm Court Jazz Club: Lars Edegran and Topsy Chapman with Palm Court Jazz Band (JV) 8p Preservation Hall: Preservation Hall All-Stars feat. Mark Braud (TJ) 8p Republic: Alison Wonderland, Golden Features (EL) 10p Rock ‘n’ Bowl: the Boogie Men (SI) 8p Snug Harbor: Uptown Jazz Orchestra (JV) 8 & 10p Spotted Cat: Chris Christy (JV) 4p, Shotgun Jazz Band (JV) 6p, Antoine Diel and the New Orleans Power Misfits (JV) 10p Three Muses: Leslie Martin (JV) 5p, Sarah McCoy (JV) 7p Tropical Isle Bourbon: Jezebels Chill’n (RK) 5p, Debi and the Deacons (RK) 9p Tropical Isle Original: Debi and the Deacons (RK) 5p, Late As Usual (RK) 9p

THURSDAY FEB 25

30/90: Andy J. Forest (VR) 5p, Smoke N Bones (VR) 9p Banks Street Bar: Kelcy Mae (SS) 9p Bombay Club: Kris Tokarski with Tim Laughlin (JV) 8p Buffa’s: Alexandra Scott and Josh Paxton (VR) 5p, Tom McDermott and Aurora Nealand (JV) 8p Chiba: Keiko Komaki (PI) 6p Chickie Wah Wah: Phil DeGruy (VR) 6p, the Rotten Cores (VR) 9p Crazy Lobster: the Spanish Plaza 3 (VR) 5p d.b.a.: Little Freddie King (BL) 11p Dos Jefes: the Iguanas (RK) 9p Dragon’s Den: the Ill Vibe with DJ Matt Scott (VR) 10p Funky Pirate: Marc Stone Duo (BL) 4p, Blues Masters feat. Big Al (BL) 8:30p Hi-Ho Lounge: Cirque d’Licious (BQ) 8p Howlin’ Wolf (the Den): Comedy Gumbeaux (CO) 8:30p Kerry Irish Pub: Foot and friends (FO) 9p Little Tropical Isle: Allen Hebert (RK) 5p, Mike Berger (RK) 9p Maison: Jon Roniger, Dinosaurchestra, Dysfunktional Bone (VR) 4p Maple Leaf: the Trio feat. Johnny Vidacovich and special guests (FK) 11p Nunemaker Auditorium (Loyola University): Jazz Underground Series feat. Wessell Anderson, Ashlin Parker, Delfeayo Marsalis and others (JV) 7:30p Ogden Museum of Southern Art: Carol Fran (BL) 6p Palm Court Jazz Club: Duke Heitger and Crescent City Joymakers (JV) 8p Preservation Hall: Preservation Hall Legacy Band feat. Gregg Stafford (TJ) 6p, Preservation Hall All-Stars feat. Lucien Barbarin (TJ) 8p Rock ‘n’ Bowl: Horace Trahan (ZY) 8:30p Snug Harbor: Larry Sieberth Quartet Live Recording (JV) 8 & 10p Spotted Cat: Sarah McCoy and the Oopsie Daisies (JV) 4p, Miss Sophie Lee (JV) 6p, Jumbo Shrimp (JV) 10p Three Muses: Tom McDermott (JV) 5p, Luke Winslow King (JV) 7:30p Tropical Isle Bayou Club: Cajun Drifters (KJ) 4p, Brandon Moreau and Cajungrass (KJ) 8:30p Vaughan’s Lounge: the Heart Attacks (JV) 10p Verret’s Lounge: Calvin Johnson and Kirk Joseph present Chapter:SOUL (SO) 9p

FRIDAY FEB 26

30/90: the Little Things (VR) 2p, Jon Roniger Gypsyland (VR) 5p, Marc Stone (BL) 8p, Jesse Smith Project (VR) 11p Banks Street Bar: Chris Zonada (SS) 7p, the Fruit Machines (RK) 10p Bombay Club: Phillip Manuel (JV) 8:30p Buffa’s: Jenna Guidry (VR) 5p, Paul Sanchez and Alex McMurray (VR) 8p, Sweetwater and Company (VR) 11p Carrollton Station: Debauche (GY) 10p Chickie Wah Wah: the Bluerunners (VR) 9p, Mike Dillon Band (MJ) 10:30p d.b.a.: Tuba Skinny (TJ) 6p, Dwayne Dopsie and the Zydeco Hellraisers (ZY) 10p Dragon’s Den: Zobin Baygan (VR) 5p, Loose Marbles (JV) 7p; Upstairs: Comedy Fuck Yeah (CO) 8p, Latin Night (LT) 11p Funky Pirate: Marc Stone Duo (BL) 12p, Mark and the Pentones (BL) 4p, Blues Masters feat. Big Al (BL) 8:30p Gasa Gasa: Radiation City, Deep Sea Diver, Mariine (ID) 9p

Hi-Ho Lounge: the Wooden Wings, South Jones, West Without (RK) 9p Kerry Irish Pub: Old Money (FO) 9p Little Gem Saloon: Circular Time (JV) 8p Little Tropical Isle: Reed Lightfoot (RK) 5p, Mike Berger (RK) 9p Maison: Roamin’ Jasmine, Shotgun Jazz Band (JV) 1p, Soul Project, Musical Expression (VR) 10p Maple Leaf: Johnny Vidacovich and John Medeski (VR) 10:30p Morning Call: Valerie Sassyfras (VR) 10a Palm Court Jazz Club: Lucien Barbarin and Palm Court Jazz Band (JV) 8p Preservation Hall: Preservation Hall Brass Band feat. Daniel Farrow (TJ) 8p Rock ‘n’ Bowl: Bag of Donuts (VR) 9:30p Saint Hotel: Creole Sweet Tease Burlesque Show (BQ) 9p Snug Harbor: Ellis Marsalis Quintet (JV) 8 & 10p Spotted Cat: Andy J. Forest (JV) 4p, Washboard Chaz Blues Trio (BL) 6p, New Orleans Cottonmouth Kings (JV) 10p Three Muses: Matt Johnson (JV) 5:30p, Glen David Andrews (JV) 9p Tipitina’s: the Low End Theory Players present a Tribute to A Tribe Called Quest feat. Mr Smoker, M@ Peoples, Sean C, MC Koan, Gravity A, Mike Dillon and Jermaine Quiz (VR) 10p Tropical Isle Original: Down River (RK) 1p, the Hangovers (RK) 5p, Late As Usual (RK) 9p

SATURDAY FEB 27

30/90: Pink Magnolias (VR) 2p, St. Cecilia’s Asylum Chorus (VR) 5p, Soul Brass Band (BB) 8p, Troy Swayer and the Elements (VR) 11p Banks Street Bar: Josh Richoux, Ugly, Cerebral Drama (RK) 10p Blue Nile: Washboard Chaz Blues Trio (BL) 7p Bombay Club: Kris Tokarski Trio (JV) 8:30p Buffa’s: Red Hot Jazz Band (JV) 11am, Crossing Canal with Ruby Ross and Patrick Cooper (FO) 5p, the Four Sideman of the Apocalypse (JV) 8p, Keith Burnstein’s Kettle Black (VR) 11p Chickie Wah Wah: Susan Cowsill (VR) 9p Circle Bar: Heidijo (JV) 6p, the Sheiks, Black Abba (VR) 9p, Mod Dance Party (VR) 11p Crazy Lobster: the River Gang (VR) 11a, the Neon Shadows (VR) 4p Creole Cookery: Mark Weliky Trio (JV) 11a d.b.a.: John Boutte (JV) 8p Dragon’s Den: Matt Babineaux (RK) 5p, Afro Cube (AF) 7p; Upstairs: Talk Nerdy to Me (BQ) 8p, Sadder Days with R3GAL (VR) 10p Funky Pirate: Marc Stone Duo (BL) 12p, Mark and the Pentones (BL) 4p, Blues Masters feat. Big Al (BL) 8:30p Hi-Ho Lounge: the Rip Off Show (CO) 7p, Hustle feat. DJ Soul Sister (FK) 11p House of Blues (the Parish): Bag Raiders, Plastic Plates (EL) 9p House of Blues: Undoing Racism: Benefit for PISAB feat. Shalita Grant of NCIS (VR) 8p Jazz National Historical Park: Royal Players Brass Band (BB) 12p Kerry Irish Pub: Mark Parsons (FO) 5p, Hurricane Refugees (FO) 9p Louisiana Music Factory: the Pentones (VR) 2p, Les White (VR) 3p, Jason Marsalis (JV) 4p Maison: Chance Bushman and the Ibervillainaires, Leah Rucker, Smoking Time Jazz Club (VR) 7p, Cakewalk, Big Easy Brawlers (FK) 10p Maple Leaf: Bernie Sanders Benefit feat. Eric “Benny” Bloom and Gemini, Pirate’s Choice, Smoke N Bones (FK) 10:30p Preservation Hall: Preservation Hall All-Stars feat. Mark Braud (TJ) 8p Rock ‘n’ Bowl: Dave and Phil Alvin (BL) 9:30p Snug Harbor: Germaine Bazzle and Larry Sieberth Trio (JV) 8 & 10p Spotted Cat: Jazz Band Ballers (JV) 2p, Meschiya Lake and the Little Big Horns (JV) 6p, Ecirb Muller’s Twisted Dixie (JV) 10p Three Muses: Chris Peters (JV) 5p, Debbie Davis (JV) 6p, Shotgun Jazz Band (JV) 9p Tropical Isle Original: Down River (RK) 1p, the Hangovers (RK) 5p, Late As Usual (RK) 9p

www.OFFBEAT.com

LIVE LOCAL MUSIC UNO Lakefront Arena: 9th Annual Big Easy Blues Fest (BL) 8p

SUNDAY FEB 28

30/90: Revival (VR) 2p, Ted Hefko (VR) 5p, T’Canaille (VR) 9p Banks Street Bar: Ron Hotstream and the Mid-City Drifters (CW) 7p Bombay Club: Tom Hook (PI) 8p Buffa’s: Some Like It Hot! (TJ) 10:30a, Jazz Youth Showcase with Miles Lyons Jass Band (JV) 4p, Kris Tokarski Trio (JV) 7p Chickie Wah Wah: Sweet Olive Duo (JV) 6p, Meschiya Lake and the Little Big Horns (JV) 8p Civic Theater: Dropkick Murphys, Tiger Army, Darkbuster (PK) 8p Columns Hotel: Chip Wilson (JV) 11a Crazy Lobster: the Gator Baits (VR) 11a, Poppy’s AllStars (VR) 4p d.b.a.: Palmetto Bugs Stompers (SI) 6p, John Sinclair and the Carlo Ditta Trio (VR) 10p Dragon’s Den: Open Jazz Jam with Anuraag Pendya (SS) 7p, Church (EL) 10p Funky Pirate: the Pentones (BL) 6p Hi-Ho Lounge: NOLA Comedy Hour Open Mic (CO) 8p, Vice Is Right (BQ) 9p Howlin’ Wolf (the Den): Hot 8 Brass Band (BB) 10p Kermit’s Mother-in-Law Lounge: Kermit Ruffins and the BBQ Swingers (JV) 5:30p Kerry Irish Pub: Patrick Cooper (FO) 8p Louisiana Music Factory: Marlowe Shepherd (VR) 1p Maison: Swinging Gypsies, Dinosaurchestra, Brad Walker, Soul Company (VR) 1p Maple Leaf: Jamie Galloway Block Party and Musician’s Clinic Fundraiser (VR) 3p’ Joe Krown Trio feat. Russell Batiste and Walter “Wolfman” Washington (FK) 10p Palm Court Jazz Club: Lucien Barbarin and Sunday Night Swingsters (JV) 8p Preservation Hall: Preservation Hall Legacy Band feat. Gregg Stafford (TJ) 6p, Preservation Hall All-Stars feat. Wendell Brunious (TJ) 8p

www.OFFBEAT.com

Rock ‘n’ Bowl: Fais Do Do with Bruce Daigrepont (KJ) 5:30p Snug Harbor: NOLAtet CD-release party (JV) 8 & 10p Spotted Cat: Jamey St. Pierre (JV) 2p, Kristina Morales and Bayou Shufflers (JV) 6p, Pat Casey and the New Sound (JV) 10p Three Muses: Raphael et Pascal (JV) 5p, Linnzi Zaorski (JV) 8p Tropical Isle Original: the Hangovers (RK) 5p, Late As Usual (RK) 9p

MONDAY FEB 29

30/90: Perdido Jazz Band (JV) 5p, New Orleans Super Jam (VR) 9p Banks Street Bar: Lauren Sturm’s Red Beans and Rice Piano Night (JV) 7p, South Jones (RK) 10p Bombay Club: Josh Paxton (PI) 8p Buffa’s: Arsene DeLay (VR) 5p, Antoine Diel (JV) 8p Chickie Wah Wah: Alexis and the Samurai (ID) 8p Crazy Lobster: the Insta-Gators (VR) 5p d.b.a.: Luke Winslow King (JV) 7p, Glen David Andrews (JV) 10p Dos Jefes: John Fohl (BL) 9p Funky Pirate: Mark and the Pentones (BL) 8:30p Hi-Ho Lounge: Bluegrass Pickin’ Party (BU) 8p, Instant Opus Improvised Series (MJ) 9p Kerry Irish Pub: Claire Cannon and Kenna Mae (FO) 8p Little Tropical Isle: Frank Fairbanks (RK) 5p, Reed Lightfoot (RK) 9p Maison: Chicken and Waffles, Aurora Nealand and the Royal Roses, Ainsley Matich and the Broken Blue (JV) 4p Maple Leaf: George Porter Jr. Trio (FK) 10p Morning Call: Valerie Sassyfras (VR) 10a One Eyed Jacks: Dazed on Toulouse (VR) 10p Ooh Poo Pah Doo: James Andrews with the Crescent City All-Stars and Bobby Love (VR) 8p Preservation Hall: Preservation Hall Jazz Masters feat. Leroy Jones (TJ) 8p the Saint: Motown Mondays with DJ Shane Love (SO) 10p

Snug Harbor: Charmaine Neville Band (JV) 8 & 10p Spotted Cat: Sarah McCoy and the Oopsie Daisies (JV) 4p, Dominick Grillo and the Frenchmen St. All-Stars (JV) 6p, Jazz Vipers (JV) 10p Three Muses: Joe Cabral (JV) 7p Tropical Isle Original: Graham Robertson (RK) 5p, Whiskey Bay (RK) 9p

FESTIVALS FEB 7-9 The Ultimate Louisiana Party presents Mardi Gras in Treme (1520 N. Claiborne Ave.), a three-day celebration with two music stages, an art market and food vendors. EventCrazy.com/New-Orleans-LA/ events/details/614643-Ultimate-Louisiana-PartyMardi-Gras-in-the-Treme

MARDI GRAS PARADE SCHEDULE JANUARY 29 Krewe of Cork (French Quarter) 3p, Oshun (Uptown) 6p, Cleopatra (Uptown) 6:30p, Excalibur (Metairie) 7p, Athena (Metairie) 7:30p JANUARY 30 Adonis (West Bank) 11:45a; Nemesis (St. Bernard) 1p; Pontchartrain (Uptown) 1p, Choctaw (Uptown) 2p, Freret (Uptown) 2:30p, Sparta (Uptown) 6p, Pygmallion (Uptown) 6:15p; Caesar (Metairie) 6p; ‘tit Rex (Marigny) 5p, Krewe of Chewbacchus (Marigny) 7p JANUARY 31 Carrollton (Uptown) noon, King Arthur (follows), Alla (follows), Femme Fatale (follows Alla); Barkus (French Quarter) 2p; Corps de Napoleon (Metairie) 5:30p FEB 3 Druids (Uptown) 6:30p, Nyx (Uptown) 7p

FEB 4 Knights of Babylon (Uptown) 5:45p, Chaos (Uptown) 6:15p, Muses (Uptown) 6:30p FEB 5 Bosom Buddies (French Quarter) 11:30a, Hermes (Uptown) 6p, Le Krewe D’etat (Uptown) 6:30p, Morpheus (Uptown) 7p, Centurions (Metairie) 7p FEB 6 NOMTOC (Westbank) 10:45a, Iris (Uptown) 11a, Tucks (Uptown) 12p, Endymion (Mid-City) 4:15p, Isis (Metairie) 6:30p FEB 7 Okeanos (Uptown) 11a, Mid-City (Uptown) 11:45a, Thoth (Uptown) 12p, Bacchus (Uptown) 5:15p FEB 8 Reds Beans (Marigny) 2p, Proteus (Uptown) 5:15p, Orpheus (Uptown) 6p, Pandora (Metairie) 7p FEB 9 Zulu (Uptown) 8a, Rex (Uptown) 10a, Elks Orleanians follows Rex, Cresent City follows Orleanians, Argus (Metairie) 10a, Krewe of Elks Jefferson follows Argus, Jefferson follows Elks

SPECIAL EVENTS FEB 5-8 The French Market holds its annual Mardi Gras Mask Market in Dutch Alley to get everyone ready for Carnival season. FrenchMarket.org FEB 8 The Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club holds its annual Lundi Gras Festival at Woldenberg Riverfront Park featuring live music, arts and crafts and food vendors. LundiGrasFestival.com

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David Bowie Readers may be shocked by some of the comments Bowie expresses here, but Bowie later disavowed many of these kinds of comments blaming them on mental instability caused by his drug problems.—Ed.

in 1971

day after David Bowie died I got a phone call from manager Rueben Williams. “Tell me your Bowie story. I know you’ve got one.” Well, yes—I interviewed Bowie in 1971 on his first trip to America. It was for Zygote magazine, which folded before the story could be published. The Man Who Sold the World was the new album, before Bowie became Ziggy Stardust and went on to fame. He talked a lot about his philosophy and what he was planning to do. We took him to the airport on his way back to England and when we picked him up at the apartment where he was staying he was listening to a new album, the Velvet Underground’s Loaded, over and over again. I pulled out my old loose leaf notebook with the handwritten transcript in pencil and re-read the interview. I became a fan of Bowie’s after Space Oddity. The title track, with its astronaut Major Tom, was a great science fiction–oriented piece, but other tracks also had fascinating SF themes. The mysterious “Cygnet Committee” reminded me of the Philip K. Dick novels I was greedily devouring, and “Memory of a Free Festival” was a psychedelic meditation complete with an alien visitation that rivaled anything Pink Floyd had produced. I was puzzled by The Man Who Sold the World when I first listened, expecting more of Space Oddity. There was no way I could have known that the radical shift between projects was a precursor to Bowie’s relentlessly variegated sequence of ideas and identities. But there was a connection through the two albums that continued into his next record, Hunky Dory, and its follow up, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars. Bowie was envisioning—perhaps even conjuring—a new evolution of humans: Homo Superior. Please explain “Cygnet Committee.” That first part is supposed to be the kind of guy who would put money into so-called underground activities, putting backing behind it hoping that he would get something out of it on a material level. And it did soothe his conscience a

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bit. There’s probably people over here like that as well. A kind of harmless… Okay call him a liberal, then. Ah, the second section were the Cygnet Committee, the people he had helped. I didn’t bother spelling this out at the time, but I realized very quickly after I recorded it that I should have been a little more specific. Although it’s worked nicely because some people have taken it totally different from the way I intended it and they’ve got a fine old meaning out of the whole thing. By John Swenson

Space Oddity strikes me as being religious. “Memory of a Free Festival” is sort of like the drug religion. It was a drug-oriented festival. Even if I had tried to write the song without drugs in mind I would have rather not written the song. Everybody was, all of us were very heavily into drugs. The physical body is being put to the limits of its exertion at the moment. Never before in the history of mankind have we been required www.OFFBEAT.com

photo: earl perry

BACKTALK

CK BA

TALK

“I’m a radical thinker in that I go from extreme to extreme. I find it stimulating. I’d hate to think that people considered me to have a point of view.”

to do so much in such a short space of time. It’s very hard for us to be natural.

years, ’cause there’s a lot of other places I’d like to live in as well. Everything’s exciting again.

Do you still consider yourself a Buddhist? Do you look at it as a religion or a philosophy? [After a long pause, Bowie points out the window to a hotel across the street.] The lights over there are very amazing to me. They are twinkling and they seem very wonderful things, and yet I have them in my own room but I don’t really take much notice of them. If that’s any kind of answer… It’s with me all the time; I’ll never be able to forget it, because possibly I am it a bit. I can still look at it as an incredible way of life or a philosophy. I wish that I could become… disciplined enough to immerse myself in that lifestyle. But I fall back on the fact that I’ve absorbed a lot of it already. Then I think, well I’m doing it the Western way. Or maybe I’m not doing it at all, just taking out of it what I needed to get through my existence.

What about “All the Madmen”? The guy in that story has been placed in a mental institution and there are a number of people in that institution being released each week that are his friends. Now they’ve said that he can leave as well. But he wants to stay there, ’cause he gets a lot more enjoyment out of staying there with the people he considers sane. He doesn’t want to go through the psychic compromises imposed on him by the outer world. [Pauses.] Ah, it’s my brother. ’Cause that’s where he’s at.

There’s a big difference between those two albums, not only an attitude difference but a difference in the kind of images that the songs give. In some ways The Man Who Sold the World was a depressing album. Space Oddity seemed a lot clearer, less confused. Well, I’m enjoying life much more. I’ve slowed down a hell of a lot. I’m still too close to that new one that’s just come out, to listen to it and analyze it. It would be better if you could take a specific song… All right, “The Width of a Circle.” “Width of a Circle” covers a period from when I was about 17 to just before I recorded this album. Jesus, my next album is going to be totally different from either of these two. I can’t relate to Man very easily because I’m still pretty near to it and I’m still having something of a difficult time at the moment. It’s much calmer again and it’s back to that, but with a different edge because now I’m happy, and I really mean it now, I’m happier than I’ve ever been. I got married last year, I’ve been married for one year, and it’s been the best year of my life. My wife’s pregnant now and I’ll have a child in two months’ time. I don’t live in London anymore and I intend on coming over here to live. I made up my mind yesterday that I’m coming here to live—only for a couple of www.OFFBEAT.com

How about “She Shook Me Cold”? Well, the two guys I was working with, drummer Woody Woodmansey and guitarist Mick Ronson, are semi-pro musicians from the North. They had a lot of trouble with my stuff ’cause they’re blues freaks, ah, and it’s all very hard and ultra-masculine stuff, so I thought I’d write one for them. And they loved it; they played their guts out on it! Tony Visconti is still producing, doing Tyrannosaurus Rex and such. “Black Country Rock” was written for Marc Bolan. “The Supermen,” that was the seed of an idea of Homo Superior I was toying with. The coming of the New Man. I’ve written a lot of songs around that theme and only today I got an insight into another vehicle by which Homo Superior would arrive here. They were taping a show at WABC AM, one of the public service shows, and the Jewish Defense League people were being interviewed. There was a guy sitting on a piano bench in the studio. He’s taking Hebrew lessons with the fellow who’s the head of the JDL. It was Bob Dylan, who has gotten very involved with his Jewish heritage. Ain’t that a mindfucker? As you can see there is food for thought. The “revolution” might not be so much of a political thing when it does come, but a race survival thing, as it surely is becoming here as part of the black/white struggle. If the population explosion goes on at the rate it’s been going, the politics of the whole thing will drop out and will become a matter of a race revolution. Whether that will produce a race of Homo Superior, we shall see. This idea is only vaguely seeding itself in my head at the moment, just today, and yesterday. I’ve got to think about it a lot more before I write about

that particular idea. That was purely a mystical thought, a humanoid that lived forever, even though his gods were dying. It’s a murderer, a guy capable of murdering someone who found a way to kill people; he would be the new god. I flashed on ancient Greek war heroes who would die intact when I heard that. Yeah. It wasn’t based on that but it certainly is a parallel. I saw an interesting thing the other night on one of the Star Trek shows. Gassy show. When that embryonic force got into the spaceship and neutralized all their weapons yet kept them fighting each other inside the ship and thriving on that energy. If that had stayed around it would have been like that, it probably would have approached the Superman. Are the songs you’re writing on this theme going to be the basis of your next album? The new LP is just going to be a general series of observations, I’ve got like 20 numbers so far, two albums’ worth at the moment. My ego says I should put out a double album but my sales figures show that I shouldn’t do one. By the time I’m ready to record I’ll select the ones that are up to my present way of thinking. However I’ll be thinking two months from now I don’t know. I’m a radical thinker in that I go from extreme to extreme. I find it stimulating. I’d hate to think that people considered me to have a point of view. The foremost way of expansion is to accept. Listen to people and learn from everyone and everything you see. We are told we have ultimate knowledge within ourselves and I think we can somewhat get onto the right road by looking at our fellow man. You can do so much on your own, but you can’t hide the fact that we are here with each other. How do you see your role as an artist communicating through albums? I like a professional attitude to media because it’s so important that if you’re going to communicate, you communicate right. You should know and study your media before you use it, and music is a very hard medium to use and you have to master it. You have to be graphic to be effective because this is a very fast era and to impress you must hit hard. People must be able to understand you instantly. I would like to fulfill an image… because the people in this business are purely images. FEBRU A RY 2 016

KTA

photo: jerry moran

B AC

The audience just relates to whichever image they want. I would like to supply yet another image. I would like to supply the image of the underlying feeling of… the coming of a new world, not necessarily a new society. It’s a very intangible state at the moment; hopefully the LP will explain it all. Do you see yourself coming out a tradition of English psychedelic “head” bands like Pink Floyd, Arthur Brown, Procol Harum? Don’t forget that England’s always been more of a philosophic nature than America. But the American counterpart to that is the Grateful Dead, which is a totally different direction. Well, dare I say that the Americans approach it with more of a primitive idealism. Not so much that, but also because everything moves so fast over here you’ve got to cut out the crap and get right down and lay home an idea very hard, and in very graphic details, whereas in England, we take our time about that and philosophize… we’re lethargic, we don’t produce any action. We just talk a lot. Do you think that’s behind the development of these fantastically intricate concept bands? Yes. Also, there’s more of a classical strain running through our entire musical tradition, whereas the young people in your country seem to be very aware that their heritage lies in the folk music tradition of this country. There’s another thing to consider, with Traffic living in the shadow of Stonehenge and all. England is the strongest mystical force in the Western world. We don’t know it, none of us know it now, but it’s being revived gradually. There are so many empires of magical thought in our country that we’ve lost, forgotten through the ages. Do you know who else was very hot on England’s magical force? Hitler. He wanted to possess our country for that reason; he needed that power to develop his Aryan race. Himmler, his right hand man, sent over 117 million pounds of SS money trying to find the Holy Grail in England. In England, the Druids have access to a lot of the Nazi books. They were turned on to the idea of Homo Superior long

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The David Bowie secondline, led by Preservation Hall and Arcade Fire drew enormous crowds to the French Quarter on Saturday, January 16

before anyone else. They found out that that was what the Nazi thing was about and they just collected all the books before anybody else got interested in it, or even was aware that there was such a thing as Homo Superior. What is David Bowie? What is David Bowie? David Bowie is the image, David Jones is me. But David Bowie is not a false person; I mean I am, also, David Bowie. I am schizoid. I’m as schizoid as my brother, except that I’m in the music business where I can get

away with a lot more than my brother could get away with in the job that he had. I mean he was put into an institution for being like me. This is the fantastic quality of this business. Our level of standards of living is totally insane and absurd—to the civilian [laughs at the word] world. This army, it’s a pop army of madmen. The whole thing’s a symbolic army. I’m sure this is true, especially in England as we don’t have any more National Service, especially ’cause of this big virile blues kick that we’ve got going. Ah, it does feel like an army; I get a bit scared at times. O www.OFFBEAT.com