OffBeat Magazine October 2010 Issue

BOBBY CHARLES SUSAN COWSILL ZACK SMITH DIRTY DOZEN MESCHIYA LAKE RUTHIE FOSTER

LOUISIANA MUSIC, FOOD & CULTURE—OCTOBER 2010

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

New Brass Members of the hip-hop generation pick up their horns.

Making Faces

Drummer Zack Smith documents Voodoo and the New Orleans’ music community his way.

In the Kitchen with Susan Cowsill

Elsa Hahne talks to Susan about crack chicken.

Letters

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Mojo Mouth

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Fresh

18

The Early Dozen

24

28 38 40

Reviews

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Listings

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Tulane’s Matt Sakakeeny conducts an oral history session with members of the Dirty Dozen Brass Band.

THE BRASS ISSUE

Live for Today

Rosalie Cohn explores the next generation of brass bands.

OffBeat Eats

Meshiya Lake is in The Spot at Three Muses, and Rene Louapre and Peter Thriffiley review Hillbilly Bar-B-Q.

Backtalk with Ruthie Foster Singer Ruthie Foster made a big impression at her first Jazz Fest appearance in 2008. Alex Rawls talks to her about performing in the Blues Tent. “I just remember feeling like I was walking three or four feet off the stage.”

Photo: Golden Richard III

+ Plan A with Robert Randolph and the Family Band.

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BLAST FROM THE PAST “Brass Band Jazz, Pt. 1” by Kalamu ya Salaam, OffBeat, November 1989

A new generation, a new evolution in brass band music. Over 20 years ago it was now elder statesmen Dirty Dozen and Rebirth who had just hit it big. This first part of a three-issue series on brass bands traced the form’s origins in early jazz, with the next two chapters bringing the story up to date with the major players in the late ‘80s scene.

To read this article and more from this issue online, go to offbeat.com/1989/11.

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Letters

“Food and music—it’s what makes the world go round.”

—Dudley Passman, Metairie, LA

Louisiana Music & Culture

October 2010 Volume 23, Number 10 Publisher and Editor-in-Chief Jan V. Ramsey, janramsey@offbeat.com Managing Editor Joseph L. Irrera, josephirrera@offbeat.com

SCHOOLED BY NEW ORLEANS

DONNA’S

Great article on the great soul known as Ed Blackwell.

I first heard Blackwell play in New York City in the late ’70s and not knowing his background, my first thought was that he sounded like a “Caribbean street parade.”

It wasn’t until 25 years later when I finally got to New Orleans that I realized Blackwell was part of the great tradition of New Orleans drumming.

You mention the influence Ornette Coleman had on Blackwell’s playing. Equally important and not well known is the influence New Orleans had on Ornette. Stranded on the road, Ornette was taken in by Melvin Lastie and the Lastie family and lived with them in the Lower Ninth Ward before he moved to Los Angeles.

Ornette told me specifically that it was through his experiences in the Sanctified Church that he realized he could play like himself and find acceptance for his style.

Note there’s no organ in Sanctified Church music and Ornette has mostly eschewed keyboards in his groups, a radical practice at the time when he emerged in 1959. Coincidence?

So New Orleans deserves no small amount of credit not only for Ray Charles’ development (aided by Blackwell’s drumming), but also for Ornette Coleman’s unfolding as an artist.

While we’re on the subject of the “secret” history of New Orleans’ impact on jazz, I wonder how many jazz fans realize that while Lester Young was born in Mississippi and associated with Kansas City, he spent his formative childhood years in Algiers and took the ferry over to the city frequently. New Orleans seems oblivious to the fact he’s one of the city’s many creative sons. Louis Armstrong, Lester Young, Ornette Coleman… there’s no jazz without these cats and they were well schooled in one way or another by New Orleans.

—Ken McCarthy, Tivoli, NY

It is with sincere regret I learned of the closing of Donna’s. Many good memories from way back. I hung out at that location when I moved here in 1962.

Donna made it a brass band hang-out and helped so many young musicians including Trombone Shorty.

When I was hired to hire the brass bands for French Quarter Festival, Donna’s sponsored at least four of the bands. Because of Donna’s dedication, that stage remains important for the fest.

—Donald Marquis, New Orleans, LA

DELICIOUS Just wanted to send “props” on the delicious food issue. The cover was perfect. I had always dreamed about the rocker chick underneath Susan Spicer’s Chef’s whites— wow! She is a great cook, a very professional restaurateur and a very gracious human being—’bout the nicest chef I ever met.

Next, I turned the page to see Dean [Pigeon] schlepping his fine chow to the world’s greatest football team. Another great New Orleans food family that has worked really hard to share South Louisiana culinary culture.

Food and music—it’s what makes the world go round. Thanks for reminding me.

—Dudley Passman, Director of Food Service for Zatarain’s, Metairie, LA

DISAPPOINTING REVIEW Regarding the CD review of Meschiya Lake and the Little Big Horns by Zachary Young, I am disappointed not only in the review, but that you shot far too low by not featuring her on the cover. It is interesting that the eclecticism of Shamarr Allen and Helen Gillet has been trumpeted as it should be, but in the case of Lake, this is termed as “more interested in the theatrical trappings.” I think that very few who have seen her live on Royal Street or in a club performing would say that she is play-acting or not purely into the music. It is unfortunate

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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Associate Editor Alex Rawls, alexrawls@offbeat.com Consulting Editor John Swenson Listings Editor Craig Guillot, craigguillot@offbeat.com Online Editor Ben Berman, benberman@offbeat.com Contributors Ben Berman, Brian Boyles, Rosalie Cohn, Barbie Cure, Greg Duhe, Richard Giraldi, Elsa Hahne, Jeff Hannusch, Aaron LaFont, Chris Lee, Jacob Leland, Red LeVine, Rene Louapre, Tom McDermott, Julia Ramsey, Matt Sakakeeny, John Swenson, Peter Thriffiley, Dan Willging, Courtney Young Cover Nicolas Wambolt Design/Art Direction Elsa Hahne, elsahahne@offbeat.com Advertising Sales Casey Boudreaux, caseyboudreaux@offbeat.com Melinda Johnson, melindajohnson@offbeat.com Aaron Lafont, aaronlafont@offbeat.com Advertising Design PressWorks, 504-944-4300 Business Manager Joseph L. Irrera Interns Rosalie Cohn, Barbie Cure, Cooper O’Bryan, Julia Ramsey, Cierra Stovall, Courtney Young, Zachary Young Distribution Patti Carrigan, Doug Jackson, Shea MacKinnon 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 Copyright © 2009, 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 at $39 per year ($45 Canada, $90 foreign airmail). Back issues available for $6, except the May issue for $10 (for foreign delivery add $2). Submission of photos and articles on Louisiana artists are welcome, but unfortunately material cannot be returned.

that someone with the talent and, shall I say it, apparent and obvious star power of Lake is seemingly underappreciated by the pre-eminent musical periodical in her adopted hometown. I expect that OffBeat will have some negative reviews, but perhaps they should be saved for the groups truly deserving of them, as there are definitely some who are riding irony, NOLA family background, or heartfelt-buthorrible all the way to the, albeit small, bank.

—Michael Zell, New Orleans, LA

NOT SICK OF KATRINA I don’t live in Louisiana and I’m not sick of hearing about Katrina.

My wife and I were scheduled to visit Metairie a few weeks after Katrina. I didn’t realize how bad things were for at least a day. I guess I was in denial, 300 plus miles away. I tried to call my hotel (a chain) and there was no answer. So I called the number for the hotel’s headquarters and

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they told me they hadn’t been able to contact them either.

Needless to say, we didn’t visit Metairie then. When I saw scenes on TV of people standing on the freeway, I wondered how close they were to our hotel.

I flew into Baton Rouge some weeks later and much of the damage across the state was visible, and yet other areas looked fine. Weird.

We finally returned to New Orleans last fall for a long weekend. We asked several locals about their experiences. We didn’t want to seem like ghoulish tourists, but we were interested in people’s stories. No one seemed insulted and all seemed eager to share. The unanimous opinion was that business is still down since Katrina. We walked through the Quarter and many places seemed to be permanently closed.

For example, there was a stone/jewelry shop that I had visited for many years and I

thought my wife would like it. It was closed, presumably for good.

I never thought that place would close.

I don’t expect Katrina to leave the Louisiana vocabulary for a very long time, nor should it.

—David Swanger, Auburn, AL

LETT

ERS

SENSATIONAL I was fortunate to get to New Orleans with a group of fellow Aussie music fans for this year’s Jazz Fest. This was my first trip overseas and it was a dream come true to travel down from Memphis then onto Clarksdale and finish in New Orleans for two weeks. I loved every minute of my time in your incredible city. I always look forward to getting the email updates and reading about what is happening brings back many fond memories. I just can’t stop thinking about all your city has to offer and can’t wait to get back someday. With all the troubles you have had

over many years I marvel at your city’s citizens’ resilience and I think this is due in no small way to the sensational music and musicians that call New Orleans home.

I am the President of a Roots music club in Williamstown, Melbourne (Victoria) Australia and extend a warm invitation for any travelers from Louisiana and Tennessee who may come our way to come down and enjoy some Aussie Blues and roots music.

—Rob Rowe, Williamstown, Australia

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MOJO MOUTH

Where is the Pride?

W

e take an enormous amount of pride in OffBeat, and we put a lot of time, effort and money into our editorial content, photography, design, distribution and even into our ad design. We are dedicated to our mission of promoting local music and culture, presenting new music and ideas, and also to paying tribute to our forebears, who are, after all the basis of our musical culture and traditions.

New Orleans’ music—and the rest of Louisiana’s, for that matter—represents a unique cultural phenomenon: musical traditions that are decades, centuries, old that are being passed on from generation to generation.

That’s sort of the subject of this issue on brass bands. While we certainly can’t do a comprehensive review of brass bands in this issue, we’ve tried to focus on one of the brass bands who were the first to make the genre “popular” to a more mainstream audience: the Dirty Dozen Brass Band. Our feature story is about the younger

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bands that are carrying on the tradition, are transfiguring it, and modernizing it, while still keeping their roots in the brass band oeuvre.

That’s one of the things that’s so cool about New Orleans music. The creative web that connects all musicians here is strong and deep. But it’s not just their creativity that binds them together; it’s the way they connect with each other through the musical bones of their ancestors. I know I’m sounding real crunchy here, but I believe that music is a spiritual phenomenon that’s incredibly strong in New Orleans.

Whether you play in a brass band, a rock band, a jazz band, a zydeco band or a funk band, you have to admit that you owe what you play to the people who came before you. Music is not only in our blood; it is our blood. It’s that deep.

So, obviously, we at OffBeat have a real passion for music and for the artists who create it. And pride in what we do.

I just wish everyone felt the same way that we do.

Even though more and more people are giving lip service to how important our music is, I’m still longing for that passion for our musical heritage and culture to be personified in the form of support from the local business and educational communities. Music still isn’t considered to be vital to our economy and our tourism sector. If it were, we’d have that music museum I keep hoping for; we’d have a real music office at City Hall; we’d at least have a concerted effort to create a means to educate anyone who’ll listen (and there are lots of tourists and visitors who would listen) about why New Orleans is a real “music town.”

We think it is, and it so galls me when I read in travel magazines that the best two music towns in the U.S. are Austin, Texas and Athens, Georgia. Music should be the new theme of our marketing efforts, not sports, or food or liquor.

Yeah, we feel pride in the Saints. Where’s the pride in our music?

—Jan Ramsey

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Tom McDermott and Danza before a live broadcast from Donna’s, New Year’s Eve, 2008

in town for a while. A typical Monday would feature blazing solos from sidemen like Eric Traub and Leon Brown, and fantastic talents like Davell Crawford or Henry Butler would sit in regularly. There were also some of the least musical singers sitting in you could imagine. It was a vaudevillian escapade that French kept well under control with his gift of gab.

“It’s hard to single out a Donna’s ‘greatest performance,’ as we heard hundreds of great ones,” continues Donna. “Perhaps one Dirty Dozen performance where Gregory Davis was cutting up nonstop, but you can hardly name someone in New Orleans playing straight-ahead or brass band who hasn’t played our club and had a great night. We had celebrities in the audience of course, but I really value the musicians who came in, from New Zealand to South Africa.”

One gets the sense that Donna and Charlie, while relieved to be free of the music business, are well-aware of how important their club was. “We didn’t just support the brass scene here; we planted the seed for bands like Mama Digdown in Madison and the Black Bottom Brass Band in Tokyo. We were at the center of New Orleans music for 17 years, but it was time to stop” Donna concludes.

“We’re going to split our time from now on in New Orleans and Central Florida, and we’re writing two books, a New Orleans cookbook and a memoir about Donna’s.”

—Tom McDermott www.OFFBEAT.com

Photo: joshua jackson

oodbye Donna’s

It’s not all that

surprising that Donna’s Bar and Grill, the Rampart Street club beloved

by New Orleans music followers around the globe, closed its doors this summer.

The joint was in disrepair, and Charlie Sims, the primary force behind the club for years, had turned 75 and had grown tired. “The owners wouldn’t repair the building, and we couldn’t see putting even more money into a building we didn’t own,” Sims says in a phone talk from his central Florida home.

Indeed, the club had been in wobbly financial straits for years; it had been kept afloat in recent times by the pension Charlie receives for his 30 years as an Amtrak chef.

Donna’s was one of the three or four clubs responsible for the New Orleans music resurgence of the last 20 years. If there’s a New Orleans brass band playing in your city this year, there’s a good chance they played some of their first gigs at Donna’s. The club began in 1993, when Chicagoan Charlie met Donna Poniatowski, a New Orleans native. “The first musicians to play at our club were actually blues buskers,” Donna says. “But by the spring of 1994 we were the brass band headquarters. Treme was first, followed in order by the Soul Rebels, Pinstripe and Algiers. New Birth, Rebirth, Chosen Few, the Nightcrawlers, Hot 8, Mahogany. They all played here. We had brass bands seven nights a week, with double bills on weekends.”

Donna became a brass band impresaria, even taking brass bands on the road for a while. But the brass band-only phase lasted just three years or so. While the music was often fantastic, the couple tired of nights where three or four members out of an eight-piece band—or no one at all—would show up for the gig. Eventually, it was decided that smaller groups were more economically feasible, and the booking policy shifted primarily to smaller jazz combos.

Some memorable long-term gigs came out of the post-brass band period. Kermit Ruffins had the Monday shift for about three years. Leroy Jones probably played more gigs than anyone else at Donna’s over the years and was one of the last musicians to have a steady night. Shannon Powell, who used superb players like vibist Jason Marsalis and pianist Larry Sieberth, had the Sunday night shift for many years.

The wildest standing date was Bob French’s Monday night gig, a five-year stint that began around 1999. It was the most popular gig

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istory on a Phone Pole

Over the past

two years, Pat Roig has collected over 380 punk rock flyers.

This collection of what lead vocalist of the Circle Jerks Keith Morris calls “the cheapest form of advertising” started with humble beginnings—in a box in an attic. Roig says, “I went into my mom’s attic after the storm. They were gutting her house and there was a box with my name on it. Turns out she pulled all the flyers that used to hang on my wall off the wall and put them in a box.”

Roig put the flyers into a binder and brought them to an Eyehategod show in Fat City. Band members Mike Williams and Jimmy Bower told Roig that he should make the collection into a book. “It kind of sat in the back of my mind for the longest time, and then I thought ‘Why not?’ And I figured if I would be interested in it, other people that grew up in the scene would be interested in it too.” The result is From Staple Guns to Thumbtacks: Flyer art from the 1982-1995 New Orleans Punk & Hardcore Scene, a collection of what author Mike Bevis calls, “apocryphal documents… that serve to set the record straight about the history of the New Orleans underground music scene.”

Roig got into the scene while hanging out at venues such as the VFW Hall on Franklin Avenue. “I can remember hanging out there all day waiting for bands to come,” he says. “It was a place that we could all hang out without worrying about getting beat up because back then, we would get chased by pretty much everybody—I guess because we looked different from everybody else.”

The book contains gig flyers for an assortment of bands ranging from locals such as Eyehategod and the Alcoholic Sluts to national headliners U2, the Clash and the Ramones. One flyer is from when the Ramones played at Tipitina’s with Faith No More as the opener.

Along with pleasing fans of the groups in the book, Roig also hopes that younger folks will flip through the pages and find something they like. “The thing with those bands that are in that book, [is that] it’s not the watered-down pop punk garbage that’s on the radio. It’s the bands that supposedly influenced these other bands.”

From Staple Guns to Thumbtacks is available now from Lulu.com, Amazon, and Barnes and Noble. Roig will also sell his book at select shows for cheaper than the list price. Roig is hoping to have a show with several bands—some from the book—to promote the book in November.

—Barbie Cure

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he Sunny Side of Sorrow

Kirk Windstein (Down, Crowbar), and Jamey Jasta (Hatebreed) are good friends and admirers of each other’s music. The two metal musicians have recently teamed up for Behind the Blackest Tears, the new album from their side project, Kingdom of Sorrow.

As the name suggests, the album features dark, melancholy lyrics and crushing, syrupy mid-tempo guitar riffs. Windstein’s Black Sabbath-inspired blues riffs, bent notes, aggressive bass lines and groovy lead guitar contrast Jasta’s hardcore punk/metal fusion vocals. That doesn’t necessarily mean the music comes from a dark place, though. According to Windstein, “The art comes from creativity, and that is where I get my enjoyment.”

And his third band? He sees that as a New Orleans thing, not a metal thing, something he does because of “all the great musicians in New Orleans,” he says.

“Especially during Jazz Fest, it helps as a musician and artist because it is a positive thing to make music, it makes people happy and it makes you happy.”

—Greg Duhe www.OFFBEAT.com

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lvis, Nick and Derek

Since parting ways

from the Iguanas, saxophonist Derek Huston has kept busy as a free agent.

“I’ve really enjoyed the different experiences I’ve had as a freelancer,” Huston says. “It’s definitely a job in and of itself trying to keep your schedule full and juggle all different opportunities that come along. It’s kind of feast or famine, and I prefer a feast!”

Huston has toured with R&B singer James Hunter, and he tours with kids’ rock band Imagination Movers a couple times a year and joined them this summer to film their Disney Channel concert special at the UNO Lakefront Arena.

“They’re really, really fun, and they’ve got such great energy,” Huston says. “I have kids, but I like watching their show myself.

It’s like watching The Monkees. I appreciate their humor.”

This month, Huston will play a slightly more adult gig as a member of the band when Nick Lowe and Elvis Costello play each other’s songs October 1 at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco. Huston became connected with the show through former Commander Cody and the Lost Planet Airmen guitarist Bill Kirchen and pianist Austin De Lone, both of whom will be part of the show.

“Austin de Lone called me up in midAugust and said, ‘We’re putting a show together, it’s one night only with Nick Lowe doing Elvis Costello songs and Elvis Costello doing Nick Lowe songs,’” Huston says. “He asked if I could recommend anyone who can play the tenor or the baritone sax. Of Derek Huston course, I raised my hand quickly, but I knew it was a rhetorical question because we had played music together before.”

“Costello sings Lowe/Nick Sings Elvis” will showcase a rare collaboration between the two performers at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco on October 1. The performance will be on the evening of the first night of San Francisco’s Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival and will also feature New Orleanian Bob Andrews, who played keyboards in British pub rock band Brinsley Schwarz with Lowe.

Huston calls himself a “huge Nick Lowe fan. “I really appreciate his sense of humor and his world view on relationships.

“I know that Nick Lowe doesn’t tour very often anymore, and I think he’s more often going out as solo. I’m just thrilled my number came up, and I get to play with these guys.”

—Courtney Young

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Photo: KIM WELSH

T

he Saints in October

[Supagroup’s Chris Lee is playing this year’s Saints season on

Madden ’11 and using it to predict this season’s games.]

October 3, Carolina @ New Orleans: Carolina may be the toughest match-up for the Saints in the division. They play good defense, control the clock, and can score quickly. Their big plays come on the ground, with DeAngelo Williams being ridiculously hard to both catch and to bring down, and Jonathan Stewart would start on almost any other team. QB Matt Moore is actually quite good against coverage as well as the blitz, and this results in loooooong drives going both ways. However, without a solid receiver to take the pressure off of Steve Smith, the Saints Defense concentrates on keeping Williams contained, if not stopped. Evans and Bush score through the air, and the defense racks up three sacks and two INTs as the Saints grind out a tough 20-7 win.

October 10, New Orleans @ Arizona: Madden finds Arizona a team in disarray as Brees breaks the NFL record for passing TDs in a game as he throws seven to seven different receivers (Evans, Henderson, Meacham, Moore, Pierre Thomas, Colston and Bush) and over 400 yards passing.

Morstead doesn’t punt once. The Cards’ Steve Breaston catches and runs in two scores while two Brees sack/fumbles (Sorry Drew, I let you down) returned for TDs make the final score a somewhat misleading 52-31 Saints victory.

October 17, New Orleans @ Tampa Bay: Porter takes back Josh Freeman’s first pass for a score, Shockey catches four first downs including two TDs, Bush scores on the ground, and Colston catches seven passes for over 100 yards as the young Bucs go down 35-7.

October 24, Cleveland @ New Orleans: I have a feeling the Browns, and especially Jake Delhomme, are going to be much better this year than Madden gives them credit for, but Reggie Bush breaks open a close 7-0 game late in the first half with a punt return for TD, and later catches another score. Once the Saints go up two TDs, it’s all Pierre Thomas as he finishes with a TD and over 100 total yards. Alex Brown has two sacks, Porter and Harper add picks, and the defense holds Cleveland scoreless for what could have been a lot worse than the 28-0 final score indicates.

Trends: Toughest game by far this month is Carolina at home…

Madden hates: Delhomme, Freeman, Saints run D, (hope the next update corrects this somewhat)… Madden loves: Matt Moore, DeAngelo Williams, Tracy Porter; and Sedrick Ellis is having a breakout season.

—Chris Lee, fake football expert

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he Blues are Five

This October

marks the fifth anniversary of the Crescent City Blues and BBQ Festival. On October 16 and 17, Lafayette Square will have the blues on two stages as the free festival returns with local and international stars including Taj Mahal, Ruthie Foster (see this month’s “Backtalk”), Corey Harris, Li’l Ed and the Blues Imperials and Colorado blues minimalist Otis Taylor will perform with Don Vappie.

As the name implies, the festival also presents barbecue, along with other less conventional grilled items.

Vendors include The Joint, Walker’s BBQ, Vaucresson’s Sausage Company, Boswell’s Jamaican Grill, Emeril’s, Ba Mien Vietnamese Restaurant and more.

Abita is a major sponsor of this year’s Crescent City Blues and BBQ Festival, and it will institute the Abita Sports Bar, a place on site to keep up on the weekend’s games with a full array of Abita beers. There will also be a new Oral History stage this year in the NORD Theater in the ground floor Li’l Ed & the Blues Imperials of Gallier Hall, just across the street from Lafayette Square.

Here, performing artists will be interviewed to talk about their music and their lives.

The Crescent City Blues and BBQ Festival is presented by the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Foundation. For more information, go to JazzAndHeritage.org.

—Alex Rawls

Saturday, October 16 Dancehall Stage 11:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m.: Honey Island Swamp Band 1:15-2:15 p.m.: Little Freddie King 3:15-4:15 p.m.: The Stanton Moore Trio plus Anders Osborne 5:15-6:15 p.m.: Luther Kent & Trick Bag 7- 8:15 p.m.: Taj Mahal

Juke Joint Stage 10:30-11:30 a.m.: New Orleans Blues Society Contest Winner 12:30-1:15 p.m.: Carol Fran

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2:15-:15 p.m.: Otis Taylor with Don Vappie 4:15-:15 p.m.: Corey Harris 6:15-7 p.m.: Henry Gray

Sunday, October 17 Dancehall Stage 11:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m.: Mem Shannon 1:30-2:30 p.m.: The Joe Krown Trio featuring Walter “Wolfman” Washington and Russell Batiste 3:30-4:30 p.m.: Jon Cleary 5:45-7 p.m.: Ruthie Foster

Juke Joint Stage 10:30-11:30 a.m.: New Orleans Blues Society Contest Winner: Big Daddy O 12:30-1:30 p.m.: Shannon McNally & Hot Sauce 2:30-3:30 p.m.: Li’l Ed & the Blues Imperials 4:30-5:45 p.m.: Barbara Lynn www.OFFBEAT.com

DIRTY DOZEN

The Early Dozen The Dirty Dozen recall the days of disco, Danny Barker, wheelchairs and more. images by michael P. Smith, COpyright THE HISTORIC NEW ORLEANS COLLECTION

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n Sweet Home New Orleans’ recent State of the Music Community report, it found that while musicians in general were struggling, the brass band community was in relatively good shape. The mainstays are playing regularly and new brass bands are emerging. It wasn’t always that way. Recently, Tulane Assistant Professor in Music Matt Sakakeeny conducted an oral history session with members of the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, who remembered the brass band tradition as one that was endangered when they started in the mid-1970s. This is an excerpt from that oral history, part of the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities’ series “As Told by Themselves.”

What was the brass band scene like as Dirty Dozen was forming?

Gregory Davis: As I remember, there weren’t many brass bands happening. When we got started, it was kind of the height of the disco era. Right after disco started dying out, everybody wanted to be an urban cowboy. So there really wasn’t much happening for wind instruments. Danny Barker put his hand on it to get the Hurricane Brass Band started; the most prominent person in that band at that time was Leroy Jones. He came from the Fairview.

Harris: Fairview was a Baptist church. And Rev. (Andrew) Darby was the preacher. I think Mr. Barker went through the church so we could have the permits to be able to play in the French Quarter.

Davis: I grew up in the St. Bernard Housing Project, which was near Fairview Baptist Church.

Danny Barker lived near that area, and so did Leroy and Kevin.

Roger Lewis: I was in the first Fairview Baptist Church band with

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Leroy and few other people, people who don’t play music these days.

The whole idea was to get the kids involved in something as well as anybody who really wanted to play the music because the music was starting to die off and there weren’t

too many people involved. His idea was to get everybody involved, get the church behind the bands and different things like that.

Davis: When I was in high school, everybody was in some kind of R&B and funk band. When Fairview

By Matt Sakakeeny and Alex Rawls

started playing, people started gravitating toward that. The disco and urban cowboy started trickling and led to the Dirty Dozen. It was like a rehearsal effort that was happening all the time. We could get a gig every now and then. It wasn’t about www.OFFBEAT.com

DIR TY D

OZ E

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Charles would come grab me and pull me and say, “Come on, man.

You ain’t doing nothing. Come on out there!” That’s basically what got me into the band. getting gigs or trying to make any money; it was about playing music.

Lewis: I think we’re different than traditional New Orleans music. You know we wanted to play the music that we were growing up with. We were listening to avant-garde bands, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, things like that. We wanted to learn that kind of music and open up the music thing for some of the people.

So they could hear something a little different and see how that works on the street. And basically, it just took off from there.

Ephraim Townes: In New Orleans we have a great culture out here. The music is just one side of it. So we were always able to have a market to play due to the culture. We once had a card that said, “Anything from birthdays to funerals,” so there was always some kind of avenue to be able to perform. We’ve played baseball games, baby showers, everything back in the day.

Funk and modern jazz was in the air and it seems like you guys were grabbing onto that and bringing it out to the street I’m guessing.

Davis: We were rehearsing a lot of stuff, but didn’t have anywhere to play. Guys started bringing different songs to rehearsals; whatever anybody wanted to play, that’s what we rehearsed. Most gigs at the time were the Sunday afternoon second line parade, or we would get a funeral every now and then. But obviously, we couldn’t book funerals in advance.

I recall—and I could be wrong— one of the first tunes that we played that was not a traditional song. I think Roger brought “Night Train” to the rehearsal. I think we were getting ready to do the Saint Joseph Day parades on the bayou, and we were warming up and played that.

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People thought that was amazing that somebody was playing “Night Train.” We added a bongo beat and stuff like that. To us, it was just music that we wanted to play.

Townes: New Orleans music tends to grow. It constantly evolves.

I think our crowd evolved along with us playing the music, so we all grew up together. And to this day, music still evolves as we speak.

Harris: One of the first places that we did play was this club called Daryl’s that was on St. Anthony. I stayed just a few blocks off, and every time I got off work—I used to drive a tow truck—Charles would come grab me and pull me and say, “Come on, man. You ain’t doing nothing. Come on out there!”

That’s basically what got me into the band. I would just pull up in a tow truck to Daryl’s, and go straight in there with my horn.

Some say Dirty Dozen helped bring brass band music from the streets to the stage.

Was there brass band music in the clubs?

Davis: Not really. At the time— Harris: —most bands had to travel.

Davis: Actually, the only brass band that was doing anything was the Olympia Brass Band, you know, as far as traveling around the U.S. and internationally. And I know I was hired—I’m sure some of these guys too—as a sideman with Olympia every now and then. I never made any of the international trips, but I made some of the regional stuff with them. For a lot of the other guys who had any idea about wanting to play in a brass band, the standard was the Olympia Brass Band.

But here in New Orleans, it wouldn’t necessarily be a

regular thing to see Olympia playing at Daryl’s.

Harris: No. I can’t remember how we ended up in Daryl’s. But the Glass House, we ended up in there because one of the clubs had a parade, and after the parade, they wanted us to play a little while longer. So we did on a Sunday, and they sold all the alcohol they had in the place. So after we had done the parade, that Monday they asked us to come and play a few numbers after they had their meeting where they would serve red beans and chicken and whatever. We played that, and they sold everything again on that Monday. So that led to us getting that regular Monday night gig at the Glass House.

Tell me about the Glass House.

Townes: It’s Uptown on Saratoga between 2nd and 3rd streets. And at the Glass House, it was always Christmas time.

Christmas year ’round, 365, seven days a week. The Christmas ornaments never came down. It was a small place, but I tell you, I’ve seen some legendary stuff go down in the Glass House.

Davis: New Orleans had the Blue Room at the Fairmont, and that was the place that would bring in national acts. But when they would finish their gig up at the Blue Room, a lot of them would come hang out at the Glass House.

Lewis: Fats Domino came.

Davis: Fats Domino came through there, even the Red Hot Chili Peppers came through there.

Everybody used to come to the Glass House. It could probably hold 25-30 people. But it ended up being that we’d do 150, 200 people on a Monday night.

Townes: This group of dancers— Smitty and Sugar Slim—these guys used to do some dances with the music, and whoooo, their knees

were parallel to their chin! It was a very physical form of dancing, but it was beautiful to watch because they coincided the dancing with everything we played. You were actually relating to someone, speaking to them, and they would respond to it by persuading their body to do different things, and it was very beautiful to watch.

(To the audience) You might be able to get a little taste of it because Alan Lomax came and shot a documentary back then. 1988 maybe.

(Documentary plays) (To the band) We can see Kirk and Charles (Joseph) in there.

You’ve already mentioned how the front line brought this modern jazz, I don’t know if people understand how revolutionary that was, but what the rhythm section was doing was really rewriting the brass band and really making that more prominent.

Harris: Well Kirk played rhythm changes on the bass. It wasn’t typical BOOM boom BOOM boom. And the horns, we pretty much do what the vocalists do. We did the melodies, and the rhythm was constantly enhanced by what we were doing.

But it’s definitely different from what had been happening because Kirk had the concept of playing those rhythm changes, playing the moving bass parts.

Davis: What set the direction was the selection of the repertoire.

Since we didn’t have any gigs that were really happening, whatever we wanted to rehearse, that’s what we rehearsed. When we started to play some of the other music, yeah some people were upset because it wasn’t the socalled traditional New Orleans brass, or traditional New Orleans jazz music. But what encouraged www.OFFBEAT.com

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us were some of the older guys like “Frog” Joseph encouraged us—we used to rehearse at his house—and Danny Barker encouraged us. It was that younger generation at the time wanted to hear what they were terming “new music,” but we were really just playing some of the music that had already been played by other people. And that rhythm section that existed then—on that clip was Kirk Joseph, Jenell Marshall, and I think Lionel Batiste—once they were able to jell, that just pushed us even further.

Townes: We did learn a lot of traditional New Orleans tunes, but the clientele we were working for liked what we were doing, so we didn’t play a lot of those traditional tunes that we have heard over the years. But many times, and to the day we still play a lot of traditional songs.

You’ve also added to the tradition yourself. As far as I know, one of the first recordings you ever made included two great songs: “My Feet Can’t Fail Me Now” and “Blackbird Special,” which are Dirty Dozen through and through. Am I right?

Davis: Yeah, some of those songs that we developed. “My Feet Can’t Fail Me Now,” I think we started doing that at Daryl’s on Thursday nights, and it wasn’t that we said, “Okay, you play this, you play this.” Somebody started something and then we added to it. Maybe the second or third time through, we put it together, but a lot of the stuff we did was really spontaneous.

Townes: I think Tool Man had a lot to do with “Feet.”

Davis: Who? Townes: Tool Man. He’s a guy in a wheelchair who danced. He

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Dirty Dozen at the Glass House couldn’t stand up and dance, so he said his feet couldn’t fail him now. You might see some guys in wheelchairs do their stuff, but this is the first guy I’ve actually seen keep rhythm in a wheelchair, dancing right in the middle of the Glass House. You had to see it to believe it.

(Plays “Blackbird Special”) Can you second line that fast?

Townes: They were doing it at this speed!

Harris: The guys at the Glass House, it was almost like if you saw the Charlie Brown cartoon--I can’t remember the cat’s name-but he’s dancing and running and you can see his feet flashing.

That’s how they used to dance.

We did play a show one time at the Municipal Auditorium.

Davis: Don’t talk about that!

(Laughter) Harris: There was a guy who was beyond 40. He actually had a heart attack on the floor. Now we try to laugh and joke about it, but people were actually moving that fast trying to dance to it.

That whole record is very energetic. Maybe you could tell us why this is the record that maybe not only broke

Dirty Dozen but also broke brass band music to the world.

Davis: George Wein of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival had a series on the Concord labels, and we were one of the acts that he signed. He gave us the money and said, “Go make a record.” We picked songs that we had already been playing, so we didn’t have to spend a whole lot of time figuring out what we were going to play.

Harris: Took three days in Bogalusa.

What happened when this record broke? Dirty Dozen seemed all of the sudden to be not just a New Orleans band but a touring band.

Davis: Doing the record for George Wein didn’t hurt because at that time Festival Productions were probably doing 60-65 festivals worldwide. They were doing stuff all over the place.

So the deal was we were going to go out for two weeks, twoand-a-half weeks. A few dates in New York then go to Europe for a few dates and then go back to New Orleans. That two-week trip turned into about a seven or eight-week trip. We spent about six weeks at the famous Village

Gate, and stayed at the Edison Hotel at 47th and Broadway, we stayed up a long time. Stuff kept happening. By the time we got back to New Orleans after staying in New York six seven eight weeks, there was another call to go out to California to do a tour. That tour was three or four weeks, then by the time we got back from that there was a call to go over to Europe to do something. It started rolling, and it kept going.

One of those famous early gigs was recorded, Live: Mardi Gras at Montreux.

Townes: Which was about three o clock in the morning.

Harris: I think we got in there about eleven?

Townes: It was one of the marathon days, “Tour de Switzerland”.

Davis: I remember that at the time we started all this traveling, my oldest daughter was in kindergarten or something, and all the kids had to tell what their parents do. My daughter told her teacher that I worked at the airport. (laughter) Because it was always a situation where they were either dropping me off or picking me up. It was happening just that fast.

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ZACK SMITH

Making Faces I

n 2008, Zack Smith commandeered a back corner of the Voodoo grounds in City Park where he set up a photo booth.

Specially-made wallpaper hung on one wall, and a sheet of plywood on a couple of sawhorses stored an array of cameras. Over the course of the weekend, he cycled musicians, fans and members of the music community through his makeshift photo booth. Smith repeated the process in 2009 and has executed a number of similar serial portrait projects at Chaz Fest and last year, when he shot “The Faces of Rock” using a homemade light box.

Smith has feet in two creative worlds—in the art community as a photographer and a partner in Canary Gallery on Julia Street, and as the drummer for Rotary Downs. At Voodoo, his interests come together; he performs and he documents New Orleans music at its most inclusive, shooting across ages and levels of involvement. Next year, a book of his portraits, Beyond Selves, will be published, but between now and then he’s got a photo booth to run at the Voodoo Experience in City Park on Halloween weekend.

How did you get into photography?

The camera is a tool to record what you see, right? After writing so long in high school and college, I started seeing things that I couldn’t write down. I started shooting and taught myself how to develop film, how to print, how to do all that, in my newly converted bathroom. After knocking on every door in town hustling for work and getting my feet wet, I ended up working with Herman Leonard for three years before Katrina. I miss that motherfucker.

I understand you had an interesting set-up when you did your Voodoo portraits. Do

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Voodoo Fest—photographing musicians who have just performed and gotten more of their 15 minutes. The book covers the projects I did at Jazz Fest all the way up to Voodoo 2010.

you think that stylized look is reflective in some way of the Voodoo experience?

Stephen Rehage gave me a chance, but I owe a lot of what I do to Ben Jaffe and the folks at Preservation Hall. They’ve given me the opportunity to document the very talented and amazing musicians who play on their stage. Two years ago, I partnered up with John Sherman from Flavor Paper to make a custom wallpaper backdrop, and John created this Voodoo-meetsPreservation Hall emblem. I built four 4’x8’ wood backdrops and John and Ben came that morning and laid the wallpaper on the backdrops.

I got these iconic shots of Walter “Wolfman” Washington, Marva Wright—bless her soul—Rockie Charles—also not with us—Joe Cabral, Luke Allen, the list goes on.

Last year I decided to do just a very simple 20’x20’ butterfly (a large

By Julia Ramsey

diffusion panel), two of my custom light boxes, and only shot one day because the year before almost killed me. We had played that day, we played Halloween night, that Saturday—and I came back again the next day to shoot portraits. Brutal.

Do you have any planned or ongoing projects?

Yes! I’m doing a book right now, probably out in the summer of next year. It’s phases of portrait photography. I started with a white backdrop with simple, simple portraits. I had a king-sized bedsheet on a pole outside of Jazz Fest in ’01.

I think I shot 500 people in two days.

The first shot I asked them to do a relaxed face, looking at me, and the next shot I said, “Do whatever you want.” That started what I’m doing now, the simple backdrop and people just being themselves.

That’s what I’m trying to transfer into

Your portfolio has live and editorial shots of bands. Which ones do you prefer?

I used to do mostly live shots. I started to gravitate towards portraits of musicians because I think I learned more about them and myself. The frenetic pace of shooting live shows would never cut it when you are trying to get to the essence of someone’s personality.

You need to slow down. I needed to slow down, and I started to. Allowing the music to just “take you” in live music photography didn’t translate at all to shooting the people behind the music.

Do you find when doing music photography that because of your background in music you focus in on details or moods that others might miss?

The things that I like to focus on when I’m photographing people, if they’re musicians—and I do a lot of them—are very schizophrenic.

I like shooting their calm manner, and on the other hand, I like to create visual tapestries that have so much going on in them. I like to think that musicians trust me to make them look good.

You’re picking up what they’re putting down.

I’m picking it up and looking at it and seeing if it reflects in the light.

If it does, I’ll put it in my pocket; if it doesn’t, I’ll give it back to them. www.OFFBEAT.com

Photo: ZACK SMITH

Drummer Zack Smith documents Voodoo and the New Orleans’ music community his way.

Photos: ZACK SMITH

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Top left: Walter “Wolfman” Washington and Marva Wright.

Top right: Rockie Charles.

Left: Ballzack and Odoms, a.k.a. Rami Sharkey and Adam Bourgeois.

Previous page: Chris Kaiser.

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www.OFFBEAT.com

Joseph Maize, Jr. of the TBC Brass Band

COVER STORY

Live for Today

By Rosalie Cohn

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ean Roberts, 23, likens learning how to play the trumpet to learning how to walk or talk. “I didn’t even really have to learn,” explains the trumpet player with To Be Continued Brass Band (TBC). “It was like, once I picked it up, I instantly knew how to play.”

At the age of six, Glenn Hall III, the 15-year-old Baby Boyz Brass Band trumpet player and band leader, knew he wanted to pursue musical performance as a career. For Hall, the recipe for success is simple: finish his last two years at McDonogh 35 College Preparatory High School and the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, attend an out-of-state conservatory, book gigs, and become a star.

Ashton Hines is 21, and he plays trumpet in the Young Fellaz Brass Band. He can also tell you his first musical memory. “I sat at the drums one day and played this beat,” he says. “My parents were like, ‘Man, put him in a band!’ And from then on, I’ve been playing the drums.” Hines was five years old at the time. “I couldn’t even reach the drums,” he says, “I was standing up, jumping to hit the cymbal.”

The three musicians possess a youthful optimism that is paired with the complete confidence that playing music is what they were born to do, and they lead the next generation of brass bands in New Orleans.

Generational relationships in the brass band community have often seemed overblown, as the younger bands seemingly turn their back on older bands and their tradition, get criticized for it, only to become part of the tradition themselves as they age. In the meantime, their youth has allowed them to develop their sound and expand their careers without fear. Open-minded and unrestricted, TBC, Baby Boyz and the Young Fellaz function like sponges, searching for inspiration, and learning from virtually everything they encounter.

All the members of TBC were in high school when the band started, and it has been together for eight full years now. Baby Boyz have been together for three, and the Young Fellaz—made up of 14 to 23-yearolds—formed just three years ago. Constantly on the up-and-up, all three www.OFFBEAT.com

bands are self-proclaimed works in progress. “We weren’t the best band,” Hall admits. “We came a long way within three years.”

Roberts echoes a similar sentiment for TBC, whose members range from 21 to 25. “By starting so young, sometimes people look at us like we’re the same teenagers as when we first started,” he says. “We started as young men, but we’re grown-ups now. We’ve still got that young people funk and image, you feel me? We’ve got that. But we’re grown.”

With monikers that hint of something yet to come, TBC, Baby Boyz and Young Fellaz define themselves as young and energetic, and their sound was sufficiently developed to attract the attention of Ben Coltrane, a Los Angeles-based producer. His love of jazz brings him back to the Crescent City, where he is constantly searching for new talent. Coltrane first heard TBC after finishing dinner at Felix’s, his favorite restaurant in New Orleans, when he stopped and listened to the young musicians who were performing curbside outside of the restaurant. Thinking that TBC’s sound was interesting and should be recorded, Coltrane’s relationship with the band began.

He founded Blue Train Production, the label behind TBC’s first studio album, Modern Times, and the Young Fellaz’ upcoming studio album Assassination of American Pop because he saw a need for a record label that was willing to take risks on new and young talent. The idea behind the label is to capture the constantly changing music that young brass bands are making today on the streets of New Orleans, and to ensure that it reaches audiences beyond our city limits. Likening himself to the Martin Scorsese of brass bands, Coltrane sees his role of producer playing double duty as that of preserver of history.

While young brass bands respect and learn from tradition, they will break away from it without apology. For TBC, it helps to be hardheaded. “You’ve got to say, ‘Screw the audience,’” Roberts says bluntly. “You have no choice but to listen to our music. This is our music, and you’re going to listen. If you want the crowd to feel hyped, you’re going to get the crowd hyped.”

The Baby Boyz try to incorporate as many different types of music as they can when they perform. Says Hall, “We might play some jazz, some funk, some R&B. Sometimes you may catch us playing some orchestra music.”

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For the next generation of brass bands, it’s all they know.

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Baby Boyz Brass Band

The repertoire has always been a difference-maker between generations.

The Dirty Dozen brought Dizzy Gillespie, then-modern jazz and funk to brass, and Rebirth made Gerald Levert’s “Casanova” from 1987 a brass band staple.

TBC has performed with the Roots, and Young Fellaz have applied the brass aesthetic to Adele’s “American Boy” and Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance.”

“Good music is good music,” Roberts says. “Sometimes we’ll play, like, a hip-hop song with an up-tempo beat, and some older guys they will be like, ‘That’s not traditional New Orleans music.’ And sometimes we go, ‘Kiss our ass, we know it’s not. We know that.’” “As far as the fusion, you feel it,” the Young Fellaz’ Ashton Hines says. “If I’m playing a traditional New Orleans song, and a hip-hop song comes to my mind, I play it. It’ll fit perfectly. I guess good music can do that. Good music can blend with other good music. We go by this: If we like it, somebody else will like it. We just do what we like.”

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While the understanding that brass bands are rooted in tradition is respected, what youth are doing today on the streets of New Orleans is another game altogether. Young brass musicians are moving from their traditional social functions, accompanying intimate musical process of mourning and celebration, and moving closer to contemporary notions about the place of music. Spectacle and performance are the ultimate goals, and they’re not the first to think along these lines. The Soul Rebels, for example, focus on the stage and rarely parade. “Everyone wants to please the crowd,” says Hall. “That’s the main focus, to make the crowd feel happy when we’re playing. Have that confidence. We came here to entertain you.”

Hines agrees, emphasizing the importance of entertainment to the Young Fellaz. “We sing a lot. We dance a lot. We do a lot of dance moves together. We do a lot of dance moves separate. You’ll be watching our www.OFFBEAT.com

Young Fellaz Brass Band

show, and we’ll get offstage and dance with you. We love to have fun.”

Departing from traditional responsibility, the bands draw motivation from euphoric live shows and dreams of stardom.

“I was about 19 when I realized, ‘I want to do this,’” says TBC’s Roberts.

“That’s when my passion for the music really kicked in. I just wanted to be outstanding. I wanted to be in shows, be in front of a crowd playing. Be outstanding and have everybody looking, applauding.” The Young Fellaz are also motivated by the empowering feeling they find onstage in front of a captive audience. “I like being onstage because I love to grab the mic,” Hines says. “I can do anything on the mic. You might catch me rapping,

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scatting, singing. That’s the thing a lot of people seem to like about the Young Fellaz—when we’re on stage, you can tell we’re having fun.”

Optimistic and interested in fame, young brass musicians recognize the benefits of taking their music on the road. Says Roberts, “In order for the world to know, we have to bring New Orleans to the world. We want to keep the music alive and going down here, but we want to bring it to the world, and make it on a broader scheme. You know, mainstream. If we have to leave for a period of time to get other places to feel us, to accept it and enjoy it and love it the way people in New Orleans do, then that’s a sacrifice I’ll have to make.”

Hines envisions a similar career path. “I want New Orleans to be home,” he says. “If I have a week off, I’m in New Orleans. I want to travel everywhere, but when I say I’m going home, I’m coming right here.

You’ll see me on Frenchmen Street.”

The emphasis on the road may seem at odds with the brass band’s traditional role—a social function the bands seem to have embraced with renewed vigor since Katrina—but unlike the brass bands before them, they’ve had generations of models for touring brass bands. TBC, Baby Boyz and Young Fellaz may or may not know that the Olympia Brass Band toured, but they certainly know that the Dirty Dozen and Rebirth maintain active touring lives.

To create a stronger live show, the bands study charismatic local musicians and mainstream entertainers. “If I were to go see, I don’t know, Billy Cyrus or something,” Roberts shakes his head and continues. “It’s not only the music, but his performance. The way he acts, how he speaks, the things he says. I try to incorporate all of that. I take that back to my band and we try to incorporate that into what we’re doing.”

The Baby Boyz’ Glen Hall III says that his cousin, Troy “Trombone Shorty” Andrews, is his biggest inspiration as a performer, while Hines looks outside the city limits. “Growing up, I looked at Michael Jackson and James Brown. I watched the Backstreet Boys and ’N Sync, and I like entertainment, so it’s like, ‘I wonder why people like them?’ I like them and they can’t sing, or they can’t play an instrument. Why do I like them?” Hines pauses for a moment before answering his own question with a smile. “Because they entertain.”

This year TBC has done a lot of growing up, and that maturation has not come without pain. On May 9, Brandon Franklin, the 22-year-old TBC saxophonist, was tragically shot and killed in the Hollygrove neighborhood. Roberts describes his bandmate as a natural leader and one of the most level-headed, focused, determined people he’s ever known. When asked how the band members were coping with the loss of their friend, Roberts replied, “some better than others, but we’re going to keep it going.” Franklin made his last recording with the Young Fellaz as a guest on their soon-to-be-released album. For TBC, the loss of Franklin created unity among the remaining band members. Says Roberts, “We’re pretty much going to have this band, these members, until we’re dust.”

Photo: elsa hahne

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Photo: TAYLOR DAVIDSON

COVER STORY

Young Fellaz Brass Band In June, TBC and the Young Fellaz had run-ins with the New Orleans Police Department when officers began enforcing an existing 8 p.m. curfew for street performers in the bustling French Quarter. The noise ordinance hit hard for TBC, who created a name for themselves over the years by playing at the corner of Bourbon and Canal. More than just a high foot traffic area for young bands to gain exposure and earn an income, the French Quarter is also where Roberts learned to play his horn. “Everything I learned, I learned it off these streets,” says Roberts. “This is the birthplace of jazz.” For the Young Fellaz, who play an average of five to six gigs a week at the corner of Chartres and Frenchmen for exposure, the ordinance was equally frustrating.

While the enforcement wasn’t directed at them or any musicians in particular, enforcement of the ordinance threatens their signature gigs.

TBC has processed the difficult year with what Sean Roberts refers to as “swagger”—a term that Jay-Z brought to hip-hop in 2001 that led to a sub-genre in Atlanta in recent years. Explains Roberts, “It’s how you carry yourself, how people perceive you when they see you playing your instrument, the way you play. When we’re not playing, it’s how we talk to people, fans and whatever. It’s everything—you as a person, when you talk to someone, when you have a conversation. You feel me?”

Sean Roberts emphasizes lifestyle attitude; the Baby Boyz’ Glen Hall focuses on chops. “If you’re going to be a musician, you must practice if you want to get better at playing your instrument,” he says. “That’s what a musician is. All of us practice almost every day.” The Young Fellaz’ Ashton Hines is similarly high-minded about his job. “The crazy thing about music is, you’ve got to be serious, but there’s so much fun going on. To me, learning about music is fun.

Learning about New Orleans is fun. My job is based on fun. Music is a job now, so I want to put eight hours a day into it.”

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TBC has a similar work ethic, playing an average of 12 shows per week.

Roberts says, “It’s good that we stay busy, this is our full-time job. When it’s for work, it’s work. Work hard, play later. Work now, play later.”

In many ways, the stories of young brass bands resemble those of the older bands they’ll eventually become. The confrontational element that they bring to the tradition changes, but the tradition has absorbed those elements and will absorb more. And each band that bucked the tradition had to decide at some point to stick with what it believed in.

“Some of the older guys tell us that it helps to be hardheaded,” TBC’s Sean Roberts says. “We’re young and we’re hardheaded. We’re kind of rebellious to an extent. We’re still learning as we’re going, so we still face challenges. For me, it’s just what I was created for.”

While successful musicians outside of the brass band world are strong influences on the stylistic development of TBC, Baby Boyz and the Young Fellaz, older New Orleans brass bands remain their gold standard. “We model ourselves after all the bands that are older than us,” says Roberts. “They’re older; they tell us about some of their mistakes.” Roberts pauses and laughs.

“Unless we’re doing a second line. If we’re doing a second line and Rebirth’s doing a second line with us, then it’s a competition.” Hall says that Rebirth and the Dirty Dozen, among other older bands, are archetypes for the Baby Boyz.

“I listen to Rebirth and the Soul Rebels a lot,” says Hines. “Soul Rebels, they have fun too. And Rebirth, it’s like, that’s tradition.” The Young Fellaz also look to their big brother band, TBC. “We went to them, and they taught us a lot—different things to look out for, like how much we should be getting paid,” says Hines. “They’re older than us,” explains Marshan Bowdon, the Young Fellaz’ tuba player and co-founder. “We’re a young band. We do everything ourselves.”

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Street Fight

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Photo: zack smith

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ome of New Orleans’ greatest music doesn’t come from inside the clubs; it comes from the street.

On October 23 at 2 p.m. underneath the Claiborne overpass, Red Bull will host Red Bull Street Kings Brass Band Blowout, a competition between four local brass bands that will, according to organizers, “be a showcase and platform for the next generation of brass bands influenced by the rich musical legacy of the New Orleans streets.” The bands will compete for a three-day trip to Los Angeles to record in the Red Bull Studio.

One band competing is the Free Agents Brass Band.

Ellis “EJo” Joseph formed the band of musical “free agents” one month after Hurricane Katrina, and they combine brass traditions with new funk. They’re respected in the musical community for their musicianship and energetic performances.

Another competitor is the Stooges Brass Band. Formed in 1996 by graduates of the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, the Stooges blend 19th Century brass band traditions with modern hip-hop. They have performed with Jessica Simpson and Jadakiss, and they performed for Barack Obama when he was running for Senate.

Also competing is the To Be Continued (TBC) Brass Band, a group that formed and started playing in the French Quarter while its members were in

COVER STORY

high school. It’s the youngest band in the competition, and it released its first album, Modern Times, earlier this year. After the storm in 2005, the group had rehearsals at the home of Efrem Towns of Dirty Dozen Brass Band.

Older musicians would stop by for jam sessions and teach TBC about New Orleans jazz traditions.

The Soul Rebels Brass Band will also vie for the prize. The Soul Rebels emerged from the Young Olympia Brass Band and took brass band traditions and incorporated R&B, funk, and hip-hop, most notably through half-sung, half-rapped lyrics. The band rarely plays

The bands will compete for a threeday trip to Los Angeles to record in the Red Bull Studio. street parades anymore, but it has performed worldwide and was featured in an episode of Treme, performing “Drinka Little Poison (4 U Die)” in Le Bon Temps Roule with John Mooney in Le Bon Temps Roule.

The event will be hosted

by Glen David Andrews, a brass band classicist who cut his musical teeth in Jackson Square with Tuba Fats.

Each band will play at least one traditional brass band standard along with original songs of their choice.

Performances will be judged by a panel that will be looking for presentation, musicality, innovation, energy and material.

For more information, visit RedBullUsa.com.

—Barbie Cure www.OFFBEAT.com

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In the Kitchen with Susan “M y mom and dad both came from Cranston, Rhode Island, outside of Providence. Lots of Italian, Portuguese and Irish Catholic, which is what we are.

The meat loafs and the stews and the roasts, that’s all Irish. Anything you can put a potato in. The roast was always smaller than all the potatoes.

My mom was the primary cook in my family. Mom food, food mom, mom food. My dad had one thing he did, which was way complicated because there are so many ingredients in it; it’s an Italian spaghetti sauce that has chicken, pork, sausage, meatballs, everything in one pot. It was called Bud’s sauce, and that was his one and only thing; my mom made everything else.

She was the meat loaf queen, the baked chicken queen, pot roast on the stove, which I don’t see much anymore, and beef stew and then there were these two really horrible dishes based around mashed potatoes. One of them was called hamburger gravy, which was just hamburger [meat], flour, butter, salt and pepper, over mashed potatoes.

The other horrible item was called cream of salmon, which was canned salmon and milk and butter and salt and pepper, over mashed potatoes.

It was a food product where you had to have a glass of milk right next to you. You don’t want to taste it and you don’t need to chew it. You could always tell when the paycheck was low, because there was that cream of salmon crap. And chipped beef—things that go over mashed potatoes that shouldn’t.

I make pies. I’m a really good pie maker. Since Katrina, it was a meditation to make pies. We’d be evacuated in somebody’s house, and I’d be sitting there on the phone asking somebody something about where we are, and I’d get stone crazy.

I got into baking at that point. I got really good at apple pies and not

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bad at lemon meringue. I make my own crust and the trick is the cold water, and when it goes in. I learned pie crusts from my sister-in-law.

Water goes in while it’s scootching around in the food processor, and it’s all about staring at it to see what consistency it is. If you go too far, pull it out, start over. I use shortening. It’s the American way, the Betty Crocker way. Crisco, flour, salt. I like to put a little sugar in.

I got scared about doing this interview because I cook off the top of my head. I don’t think about how much I’m putting in. I cook like I write; just throwing it in and hoping it works. The recipe I want to give you is Beastly chicken, paneed chicken. I don’t like deepfried food, and deep-fried is terrible for you—bless our hearts, literally.

I’m primarily olive oil, but I will pop in a little cooking oil, maybe to give it a little more of a crunchy outer coating. And then when I fry the Beastly, it’s only in an inch or so. I mean, maybe an inch and a half,

By Elsa Hahne

but then it starts to evaporate. As I go along, at some point, I have to stop, scoop out all the brown bits because now we’re smoking and burning.

Clean out the cast iron, start over. If I don’t do that the pieces at the end are much darker than the ones in the front.

I don’t think you can print this, but my kids call it crack chicken.

Doesn’t that read well? We usually serve it with mashed potatoes and broccoli and bearnaise sauce, which has become the ketchup of our household. You take the Knorr envelope, cup of milk, five pounds of butter and—boom, bearnaise!

And then there’s the mac and cheese. It was my mom’s, my grandmother’s, maybe my greatgrandmother’s—no, I don’t think they made Kraft singles back in great-grandmother’s day. Mac is something mom fed us a lot because you can make a giant vat of it and it spreads out among seven children. As a child, I didn’t care for it because it had tomato in it, but now I love it. You’ve got the crunchy cheese on top. Half the family wants it burnt, half of the family doesn’t. Strangely, only me and my brother Paul carried the recipe down.

Also, we have Saints Sundays, every game day when we’re home we have our friends over. Always the boys from the Glasgow band, Sam and Jack Craft. Even when we’re not here they will come, because we’ve got that big TV

we got for Katrina. Katrina’s like Christmas sometimes, when you say it like that. ‘Oh, we got this for Katrina!’ ‘What holiday is that?’ ‘You don’t know the Katrina holiday, when everybody got new stuff?’ Christmas, Hannukah and Katrina—I don’t know if you can print that either... Everybody brings food. The Craft brothers bring Sambalaya or Jackbalaya, which is jambalaya made by Sam or Jack— who’s middle name is Chachere.

That’s important to mention, that they’re Chachere babies. It’s in their name. So when they say they’ll bring jambalaya, I say ‘Okay.’”

Beastly Chicken 4 boneless chicken breasts (try to find medium-size) 1 cup Italian bread crumbs 1 handful (about 2 tbsp) flour 1 tablespoon Italian seasoning 1 teaspoon Lawry’s Seasoned Salt or Tony Chachere’s Creole Seasoning 1 teaspoon garlic powder 4 eggs 1/2 cup milk 1 cup olive oil 1/2 cup cooking oil Slice breasts horizontally and pound each piece with a meat tenderizer to half an inch thick.

Combine bread crumbs, flour, Italian seasoning, seasoned salt and garlic powder in a wide bowl.

Mix eggs and milk in another wide bowl or baking dish, and soak chicken for 10 minutes.

Lift chicken out of egg-milk mixture and coat each piece with bread crumb mixture by pressing each side into crumbs; place on a dry cookie sheet. Heat oil in a large cast iron frying pan. Fry chicken over medium-high heat until golden and crispy, about 3 minutes on each side. Cut each piece in half to make sure it’s done. Serve with Knorr’s Bearnaise sauce. www.OFFBEAT.com

Photo: ELSA HAHNE

Susan Cowsill considers herself the crack chicken queen.

EATS

AMERICAN Green Goddess: 307 Exchange Pl., 301-3347 Feast: 200 Julia St., 304-6318 O’Henry’s Food & Spirits: 634 S. Carrollton Ave., 866-9741; 8859 Veterans Blvd., 461-9840; 710 Terry Pkwy., 433-4111.

Port of Call: 838 Esplanade Ave., 523-0120.

BARBECUE The Joint: 801 Poland Ave., 949-3232.

Squeal Bar-B-Q: 8400 Oak St., 302-7370.

Walker’s BBQ: 10828 Hayne Blvd., 2418227.

BREAKFAST Daisy Dukes: 121 Chartres St., 561-5171.

Lil’ Dizzy’s Café: 1500 Esplanade Ave., 569-8997.

New Orleans Cake Cafe & Bakery: 2440 Chartres St., 943-0010.

COFFEE HOUSE Café du Monde: 800 Decatur St., 525-4544.

Café Rose Nicaud: 634 Frenchmen St., 949-2292.

CREOLE/CAJUN Atchafalaya Restaurant: 901 Louisiana Ave., 891-9626.

Clancy’s: 6100 Annunciation, 895-1111.

Cochon: 930 Tchoupitoulas St., 588-2123.

Dick & Jenny’s: 4501 Tchoupitoulas, 894-9880.

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.

Olivier’s Creole Restaurant: 204 Decatur St., 525-7734.

DELI Mardi Gras Zone: 2706 Royal St., 947-8787.

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

FINE DINING Antoine’s: 701 St. Louis St., 581-4422.

Café Adelaide: 300 Poydras St., 595-3305.

Commander’s Palace: 1403 Washington Ave., 899-8221.

Emeril’s: 800 Tchoupitoulas, 528-9393.

Iris Restaurant: 321 N Peters St., 299-3944.

Lüke: 333 St. Charles Ave., 378-2840.

Maison Dupuy Hotel: 1001 Toulouse St., 586-8000.

Mat and Naddie’s: 937 Leonidas St., 861-9600.

Le Meritage: 1001 Toulouse St., 5868000.

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Mr. B’s Bistro: 201 Royal St. 523-2078.

Restaurant Cuvée: 322 Magazine St., 587-9001.

7 on Fulton: 701 Convention Center Blvd., 525-7555.

Stella!: 1032 Chartres St., 587-0091.

FRENCH Café Degas: 3127 Esplanade Ave., 945-5635.

Delachaise: 3442 St. Charles Ave., 895-0858.

La Crepe Nanou: 1410 Robert St., 899-2670.

Crepes à la Cart: 1039 Broadway St., 866-2362.

Restaurant August: 301 Tchoupitoulas St., 299-9777 GERMAN Jäger Haus: 833 Conti St., 525-9200.

ICE CREAM/GELATO Creole Creamery: 4924 Prytania St., 8948680.

La Divina Gelateria: 3005 Magazine St., 342-2634; 621 St. Peter St., 302-2692.

Sucré: 3025 Magazine St., 520-8311.

INDIAN Nirvana: 4308 Magazine St., 894-9797.

ITALIAN Domenica: 123 Baronne St., 648-1200.

Eleven 79: 1179 Annunciation St., 299-1179.

Irene’s Cuisine: 539 St. Philip St., 529-8811.

Maximo’s: 1117 Decatur St., 586-8883.

Tommy’s: 746 Tchoupitoulas St., 581-1103.

JAPANESE/KOREAN/SUSHI Kyoto: 4920 Prytania St., 891-3644.

Mikimoto: 3301 S. Carrollton Ave., 488-1881.

Miyako Japanese Seafood & Steak House: 1403 St. Charles Ave., 410-9997.

Wasabi: 900 Frenchmen St., 943-9433.

MEDITERRANEAN Byblos: 3218 Magazine St., 894-1233.

Jamila’s Café: 7808 Maple St., 866-4366.

Mona’s Café: 504 Frenchmen St., 949-4115.

MEXICAN/CARIBBEAN/SPANISH Juan’s Flying Burrito: 2018 Magazine St., 569-0000.

El Gato Negro: 81 French Market Place, 525-9846.

Nacho Mama’s: 3240 Magazine St., 899-0031.

RioMar: 800 S. Peters St., 525-3474.

Taqueros Coyoacan: 1432 Saint Charles Ave., 267-3028 Tomatillo’s: 437 Esplanade Ave., 945-9997.

Vaso: 500 Frenchman St., 272-0929.

MUSIC ON THE MENU Carrollton Station Bar and Grill: 140 Willow St., 865-9190.

Chickie Wah Wah: 2828 Canal St., 304-4714.

House of Blues: 225 Decatur St., 412-8068.

NEIGHBORHOOD JOINTS Café Reconcile: 1631 Oretha Castle Haley Blvd., 568-1157.

Captain Charles’ Café on the Ave: 4600 Washington Ave., 258-1719.

Gattuso’s: 435 Huey P. Long Ave., Gretna, 368-1114.

Lakeview Harbor: 911 Harrison Ave., 486-4887.

Parkway Bakery and Tavern: 538 Hagan Ave., 482-3047.

Sammy’s Food Services: 3000 Elysian Fields Ave., 948-7361.

Sports Vue: 1400 Esplanade Ave., 940-1111.

Ye Olde College Inn: 3000 S. Carrollton Ave., 866-3683.

Wit’s Inn: 141 N Carrollton Ave., 486-1600.

PIZZA Fresco Café & Pizzeria: 7625 Maple St., 862-6363.

SEAFOOD Acme Oyster & Seafood House: 724 Iberville, 522-5973.

Casamento’s Restaurant: 4330 Magazine St. 895-9761.

Crazy Lobster Bar & Grill: 1 Poydras St. 569-3380.

Drago’s Restaurant: 2 Poydras St. (Hilton Hotel), 584-3911; 3232 N. Arnoult St., Metairie, 888-9254.

Felix’s Restaurant & Oyster Bar: 739 Iberville St. 522-4440.

Huck Finn’s Café: 135 Decatur St., 529-8600.

SOUL Dunbar’s: 501 Pine St., 861-5451.

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

Willie Mae’s Scotch House: 2401 St. Ann St., 822-9503.

WEE HOURS Clover Grill: 900 Bourbon St., 523-0904.

Mimi’s in the Marigny: 2601 Royal St., 872-9868.

WINE BAR & BISTRO Orleans Grapevine: 720 Orleans Ave., 523-1930.

Meschiya Lake hits the How did you become a regular here so quickly?

I was out of town when it opened in August, so my first night in town I came and checked it out. I love it. Three Muses is owned and operated by fellow musicians so they treat us well, plus I live just up the street, in Jelly Roll Morton’s childhood home.

Photo: ELSA HAHNE

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

Slice Pizzeria: 1513 St. Charles Ave., 525-7437.

Theo’s Neighborhood Pizza: 4218 Magazine St., 894-8554.

Turtle Bay: 1119 Decatur St., 586-0563.

What have you eaten here?

Nothing yet! But I just ordered some boiled edamame and the Chinese broccoli.

It’s nice to have greens in New Orleans; it’s not so easy to find. I love my New Orleans dive bars, but I like a good selection of wine—dry, heavy reds—South Italian, Chilean and Spanish. Just found my new favorite liqueur, St. Germain. It’s made with elderflower, and they use it for the house cocktail.

Three Muses 536 French men St. (504) 298-8746

OffBeat

Le Bon Temps Roule: 4801 Magazine St., 895-8117.

Maison: 508 Frenchmen St., 289-5648.

Mid City Lanes Rock ‘N’ Bowl: 4133 S. Carrollton Ave., 482-3133.

Palm Court Jazz Café: 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.

Shall we sit down?

Ah, I always pick the wobbly table!

—Elsa Hahne www.OFFBEAT.com

DINING OUT Hillbilly Bar-B-Q Any barbeque restaurant worth its weight in salt not only delivers quality smoked meats but also fulfills the image of a low-rent joint. Hillbilly certainly looks the part. After driving down Jefferson Highway for what seems like an eternity, take a right at the corner gas station and there on the left sits a squat, white building with a windowmounted AC unit, scribbly writing and the smell of smoking meats wafting from the front door.

Ribs, brisket, pork shoulder and chicken get little more than a sprinkling of Hillbilly’s dry rub before a long sauna over hickory wood that owner Larry Wyatt hauls down from his hometown of Paducah, Kentucky. Solid ribs are on display here, their flesh taut and heady with the penetrating power of smoke.

Both the pork and brisket, while admirably done, arrive too dry for our liking. The pulled pork would be better if the kitchen tossed the strands with a Carolina-style vinegar sauce, but no selfrespecting Kentucky man would ever consider such a thing. The bark on the brisket begs to

www.OFFBEAT.com

Photo: CAITLYN RIDENOUR

EATS be transformed into a sandwich of burnt ends, but the flesh requires a heavy dousing of either of the two thick, tomato-based sauces.

For some, the side dishes at a barbecue joint are of equal importance to the meats. Those in that camp will find much to love at Hillbilly. BBQ beans are thick and sweet, while the German-style potato salad has a little mustard and a nice kick of heat. But what we loved most was the cold corn salad studded with diced jalapeno, roma tomato and green onion bound together with a touch of mayo.

And if you like combining meat and starch into one glorious dish, Hillbilly has a concoction for you. A baked potato is pried open, stuffed with all the usual partners of the tuber, then crowned by an enormous dollop of your choice of barbecue.

We chose the pulled pork and the result was a gloriously messy, cheesy, creamy, salty, smoky, barbecue wet dream. 208 Tallulah Ave. River Ridge; 738-1508; Tue-Sat 11a-8p. —Rene Louapre and Peter Thriffiley

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Reviews

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

CDs reviewed are available now at In the French Quarter 210 Decatur Street 504-586-1094 or online at LouisianaMusicFactory.com

Better Living through Solitude

Curren$y Pilot Talk (Def Jam) In the video for Curren$y’s first single, 2006’s “Where da Cash At,” he’s at a waterside mansion, hundreds of video vixens in the pool and on the balcony behind him, his former label boss Lil Wayne at his side. It’s a great song, seductive yet dangerous, but in retrospect you have to wonder if the Caulfieldesque Curren$y found it phony.

Fast forward to November 2009, when the official video for “Life Under the Scope,” the Pilot Talk

closer, hit the Web. There’s not another soul around, and the most extravagant backdrop is a deserted modern art gallery. As the title and the lyrics suggest, the spotlight is all on him now. No props, just his New Orleans drawl, incredibly catchy synth loops, and some of the best drum rolls in hip-hop.

In total, seven of the 13 tracks on Pilot Talk ended up with official or promo videos. Curren$y is a loner in all of them, at most appearing with a few friends, and even then only in intimate settings.

There are some quick shots of him performing in front of a crowd in the video for the lead single, “King Kong”, but that’s the farthest he ever strays from solitude.

What marks this album is the step it takes out of the neon lights of Ciroc, Maybachs, clubs, and the Euro dance beats of today’s pop-hop.

This is bossa hip-hop—cool, breezy and removed. What it shares with the Brazilian jazz of the early ’60s is a tone both carefree and existentially lonely. The savory synth squiggles that dot producer Ski Beatz’ tracks

So where are we with the next generation of the musical dynasties?

Will they surprise us with innovation, or deliver mere updates on their fathers’/aunties’/cousins’ legacies?

The Unorthodox Drummer: Just

Jamal, the latest from Jamal Batiste of the Batiste family raises hopes.

Batiste can handle most instruments, pull from a list of talented friends, and produce a highly stylish record that sounds minty fresh on headphones.

Ambient neo-soul, thick bass lines and deadly serious keys (Ronald Markham on synth, Conun Pappas on Rhodes, Bernie Worrell in the air) all beg for the first floor of the Funky Butt and seem to echo Philadelphia.

Perhaps this is music for a more cosmopolitan Crescent City.

Maybe that’s the better question for the next generation: Can the city foster them? Listen to “Fusionristic,” a spacey track with truly unorthodox drumming. Are there gigs for this music? Got me, but I’d bet there’s an audience, given the chance. Batiste snatches important accents from the seventies—the Roy Ayers/Kool and the Gang crescendos, well-placed back-up vocals—and matches them with a DJ’s sensibility in his new day percussion, suggesting an intelligent late night scene.

Chess and Charles tried to catch lightning in a bottle more than once, following “… Alligator” with a couple of forced sides, “Watch It Sprocket” and “Take It Easy Greasy.”

However, the good far outweighs the bad here. The swamp pop tracks “On Bended Knees,” (the sax break on this is to die for) “I’m a Fool to Care,” “Ain’t Got No Home” and “Your Picture” are unsurpassed. This guy could write a song that could rip your heart out. There’s also some splendid mid-tempo numbers here, such as “One Eyed Jack,” “I’ll Turn Square for You” and “Laura Lee.”

Predictably fine accompaniment from Cosimo studio players and Charles proved a Cajun kid from Abbeville could out sing all of the Rickies, Jimmies and Pauls of the era.

Great packaging as always from Bear Family. Worth tracking down for sure.

—Jeff Hannusch

throughout only add to the ethereal sound. Like any great stoner album, these songs aren’t planted on the ground, but fly high in the sky.

Which brings you back to the most striking difference in his early “Where da Cash At” video: the absence of weed, his current calling card. It’s the centerpiece of the J.E.T. (Just Enjoy This) Life philosophy/ brand Curren$y endorses today, and he sounds comfortable now on Pilot Talk, embracing it fully.

That seeming relaxation has resulted in some of the best hiphop released all year. As he raps on “Skybourne”: “They lied / Money really do grow on trees.”

—Ben Berman

Jamal Batiste The Unorthodox Drummer: Just Jamal (Jam-All Music)

Alligator Man Bobby Charles See You Later, Alligator (Bear Family) As widely revered an American songwriter as Bobby Charles was, it’s curious that none of his early material has ever been reissued domestically on compact disc. In fact, if memory serves me right, this material was only reissued once on vinyl in the US when All Platinum controlled the Chess catalog briefly in the early 1980s.

If you’re a regular OffBeat reader, you should be familiar with the

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recently deceased Charles’ history.

This German release contains his first efforts as a recording artist, tracks recorded in the 1950s that became the foundation of South Louisiana rock ’n’ roll and swamp pop. The title track of course is the centerpiece here, a song that speaks for itself. The track is as chaotic as anything Cosimo Matassa supervised (except maybe Guitar Slim’s sessions), and I have a sneaky feeling the tape for “Later Alligator” was sped up slightly when Chess mastered it. Whatever the case, the song became Charles’ signature.

www.OFFBEAT.com

REVIEWS Overindulgence in virtuosity by several parties reminds us of many a self-produced effort by young (and not-so-young) local talents. Batiste’s musical voice could use direction, but the sound here is original enough to make you trust his judgment. Yesterday or tomorrow, confidence remains an important hallmark of our best musicians.

—Brian Boyles

Dax Riggs Say Goodnight to the World (Fat Possum) Dax Riggs’ cover of “Heartbreak Hotel” on Say Goodnight to the World clocks in at almost four and a half minutes; Elvis Presley’s 1956 version takes just over two. Riggs slows the song’s pace and reduces its instrumental palette to heavy

A Love Letter to the Crescent City Various Artists Dear New Orleans (Air Traffic Control) A working streetcar, a Saints Super Bowl victory and five years later, it might be easy for the events of August 29, 2005 to become a more distant memory for some. But if Dear New Orleans, the new digital benefit compilation dedicated to the Big Easy from Air Traffic Control, is any proof, no one will ever forget that day or its impact.

What makes the 31-song collection such an important compilation is that many of the musicians featured are national artists. The record acts as a love letter from musicians of all backgrounds coming together because at one point, New Orleans touched them and their music.

The talent on Dear New Orleans comes from all divisions of rock and pop, from former Rage Against the Machine-er Tom Morello to New Jersey indie rock outfit the Wrens to singer-songwriter Nellie McKay. Morello adopts his protest singer persona, The Nightwatchman, for “Midnight in the City of Destruction.” The Wrens contribute an all-new track, their first since 2003, in the jangly, hissing melody of “Crescent.” Los Angeles-viaChicago pop rockers OK Go’s short visit to New Orleans inspired the light-hearted, four-chord approach of “Louisiana Land.” The track opens

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the album with a shout-out to the late Antoinette K-Doe and sets the stage for songs that may be directed towards New Orleans without being carbon copies of the sound associated with the city.

Hometown artists are featured, including the Paul Sanchez and Shamarr Allen contribution “Don’t Be Sure.” The heart-tugging folk guitar and Sanchez’s warm croon float over Allen’s firefly trumpet.

The album ends with six live songs involving Bonerama, but only one, “Mr. Go,” was recorded in New Orleans. The others, which include a dark and bitter version of “When the Levee Breaks” featuring Nicole Atkins and a powerful take of “Kick Out the Jams” with R.E.M.’s Mike Mills and original MC5 member Wayne Kramer, were recorded live in Washington, D.C. in late 2009. The perfect locale for a feverish wake-up call to remind politicians that New Orleans still stands.

Chris Rose’s “Dear America” letter in the September 6, 2005 TimesPicayune promised that New Orleans would repay all the hospitality and generosity the country showed during the city’s time of despair.

Five years later, consider Dear New Orleans the antithesis, a musical thank you to New Orleans for its ability to overcome and still inspire.

—Richard Giraldi www.OFFBEAT.com

REVIEWS

bass, sparse drums and a guitar melody crackling just on the edge of feedback, making “Heartbreak Hotel” appear unfamiliar because it’s been robbed of Elvis’ pop sensibilities. When the volume swells over the chorus, we can hear that a song we’ve always known to be about death and loneliness is, well, downright spooky.

“Heartbreak Hotel” is the only cover song on Say Goodnight to the World, but from “Gravedirt on My Blue Suede Shoes” to “See You All in Hell or New Orleans,” Riggs makes it his business to darken rock ’n’ roll’s lighthearted iconography. The album’s nine original songs load up rock music with ideas about death, hell and the road there.

Those ideas, Riggs seems to remind us, are built right into the tradition. Such gloomy images are familiar from the singer’s earlier career with Acid Bath, Agents of Oblivion, and Deadboy and the Elephantmen, but as a solo artist Riggs continues to move away from playing metal. In place of the overloaded, distorted feel that we might expect from its lyrical content, this CD puts forth a more spacious, psychedelic soundscape.

Say Goodnight to the World is aggressively spare, relying primarily on rhythmic, repetitive bass lines to push its groove along. It’s designed to both create and accentuate wide-open spaces where its compositions, along with its listener, can get lost in the dark.

—Jacob Leland

Impulss Marie Laveaux’s Hustle (Quarter Rat Music) Daniel “Impulss” Perez knows a thing or two about the hustle.

He knows what it’s like to be on www.OFFBEAT.com

the brink of a big deal one minute only to be back on square one the next. But since being hung out to dry by Def Jam a few years back, Impulss has decided to get his hustle on, returning to his New Orleans roots and reigniting its resurgent, underground scene. On his latest effort, Marie Laveaux’s Hustle, Pulss is back at it, pounding the mic as he pledges his allegiance to the Crescent City.

On the track “We Love the N.O.,” Impulss reveals his MO: “I’m James Booker’s fingers / I’m Marie Laveaux’s hustle,” an homage to two of the Crescent City’s most memorable and mystifying figures and a metaphor that insinuates that making it in the Big Easy is often a struggle against slipping through the cracks.

On the mic, Pulss’ warped rhymes and wicked insights blend the persona of another New Orleans icon, Dr. John, with the witty, rapid-fire wordplay of a socially conscious Eminem. He uses a scratchy sample of the Doctor’s ode to the Voodoo Queen of New Orleans to set the album’s tone as he spews profusely over the stinging funk of the opener, “Restless Leg Syndrome.” One of the few emcees on the scene with a flow prolific and profound enough not to play himself out over the course of an album, Impulss keeps his collaborators to a minimum, picks them wisely, and packs 16 deep cuts into Marie Laveaux’s Hustle, 10 of which he produced himself. Alt-rap icon Prince Po lays it down on “Do It!,” Curren$y conspirator Nesby Phips kicks it on “Fly Talk,” and underground guerilla ElEsPee lends his lackadaisical flow to “Photo I.D.,” a track that also features Impulss’ wife, Rita LaGrange, on vocals. The album’s best moment comes through on “Tumblin’ Down,” where Pulss resurrects the hook from a previous Akon collab as he sizes up New Orleans’ social climate. To close things out, he brings in Bronx producer Bazooka Joe to remix “Do It!” Once again, Impulss lets everyone know exactly why he plays the game: “For the love and the passion.”

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Dash Rip Rock Call of the Wild (Alternative Tentacles) “Didn’t come to college to learn how to think / Came here to learn how to drink.” That’s a line from Professor Cuervo, an instructor for the class “Party 101.” The declaration sums up the mission of the latest Dash Rip Rock album, Call of the Wild. Out of 12 tracks, four include the word “party” in the title. The good professor arrives in the second track, which is followed by the title track, a kind of outlaw story punctuated by whoops and arribas and yodels.

A certain sense of humor is at work here, but most of the jokes arrive far inside.

Dash Rip Rock is a veteran outfit, which makes their determination to claim a place in the “Party Hall of Fame” all the more forced. After all, you’re either in it or you’re not by now, (Hunter S. Thompson, Keith Richards, and Robert Downey, Jr. are there, in case you were wondering) and the warmed over Stones riffs are no last-minute appeal.

The band is known to rock a bar, and as in a bar set, things warm up as the album progresses.

Guitar work complicates, drums expand, there’s a very friendly vibe going, but the focus remains “geddinfuggedup,” as we used to say freshman year. While that terrain gets plowed thoroughly, you wonder if the debauchery doesn’t weary when done over and again

Listening to the Aliens Magnetic Ear Aliens of Extraordinary Ability (Independent) The track listing for Magnetic Ear’s Aliens of Extraordinary Ability is packed tight with guest appearances from throughout the various strata of the New Orleans music scene: from newcomer Sasha Masakowski to Dirty Dozen Brass Band co-founder Roger Lewis.

The credits demonstrate the wideranging connections that Magnetic Ear’s members have made, and the music they’ve made with so many extraordinarily able performers alien to the core group itself is a testament to the band’s and bandleader Martin Krusche’s ability to bring that eclecticism together into a coherent musical statement.

The core group that makes up Magnetic Ear is a pocket brass band: two saxophones, two trombones, sousaphone, and drums. Its style belongs to the brass band tradition from New Orleans and well beyond. Eastern European, Caribbean and African influences are just as prevalent as the second-line funk and traditional New Orleans jazz sounds we might expect to dominate. There are also covers of Nirvana’s “In Bloom” and Radiohead’s “Everything in Its Right

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Place,” and an original tango tribute to the late Alex Chilton. The result of such a cross-cultural array is a wholly fresh and unique take on the danceparty brass sound that maintains a distinctly New Orleanian character.

The album’s groove is inevitably designed for the New Orleans dance floor, but this is no free-forall jam session caught on tape.

Aliens of Extraordinary Ability is an album for listeners. Its chief strength is its tightly arranged compositions, whose complex harmonies and rhythmic figures bring out the individual performers’ talents. The CD takes its name from a designation that allows people to cross borders; with this effort, Magnetic Ear shows how much the license to travel through styles can bring back to brass band music.

—Jacob Leland www.OFFBEAT.com

REVIEWS

in the same basic tone. There are women like “Meth Lab Girl” in track five and “Cowbell Girl” in track nine to keep it interesting, I guess. May they never grow old.

—Brian Boyles

Louisiana Hellbenders Main Drag Fair (Bayou Dog) Listening to this record is like spending a night at the Ponderosa Stomp. Along with a good sense of the personality of the band we get a history lesson at the crossroads of R&B, rockabilly and Louisiana rock ’n’ roll. The group is a sturdy unit built around the rockabilly rhythm section of Dave Maleckar on acoustic bass and Matthew Swiler on snare-heavy drums. Kenny Holladay is the main instrumental voice on guitar and pedal steel. Lead vocalist Ross Hallen accompanies himself on guitar and has help from several backup vocalists on harmony arrangements that ingeniously buttress his limited yet expressive vocal range.

The band makes the most of some clever and relatively obscure covers, starting with the driving “Slow Down,” a classic ’50s tune by the minor Sun and Philips recording artist Jack Earls, who wrote the song in his ’56 Buick Roadmaster. Maleckar’s slapback bass animates another vintage tune, “Stairway to Nowhere” by Al and Jo Ann Wingate, “Talkin’ to You,” and Hallen delivers a great read of Doc Pomus’ irresistible “Boogie Woogie Country Girl,” a metaphorically lascivious ditty about a hot country girl.

The Hellbenders searched the halls of Jay Miller’s Crowley, Louisiana legacy for a cover of www.OFFBEAT.com

Rocket Rodney Morgan’s Zym release “You’re Humbuggin’ Me,” a real Cajun stomper that gets Swiler’s best performance on the record.

The crushing finale, “Snow Don’t Fall,” really captures the exquisitely wistful blues at the heart of Townes Van Zandt’s vision.

Hallen is a more than capable writer whose own compositions hold their own alongside the well-chosen cover material.

“Southwind” is a spooky, atmospheric western swing tune with a clarinet interlace played by Nervous Dwayne that suggests a connection to traditional New Orleans jazz. “Waitin’ on You” and “Chicken Head” are both swinging rockabilly originals that give the band a chance to pack the dance floor, while “Nothin’ to Lose” is a doomy ballad that goes a long way toward explaining why Hallen chose to cover two Townes Van Zandt songs on the record.

—John Swenson

Truckstop Honeymoon Homemade Haircut (Squirrel)

mushroom

Writer’s block, what’s that?

Whatever it is, it’s definitely not in Truckstop Honeymoon’s vocabulary.

Since its 2003 inception and over the course of six albums, the husband-and-wife songwriting team of Mike West and Katie Euliss has had no problem in finding fodder for songs. Ordinary life scenes serve as a prop to make a point, such as a family trip to the aquarium, which is really about gender inequality of childbearing manifested through seahorses.

The title track is really a statement regarding the overly vain and pious, only to be capped off with Euliss’ defiant quip “I got a homemade haircut and I look better than all of you.”

Not all songs have a two-tier structure, however. Some resemble a sonic family scrapbook with candid perspectives from all, even the kiddos who have been known to protest the frequent rehearsals (“Daddy Don’t Play”). Euliss’ own “Childhood Memories” wins the most outrageous song of the year O CTO BER 2 010

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award—a whirlwind Appalachianstyled tune of how she got dear old mama stoned and lived to regret such uncharacteristic behavior.

Yet, where this Truckstop Honeymoon record stands out is in the arrangements. Normally folk and bluegrass-oriented, here they’re broadened to include western swing fiddle licks; bouncy, jazz piano; and mood-setting trumpets. West and Euliss’ vocal interplay and amusing lines are almost an off-Broadway musical (“Accidentally,” “Romantic Conversations”), albeit a demented one for some, but one that’s still highly entertaining and deeply provocative at the same time.

—Dan Willging

Otis Redding Live On Sunset Strip (Stax) The true test of the worthiness of a live album is when the listener says to him or herself, “I wish I’d have been at that show.” This is such a recording. Recorded in 1966 at the legendary Whiskey a GoGo, several of these tracks were available on LP back in the days of vinyl. However, this is the first time the entire amazing three live sets recorded over Easter weekend have been made available.

There’s a lot of up-tempo material: “Security,” “I Can’t Turn You Loose,” “Respect”—this was recorded a year before Aretha’s cover—”Satisfaction” and, even “A Hard Day’s Night,” and “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag.” But it’s the ballads that are most gripping.

Nobody could “worry” a song quite like the Big O. “These Arms of Mine,” “Chained and Bound” and especially “Just One More Day” and “Good to Me” are soul balladry at its apex.

Redding truly sings from his heart.

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Redding was backed by his road band at the Whiskey, so there’s a more energetic, less meticulous feel to the songs here than on his studio recordings when Booker T & the MGs and the Memphis Horns provided the accompaniment. There are four versions of “Satisfaction,” which is redundant, but there’s a plethora of jaw-dropping material here. This is 1960s soul music at its best. One listen and you’ll wish you’d been at the Whiskey, too.

—Jeff Hannusch

The Hons To Skyward (Miss New Orleans) You may think your dad is sort of hokey sometimes, but you still love him right? The same goes for The Hons’ To Skyward, an album your dad would love. This is adult contemporary power pop, in the best sense of the term. To Skyward is the album Weezer wishes they could make if they could muster the sincerity.

Dad would love the Hons because he appreciates craftsmanship, and To Skyward is painstakingly crafted, from the tight-yet-light songwriting, to the perfect but not stifled recording, to the delicious and crafty guitar leads peppered throughout by local guitar god and auxiliary Hon, Cranston Clements. David Torkanowsky also lends B3 to several tracks. Your dad also dislikes the way new rock singers whine and scream and struggle with their limitations, but the Hons’ Richard Bates sings to his strengths and keeps it cool, staying in the pocket like a power-pop Frank Sinatra until, as near the end of “Touching Leaves,” he busts into one of the nicest falsettos you’ve ever heard.

The Hons can get a little hokey, like when Bates equates love (the consistent topic of the record) with Star Wars (“Sixth sense detects tremors in The Force”) on the faux metal “There Was a Time,” and when his in-the-pocket voice admits, “I got a box of condoms / and your wicked smile is on my mind.” A nerdy randiness runs throughout the album—sex comes up bluntly where you least expect it—and while its candy-coated sweetness may seem www.OFFBEAT.com

REVIEWS cute and cuddly to some, others may think, “Knock it off, dad!” But since guitar-driven power pop often sounds like teenagers having rushed sex, the Hons’ smooth, adult take on the genre is strikingly listenable, while showing the kids how it should be done.

—Red LeVine

Smiley with a Knife Long Now (Independent) In 2008, New Orleans-based instrumental outfit Smiley with a Knife debuted with How a Reign Comes to an End, a brazenly presumptive, morose mélange of metal and math rock dripping with dark irony. With it, they affirmed their existence. On their second album, Long Now, Smiley with a Knife has shed many of the pretensions that plague most progressive rock acts (ostentatious musical and conceptual overindulgence), sharpened their focus, and tempered their playing, delivering an effort that pushes past

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the borders of sheer virtuosity and cinematic sound collages to span the space between the palpable and the surreal. Here, they claim their sound, which, in the world of instrumental rock, is where most bands fail to distinguish themselves.

Rather than rely solely on instrumental prowess or adhere to a rigid framework, Smiley with a Knife opens up their sound to encompass various streams of influence. Their acutely composed tracks blend the seemingly incongruous angular shifts of math rock, the avant timbres of post rock, the drifting ephemera of shoegaze, and the unpredictable ferocity of noise rock.

This is no easy feat, and there are a handful of moments on Long Now where melodies capsize and along with contrast and texture get sucked into a grating maelstrom. But Smiley with a Knife shows extreme poise for a young group and possesses a keen knack for reeling in a tune winding down the abyss. Early on, the spacious, syncopated drumming and spontaneous rhythmic surges

in “Egyptian Porridge” give the intertwining guitars plenty of room to soar and seize and save the song from submerging. Later, a jazzy bass motif molds the cascading glide of “Cosmonauts Are Not So Cosby Nazi” into a cool groove, while a cleverly placed Southern rock bridge prevents the frenetic gallop of “Sexy Butcher” from running over itself. At a tad longer than 40 minutes, Long Now takes the shape of a stream-ofconsciousness, macabre tale of selfdiscovery—bewilderingly cryptic and bitterly post-modern.

—Aaron LaFont

Asleep at the Wheel Featuring Leon Rausch It’s a Good Day (Bismeaux Productions) Now rolling into its fifth decade as America’s premier Western swing institution, Asleep at the Wheel (AATW) has figured out how to keep it fresh while remaining faithful to the canon. Collaborations appear to be the key, and this billing with former

Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys’ Leon Rausch couldn’t be more appropriate.

Rausch joined the Playboys in the late ‘50s and later guided AATW during its formative years in the early ‘70s.

Like AATW, he has been instrumental in keeping Wills’ legacy alive with his various Texas Playboys II incarnations.

At 83, the golden baritone’s vocals are as strong as ever and come equipped with a sunny demeanor. He’s not the smooth crooner like legendary alumnus Tommy Duncan, but his slightly raspy vocals do have character and are more akin to a seasoned blues or jazz singer.

Unpredictability is the other key, meaning that though Rausch is heavily featured, he shares the limelight with three alternating AATW vocalists as well as Willie Nelson on “Truck Driver’s Blues.” This is hardly a Western swing songbook rehash, either. Some of the best performances come from selections outside the box, such as the swinging Peggy Lee title track and the playful showtune-like duet (“Alright, Okay, You Win”) between Rausch and Elizabeth McQueen that works well

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Though many would have retired way before this, Leon Rausch proves that you’re never too old to cut the mustard.

—Dan Willging

The Vettes Plasticville (Independent) The Vettes meet their detractors head-on on their debut album, Welcome to Plasticville. They’re not about keeping it real—what could be more boring? The Vettes have embraced rock’s artificiality because it’s more entertaining and fun than sincerity. In “Lil Wayne,” Rachel Vette can’t wait for Weezy to get out of jail to “save us from the ordinary world.” The best material here is about celebrity and wanting to be one.

Appropriately, no sounds found in nature were used in the recording of this album. Eighties synthesizers dominate the sound matched with heavily compressed guitars, but even Vette’s voice and the drums have a sheen of techno-polish on them.

Not surprisingly, Plasticville sounds great as it recalls Berlin and Missing Persons, and it’s a more consistently entertaining album than anything either of those bands made. There are a half-dozen songs that I could remember after a single play.

Unfortunately, in a time when “celebrity” is being defined down daily, the Vettes’ notion of it already feels a little dated. And since the best songs on the album have been in the band’s set for a while, I wonder about how quickly the Vettes write. If they’re not careful, they and their muse could pass each other by without realizing it.

—Alex Rawls

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Skipp Coon and Mr. Nick Sophomore Slump Vol. 1 (TibbiT) “[This] just might be my favorite ish in a LONG arse TIME,” The Roots’ Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson tweeted after hearing Sophomore Slump Vol. 1, the latest project from Skipp Coon and Mr. Nick. Amidst a sea of mediocre mixtapes, a clever 140-character quip from a hip-hop icon is about as emphatic an endorsement as an underground artist could hope for.

Banter and blog buzz aside, at only five tracks, the Jackson, Mississippi rapper and producer’s second offering stands as one of the most subversive and audacious releases to drop in long time.

As his name alludes, Skipp Coon isn’t one to tiptoe around touchy subjects. In fact, it’s fair to say he’s an agitator, a renegade, and an outright dissident. “Now that y’all got Obama, y’all happy as some pigs in slop,” he barks disparagingly on the album’s opening verse. The song, “James,” a nod to the earnest, hardworking father from the sitcom Good Times, cracks down on social ills before closing on the call, “We got enough J.J.s / Who wanna be a James?”

Skipp’s partner-in-grime, Mr. Nick, a musical misfit of equal pedigree, proves an able accomplice, shadowing Skipp’s provocations with ominous grooves. The disc’s standout, “4-28-1967 (Parts I and II),” compares street-life, the war in Afghanistan, and Vietnam as tirades from the film Network stitch together verses from a slew of emcees, including Dirty South heavyweight David Banner. While the moody, proto-rap poetics of “It Is What It Is” and the exasperating grind of “Get Mad” balance the album’s tensions, the sinister sendoff “Fight” best synopsizes Sophomore Slump Vol. 1’s seditious and satiric pretext. “I’m a rebel and this rap is a hoax / You spit for tall kids and I write it for adults / Give me a beat; I’ll beat a rapper to a pulp,” Skipp spews with the righteous fury of Chuck D., the cunning wit of Lil Wayne, and the belligerent bravado of Big Boi. The message is potent and the music, even more so.

—Aaron LaFont www.OFFBEAT.com

When you’re out, text the word ‘offbeat’ to 33669 for daily listings. For complete listings, go to www.offbeat.com

Listings EXPRESS

Here are OffBeat’s highlights of music and entertainment in New Orleans and the surrounding area for the current month. Each day’s events are listed in alphabetical order by club or venue. Listings are compiled based on information provided by clubs, bands and promoters up to our deadlines. Unfortunately, some information was not available at press time and listings are subject to change.

Special events, concerts, festivals and theater listings follow the daily listings. For up-to-theminute, complete music listings, check OffBeat’s web page at www.offbeat.com. For more details on a show, call the club directly. Phone numbers of clubs are shown in this section and/or at www.offbeat.com.

To include your date or event, please email information to our listings editor, Craig Guillot at craigguillot@offbeat.com or call 504-944-4300.

Mr. Guillot can also provide listing deadlines for upcoming issues.

AC AU BL BU BB SH KJ KS CL CO CW DN FE FK GS IR IN MJ TJ JV LT ME PK PP RG RH RB RR SI SW TC VO ZY

A Cappella Acoustic Blues Bluegrass Brass Band Cabaret/Show Cajun Christian Classical Comedy Country Dance Folk Funk Gospel Indie Rock International/World Jazz, Contemporary Jazz, Trad Jazz, Variety Latin Metal Piano/Keyboards Pop/Top 40/Covers Reggae Rap/Hip Hop Rhythm & Blues Rock Swing/Gypsy Spoken Word Techno/Dance/Electronica Vocals Zydeco

FRIDAY OCT 1

12 Bar: Marc Bellonie (BL) 6p Apple Barrel: John Williams (BL) 4p, Kenny Holliday and Rick Westin (BL) 8p,Mike Hood (BL) 11p Blue Nile: Mykia Jovan and Jason Butler (MJ) 8p, Ani DiFranco (upstairs) (MJ) 9p Chickie Wah Wah: the Pfister Sisters (JV) 5:30p, Paul Sanchez (OR) 8p, Seth Walker (BL) 10:30p d.b.a.: Hot Club of New Orleans (JV) 6p, Happy Talk Band (JV) 10p Davenport Lounge (Ritz-Carlton): Jeremy Davenport (JV) 9p

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Funky Pirate: Mark Penton (BL) 4p, Big Al Carson & the Blues Masters (BL) 8p House of Blues: the Wailers, Trevor Hill 9p Howlin’ Wolf (The Den): Coyotes, Handsome Beast (RR) 9p Howlin’ Wolf NorthShore (Mandeville): Rebirth Brass Band (BB) 9p Irvin Mayfield’s Jazz Playhouse (Royal Sonesta): Professor Piano Series feat. Tom McDermott (MJ) 5p, Leon “Kid Chocolate” Brown (MJ) 8p, Midnight Burlesque Ballroom feat. Trixie Minx, Jayna Morgan and Sazerac Sunrise (MJ) 12a Kerry Irish Pub: Damien Louviere (BL) 5p, Kim Carson Band (BL) 9p Le Bon Temps Roule: J. Monque’D Blues Band (BL) 11p Little Tropical Isle: Dwight Breland (RR) 4:30p, Frank Fairbanks Duo (SS) 9p Maple Leaf: the Radiators (RR) 10p Margaritaville: Eddie Parino (RR) 2p, Irving Bannister’s All-stars (RB) 7p One Eyed Jacks: New Orleans Bingo Show!

(RR) 9p Palm Court: Palm Court Jazz Band feat. Lucien Barbarin (JV) 7p Preservation Hall: Preservation Hall Jazz Masters feat. Lars Edegran (JV) 8p Rivershack: Ghost Town (CW) 9p Rock ’n’ Bowl: Amanda Shaw, Dash Rip Rock (KJ RR) 9p Snug Harbor: Johnny Vidacovich Trio (MJ) 8 & 10p Three Muses: Harmonouche (JV) 6p Tipitina’s: call club Tropical Isle Bourbon: Captain Leo (OR) 1p, Mark Barrett (OR) 5p, Debbie & the Deacons (OR) 10p Tropical Isle Original: Butch Fields (OR) 1p, Cruz Missiles (OR) 5p, Late as Usual (OR) 9p

SATURDAY OCT 2

12 Bar: Erin Demastes (BL) 6p; Sweet Jones (BL) 9:30p Apple Barrel: John Williams and Billy Outlaw (BL) 4p, Sneaky Pete (BL) 8p, the Hip Shakers (BL) 11p Blue Nile: Washboard Chaz Blues Trio (MJ) 7p, Kermit Ruffins & the BBQ Swingers (MJ) 11p, Marcos Maceria Band (upstairs) (MJ) 10p d.b.a.: John Boutte (JV) 8p, Good Enough for Good Times (JV) 11p Davenport Lounge (Ritz-Carlton): Jeremy Davenport (JV) 9p Fritzel’s: Mike Fulton and Richard Scott (JV) 9p Funky Pirate: Mark Penton (BL) 4p, Big Al Carson & the Blues Masters (BL) 8p House of Blues: the Cult, the Black Ryder (RR) 8p Howlin’ Wolf (The Den): G-Eazy (RH) 10p Howlin’ Wolf NorthShore (Mandeville): Future Leaders of the World, Trevelyan and Poltern Kinder (RR) 10p Howlin’ Wolf: Rebirth Brass Band (BB) 10p Irvin Mayfield’s Jazz Playhouse (Royal Sonesta): Bill Summers and Friends (MJ) 8p, Midnight Brass Band Jam feat. Kinfolk Brass Band (BB) 12a Kerry Irish Pub: Speed the Mule feat. Paul Tobin (BL) 5p, Hurricane Refugees (BL) 9p Le Bon Temps Roule: Wild Magnolias (FK) 11p Little Tropical Isle: Jason Bishop (RR) 4:30p, Frank Fairbanks Duo (SS) 9p

Maple Leaf: Jake Eckert CD-release party (FK) 10p Margaritaville: Joe Bennett (RR) 2p, Irving Bannister’s All-stars (RB) 5p One Eyed Jacks: Trannyshack (RR) 9p Palm Court: Palm Court Jazz Band feat. Lionel Ferbos (JV) 7p Preservation Hall: Preservation Hall Jazz Band feat. Mark Braud (JV) 8p Rivershack: Broken Heart Pharoahs (RR) 10p Rock ’n’ Bowl: Eric Lindell (RR) 9:30p Snug Harbor: Vernel Bagneris & Orange Kellin’s Blue Serenaders (MJ) 8 & 10p Three Muses: the Owen Trio, St. Louis Slim (JV) 7p Tipitina’s: Sketchy Black and Gold Party feat.

Johnny Sketch & the Dirty Notes, Captain Midnight Tropical Isle Bourbon: Captain Leo (OR) 1p, Mark Barrett (OR) 5p, Debbie & the Deacons (OR) 10p Tropical Isle Original: Butch Fields (OR) 1p, Rhythm & Rain (OR) 5p, Late as Usual (OR) 10p Band and the Super Fans (FK) 10p

Hi Ho Lounge: Bluegrass Pickin’ Party (BU) 8p Irvin Mayfield’s Jazz Playhouse (Royal Sonesta): Bob French & the Original Tuxedo Jazz Band (MJ) 8p Kerry Irish Pub: Kim Carson (BL) 9p Little Tropical Isle: Marc Stone (BL) 4:30p, Jason Bishop (RR) 9p Maple Leaf: Papa Grows Funk (FK) 10p Margaritaville: Butch Fields (RR) 2p, Brint Anderson (BL) 7p Old Point Bar: Brent Walsh Jazz Trio (JV) 5p Preservation Hall: Preservation Hall Jazz Band feat. Mark Braud (JV) 8p Snug Harbor: Charmaine Neville (MJ) 8 & 10p Three Muses: New Orleans Singer Songwriters Night feat. Kristin Diable (SS) 7p Tropical Isle Bourbon: Butch Fields (OR) 5p, Can’t Hardly Playboys (OR) 9p Tropical Isle Original: Damien Louviere (OR) 1p, Big Feets (OR) 5p, Rhythm & Rain (OR) 9p

SUNDAY OCT 3

Apple Barrel: Luke Winslow-King (BL) 7p, Kenny Swartz & the Palace of Sin (BL) 10:30p Blue Nile: Open Ears Music Series (upstairs) (MJ) 10p Chickie Wah Wah: Ruby and Suki (OR) 6p d.b.a.: Cottonmouth Kings of New Orleans (JV) 9p Fritzel’s: Tom Fisher and Friends (JV) 9p Funky Pirate: Big Al Carson & the Blues Masters (BL) 8p Irvin Mayfield’s Jazz Playhouse (Royal Sonesta): Jason Marsalis (MJ) 8p Kerry Irish Pub: Honky Tonk Open Mic feat. Jason Bishop (CW) 9p Little Tropical Isle: Marc Stone (OR) 4:30p, Rainmakers (RR) 9p Maple Leaf: Rebirth Brass Band (BB) 10p Margaritaville: Butch Fields (RR) 2p, Brint Anderson (BL) 7p One Eyed Jacks: Peelander-Z feat. Die Rottz (RR) 9p Preservation Hall: Preservation Hall-stars feat.

Shannon Powell (JV) 8p Rock ’n’ Bowl: Lynn Drury (BL) 8:30p Snug Harbor: Phil Degruy (MJ) 8p & 10p Tropical Isle Bourbon: Frank Fairbanks (OR) 5p, Damien Louviere (OR) 9p Tropical Isle Original: Rainmakers (OR) 1p, Cruz Missiles (OR) 5p, Radio Active (OR) 9p

Apple Barrel: John Williams (BL) 4p, Kenny Claiborne (BL) 8p, Ready Teddy (BL) 10:30p Blue Nile: Sunday Night Brass feat. Mainline (BB) 10p d.b.a.: Palmetto Bug Stompers (JV) 6p, Billy Iuso & the Restless Natives feat. War Chief Juan (FK) 10p Funky Pirate: Mark Penton (BL) 4p, Willie Lockett & All Purpose Blues Band (BL) 8p House of Blues: Sunday Gospel Brunch (GS) 10a Howlin’ Wolf (The Den): Brass Band Sunday feat.

Hot 8 Brass Band (BB) 9p Irvin Mayfield’s Jazz Playhouse (Royal Sonesta): Tyler’s Revisited feat. Germaine Bazzle (MJ) 7p Kerry Irish Pub: Irish Session (BL) 5p, Schatzy & Associates (BL) 8p Little Tropical Isle: Jason Bishop (RR) 4:30p, Lacy Blackledge (SS) 9p Maple Leaf: Joe Krown Trio feat. Russell Batiste and Walter “Wolfman” Washington (FK) 10p Margaritaville: Cindy Chen (RR RB PK) 7p, Irving Bannister’s All-stars (RB) 2p Palm Court: Sunday Night Swingsters feat. Mark Braud (JV) 7p Preservation Hall: Tommy Sancton’s New Orleans Jazz Band (JV) 8p Snug Harbor: Phil Parnell Trio (MJ) 8 & 10p Three Muses: Jayna Morgan (JV) 7p Tropical Isle Bourbon: Marc Stone (OR) 1p, Mark Barrett (OR) 5p, Debbie & the Deacons (OR) 9p Tropical Isle Original: Butch Fields (OR) 1p, Rhythm & Rain (OR) 5p, Late as Usual (OR) 9p

MONDAY OCT 4

Apple Barrel: Sam Cammarata (BL) 8p, Shotgun House (BL) 10:30p Chickie Wah Wah: Jimmy Robinson and Cranston Clements unplugged (AU) 7p d.b.a.: Glen David Andrews feat. Amanda Shaw (KJ JV) 9p Fritzel’s: Tim Laughlin Quartet (JV) 9p Funky Pirate: Willie Locket & All Purpose Blues Band (BL) 8p

TUESDAY OCT 5

WEDNESDAY OCT 6

12 Bar: the Pinettes (BB) 9p Apple Barrel: Wendy Darling (BL) 8p, 19th St. Red (BL) 10:30p Blue Nile: United Postal Project (JV) 8p, Khris Royal and Dark Matter (JV) 10p, Gravity A and guests (RR) 11p Chickie Wah Wah: John Mooney (BL) 8p d.b.a.: the Mirlitones (JV) 7p, John Gros & the Roadmasters (FK) 10p Fritzel’s: Chuck Brackman and Barry Foulon (JV) 9p Funky Pirate: Big Al Carson & the Blues Masters (BL) 8p Howlin’ Wolf: Curren$y, Big KRIT, Smoke Dza, Mac Miller, Boaz and Rich Hill (VR) 10p

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LIVE LOCAL MUSIC Irvin Mayfield’s Jazz Playhouse (Royal Sonesta): Sasha Masakowski (MJ) 5p, Masters Month feat. Irvin Mayfield interpreting Porgy and Bess (MJ) 8p Kerry Irish Pub: Chip Wilson (BL) 9p Lafayette Square: Harvest the Music Concert Series feat. Dr. John & the Lower 911 plus Treme Brass Band (BB) 5p Little Tropical Isle: Frank Fairbanks (BL) 4:30p, Frank Fairbanks Duo (BL) 9p Maison: Jerry Jumonville & the Jump City Band (JV) 6p Maple Leaf: the Jameson Family (FK) 10p Margaritaville: Ched Reeves (RR) 2p, Joe Bennett (RR) 7p Palm Court: Palm Court Jazz Band feat. Lars Edegran and Topsy Chapman (JV) 7p Preservation Hall: Preservation Hall Jazz Band feat. Mark Braud (JV) 8p Rock ’n’ Bowl: Johnny Angel & the Swingin’ Demons (SI) 8:30p Snug Harbor: Delfeayo Marsalis (MJ) 8 & 10p Three Muses: Delia Nakayama and Peter Nu (JV) 7p Tropical Isle Bourbon: Damien Louviere (OR) 5p, Damien Louviere & the Garlic Truck Band (OR) 9p Tropical Isle Original: Mark Penton (OR) 1p, Debbie & the Deacons (OR) 5p, Late as Usual (OR) 9p

THURSDAY OCT 7

12 Bar: Johnny J & Gary Hirstius (BL) 7p Apple Barrel: John Williams (BL) 8p, Mike Darby & the House of Cards (BL) 10:30p Blue Nile: Bayou International feat. DJ T-Roy (RG) 11p Carrollton Station: Jimmy Robinson’s Musicworks feat. Cranston Clements (OR) 9p d.b.a.: Washboard Chaz Blues Trio (BL) 7p, call club for late show Davenport Lounge (Ritz-Carlton): Jeremy Davenport (JV) 5:30p Fritzel’s: Tom Fisher and Friends (JV) 9p Funky Pirate: Big Al Carson & the Blues Masters (BL) 8p Hi Ho Lounge: Stooges Brass Band (BB) 9:30p House of Blues: Devendra Banhart, the Grogs, Twin Sister (RR) 8p Howlin’ Wolf (The Den): Comedy Gumbeaux (CO) 8p Irvin Mayfield’s Jazz Playhouse (Royal Sonesta): Roman Skakun (MJ) 5p, Shamarr Allen (MJ) 8p Jazz at the Rat (Tulane University): Saxophone Colossus: Cannonball and Coltrane (JV) 8p Kerry Irish Pub: Dave James and Tim Robertson (BL) 9p Le Bon Temps Roule: Soul Rebels Brass Band (BB) 11p Little Tropical Isle: Al Hebert (RR) 4:30p Maple Leaf: the Trio feat. Johnny Vidacovich and guests (FK) 10p Margaritaville: Frank Fairbanks (AU RR) 2p, Colin Lake (BL) 7p Ogden Museum: Ogden After Hours feat. A Night of Gershwin (CL) 6p Palm Court: Crescent City Joymakers (JV) 7p Preservation Hall: Brass Band Thursday feat. New Birth Brass Band (BB) 8p Rivershack: Austin and Jim (RR BL) 7p Rock ’n’ Bowl: Geno Delafose (ZY) 8:30p Snug Harbor: Jolly House (MJ) 8 & 10p Three Muses: Luke Winslow-King (JV) 7p Tropical Isle Bourbon: Mark Barrett (OR) 5p, Debbie & the Deacons (OR) 9p Tropical Isle Original: Mark Penton (OR) 1p, Cruz Missiles (OR) 5p, Late as Usual (OR) 10p Vaughan’s: Kermit Ruffins & the BBQ Swingers (MJ) 8:30p

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FRIDAY OCT 8

12 Bar: Refried Confusion (BL) 9p Apple Barrel: John Williams (BL) 4p, Kenny Holliday and Rick Westin (BL) 8p, the Hip Shakers (BL) 11p Blue Nile: Mykia Jovan and Jason Butler (MJ) 8p, Abney Effect (upstairs) (MJ) 10p, Otra (LT) 10:30p, Black Pearl and DJ Real (DN) 12a Chickie Wah Wah: Paul Sanchez (BL) 8p, Coot (RR) 10:30p Circle Bar: Sam and Boone (RR) 6p, the Love Language (RR) 10p Columns: the Alex Bachari Trio (MJ) 5p d.b.a.: Happy Talk Band (RR) 10p Davenport Lounge (Ritz-Carlton): Jeremy Davenport (JV) 9p Fritzel’s: Tom Fisher and Barry Foulon (JV) 9p Funky Pirate: Mark Penton (BL) 4p, Big Al Carson & the Blues Masters (BL) 8p Harrah’s Casino: Thom Kaz’s Hypnaughty (CO) 8p House of Blues (the Parish): Reckless Kelly (RR) 9p House of Blues: 12 Stones (RR ME) 8p Howlin’ Wolf: Monster Dash benefit feat.

Flashback (VR) 6p Irvin Mayfield’s Jazz Playhouse (Royal Sonesta): Professor Piano Series feat. Tom McDermott (MJ) 5p, Leon “Kid Chocolate” Brown (MJ) 8p, Midnight Burlesque Ballroom feat. Trixie Minx, Jayna Morgan and Sazerac Sunrise (MJ) 12a Kerry Irish Pub: Buddy Francioni and Home Grown (BL) 5p, Foot & Friends (BL) 9p Le Bon Temps Roule: R. Scully and the Rough Seven (RR) 11p Little Tropical Isle: Dwight Breland (RR) 4:30p, Frank Fairbanks Duo (SS) 9p Maple Leaf: Johnny Sketch’s Dirty Harry Gnutt (FK) 10p Margaritaville: Eddie Parino (RR) 2p, Irving Bannister’s All-stars (RB) 7p Palm Court: Palm Court Jazz Band feat. Clive Wilson (JV) 7p Preservation Hall: Preservation Hall Jazz Masters feat. Leroy Jones (JV) 8p Rivershack: Blackened Blues (RR BL) 9p Rock ’n’ Bowl: New Orleans Blues Society Blues Championship Finals (BL) 8p Snug Harbor: Jason Marsalis Vibes Quartet (MJ) 8 & 10p Three Muses: Harmonouche (JV) 6p, Davis Rogan Trio (JV) 10p Tipitina’s: Music for Matt fear. Glasgow, Rotary Downs and Dee-1 (RR) 10p Tropical Isle Bourbon: Captain Leo (OR) 1p, Mark Barrett (OR) 5p, Debbie & the Deacons (OR) 10p Tropical Isle Original: Butch Fields (OR) 1p, Cruz Missiles (OR) 5p, Late as Usual (OR) 9p

SATURDAY OCT 9

Apple Barrel: John Williams and Billy Outlaw (BL) 4p, Sneaky Pete (BL) 8p, the Hip Shakers (BL) 11p Blue Nile: Washboard Chaz Blues Trio (BL) 7p, Amanda Shaw (KJ) 10:30p, Bionica (upstairs) (FK) 10p, Black Pearl and DJ Real (DN) 1a d.b.a.: Little Freddie King (BL) 11p Davenport Lounge (Ritz-Carlton): Jeremy Davenport (JV) 9p Fritzel’s: Charlie Fardella and the Jazz Package Stimulators (JV) 9p Funky Pirate: Mark Penton (BL) 4p, Big Al Carson & the Blues Masters (BL) 8p House of Blues: Yeasayer, Washed Out (RR) 10p Irvin Mayfield’s Jazz Playhouse (Royal Sonesta): Glen David Andrews (MJ) 8p, Round Midnight Brass Band Jam feat. Kinfolk Brass Band (BB) 12a Kerry Irish Pub: Speed the Mule feat. Paul Tobin (BL) 5p, Rites of Passage (BL) 9p O CTO BER 2 010

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Little Tropical Isle: Jason Bishop (RR) 4:30p, Frank Fairbanks Duo (SS) 9p Louisiana Music Factory: Josh Hyde, We Are One Brass Band, Tuba Skinny (JV BB) 2p Mahalia Jackson Theatre: Vampire Weekend, Beach House (RR) 8p Maple Leaf: Flow Tribe CD-release party (FK) 10p Margaritaville: Joe Bennett (RR) 2p, Irving Bannister’s All-stars (RB) 5p Old Point Bar: Gal Holiday (CW) 9:30p One Eyed Jacks: Suplecs (RR) 9p Palm Court: Palm Court Jazz Band feat. Lionel Ferbos (JV) 7p Preservation Hall: Preservation Hall Jazz Band feat. Mark Braud (JV) 8p Rivershack: Pig Pen (RR BL) 10p Rock ’n’ Bowl: Kermit Ruffins (MJ) 9:30p Snug Harbor: Topsy Chapman & Solid Harmony (MJ) 8 & 10p Three Muses: Hot Club of New Orleans, St. Louis Slim (JV) 7p Tipitina’s: Robert Randolph & the Family Band (RR) 10p Tropical Isle Bourbon: Captain Leo (OR) 1p, Mark Barrett (OR) 5p, Debbie & the Deacons (OR) 10p Tropical Isle Original: Butch Fields (OR) 1p, Rhythm & Rain (OR) 5p, Late as Usual (OR) 10p Band and the Super Fans (FK) 10p Vaughan’s: Morella & the Wheels of If CD-release party (SH) 8p

Funky Pirate: Willie Locket & All Purpose Blues Band (BL) 8p Irvin Mayfield’s Jazz Playhouse (Royal Sonesta): Bob French & the Original Tuxedo Jazz Band (MJ) 8p Kerry Irish Pub: Lynn Drury (BL) 9p Little Tropical Isle: Marc Stone (BL) 4:30p, Jason Bishop (RR) 9p Maple Leaf: Papa Grows Funk (FK) 10p Margaritaville: Butch Fields (RR) 2p, Brint Anderson (BL) 7p Preservation Hall: Preservation Hall Jazz Band feat. Mark Braud (JV) 8p Snug Harbor: Charmaine Neville (MJ) 8 & 10p Three Muses: New Orleans Singer Songwriters Night feat. Kristin Diable (SS) 7p Tropical Isle Bourbon: Butch Fields (OR) 5p, Can’t Hardly Playboys (OR) 9p Tropical Isle Original: Damien Louviere (OR) 1p, Big Feets (OR) 5p, Rhythm & Rain (OR) 9p

PLAN A: Robert Randolph and the Family Band On the cover of his latest album We Walk This Road, Robert Randolph seems to be healing his instrument by laying on hands. That instrument, the pedal steel or—in the church context from which Randolph emerged—the sacred steel, has doubtlessly done its share of healing over the years to wider and more diverse congregations. In 2000, Randolph started playing secular gigs in New York City, and a gig at the Bowery

SUNDAY OCT 10

Apple Barrel: John Williams (BL) 4p, Kenny Claiborne (BL) 8p, Ready Teddy (BL) 10:30p Blue Nile: Sunday Night Brass feat. Mainline (BB) 10p d.b.a.: Palmetto Bug Stompers (JV) 6p, the Jackals (RR) 10p Fritzel’s: Jumbo Shrimp Jazz Band (JV) 8p Funky Pirate: Mark Penton (BL) 4p, Willie Lockett & All Purpose Blues Band (BL) 8p House of Blues: Sunday Gospel Brunch (GS) 10a Howlin’ Wolf (The Den): Brass Band Sunday feat.

Hot 8 Brass Band (BB) 9p Irvin Mayfield’s Jazz Playhouse (Royal Sonesta): Tyler’s Revisited feat. Germaine Bazzle (MJ) 7p Kerry Irish Pub: the Mockingbirds feat. Heidi Campbell and Mike Rihner (VR) 8p Little Tropical Isle: Jason Bishop (RR) 4:30p, Lacy Blackledge (SS) 9p Maple Leaf: Joe Krown Trio feat. Russell Batiste and Walter “Wolfman” Washington (FK) 10p Margaritaville: Irving Bannister’s All-stars (RB) 2p, Cindy Chen (RR RB PK) 7p One Eyed Jacks: Mount Carmel feat. Karma to Burn (RR) 9p Palm Court: Sunday Night Swingsters feat. Lucien Barbarin (JV) 7p Preservation Hall: 726 Jazz Band feat. Lars Edegran (JV) 8p Snug Harbor: call club Three Muses: Debbie Davis (JV) 7p Tipitina’s: Cajun Fais Do Do feat. Bruce Daigrepont (KJ) 5:30p Tropical Isle Bourbon: Marc Stone (OR) 1p, Mark Barrett (OR) 5p, Debbie & the Deacons (OR) 9p Tropical Isle Original: Butch Fields (OR) 1p, Rhythm & Rain (OR) 5p, Late as Usual (OR) 9p

MONDAY OCT 11

Apple Barrel: Sam Cammarata (BL) 8p, Ivorie Spectacle (BL) 10:30p Chickie Wah Wah: Jimmy Robinson and Cranston Clements unplugged (AU) 7p d.b.a.: Glen David Andrews feat. Derrick Tabb (JV) 9p Fritzel’s: Tim Laughlin Quartet (JV) 9p

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d.b.a.: Tin Men (JV) 7p, John Gros & the Roadmasters (FK) 10p Dos Jefes: Bob Andrews (JV BL) 9:30p Fritzel’s: Chuck Brackman and Barry Foulon (JV) 9p Hi Ho Lounge: local piano night (PK) 8p Irvin Mayfield’s Jazz Playhouse (Royal Sonesta): Sasha Masakowski (MJ) 5p, Irvin Mayfield & the NOJO Jam Session (MJ) 8p Little Tropical Isle: Frank Fairbanks (BL) 4:30p, Frank Fairbanks Duo (BL) 9p Kerry Irish Pub: Chip Wilson (BL) 9p Lafayette Square: Harvest the Music Concert Series feat. Kermit Ruffins & the Barbecue Swingers (MJ) 5p Maison: Jerry Jumonville & the Jump City Band (JV) 6p Maple Leaf: the Jameson Family (FK) 10p Margaritaville: Ched Reeves (RR) 2p, Joe Bennett (RR) 7p Palm Court: Palm Court Jazz Band feat. Lars Edegran and Topsy Chapman (JV) 7p Preservation Hall: Preservation Hall Jazz Band feat. Mark Braud (JV) 8p Rock ’n’ Bowl: Jeremy Embree (SI) 8:30p Snug Harbor: Delfeayo Marsalis (MJ) 8 & 10p Three Muses: Zazou City Trio (JV) 7p Tropical Isle Bourbon: Damien Louviere (OR) 5p, Damien Louviere & the Garlic Truck Band (OR) 9p Tropical Isle Original: Mark Penton (OR) 1p, Debbie & the Deacons (OR) 5p, Late as Usual (OR) 9p

THURSDAY OCT 14

TUESDAY OCT 12

Apple Barrel: Kenny Claiborne (BL) 7p, Kenny Swartz & the Palace of Sin (BL) 10:30p Blue Nile: Open Ears Music Series (upstairs) (MJ) 10p Chickie Wah Wah: the Nightcrawlers (BB) 8p d.b.a.: Cottonmouth Kings of New Orleans (JV) 9p Funky Pirate: Big Al Carson & the Blues Masters (BL) 8p House of Blues: Matt and Kim, Big Freedia 9p Irvin Mayfield’s Jazz Playhouse (Royal Sonesta): Masters Month feat. Victor Atkins interpreting the Magic Flute (MJ) 8p Kerry Irish Pub: Honky Tonk Open Mic feat. Jason Bishop (CW) 9p Little Tropical Isle: Marc Stone (OR) 4:30p, Rainmakers (RR) 9p Maple Leaf: Rebirth Brass Band (BB) 10p Margaritaville: Butch Fields (RR) 2p, Brint Anderson (BL) 7p Preservation Hall: Preservation Hall-stars feat.

Shannon Powell (JV) 8p Rock ’n’ Bowl: Eddie Zip (RB) 8:30p Snug Harbor: Thelonious Monk Institute Ensemble (MJ) 8 & 10p Tropical Isle Bourbon: Frank Fairbanks (OR) 5p, Damien Louviere (OR) 9p Tropical Isle Original: Rainmakers (OR) 1p, Cruz Missiles (OR) 5p, Radio Active (OR) 9p

WEDNESDAY OCT 13

Apple Barrel: Wendy Darling (BL) 8p, Margie Perez (BL) 10:30p Blue Nile: United Postal Project (JV) 8p, Khris Royal and Dark Matter (FK) 10p Gravity A and guests (JV) 11p Chickie Wah Wah: John Mooney (BL) 8p

Ballroom with North Mississippi All-Stars led them to the jam band community who quickly embraced the soaring exploration of his solos. From there, Randolph’s profile has ascended an arc like the piercing glissandi he plays.

Under the careful guidance of producer T Bone Burnett, Randolph and his Family Band resemble a latter day Los Lobos on We Walk This Road; seasoned musicians capable of drawing every influence in and making it their own. “I Still Belong to Jesus” sounds so much like Fleetwood Mac, I’m surprised when Stevie Nicks doesn’t pop up, but it’s the backwoods blues on “Don’t Change” and the soul bump of “Dry Bones” that give this album its real teeth. No matter how much they expand their sound or how many hippie gatherings they’ve played, Randolph never shies away from his gospel themes and though they are playing Tipitina’s on a Saturday night, saints and sinners alike are going to get taken to church and might just find themselves healed.

Robert Randolph and the Family Band at Tipitina’s, Saturday, October 9. $25.

—Alex V. Cook

12 Bar: the Pinettes (BB) 9p Apple Barrel: John Williams (BL) 8p, I Tell You What (BL) 10:30p Blue Nile: Unlock the House feat. Tom Harvey (upstairs) (VR) 10p, Bayou International feat.

DJ T-Roy (RG) 10p Carrollton Station: Jimmy Robinson’s Music Works feat. Tommy Malone (OR) 9p Chickie Wah Wah: Michelle Mangione (OR) 8p d.b.a.: John Cleary (FK) 7p, call club for late show Davenport Lounge (Ritz-Carlton): Jeremy Davenport (JV) 5:30p Funky Pirate: Big Al Carson & the Blues Masters (BL) 8p Hi Ho Lounge: Stooges Brass Band (BB) 9:30p House of Blues: Eric Benet 8p Howlin’ Wolf (The Den): Comedy Gumbeaux (CO) 8p Howlin’ Wolf: Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros (OR) 10p Irvin Mayfield’s Jazz Playhouse (Royal Sonesta): Roman Skakun (MJ) 5p, Shamarr Allen (MJ) 8p Kerry Irish Pub: Irish Session feat. Filid (FE) 8:30p Le Bon Temps Roule: Soul Rebels Brass Band (BB) 11p Little Tropical Isle: Al Hebert (RR) 4:30p Maple Leaf: the Trio feat. Johnny Vidacovich and guests (FK) 10p Margaritaville: Frank Fairbanks (AU RR) 2p, Colin Lake (BL) 7p Ogden Museum: Ogden After Hours feat. Chris Thomas King (BL) 6p Palm Court: Palm Court Jazz Band feat. Leroy Jones and Katja Toivola (JV) 7p Preservation Hall: Brass Band Thursday feat.

Paulin Brothers Brass Band (JV) 8p Rivershack: Brent Geo (RR BL) 7p Rock ’n’ Bowl: Same Ol’ 2 Step (ZY) 8:30p Snug Harbor: Warren Batiste (MJ) 8 & 10p Three Muses: Smokeys Farmland, Luke WinslowKing (JV) 6p Tropical Isle Bourbon: Mark Barrett (OR) 5p, Debbie & the Deacons (OR) 9p Tropical Isle Original: Mark Penton (OR) 1p, Cruz Missiles (OR) 5p, Late as Usual (OR) 10p Vaughan’s: Kermit Ruffins & the BBQ Swingers (MJ) 8:30p

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Photo: Danny Clinch

LIVE LOCAL MUSIC

LIVE LOCAL MUSIC

FRIDAY OCT 15

12 Bar: Viva’s Quartet 9p Apple Barrel: John Williams (BL) 4p, Kenny Holliday and Rick Westin (BL) 8p, the Hip Shakers (BL) 11p Blue Nile: Mykia Jovan and Jason Butler (MJ) 8p, Ani DiFranco (upstairs) (MJ) 9p, Black Pearl and DJ Real (MJ) 12a, Kermit Ruffins & the BBQ Swingers (MJ) 11p Chickie Wah Wah: Johnny J. and Gary Hirstius (BL RR) 5:30p, Paul Sanchez (OR) 8p, Susan Gibson (OR CW EE) 10:30p d.b.a.: Hot Club of New Orleans (JV) 6p, Iguanas (LT RR) 10p Fritzel’s: Tom Fischer and Friends (JV) 9p Funky Pirate: Mark Penton (BL) 4p, Big Al Carson & the Blues Masters (BL) 8p House of Blues: Michael Franti & Spearhead, Tamarama 9p Howlin’ Wolf NorthShore (Mandeville): Channel of Release feat. Touching the Absolute and Dope-I-Mean (OR) 10p Irvin Mayfield’s Jazz Playhouse (Royal Sonesta): Professor Piano Series feat. Joe Krown (MJ) 5p, Leon “Kid Chocolate” Brown (MJ) 8p, Midnight Burlesque Ballroom feat. Trixie Minx, Jayna Morgan and Sazerac Sunrise (MJ) 12a Kerry Irish Pub: Damien Louviere (BL) 5p Le Bon Temps Roule: Juice (FK) 11p Little Tropical Isle: Dwight Breland (RR) 4:30p, Frank Fairbanks Duo (SS) 9p Maple Leaf: 101 Runners (FK) 10p” Margaritaville: Eddie Parino (RR) 2p, Irving Bannister’s All-stars (RB) 7p One Eyed Jacks: Honky, Manwitch (RR) 9p Palm Court: Palm Court Jazz Band feat. Clive Wilson (JV) 7p Preservation Hall: Preservation Hall Jazz Masters feat. Leroy Jones (JV) 8p Rivershack: Truman Holland (RR BL) 9p Rock ’n’ Bowl: the Warehouse New Orleans Revisited 40th Anniversary Show (VR) 8p Snug Harbor: Ellis Marsalis Trio (MJ) 8 & 10p Three Muses: Harmonouche (JV) 6p, Davis Rogan Trio (JV) 10p Tipitina’s: Soul Rebels Brass Band (BB) 10p Tropical Isle Bourbon: Captain Leo (OR) 1p, Mark Barrett (OR) 5p, Debbie & the Deacons (OR) 10p Tropical Isle Original: Butch Fields (OR) 1p, Cruz Missiles (OR) 5p, Late as Usual (OR) 9p

SATURDAY OCT 16

12 Bar: Terc (BL) 9p Apple Barrel: John Williams and Billy Outlaw (BL) 4p, Sneaky Pete (BL) 8p, the Hip Shakers (BL) 11p Blue Nile: Washboard Chaz Blues Trio (BL) 7p, Gov’t Majik Birthday Tribute for Fela Kuti 10:30p, the Fessters (upstairs) (RR) 10p, Black Pearl and DJ Real (DN) 1a Blue Nile: d.b.a.: John Boutte (JV) 7p, Stanton Moore and Anders Osborne (JV) 11p Dos Jefes: Sunpie & Louisiana Sunspots (JV BL) 10p Funky Pirate: Mark Penton (BL) 4p, Big Al Carson & the Blues Masters (BL) 8p Howlin’ Wolf: Warehouse Fest 2010 feat. The Generationals, Dee 1, Andrew Duhon, The Dirty Bourbon River Show and may more (VR) 1p Irvin Mayfield’s Jazz Playhouse (Royal Sonesta): Shannon Powell (MJ) 8p, Midnight Brass Band Jam feat. Kinfolk Brass Band (BB) 12a Kerry Irish Pub: Invisible Cowboy (BL) 9p Le Bon Temps Roule: Coot (FK) 11p Little Tropical Isle: Jason Bishop (RR) 4:30p, Frank Fairbanks Duo (SS) 9p Maple Leaf: Yo Mama’s Big Fat Booty (FK) 10p

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Margaritaville: Joe Bennett (RR) 2p, Irving Bannister’s All-stars (RB) 5p Palm Court: Palm Court Jazz Band feat. Lionel Ferbos (JV) 7p Preservation Hall: Preservation Hall Jazz Band feat. Mark Braud (JV) 8p Rivershack: Refried Confuzion (RR BL) 10p Rock ’n’ Bowl: the Help, Gal Holiday (CW) 9p Snug Harbor: Clark Vreeland (MJ) 8 & 10p Three Muses: the Owen Trio (JV) 7p, Smokey Greenwell and John Lisi (JV) 10p Tipitina’s: Railroad Earth, Honey Island Swamp Band (RR) 10p Tropical Isle Bourbon: Captain Leo (OR) 1p, Mark Barrett (OR) 5p, Debbie & the Deacons (OR) 10p Tropical Isle Original: Butch Fields (OR) 1p, Rhythm & Rain (OR) 5p, Late as Usual (OR) 10p Band and the Super Fans (FK) 10p

SUNDAY OCT 17

12 Bar: DJ Brice, 101 Runners with Monk Boudreaux 9p Apple Barrel: John Williams (BL) 4p, Kenny Claiborne (BL) 8p, Eve’s Lucky Planet (BL) 10:30p Blue Nile: Voices of New Orleans Writers Night (upstairs) (SW) 7p, Sunday Night Brass feat.

Mainline (BB) 10p d.b.a.: Palmetto Bug Stompers (JV) 6p, Ingrid Lucia (VF JV) 10p Funky Pirate: Mark Penton (BL) 4p, Willie Lockett & All Purpose Blues Band (BL) 8p House of Blues: Sunday Gospel Brunch (GS) 10a, Gabriel Iglesias Fluffy Shop Tour (CO) 8p Howlin’ Wolf: Brass Band Sunday feat. Hot 8 Brass Band (BB) 9p Irvin Mayfield’s Jazz Playhouse (Royal Sonesta): Tyler’s Revisited feat. Germaine Bazzle (MJ) 7p Kerry Irish Pub: Dave Stover Project (BL) 8p Little Tropical Isle: Jason Bishop (RR) 4:30p, Lacy Blackledge (SS) 9p Maple Leaf: Joe Krown Trio feat. Russell Batiste and Walter “Wolfman” Washington (FK) 10p Margaritaville: Irving Bannister’s All-stars (RB) 2p, Cindy Chen (RR RB PK) 7p Palm Court: Sunday Night Swingsters feat. Lucien Barbarin (JV) 7p Preservation Hall: St. Peter Street All-stars feat.

Steve Pistorious (JV) 8p Snug Harbor: call club Three Muses: Debbie Davis (JV) 7p Tipitina’s: Cajun Fais Do Do feat. Bruce Daigrepont (KJ) 5:30p Tropical Isle Bourbon: Marc Stone (OR) 1p, Mark Barrett (OR) 5p, Debbie & the Deacons (OR) 9p Tropical Isle Original: Butch Fields (OR) 1p, Rhythm & Rain (OR) 5p, Late as Usual (OR) 9p

MONDAY OCT 18

Apple Barrel: Sam Cammarata (BL) 8p, Johnny J. and Benny Maygarden (BL) 10:30p Chickie Wah Wah: Jon Cleary (PK) 7p d.b.a.: Glen David Andrews feat. Big Chief Monk Boudreaux (JV) 9p Fritzel’s: Tim Laughlin Quartet (JV) 9p Funky Pirate: Willie Locket & All Purpose Blues Band (BL) 8p Hi Ho Lounge: Bluegrass Pickin’ Party (BU) 8p Irvin Mayfield’s Jazz Playhouse (Royal Sonesta): Bob French & the Original Tuxedo Jazz Band (MJ) 8p Kerry Irish Pub: Lynn Drury (BL) 9p Maple Leaf: Papa Grows Funk (FK) 10p Margaritaville: Butch Fields (RR) 2p, Brint Anderson (BL) 7p Preservation Hall: Preservation Hall Jazz Band feat. Mark Braud (JV) 8p Snug Harbor: Charmaine Neville (MJ) 8 & 10p Three Muses: New Orleans Singer Songwriters Night feat. Kristin Diable (JV) 8p

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LIVE LOCAL MUSIC Tropical Isle Bourbon: Butch Fields (OR) 5p, Can’t Hardly Playboys (OR) 9p Tropical Isle Original: Damien Louviere (OR) 1p, Big Feets (OR) 5p, Rhythm & Rain (OR) 9p

TUESDAY OCT 19

Apple Barrel: Luke Winslow-King (BL) 7p, Kenny Swartz & the Palace of Sin (BL) 10:30p Blue Nile: Open Ears Music Series (upstairs) (MJ) 10p Chickie Wah Wah: the Nightcrawlers (BB) 8p d.b.a.: Cottonmouth Kings of New Orleans (JV) 9p Funky Pirate: Big Al Carson & the Blues Masters (BL) 8p Irvin Mayfield’s Jazz Playhouse (Royal Sonesta): Masters Month feat. Ed “Sweetbread” Petersen interpreting the Pearl Fishers (MJ) 8p Kerry Irish Pub: Honky Tonk Open Mic feat. Jason Bishop (CW) 9p Little Tropical Isle: Marc Stone (BL) 4:30p, Jason Bishop (RR) 9p Maple Leaf: Rebirth Brass Band (BB) 10p Margaritaville: Butch Fields (RR) 2p, Brint Anderson (BL) 7p Preservation Hall: Preservation Hall-stars feat.

Shannon Powell (JV) 8p Rock ’n’ Bowl: call club Snug Harbor: Steve Pistorious Trio (MJ) 8 & 10p Tropical Isle Bourbon: Frank Fairbanks (OR) 5p, Damien Louviere (OR) 9p Tropical Isle Original: Rainmakers (OR) 1p, Cruz Missiles (OR) 5p, Radio Active (OR) 9p University of New Orleans: Musical Excursions Series feat. The Borealis String Quartet (JV) 7:30p

WEDNESDAY OCT 20

Apple Barrel: Wendy Darling (BL) 8p, Shotgun House (BL) 10:30p Blue Nile: Khris Royal and Dark Matter (FK) 10p, Gravity A and guests 11p Chickie Wah Wah: John Mooney (BL) 8p d.b.a.: the Mirlitones (JV) 7p, John Gros & the Roadmasters (FK) 10p Dos Jefes: Bob Andrews (JV BL) 9:30p Funky Pirate: Big Al Carson & the Blues Masters (BL) 8p House of Blues: Playing for Change Band (RR) 8p Howlin’ Wolf: Built to Spill, Revolt Revolt (RR) 10p Irvin Mayfield’s Jazz Playhouse (Royal Sonesta): Sasha Masakowski (MJ) 5p, Irvin Mayfield & the NOJO Jam Session (MJ) 8p Little Tropical Isle: Frank Fairbanks (BL) 4:30p, Frank Fairbanks Duo (BL) 9p Kerry Irish Pub: Chip Wilson (BL) 9p Lafayette Square: Harvest the Music Concert Series feat. The Radiators (RR) 5p Maison: Jerry Jumonville & the Jump City Band (JV) 6p Maple Leaf: the Jameson Family (FK) 10p Margaritaville: Ched Reeves (RR) 2p, Joe Bennett (RR) 7p Palm Court: Palm Court Jazz Band feat. Lars Edegran and Topsy Chapman (JV) 7p Preservation Hall: Preservation Hall Jazz Band feat. Mark Braud (JV) 8p Rock ’n’ Bowl: Swing-a-Roux (SI) 8:30p Snug Harbor: Delfeayo Marsalis Trio (MJ) 8 & 10p Three Muses: Hot Club of New Orleans (JV) 7p Tipitina’s: the Gracious Few, American Bang (RR) 9p Tropical Isle Bourbon: Damien Louviere (OR) 5p, Damien Louviere & the Garlic Truck Band (OR) 9p Tropical Isle Original: Mark Penton (OR) 1p, Debbie & the Deacons (OR) 5p, Late as Usual (OR) 9p

THURSDAY OCT 21

12 Bar: Jake Eckert Trio 9p Apple Barrel: John Williams (BL) 8p, Coco’s Birthday party feat. Blue Maxx (BL) 10:30p

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Blue Nile: Unlock the House feat. Tom Harvey (upstairs) (VR) 10p, Bayou International feat.

DJ T-Roy (RG) 10p Carrollton Station: Jimmy Robinson’s Music Works feat. Brian Stoltz (OR) 9p Chickie Wah Wah: the Iguanas (LT) 8p d.b.a.: Eric Lindell (JV) 7p, Washboard Rodeo (BL) 10p Funky Pirate: Big Al Carson & the Blues Masters (BL) 8p Hi Ho Lounge: Stooges Brass Band (BB) 9:30p Howlin’ Wolf (The Den): Comedy Gumbeaux (CO) 8p Irvin Mayfield’s Jazz Playhouse (Royal Sonesta): Roman Skakun (MJ) 5p, Shamarr Allen (MJ) 8p Kerry Irish Pub: Bloomin Onions (BL) 9p Le Bon Temps Roule: Soul Rebels Brass Band (BB) 11p Little Tropical Isle: Al Hebert (RR) 4:30p Maple Leaf: the Trio feat. Johnny Vidacovich and guests (FK) 10p Margaritaville: Frank Fairbanks (AU RR) 2p, Colin Lake (BL) 7p Ogden Museum: Ogden After Hours feat. Jason Marsalis (MJ) 6p Palm Court: Crescent City Joymakers feat. Duke Heitger (JV) 7p Preservation Hall: Brass Band Thursday feat.

Survivors Brass Band (BB) 8p Rivershack: Reed Alleman (RR BL) 7p Rock ’n’ Bowl: Brian Jack (ZY) 8:30p Snug Harbor: Tom McDermott Jelly Roll Birthday Tribute (MJ) 8 & 10p Three Muses: Luke Winslow-King (JV) 7p Tipitina’s: Homegrown Night (RR) 8:30p Tropical Isle Bourbon: Mark Barrett (OR) 5p, Debbie & the Deacons (OR) 9p Tropical Isle Original: Mark Penton (OR) 1p, Cruz Missiles (OR) 5p, Late as Usual (OR) 10p Vaughan’s: Kermit Ruffins & the BBQ Swingers (MJ) 8:30p

FRIDAY OCT 22

12 Bar: Johnny J (BL) 9p, Christian Serpas & Ghost Town 10p Apple Barrel: John Williams (BL) 4p, Kenny Holliday and Rick Westin (BL) 8p, the Hip Shakers (BL) 11p Blue Nile: Abney Effect (upstairs) (MJ) 10p, Johnny Sketch & the Dirty Notes (FK RR) 10:30p, Black Pearl and DJ Real (DN) 1a Chickie Wah Wah: Paul Sanchez (OR) 8p d.b.a.: Meshiya Lake & the Little Big Horns (JV) 6p, Members of Morphine feat. Jeremy Lyons (BL) 10p Davenport Lounge (Ritz-Carlton): Jeremy Davenport (JV) 9p Funky Pirate: Mark Penton (BL) 4p, Big Al Carson & the Blues Masters (BL) 8p Harrah’s Casino: Lloyd Price (RB) 8p Hi Ho Lounge: Color Revolt, Sun Hotel (RR) 10p House of Blues: 1999 Prince Tribute (PP) 9p Irvin Mayfield’s Jazz Playhouse (Royal Sonesta): Professor Piano Series feat. Tom Worrell (MJ) 5p, Leon “Kid Chocolate” Brown (MJ) 8p, Midnight Burlesque Ballroom feat. Trixie Minx, Jayna Morgan and Sazerac Sunrise (MJ) 12a Kerry Irish Pub: Buddy Francioni and Home Grown (BL) 5p, Hurricane Refugees (BL) 9p Le Bon Temps Roule: Soul Project (FK) 11p Little Tropical Isle: Dwight Breland (RR) 4:30p, Frank Fairbanks Duo (SS) 9p Maple Leaf: Big Sam’s Funky Nation (FK) 10p Margaritaville: Eddie Parino (RR) 2p, Irving Bannister’s All-stars (RB) 7p Palm Court: Palm Court Jazz Band feat. Clive Wilson (JV) 7p Preservation Hall: Preservation Hall Jazz Masters feat. Leroy Jones (JV) 8p O CTO BER 2 010

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LIVE LOCAL MUSIC Rivershack: Lil Red & Big Bad (RR BL) 9p Rock ’n’ Bowl: the Radiators (RR) 9:30p Snug Harbor: Ellis Marsalis Trio (MJ) 8 & 10p Three Muses: Harmonouche (JV) 6p, Glen David Andrews (JV) 10p Tipitina’s: Frightened Rabbit, Plants and Animals (RR) 10p Tropical Isle Bourbon: Captain Leo (OR) 1p, Mark Barrett (OR) 5p, Debbie & the Deacons (OR) 10p Tropical Isle Original: Butch Fields (OR) 1p, Cruz Missiles (OR) 5p, Late as Usual (OR) 9p

SATURDAY OCT 23

Apple Barrel: John Williams and Billy Outlaw (BL) 4p, Sneaky Pete (BL) 8p, the Hip Shakers (BL) 11p Blue Nile: Washboard Chaz Blues Trio (BL) 7p, Duppy y Jamba (upstairs) (OR) 10p, Hot 8 Brass Band (BB) 11p, Black Pearl and DJ Real (DN) 1a Carrollton Station: the Nawlins Johnnys (RR) 9p Chickie Wah Wah: Cloud Sharp (JV) 9p d.b.a.: John Boutte (JV) 8p, King James & the Special Men (JV) 11p Funky Pirate: Mark Penton (BL) 4p, Big Al Carson & the Blues Masters (BL) 8p Harrah’s Casino: Lloyd Price (RB) 8p Irvin Mayfield’s Jazz Playhouse (Royal Sonesta): Glenn David Andrews (MJ) 8p, Midnight Brass Band Jam feat. Hot 8 Brass Band (BB) 12a Kerry Irish Pub: Speed the Mule feat. Paul Tobin (BL) 5p, Rites of Passage (BL) 9p Little Tropical Isle: Jason Bishop (RR) 4:30p, Frank Fairbanks Duo (SS) 9p Louisiana Music Factory: Riccardo Crespo, Navy Band of New Orleans (JV) 3p Maple Leaf: Afroskull (FK) 10p Margaritaville: Joe Bennett (RR) 2p, Irving Bannister’s All-stars (RB) 5p Palm Court: Palm Court Jazz Band feat. Lionel Ferbos (JV) 7p Preservation Hall: St. Peter Street All-stars feat.

Steve Pistorious (JV) 8p Rivershack: Kim Carson (RR BL) 10p Rock ’n’ Bowl: the Radiators (RR) 9:30p Snug Harbor: Jeff Gardner Quartet (MJ) 8 & 10p Three Muses: Kenny Claiborne (JV) 6p, Zazou City Trio (JV) 11p Tipitina’s: EOTO (OR) 10p Tropical Isle Bourbon: Captain Leo (OR) 1p, Mark Barrett (OR) 5p, Debbie & the Deacons (OR) 10p Tropical Isle Original: Butch Fields (OR) 1p, Rhythm & Rain (OR) 5p, Late as Usual (OR) 10p Band and the Super Fans (FK) 10p

SUNDAY OCT 24

Apple Barrel: John Williams (BL) 4p, Kenny Claiborne (BL) 8p, Eve’s Lucky Planet (BL) 10:30p Blue Nile: Sunday Night Brass feat. Mainline (BB) 10p d.b.a.: Palmetto Bug Stompers (JV) 6p, Jeremy Lyons & the Deltabilly Boys (BL) 10p Funky Pirate: Mark Penton (BL) 4p, Willie Lockett & All Purpose Blues Band (BL) 8p House of Blues: Sunday Gospel Brunch (GS) 10a, Bone Thugs N Harmony (RH) 9p Howlin’ Wolf (The Den): Brass Band Sunday feat.

Hot 8 Brass Band (BB) 9p Irvin Mayfield’s Jazz Playhouse (Royal Sonesta): Tyler’s Revisited feat. Germaine Bazzle (MJ) 7p Kerry Irish Pub: Mike Ryan (BL) 8p Maple Leaf: Joe Krown Trio feat. Russell Batiste and Walter “Wolfman” Washington (FK) 10p Margaritaville: Irving Bannister’s All-stars (RB) 2p, Cindy Chen (RR RB PK) 7p Preservation Hall: Preservation Hall Band feat.

Clive Wilson (JV) 8p

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Snug Harbor: Narada Burton Greene (MJ) 8 & 10p Three Muses: Debbie Davis (JV) 7p Tipitina’s: Cajun Fais Do Do feat. Bruce Daigrepont (KJ) 5:30p Tropical Isle Bourbon: Marc Stone (OR) 1p, Mark Barrett (OR) 5p, Debbie & the Deacons (OR) 9p Tropical Isle Original: Butch Fields (OR) 1p, Rhythm & Rain (OR) 5p, Late as Usual (OR) 9p

MONDAY OCT 25

Apple Barrel: Sam Cammarata (BL) 8p, Butch Trivette (BL) 10:30p Chickie Wah Wah: Jon Cleary (PK) 7p d.b.a.: Glen David Andrews feat. the Andrews Family Band (JV) 9p Fritzel’s: Tim Laughlin Quartet (JV) 9p Funky Pirate: Willie Locket & All Purpose Blues Band (BL) 8p Hi Ho Lounge: Bluegrass Pickin’ Party (BU) 8p Irvin Mayfield’s Jazz Playhouse (Royal Sonesta): Bob French & the Original Tuxedo Jazz Band (MJ) 8p Kerry Irish Pub: Kim Carson (BL) 9p Maple Leaf: Papa Grows Funk (FK) 10p Margaritaville: Butch Fields (RR) 2p, Brint Anderson (BL) 7p Preservation Hall: Preservation Hall Band feat.

Maynard Chatters (JV) 8p Snug Harbor: Charmaine Neville (MJ) 8 & 10p Three Muses: New Orleans Singer Songwriters Night feat. Kristin Diable (JV) 7p Tropical Isle Bourbon: Butch Fields (OR) 5p, Can’t Hardly Playboys (OR) 9p Tropical Isle Original: Damien Louviere (OR) 1p, Big Feets (OR) 5p, Rhythm & Rain (OR) 9p

TUESDAY OCT 26

Apple Barrel: Kenny Claiborne (BL) 7p, Dominic (BL) 10:30p Blue Nile: Open Ears Music Series (upstairs) (MJ) 10p Chickie Wah Wah: the Nightcrawlers (BB) 8p d.b.a.: Cottonmouth Kings of New Orleans (JV) 9p Fritzel’s: Tom Fischer & Friends (JV) 9p Funky Pirate: Big Al Carson & the Blues Masters (BL) 8p House of Blues: Circa Survive and guests (RR) 8p Irvin Mayfield’s Jazz Playhouse (Royal Sonesta): Masters Month feat. Steve Masakoski interpreting II Trovatore (MJ) 8p Kerry Irish Pub: Honky Tonk Open Mic feat. Jason Bishop (BL) 9p Little Tropical Isle: Marc Stone (BL) 4:30p, Jason Bishop (RR) 9p Maple Leaf: Rebirth Brass Band (BB) 10p Margaritaville: Butch Fields (RR) 2p, Brint Anderson (BL) 7p Preservation Hall: Preservation Hall-stars feat.

Shannon Powell (JV) 8p Rock ’n’ Bowl: call club Snug Harbor: Thelonious Monk Institute Ensemble (MJ) 8 & 10p

WEDNESDAY OCT 27

Apple Barrel: Wendy Darling (BL) 8p, 19th St. Red (BL) 10:30p Blue Nile: Black Dynamite Movie Party feat. The Black Dynamite Sound Orchestra (FK) 8p Chickie Wah Wah: John Mooney (BL) 8p d.b.a.: the Tin Men (JV) 7p, John Gros & the Roadmasters (FK) 10p Dos Jefes: Bob Andrews (JV BL) 9:30p Fritzel’s: Chuck Brackman and Barry Foulon (JV) 9p Funky Pirate: Big Al Carson & the Blues Masters (BL) 8p Irvin Mayfield’s Jazz Playhouse (Royal Sonesta): Sasha Masakowski (MJ) 5p, Irvin Mayfield & the NOJO Jam Session (MJ) 8p

Kerry Irish Pub: Chip Wilson (BL) 9p Lafayette Square: Harvest the Music Concert Series feat. Ivan Neville’s Dumpstaphunk and Good Enough for Good Times (FK) 5p Little Tropical Isle: Frank Fairbanks (BL) 4:30p, Frank Fairbanks Duo (BL) 9p Maison: Jerry Jumonville & the Jump City Band (JV) 6p Maple Leaf: the Jameson Family (FK) 10p Margaritaville: Ched Reeves (RR) 2p, Joe Bennett (RR) 7p Palm Court: Palm Court Jazz Band feat. Lars Edegran and Topsy Chapman (JV) 7p Preservation Hall: Joint Chiefs of Jazz feat. Frank Oxley (JV) 8p Rock ’n’ Bowl: Joe Krown (SI) 8:30p Rubyfruit Jungle: Anita Cookie, Clams Casino, Darlinda Just Darlinda, Gigi La Femme and Minnie Tonka (SH) 10p Snug Harbor: Debbie Davis & Matt Perrine (TJ) 8 & 10p Three Muses: Zazou City Trio (JV) 7p Tropical Isle Bourbon: Damien Louviere (OR) 5p, Damien Louviere & the Garlic Truck Band (OR) 9p Tropical Isle Original: Mark Penton (OR) 1p, Debbie & the Deacons (OR) 5p, Late as Usual (OR) 9p

THURSDAY OCT 28

12 Bar: Jake Eckert Trio 9p Apple Barrel: John Williams (BL) 8p, the Louisiana Hellbenders (BL) 10:30p Blue Nile: Unlock the House feat. Tom Harvey (upstairs) (VR) 10p, Bayou International feat.

DJ T-Roy (RG) 10p Carrollton Station: Jimmy Robinson’s Music Works feat. Jim McCormick (OR) 9p Chickie Wah Wah: the Iguanas (LT) 8p d.b.a.: Woody Pines (JV) 7p, Cedric Burnside & Lightning Malcolm (JV) 10p Dos Jefes: Rick Trolsen (JV BL) 9:30p Fritzel’s: Tom Fischer & Friends (JV) 9p Funky Pirate: Big Al Carson & the Blues Masters (BL) 8p Hi Ho Lounge: Stooges Brass Band (BB) 9:30p House of Blues: Finger Eleven, Taddy Porter, the Sleeping (RR) 8p Howlin’ Wolf (The Den): Comedy Gumbeaux (CO) 8p” Irvin Mayfield’s Jazz Playhouse (Royal Sonesta): Roman Skakun (MJ) 5p, Shamarr Allen (MJ) 8p Jazz at the Rat (Tulane University): Tap Jam feat.

Michela Lerman (JV) 8p Kerry Irish Pub: Kelcy Mae (RR) 9p Le Bon Temps Roule: Soul Rebels Brass Band (BB) 11p Little Tropical Isle: Al Hebert (RR) 4:30p Mahalia Jackson Theatre: Tony Bennett (OR) 8p Maple Leaf: the Trio feat. Johnny Vidacovich and guests (FK) 10p Margaritaville: Frank Fairbanks (AU RR) 2p, Colin Lake (BL) 7p Ogden Museum: Ogden After Hours feat. Honey Island Swamp Band (RR) 6p Palm Court: Crescent City Joymakers (JV) 7p Preservation Hall: Brass Band Thursday feat.

Tornado Brass Band (BB) 8p Rivershack: Ghost Town (CW) 7p Rock ’n’ Bowl: Rosie Ledet (ZY) 8:30p Snug Harbor: Nkanyezi Cele and Tshina (MJ) 8 & 10p Three Muses: Luke Winslow-King (JV) 7p Tropical Isle Bourbon: Mark Barrett (OR) 5p, Debbie & the Deacons (OR) 9p Tropical Isle Original: Mark Penton (OR) 1p, Cruz Missiles (OR) 5p, Late as Usual (OR) 10p Vaughan’s: Kermit Ruffins & the BBQ Swingers (MJ) 8:30p

FRIDAY OCT 29

12 Bar: Walter “Wolfman” Washington (BL) 9p Apple Barrel: John Williams (BL) 4p, Kenny Holliday and Rick Westin (BL) 8p, the Hip Shakers (BL) 11p

www.OFFBEAT.com

LIVE LOCAL MUSIC Blue Nile: Black Pearl and the DJ Real (RH) 10p, Abney Effect (upstairs) (MJ) 10p, BSFN feat.

The Revivalists (MJ) 11p Chickie Wah Wah: Wilson & Moore (OR) 5:30p, Paul Sanchez (OR) 8p, Locas por Juana, Stooges Brass Band (LT BB) 11p d.b.a.: Meshiya Lake & the Little Big Horns (JV) 6p, Honey Island Swamp Band (RR) 11p Funky Pirate: Mark Penton (BL) 4p, Big Al Carson & the Blues Masters (BL) 8p Harrah’s Casino: Lakeside (FK) 8p Howlin’ Wolf: Up From the Grave Hoodoo All-stars feat. John Gros, Nick Daniels, June Yamagishi, Russell Batiste and many more (VR) 10p Irvin Mayfield’s Jazz Playhouse (Royal Sonesta): Professor Piano Series feat. Joe Krown (MJ) 5p, Leon “Kid Chocolate” Brown (MJ) 8p, Midnight Burlesque Ballroom feat. Trixie Minx, Jayna Morgan and Sazerac Sunrise (MJ) 12a Kerry Irish Pub: Damien Louviere (BL) 5p, Foot & Friends (BL) 9p Little Tropical Isle: Dwight Breland (RR) 4:30p, Frank Fairbanks Duo (SS) 9p Mahalia Jackson Theatre: Drumline Live (VR) 8p Maple Leaf: Johnny Sketch & the Dirty Notes (FK) 10p Margaritaville: Eddie Parino (RR) 2p, Irving Bannister’s All-stars (RB) 7p One Eyed Jacks: Eagles of Death Metal (RR) 9p Palm Court: Palm Court Jazz Band feat. Clive Wilson (JV) 7p Preservation Hall: Preservation Hall Jazz Masters feat. Lars Edegran (JV) 8p Rivershack: Eduora and Deep Soul (RR BL) 9p Rock ’n’ Bowl: the Topcats (PP) 9:30p Snug Harbor: Ellis Marsalis Trio (MJ) 8 & 10p Three Muses: Harmonouche (JV) 6p, Glen David Andrews (JV) 10p Tipitina’s: Galacstic feat. Cyril Neville and Corey Henry (RR) 10p Tropical Isle Bourbon: Captain Leo (OR) 1p, Mark Barrett (OR) 5p, Debbie & the Deacons (OR) 10p Tropical Isle Original: Butch Fields (OR) 1p, Cruz Missiles (OR) 5p, Late as Usual (OR) 9p

Tipitina’s: Trombone Shorty & Orleans Ave. (MJ) 10p Tropical Isle Bourbon: Captain Leo (OR) 1p, Mark Barrett (OR) 5p, Debbie & the Deacons (OR) 10p Tropical Isle Original: Butch Fields (OR) 1p, Rhythm & Rain (OR) 5p, Late as Usual (OR) 10p Band and the Super Fans (FK) 10p

SATURDAY OCT 30

CLASSICAL

12 Bar: The Trio featuring Johnny Vidacovich & Friends Apple Barrel: John Williams and Billy Outlaw (BL) 4p, Sneaky Pete (BL) 8p, Andre Bouvier & the Royal Bohemians (BL) 11p Blue Nile: Washboard Chaz Blues Trio (BL) 7p, Black Pearl and the GNO Orchestra (RH) 10p, Anders Osborne (RR) 11p Chickie Wah Wah: the Iguanas (LT RR) 10p d.b.a.: Rotary Downs (RR) 11p Funky Pirate: Mark Penton (BL) 4p, Big Al Carson & the Blues Masters (BL) 8p Howlin’ Wolf: Krewe of MOM’s Halloween Ball feat. Papa Grows Funk, Johnny Sketch & the Dirty Notes, Josh Garrett and more (VR) 9p Irvin Mayfield’s Jazz Playhouse (Royal Sonesta): Bill Summers and Friends (MJ) 8p, Midnight Brass Band Jam feat. Hot 8 Brass Band (MJ) 12a Kerry Irish Pub: Wilson & Moore (BL) 5p, Lynn Drury (BL) 9p Le Bon Temps Roule: Dead Kenny Gs (OR) 11p Little Tropical Isle: Jason Bishop (RR) 4:30p, Frank Fairbanks Duo (SS) 9p Maple Leaf: Jon Cleary (PK) 10p Margaritaville: Joe Bennett (RR) 2p, Irving Bannister’s All-stars (RB) 5p Palm Court: Palm Court Jazz Band feat. Lionel Ferbos (JV) 7p Rock ’n’ Bowl: Bucktown All-stars, Tab Benoit (BL) 9:30p Snug Harbor: Chris Thomas King (MJ) 8 & 10p Three Muses: Debbie Davis (JV) 7p, Bottoms Up Blues Band (JV) 10p

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SUNDAY OCT 31

12 Bar: Kirk Joseph’s Backyard Groove with the Jesse Hiatt Band 9p Apple Barrel: John Williams (BL) 4p, Kenny Claiborne (BL) 8p, Andre Bouvier & the Royal Bohemians (BL) 10:30p Blue Nile: Dr. Gonzeaux (upstairs) (FK) 10p, Dead Kenny Gs, Gravity A (RR) 10p d.b.a.: call club Funky Pirate: Mark Penton (BL) 4p, Willie Lockett & All Purpose Blues Band (BL) 8p House of Blues: Sunday Gospel Brunch (GS) 10a Irvin Mayfield’s Jazz Playhouse (Royal Sonesta): Tyler’s Revisited feat. Germaine Bazzle (MJ) 7p, A Halloween Blow-Out (MJ) 11p Kerry Irish Pub: Rites of Passage (BL) 9p Little Tropical Isle: Jason Bishop (RR) 4:30p, Lacy Blackledge (SS) 9p Maple Leaf: Joe Krown Trio and Jerry Joseph (FK) 10p Margaritaville: Irving Bannister’s All-stars (RB) 2p, Cindy Chen (RR RB PK) 7p One Eyed Jacks: Quintron & Miss Pussycat (RR) 9p Palm Court: Palm Court Jazz Band feat. Lucien Barbarin (JV) 7p Snug Harbor: Halloween Party (MJ) 8 & 10p Three Muses: Kenny Claiborne (JV) 10p Tipitina’s: New Mastersounds (OR) 10p Tropical Isle Bourbon: Marc Stone (OR) 1p, Mark Barrett (OR) 5p, Debbie & the Deacons (OR) 9p Tropical Isle Original: Butch Fields (OR) 1p, Rhythm & Rain (OR) 5p, Late as Usual (OR) 9p

LOUISIANA MUSIC ON TOUR Complete listings are available at OffBeat.com

OCTOBER 15 & 17 The Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess: The 20102011 season of the New Orleans Opera starts with this performance at the Mahalia Jackson Theatre. Fri. 8p, Sun. 2:30p. (504) 529-2278, NewOrleansOpera.org.

CONCERTS OCTOBER 12 Nickelback: The popular rock band plays the New Orleans Arena with Three Days Grace and Buckcherry. 6p.

OCTOBER 29-31 Widespread Panic: The popular rock band plays its annual Halloween party at the UNO Lakefront Arena three nights in a row at 7p.

FESTIVALS SEPTEMBER 30-OCTOBER 4 New Orleans Swing Dance Festival: Enjoy a weekend of traditional jazz and swing dancing at this fun event. There will be performances by 8 bands, a riverboat cruise, dance classes, a fashion show, tap jam and more. LindyShowdown.net THROUGH OCTOBER 23 Oktoberfest: Celebrate German heritage and culture with food, music, dancing and fun at the Duetsches Haus. DeutschesHaus.org.

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LIVE LOCAL MUSIC OCTOBER 1-3 Gretna Heritage Festival: Take trip out to the “best bank” for a great community festival featuring great food, entertainment and performances by the Doobie Brothers, REO Speedwagon, Charlie Daniels Band and more. (504) 361-7748, GretnaFest.com.

SPECIAL EVENTS

OCTOBER 2-9 Red River Revel: Head to Shreveport for the largest outdoor arts festival in northern Louisiana with four stages of live music and more than 100 artists. (318) 455-3686, RedRiverRevel.com.

OCTOBER 1-3 Words in Food Symposium: Head to the Southern Food and Beverage Museum at the Riverwalk for and learn everything from the history of rum production to the cultural impact of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

(504) 569-0405, SouthernFood.com.

OCTOBER 3-31 Angola Prison Rodeo: Head to one of the country’s most infamous prisons for a wild rodeo where inmates battle beasts for a shot at glory. You’ll also get to buy inmate crafts and listen to an inmate band. Sun. 9a.

AngolaRodeo.com.

OCTOBER 1-31 House of Shock: Visit what has been noted as one of the most evil and sickest haunted attractions in the country. There are also live music and special performances on the weekends. 8p. HouseofShock.com.

OCTOBER 8-10 Voice of the Wetlands Festival: Have a good time while helping restore our coast.

Performers include Juice, Dash Rip Rock, Waylon Thibodeaux and more. Southdown Plantation, Houma. VoiceoftheWetlands.com.

OCTOBER 8-10 Festivals Acadiens: Lafayette goes wild in a celebration of Cajun food, culture, arts and music. Some of this year’s performers include Wayne Toups, Steve Riley, Geno Delafose and Keith Frank. (337) 232-3737, FestivalsAcadiens.com.

OCTOBER 14-21 New Orleans Film Festival: The 21st annual event features film screenings, panels, workshops, networking events and plenty of after-hours parties. NewOrleansFilmFest.com.

OCTOBER 16 Celebracion Latina: Head to the Audubon Zoo for a fun day of Latin fun. There will be authentic Latin cuisine, children’s activities and music by such performers as Fredy Omar, Grupo Sensation, Ovi-G and Casa Samba.

AudubonInstitute.org.

OCTOBER 16-17 BBQ & Blues Fest: Head to Lafayette Square in New Orleans for two days of live blues and great barbecue. Some of this year’s performers include Taj Mahal, Ruthie Foster, Corey Harris and more. JazzAndHeritage.org.

OCTOBER 27-31 Vampire Film Festival: Enjoy a week of vampire film showings at this fun festival. For more information and a move schedule, visit VampireFilmFestival.com.

OCTOBER 29-31 Voodoo Experience: The annual rock music festival features performances by Ozzy Ozbourne, Muse, Weezer, MGMT, My Morning Jacket, Interpol, Paul Okenfold, Metric and many more. City Park.

TheVoodooExperience.com.

OCTOBER 31 Voodoofest: Not to be confused with the Voodoo Music Experience, head to Voodoo Authentica at 612 Rue Dumaine for the 12th annual “Free Voodoofest.” The event features music, lectures, food, book signings and more. 1-7p. VoodooFest.com.

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THROUGH NOVEMBER 3 Harvest the Music: Head out to Lafayette Square every Thursday for a concert series to benefit the Second Harvest Food Bank. Check the OffBeat daily listings for a schedule of performers. 5p. HarvesttheMusic.org.

OCTOBER 2 Art for Art’s Sake: Celebrate arts in the Warehouse District with open art galleries, live music, food and fun. 6-9p. Cacno.org.

OCTOBER 7-28 Ogden After Hours: Visit the Ogden Museum every Thursday evening for live entertainment by a variety of local musicians. Check the OffBeat daily listings for a schedule of performances. 6p. OgdenMuseum.org.

OCTOBER 15 Concerts in the Courtyard: Swing over to the Historic New Orleans Collection for its monthly concert series. This month, it welcomes Jason Marsalis. 6p. (504) 523-4662, Hnoc.org.

OCTOBER 16 Bywater Art Market: Head to this art market for paintings, pottery, glass, furniture and more. 9a-4p. BywaterArtMarket.com.

OCTOBER 16 Warehouse Fest: Head to the Howlin’ Wolf for a day of music featuring the Generationals, Hot 8 Brass Band, Dirty Bourbon River Show and many more. 12p.

OCTOBER 29 Fridays at the French Market: This monthly event features free live entertainment, drinking, dancing, local cuisine and fun at the French Market. This month is a special funky Halloween party. 5-8p. FrenchMarket.org.

OCTOBER 30 Jazz Half Marathon: If you’ve got the stamina, run or walk a 13.1-mile route through the Big Easy and help raise money for Children’s Hospital. 7a. JazzHalf.com.

THEATER OCTOBER 20-NOVEMBER 14 Afterlife: A ghost story in the most literal sense, this production follows Connor Danielle as they prepare their homes for an impending storm. But what awaits them is a haunting world of unsent letters, unexpected show and unforgettable loss. Southern Rep Theatre. (504) 522-6545, SouthernRep.com.

Use coupon code OFFBEAT to get $5 off.

OCTOBER 29 Drumline Live: This exciting tour was created by the team behind the movie Drumline and brings show-style marching bands to the theatrical stage. Mahalia Jackson Theatre. 8p.

www.OFFBEAT.com

BACKTALK

talks back

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inger Ruthie Foster made a big impression at her first Jazz Fest appearance in 2008. Her big voice and positive spirit levitated the Blues Tent, and no matter how animated Lady Tambourine was when she made a guest appearance, she couldn’t upstage Foster.

The Austin-based Foster has since released a follow-up to The Phenomenal Ruthie Foster— her 2008 album—with The Truth According to Ruthie Foster in 2009, both firmly rooted in the classic southern soul mode. She has made a second appearance at Jazz Fest, and she’ll close this year’s Crescent City Blues and BBQ Festival October 17 in Lafayette Square.

OffBeat spoke to Foster by phone at her home in Austin, Texas, where she has lived for the last nine years. She had just finished a workout and was about to have breakfast.

How much working out do you do?

I work out just about every day when I get a chance. Even on the road I do about a 40-minute aerobics and a little bit of free weights, keep myself nice and toned. There are a lot of allergies floating around, and keeping up with my aerobics really helps with that. Training really keeps up my voice control.

Are there any other things you have to do in order to take care of your voice?

I do try to be quiet when I’m done with being onstage or talking with folks. After playing, I like to sign CDs and hear people’s stories when they come up to me and want CDs signed, and then I try to sit somewhere quiet. My girls will tell you that when I’m in the van, I try to keep it down, keep it low and just be still.

Do you have a limit for how many days in a row you can sing?

Not really. I’ve learned a lot about how to sing. I did have formal lessons, so I’ve learned how to keep my breath controlled and how to sing even when I’m not feeling well. It’s about how you use your diaphragm. It’s an instrument; you just have to learn how to work it. The vocal chords are a muscle. You do have to work it. I do warm up and when I’m onstage, I’m careful about those notes I’m hitting. I hit a lot of high and all notes; I’m really careful how I go about that.

When did you take the class? When did you start paying attention to how you sing?

I grew up singing in church like a lot of great singers, when you’re singing from your throat, and when you’re singing as long and loud as possible.

But I went to school in Waco at a community college that actually teaches commercial music.

I had a voice teacher there who was a woman named Lorna MacDonald. She works with the Montreal Choir. I did three years with her, and I worked again with her when I lived up in New York and Jersey. And over the years, I’ve met with different people who could give me different pointers on how to keep my voice going.

I have to credit my grandmother as my very first voice teacher. She was this woman who taught me how to speak in front of the church.

I used to give little speeches, and she taught me how to pronounce and how to project my voice when I was about 10 or 11 years old. I had a little bit of a stutter, and that was something she really wanted to work with me on.

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By Alex Rawls

I suspect that by the time many singers look for coaches, they’re looking to get around the damage they’ve already done to their voices.

The first person that comes to mind is Shemekia Copeland. Here’s a singer who lets it all out every night, every time. She and I had a conversation about how to keep your voice.

When I ran into her, she was a little bit tired, and she had been playing and singing a lot, and she wanted to know what to do. My first advice for anybody with that kind of problem is you need to just relax. Take it easy. You don’t necessarily have to stop working, but a lot of it is just outside stress and worrying. Shemekia is a beautiful, giving person. She loves to see the people and make sure you’re comfortable. She likes to be out late, and sometimes you’ve got to know when to stop.

That was just something I wanted to share with her. The other thing was taking care of yourself.

It’s okay to call in a masseuse. It’s okay to have a little acupuncture, anything that relaxes you.

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Photo: ELSA HAHNE

Ruthie Foster

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I think they were looking for a Tracy Chapman-meets-Anita Baker.

The voice is meant to last a lifetime; there’s no reason you can’t have a voice at 80, 90 years old. Beverly Sills once said that your voice doesn’t even fully mature until your forties.

Can you tell me about your first experience at the New Orleans Jazz Fest?

Oh that was just surreal. I have little recollection of exactly what happened in sequence, but I just remember how I felt. And I was elated. I just remember feeling like I was walking three or four feet off the stage. And the stage was pretty high. So we were having such a great time. And I had my wonderful friend Papa Mali (Malcolm Welbourne) onstage with me that day, too. [He was] my producer for the Phenomenal CD. And Lady Tambourine came up, and she was really, really gracious about waiting for me to let her know when I wanted her to come onstage. She took it to another level. I had all my girls with me on that tour. I had Stephanie, who was the wife of a Baptist preacher in Houston on B3. And my good friend Samantha Banks from Houston on drums. And Tanya Richardson, my cousin, on bass.

It was like a tent revival.

Out of curiosity, why an all-woman band?

It just kind of happened that way.

Samantha and Tanya and I, we’ve known each other for years. These are my sisters in a lot of ways. It’s nice to be able to travel with people you’ve known for such a long time. And you know, you get a bunch of women together, and we can howl at the moon!

You’ve recorded with different bands, though, right?

Yes, I have. The Phenomenal CD was pretty much a corral of great musicians that Papa Mali came up with. For the Truth album, Chris Goldsmith, my producer, just asked me to come up with a list of people that I would really like to play with.

Why not record with your road band?

When I pick a producer, it’s usually with a certain sound in mind. And we really want that CD to hone in on that particular sound.

The coolest thing about doing that is that you can put out a CD that has a certain sound, and when it’s time to go on the road, I go on the road with a different set of musicians— the musicians I’m really comfortable with, that

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I know—they can put in their own sound. So the song kind of grows.

Why did you join the Navy? That’s not a traditional career path for a musician. (laughs) No, it’s not. I have to say that’s why I did it. It was an opportunity for me to get out of music for a while. I had just graduated college, I was a little over-saturated with the music scene, and I wanted to do something else. I wanted to really just see if I could just hold a conversation that had nothing to do with music. I did have in mind to look into the Navy band, but the auditions weren’t available at the time, so I sad “Okay, I’ll sign up for anything you got.” That’s how I ended up in San Diego working with helicopters for the year.

After the Navy, you signed with Atlantic Records?

I did four years, and I stayed in Charleston. I was singing at a little folk club there. That was really great for me because I had a chance to open for so many different great folk acts, and learn about folk music because I really didn’t know anything about that genre. I made a tape of a few songs I had written while I was in school while I was in Waco. That tape ended up in the hands of Craig Kallman, who’s a VP over at Atlantic now. He found that tape, and he apparently took it with him to the Hamptons on vacation. And he wore it out.

He called to see if he could get another copy of the songs. (laughs) Preferably on CD. And that he would also like to meet me personally.

So that’s what led you to New York?

Yeah. I figured well, why not? So I packed up my stuff and moved to New Jersey, because that was a little less expensive than living in the city.

And there I was, with Atlantic Records behind me, and I got a chance to play in all these incredible places—the Bitter End, I think the Speakeasy was still open the first year I got there, so I had a chance to play in this place where Bob Dylan was discovered and used to play all the time.

What was the Greenwich Village scene like at this point?

I was in that songwriter world again, and loved it. I kind of went to school in how to write a song, how to put together words that meant something, and melody, and placement of melody. I would set up meetings with the cats at BMI and with my contact at Atlantic, Craig, or whoever he would

suggest I need to meet or write with. I think Whitney Houston’s movie The Bodyguard had just come out; I got a chance to meet the guy who wrote “Run to You,” and we sat up all night talking songs, just pulling that song apart. I felt like I was in this world where I belonged, finally.

Why didn’t it work out?

We were really looking for a single, and we couldn’t agree on what song to put out. And my time just ran out. We parted amicably; we were both in agreement. I had a great lawyer, and he suggested that I not get into debt with a major record label, so I didn’t owe them anything when I left.

But you realized that what they wanted from you and what you had weren’t going to match up?

Yeah, I think they were looking for a Tracy Chapman-meets-Anita Baker. I wasn’t ready to meld into something they wanted me to be.

I know you’re reluctant to be pinned to a genre, but The Phenomenal Ruthie Foster and The Truth According to Ruthie Foster are firmly rooted in classic R&B. Was that intentional or where did that come from?

It was a decision I made that I wanted to do a record in Memphis and go back to that old school soul that I grew up with. It was intentional. With Phenomenal, I wanted to get away from the Americana genre because I had been placed in Americana for a long time. I didn’t want to lose my folk/Americana audience but bring them with me. With Phenomenal, I wanted to introduce myself into this other genre. I wanted to be able to do more festivals and venues that opened to the soul R&B sound. I definitely wanted to do more of that because that’s my background, too.

I admire your last two album titles, both of which make bold statements.

What was the thought behind them?

A producer and a record company coming together and deciding to do that (laughs). They used to introduce the artist to this genre, you put “The Amazing Sam Cooke” or “The Electrifying Aretha Franklin.” We really just wanted to pay homage to that old school way of introducing an artist to listeners. Using the word “Phenomenal” after recording the “Phenomenal Woman” song, I thought that played into it well.

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