Music, the Mississippi and Mardi Gras. MAL ROGERS visits the USA’s most exciting city
THE BIG Easy. NOLA. New Orleans (Louisiana). I’ve been toying with the idea of going there since an encounter with one of the finest books ever written about a city: A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. The Pulitzer Prize winning novel, featuring the misadventures of the protagonist Ignatius J. Reilly, takes its title from Jonathan Swift’s epigram: “When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him."
A bronze statue of our hero Ignatius stands under the clock on the downriver side of the 800 block of Canal Street, now the Hyatt French Quarter Hotel. (All directions in New Orleans, btw, are given in relation to the Mississippi — upriver, downriver, riverside of the street.)
The statue is about a five minute walk from Lake Pontchertrain. Once you’ve sung a few verses, it’s downriver into the French Quarter. This, the heart of New Orleans, is bounded by Canal Street, Rampart Street and the Mississippi. Nearby you catch the Natchez, a riverboat queen that cruises the length of the city twice daily. A calliope, a sort of steam driven organ, pipes you on board. It’s a hoot — in more ways than one.
You will, of course, take a streetcar on the NOLA transport system — the oldest working trolley line in the world. The wooden-framed trams trundle along delightfully rickety tracks, occasionally passing through corridors of oak, festooned with Spanish moss.
Sadly, long discontinued are the streetcars named Desire. Tennessee Williams’ play was named after tenements once part of a housing project. Crime-ridden with a high murder rate, Project Desire was razed to the ground in 1999.
On that melancholy note we’ll move closer to Bourbon Street. I was told to dine at Coop’s Place on Decatur Street. I ate sweet vegetable jambalaya and deep-fried courgette, red beans and rice, and sticks of deep fried dough covered with powdered sugar. I washed it all down with a glass of the local Bayou spiced rum. It all came to under $30. The server said: “Yeah, you get a whole lotta action here for thirty bucks.” I didn’t doubt her for a second.
A STREETCAR NAMED RIVERFRONT The elegant way to get round the Big Easy (picture by Cheryl Gerber at NewOrleans.com)The big easy turns deathly
I HEADED for the French Market and the Café du Monde for coffee and beignets, the New Orleans version of churros. This is one of the oldest cafes in America, and if my beignet was anything to go by, one of the very best. Funnily enough, its menu boards have one of the best potted histories of New Orleans that I came across — from its beginnings as a Choctaw settlement through a history for which the word chequered which we journalists would call a heartless understatement.
Today the streets — the most cosmopolitan in the US — are crammed with stalls, shops, cafes, drinking dens, crumbling backroom bars. It’s part Caribbean, part European (chiefly French, Italian and Spanish) and part African. Historic concert halls and museums are dotted throughout the area. My favourite? The Backstreet Cultural Museum which documents carnival celebrations, jazz music (including jazz funerals). This is also the home ground of the Northside Skull & Bone Gang, famous for getting Mardi Gras celebrations off to a sizzling start in the Tremé area. This scary parade is made up of paraders wearing black skeleton masks, and oversized skull helmets, adorned with everything from bones to alligator teeth. The parade members are macabre and menacing, and as they sway along they chant, “You next” to the sound of booming drums. They don’t appear to be joking.
The Northside Gang would appear to be unique in the US. But then music, food and culture developed here like nowhere else in America. Cajun and Creole cuisine emerged into an art form, from street food to fine dining. A “po’ boy” is the former — a baguette stuffed with spicy seafood and salad; the one I had was mouth-puckeringly delicious.
The muffuletta, also widely available from stalls, is an Italian meat sandwich smothered in an olive tapenade. You’re unlikely to go hungry in New Orleans, day or night..
As well as food, there’s music and art and culture and people and theatre and superstition and mythology. Everywhere, it seems.
The city has unique festivals throughout the year, but none more singular than Mardi Gras — a part Christian festival with knobs on, including voodoo, Venetian masked balls, big dollops of debauchery, and some straightforward revelry. The parades march down St Charles Street in the French Quarter on Shrove Tuesday. While we’re making pancakes and discussing recipes for syrup over here in Ireland and Britain, they’re partying on down with carnivals, parades, dancing, gyrating, singing, drumming, allsorts.
Of course, if you’re from Northern Ireland, you’ll know all about parades. But similarities with the North don’t stop there…no, hang about, on second thoughts they pretty much do.
I was delighted to hear that the Big Easy’s parades don’t finish on Shrove Tuesday, as I’d missed it by several months. The good news: it seems that every day of the week sees some parade or carnival proceeding through town. Practising, I suppose.
From jambalaya to jazz
NEW ORLEANS is the USA’s most European city. It has been called an eccentric Catholic island dangling from an Anglo-Saxon Protestant South. This major port city, with European immigrants joining those who had been forced to come from Africa, is the sort of place you would imagine to be the birthplace of jazz. It emerged here on the streets of New Orleans, played first by blacks and then other unhappy campers from the Old World, notably the Sicilians. They picked up military instruments left at pawnshops after the American Civil War and turned European brass band music into something that incorporated African beats, black rhythms, gospel harmonies, European improvisation. Congo Square, a four-minute walk from Bourbon Street, is regarded as the actual birthplace. Slaves would meet here during the French colonial years and the call-and-answer songs of the African American people, the field hollers, the spirituals, the voodoo rituals, the African dance rhythms coalesced. Soon other genres were being absorbed — the blues, folk music, church music, ragtime. Jazz was born.
This New Orleans specialty went on to inspire generations of musicians, and shape global popular music.
Bourbon Street is the epicentre of that music, but is not solely dedicated to diminished seventh chords or augmented blue chords. More street food is available here — filé gumbo, raw oysters, crawfish pie. Meanwhile music houses serve up everything from Dixieland to country, and Cajun to zydeco, going full throttle night and day.
Bourbon Street may have the PR but it’s Frenchmen Street that totally owns the bona fide mantle of jazz central in this monumental city of music.
The Blue Nile is home to countless top funk, blues, soul, and brass shows. Just along is the Snug Harbor Jazz Bistro, featuring some of the town's best jazz from Dr Michael White Quintet to Davell Crawford & Company. There’s a tasty Creole menu and a wine list as long as a trombone with all the kinks ironed out.
But here’s a good tip. You can —and I did more than once —spend your entire Frenchmen visit out on the street itself. Any given night you’ll find buskers, one-person-bands, poets, artists, dancers and travelling brass bands strumming, strutting and step-dancing their stuff. This is where Mr Bojangles would dance and sing — or to put it more accurately, where Jewell Stovall performed. Better known as Babe Stovall, he was made famous in Jerry Jeff Walker’s song.
On Frenchmen Street I saw an eight piece band — tight, mighty impressive, and very diverse — they were African American, white, Creole, Mexican, French, men and women. They were called The Average Joel Band from Hen’s Scratch. I got talking with the cornet player when they took a break. I asked about the band’s eclectic repertoire. Speaking in the most exquisite accent— a charcoal-grilled southern drawl with a French twist — he said: “So you ain’t from around here someplace?”
No, no, I replied.
“Yeah, I guessed you was from outta town,” he said nodding wisely.
About the band’s music, he said: “Ah mo tell you sumpin’, ma friend. We play most anything that passes a good time. Anything at all. But if’n you’d admire to hear us play the saints, it costed y’all thirty bucks.”
So When The Saints Go Marching— thirty dollars. My serving lady was right. Thirty bucks can get you a lot of action. Although this probably wasn’t the sort of action she meant, not as I understood it.
But because I loved the music the Average Joels were playing I gave Levi $30 — on condition he didn’t play The Saints. “Hey stranger!” he said. “You betcha! Laissez les bon temps rouler!” (Something about good times and rolling). As I wandered back down the street in the direction of the Mississippi, I could hear the band striking up the first chords of Maple Leaf Rag. As the cornet joined in I knew the good times on Frenchman Street would continue to roll.
I wondered if you could do justice to New Orleans in five days. And the answer is probably, yes, certainly. But If you really want to get to grips with the music, the cuisine, the culture, and an atmosphere that fills your soul — a lifetime would probably be better.
Next year I’m going on Shrove Tuesday. But not for the pancakes.
Thanks to New Orleans Tourist Board and British Airways for their support
British Airways has daily flights from Heathrow and Gatwick to New Orlean
See More: Jazz, Louisiana, New Orleans, Travel
