Jazz Musicians Ask if Their Scene Will Survive

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Posted in music on September 9, 2005

jazz "New Orleans is a jazz town, but also a funk town, a brass-band town, a hip-hop town and a jam-band town. It has international jazz musicians and hip-hop superstars, but also a true, subsistence-level street culture. Much of its music is tied to geography and neighborhoods, and crowds.
Mardi Gras Indian tribes, upholders of an old tradition, at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival in 2003.

All that was incontrovertibly true until a week ago Monday. Now the future for brass bands and Mardi Gras Indians, to cite two examples, looks particularly bleak if their neighborhoods are destroyed by flooding, and bleaker still with the prospect of no new tourists coming to town soon to infuse their traditions with new money...." [NY Times]