Jason Davis at the opening of the Dallas City Performance Hall.
Jason Davis
Jazz
Tag Archives: jazz
Doreen’s Jazz New Orleans
It was such a nice day to be walking around the French Quarter. Not much more than a block down Royal Street from the Nola Jitterbugs was another band playing in the street. These folks were playing the real thing, the traditional New Orleans Jazz. It was Doreen Ketchens and her band, Doreen’s Jazz New Orleans. They were very good.
Jitterbugs in the French Quarter
New Orleans is Culture. New Orleans is Architecture. New Orleans is Food. But more than anything, New Orleans is Music… Live Music.
Jazz is the one true American art form. Jazz was born in New Orleans.
At any time of any day or night you can hear live music in New Orleans. You can see dancing.
Even Jitterbugs in the French Quarter.
Dancers – Chance Bushman and Giselle Anguizola
Music – Loose Marbles
New Orleans Architecture – Fauberg Marigny and Frenchmen Street
The French Quarter has become too touristified for my taste. Filled with grimy bars, expensive antique shops, tacky trinket emporiums, and overpriced food the Vieux Carré isn’t always what it promises to be. Immediately downriver, however, is another neighborhood that is.
New Orleans is a city of neighborhoods and one of the best is the Fauberg Marigny. At the start of the 19th century, Bernard Xavier Philippe de Marigny de Mandeville (also famous for “inventing” the dice game craps) divided his plantation into residential lots, and the Fauberg Marigny was born. In the middle part of the twentieth, the neighborhood fell into decline, with the area around Jackson Square being called “Little Angola” – after the prison due to the extreme crime. In the eighties, however, commercialization in the French Quarter drove a lot of the residents downriver into Fauberg Marigny. The Marigny became what the Quarter used to be with Frenchmen street becoming ground zero for New Orlean’s essential live music scene.
The neighborhood is a good twelve inches above sea level and escaped the worst of Katrina’s ravages. There is a wide variety of classic New Orlean’s style architecture there – early Creole cottages and townhouses, American cottages, American townhouses, shotgun houses , 19th century corner store-houses, and various modern additions.
If I could live anywhere… I think I would live in Fauberg Marigny.
The Balcony Music Club isn't actually on Frenchmen Street. It's twenty feet down Decatur Street - but it's one of my favorites.
Standing outside the Balcony Music Club last Mardi Gras (I had stepped out for a second simply to catch my breath) a large group of German Tourists came down the crowded sidewalk. The man in the lead asked me in a thick accent, where to find, “Some real jazz music.” I lead them around the corner and pointed them up Frenchmen Street, telling them to stop by each club and pick the music they liked the best. He thanked me and said in very excited broken English, “Goot… Now Ve will get to see the Real New Orleans!”
Entrance to a jazz club on Frenchmen Street.
The Spotted Cat Jazz club on Frenchmen.
A row of shotgun houses in the Faubourg Marigny.
A mermaid stained glass window.
Bill Chance 