New Orleans rising

Katrina has silenced the city's famous musical pulse, washing away clubs and scattering musicians. But Crescent City singers and songwriters, producers and administrators insist the sounds of the bayou will not be muted for long.

By Rob Patterson

Read more: New Orleans, Arts & Entertainment, Arts & Entertainment Features, Hurricane Katrina

Sept. 6, 2005 | If it keeps on rainin', levee's goin' to break, when the levee breaks I'll have no place to stay
-- Public Domain (also credited to Memphis Minnie, Kansas Joe McCoy and the members of Led Zeppelin), "When the Levee Breaks"

New Orleans brass-band music, exemplified in this age by such superb purveyors as the Dirty Dozen and Rebirth Brass Bands, is built upon the fundament of the funeral march. Yet there's something in the rolling snap of the snare that all but jump-starts the living heart. And the horns, even in their funereal bleats of sorrow, recall the mighty life force of the music that crumbled Jericho's walls.

On Aug. 29, the walls that held back the seiching waters of Pontchartrain began to break in the other direction, and the most musical city in America, if not the world, was largely inundated. The flood drenched homes where creative souls lived in what more than one Crescent City musician in the last few days referred to as a "paradise." It also flowed into and over clubs and studios, as well as the means of income for a music community that was a magnet for visitors and one of the most piquant exports in a city rich with delicacies. It washed over musical instruments and equipment as well as the music itself, both recorded and written, soaking, soiling and damaging but, thank God, not fully destroying one of America's most vital, important and soulful cultural traditions.

The muddy waters roiled by Katrina have no doubt flooded some legendary musical locales and wiped out irreplaceable artifacts of New Orleans music. Among the hardest-hit areas were the poverty-stricken African-American neighborhoods, where the New Orleans musical traditions are all but woven into the tattered but colorful fabric of everyday life. But neither the music of Crescent City nor the people who create it -- nor the spirit, soul, originality, independence and distinctive locality of that art and the musicians who create it -- can be washed away, no matter what the category hurricane or depth of flood. "It's going to take some time, but it will come back," says Art Neville of the city's legendary R&B band the Neville Brothers. "We've got to put it back because it's so involved with the local economy and the United States."

"The spirit did not drown," declares New Orleans resident Allen Toussaint, the producer, songwriter and artist whose work all but defined the New Orleans R&B sound. He is confident the Big Easy will continue to bless the world with its musical magic. "In fact, I am eager to get back to rebuild it. New Orleans music for me is life itself, it's my reason for moving in the morning when I wake up."

The good news in the tragedy is that it appears that every significant New Orleans musician feared missing is safe and sound -- something of a miracle as the death toll mounts. Then again, New Orleans music itself is a miracle. It is the place where the truest and most deeply rooted strains of indigenous American music -- blues, jazz, rhythm and blues -- flowed down the proverbial waters of the Mississippi, took root and sprouted into the sounds of Cajun, zydeco and swamp pop. New Orleans is Louis Armstrong, Fats Domino and Irma Thomas. It's also the Radiators, Cowboy Mouth, and the Continental Drifters. "It's all the musicians that made their living playing Jackson Square. And now there's no Jackson Square to play," notes Marc Allan, manager of the Dirty Dozen Brass Band.

The river have busted through clear down to Plaquemines, six feet of water in the streets of Evangeline.
-- Randy Newman, "Louisiana 1927"

"People are scattered like the lost tribes of Israel," says guitarist Paul Sanchez of Cowboy Mouth, who was recording in Atlanta when the storm hit the Big Easy. Many of the city's musicians were either out of town on tour or able to leave the city for points south and southwest before the floods. Summer is the time when New Orleans musical acts tour, play festivals and escape the humidity and storm season. Because of this, some just may have also escaped the fatal waters of the flood. Still, the crisis has shown that the New Orleans musical community is truly a little village. Everyone knows everyone else, or at least who the other musicians are, regardless of age, race or musical style. As they speak about their city and its music, they all have a hunger to know how the others are faring and where they are and that their musical brethren are safe.

I, in fact, became an informational nexus for musicians. Yes, I told them, Fats Domino was said to be missing but is now reported to be rescued from his flooded house and safe at the Superdome. (After being evacuated, Domino and his family later stayed for two days with Louisiana State University quarterback JaMarcus Russell in Baton Rouge, and is now with relatives in Dallas.) A Fox News Web site story erroneously wrote that Irma Thomas was also missing, even though a simple Internet search would have revealed that she played a show in Austin, Texas, on Saturday night before the storm hit. She is now staying with relatives of her husband in Gonzales, La. Fox News also erroneously said that Toussaint was at the Superdome, too.

"Alex Chilton is missing," announces an arriving e-mail. The legendary veteran of the Box Tops and Big Star gave his car to friends on Saturday so they could evacuate and decided to stay at his home in the Treme district and ride out the hurricane. After it passed, he called a friend to say that he was OK. Then his neighborhood flooded and he wasn't heard from again. Friends saw a picture of people waiting to be evacuated from the French Quarter on CNN.com and thought the fellow with his hands over his face could be the notoriously press-shy Chilton. Finally, on Sunday it was confirmed that he was seen in Molly's, a Decatur Street watering hole, on the preceding Wednesday. On Monday, friends and family finally heard from the MIA rock musician that he is fine and had been evacuated to Houston. However, in typical fashion, Chilton declined to tell the Memphis Commercial Appeal, his hometown paper, where, exactly, he is.

Two days before Katrina hit, Toussaint checked into a room on the fourth floor of the Astor Crowne Plaza Hotel on Canal Street. During his stay, Toussaint noticed that La Louisiane across the street was open, "so I walked across the street, had a soda, and played a couple of tunes on the little piano they had there." He finally got out of town on Wednesday after "waiting for busses to arrive that never did," when he ran into a friend who had chartered a school bus, which took him and other survivors to Baton Rouge, where he spent a night at the airport before flying to New York City, where he is now staying in a hotel.

Although there have been many reports of looting and violence from New Orleans, Toussaint stresses that "close up, in such a catastrophic event, I saw many interesting and kind deeds. I saw people who probably would have never met or spoken to each other helping out each other."

Rebirth Brass Band trumpeter Derek Shezbie holed up in his fourth-floor apartment with enough food and water to make it through the height of the flood. When it started to recede, he waded through the water to a highway and hitchhiked to Baton Rouge. Even after his ordeal, he then united with his fellow members of Rebirth as well as players from the New Birth and Soul Rebels Brass Bands to play for New Orleans citizens on Labor Day at the Astrodome and bring them the healing power of music.

Many have family at home they have yet to hear from, such as Dirty Dozen saxophonist Roger Lewis, who as of Sunday had not gotten word about one of his daughters. "You've got to be strong. You can't get weak, you've got to keep your strength up," he says. Lewis isn't concerned about whether his home is flooded. "That's material. I'm just worrying about my daughters and aunts and uncles. Material things -- you can always get that back, no big deal."

Rocker Peter Holsapple of the Continental Drifters was on tour as utility guitarist and keyboard player with Hootie & the Blowfish, and his wife and child were able to evacuate their home in St. Bernard Parish. "My section of town is under 20 feet of water," he says. "My house and car are completely submerged, and all my recording gear and instruments and 30 years of song notebooks and master tapes. I try to spend my time not taking inventory of the things that I'm going to lose in this, and rather count my blessings that my family is OK and friends are OK, and that we have the ability to start over again. There are so many people down there who aren't even going to get that chance.

"My guitar tech said yesterday, and I keep repeating it like a mantra: love people, use things. I lost things, but I didn't lose the biggest things, like my wife and family and friends."

A relative of Tommy Malone of the Subdudes offered him an empty house in Denton, Texas, to stay in for the time being. He has been looking over satellite photos online to get some idea of the status of his home near Bayou St. John, where he left all his equipment. "Some of my stuff was downstairs. It's probably ruined," he says. "Most of my expensive stuff I brought at least upstairs. It just depends on how high this thing got. And whether or not looters are gonna do their trick. But considering what I've seen on the tube, I am shitting in high cotton."

Next page: What escaped the floods, what was damaged, and how everyone can help the beat go on