pt at large

Key West: Masquerade March at Fantasy Fest 2009

Fantasy Fest in Key West is the grandmother of all Halloween celebrations. It’s wacky, spirited and light hearted but not for the faint of heart. If you’re opposed to nudity and risqué antics, better trick or treat somewhere else. If you’re open-minded and want to experience it, plan ahead because the town’s lodgings are booked months in advance of the last week of October.

Back in 1978 a member of the Tourist Development Association wanted to add a spark to the dry tinder of the town’s autumn economy with a festivity before the tourist season began in earnest. Thirty years later, Fantasy Fest has the wallop of Mardi Gras in New Orleans and the sizzle of Carnivale in Rio de Janiero. Ever heard of a bonfire?

While the rest of the town remains in business as usual mode, Duval Street becomes ground zero for ten days of intense partying. From the Goombay street fair and Coronation of 2009 Fantasy Fest King and Queen on Friday October 23 to the “Fat Lady Sings” Tea Party on November 1, every day is filled with entertainment.

Ordinary diversions like the wet T shirt, Home Made Bikini contests, and Toga Parties and originals like The Third Annual “Pinking of You” Decorated Bra Auction, Captain Tony’s Party in Plaid, the 27th Annual Headdress Ball (this year’s theme was Hedonistic Heroes and Vexing Villains with Prizes for Best Headdress), Dress In White Night, and The 9th Annual Living Art Airbrush Expo (using the human form as a living canvas for artistic expression). Then there’s the Dungeon of Dark Secrets and Fetishes, hmmmm.  Straight, gay, or somewhere in between, there is something for everyone. And everyone is having a good time.

pt at large returned to Key West the day before the Friday October 30 Masquerade March, a clothing optional promenade of Disneyland proportion. Good idea.

The tropical sun ricochets off bleached tombstones as over a thousand paraders and spectators home in on the front gate of Key West Cemetery. Where else would anyone begin a Halloween March? It is 5 P.M.

Marchers with a drink in one hand and camera in the other yak it up and admire each other’s attire. Gallons of body paint, pounds of sequins, yards of taffeta, not to mention latex, leather, and lycra, have been deployed creatively.

Key West has issued a giant permission slip to participants to dress up (or down) as vampires, vixens, villains, pole dancers, kinky kings, naughty nurses, tooth fairies, monks, gladiators, sailors. Wizard of Oz characters - the list goes on.

Fantasy Fest spins straw into gold when an amalgam of levity and nudity commingles as accountants, teachers, librarians, lawyers, idlers, retirees, engineers. layabouts, - whoever- shrug off the fetters of convention and load up on body paint, Halloween costumes and an insouciance that’s contagious.

One woman walking topless down Main Street USA would end up on the evening news. Hundreds of undraped men and women walking over a mile from the cemetery to Duval Street during Fantasy Fest cause nary a ripple in Key West.

Before long, I’m looking people up and down and saying, “You look fabulous!” and snapping photos. This is a parallel universe.  These people haven’t become unhinged, just liberated for a few hours from the norms for the rest of the known world.

Look around. See men and women who’ve been getting mail from the AARP for a decade or more. They look their age and egads are they whooping it up.

Someone in the crowd remarks that some participants would be better off with their clothes on. NO, I say, This is democracy in the buff. What makes this festival fabulous is that people with soft, flabby, too big, too small bodies are flipping the bird to the conglomerates that fill glossy magazines with images of airbrushed perfection. And aren’t ashamed to bare it all right next to the hard bodies.

Free punch and beer are served along the route on tables outside neighborhood guest houses and inns en route. Mardi Gras beads, flung by celebrants on balconies and porches, rain down and end up in tree branches, phone lines and in the hands of the happy.

No one appears intoxicated. I haven’t heard one catcall or crude remark.  The drag queens are sassy. Everyone is jovial. When a knot of people forms up the street, you know a spectacularly painted body or cleverly designed costume in the middle of it.

“Nothing is free in Key West. Don’t rely on inaccurate self-exams. Have one here from an experienced hand!” shouts a man wearing a box with two chest-high holes carved in it.
He’s drawn a crowd and a several women accept the offer, much to the delight of the crowd.

By 7 PM, thousands of people have descended upon Duval Street, where several blocks have been cordoned off. Music pours from bars and saloons, Merriment prevails.

Masquerade March is a good-natured bawdy spectacle so far outside the pale of ordinary celebrations it defies explication. I’ve never seen such light hearted displays of flesh and costumery, refreshingly void of self-consciousness and filled with laughter and joie de naughtiness. I know where I’ll be trick or treating next October.

Key West Fantasy Fest: Thursday October 29, 2009

How does a town whose norm is living with its hair down celebrate? It lets its hair down and takes off its clothes. This, my dear friends, describes the general aura of the 30th Annual Villains, Vixens, and Vampires Fantasy Fest in Key West, Florida.
 
“If you look down and see confetti and peanuts, you know you missed the parade,” my college buddy host said, shaking his head at my decision to miss the event, one of the best parties on the planet. But I’d spent two great weeks crewing on, Skate, his Valiant 37 sailboat, from Fort Pierce to Key West. Leroy Thomas, the fabulous zydeco accordion player I’d heard in early October at the Café des Amis in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, was playing in my turf on Saturday. I wanted to be there. It was time to go home.

The American Airlines agent at Key West International Airport fished a Fantasy Fest brochure from her bag to show me what I would miss by leaving on Friday October 23.

The event brochure’s claim “Mortals beware… Fantasy Fest is calling all Villains, Vixens, and Vampires! Sink your teeth into ten days of tantalizing temptations, and outrageous events that are sure to leave a bite mark. There are over forty Fantasy Fest events that will quench the thirst for excitement, bizarre, and the provocative,” and the agent’s smile did register. But I’d seen a bit of the town, how good could this party be?

Three days later, during a daylong cold rainstorm at home in a suburb of Boston, I booked a flight to Key West. It was time to throw confetti and eat peanuts.
 
I bang away this missive from below deck on Skate, moored in Garrison Bight, one of the harbors that surround Key West. It is midnight. And hot in the cabin. We’ve just dinghied back from town and I’ve witnessed enough levity to float the Goodyear Blimp. I need to write about it.
 
It is Thursday night October 29. The skids have been greased with events going on in town since the day I left. Key West is an eccentric piece of real estate to begin with. Fantasy Fest slingshots it into the stratosphere.
 
Events have been going on day and night inside the saloons on Duval Street. Outside, however, is the place to be. Everyone going anywhere is out here tonight. It is about 80 degrees and humid.
 
I don’t have the inclination to compose in orderly paragraphs. Every circuit breaker in my mind accustomed to the norms of decorum in New England is blown. In the spirit of this southernmost town in the US of A, I excuse myself and go with the first draft.

There are hundreds of nearly naked people roaming around here. Men and women are walking up and down Duval Street with decorations on every anatomical appendage they were born with. There seems to be one rule. Genitalia regalia for women should (operative word) be covered by a triangular patch the size of their triangle. For him, a thong or breechcloth or a toga or a leetle towel or silky kiltie to conceal the family jewels. 

Exposed flesh is not a requisite. Many costumes are elaborate. Captain Morgan swashbuckles down the street. Mary Poppins skips. There are far more spectators than participants. Everyone is having fun. This is the French Riviera with a sense of theater.

The first few minutes of walking down Duval Street I felt like a paparazzi trying to snap photos of near naked celebrities. The epiphany came when I pointed my camera at an oncoming Eve. She stopped dead in her tracks and offered a saucy pose. A photo? Of course!

Couples, groups, and individuals (un)dressed for the occasion expect attention. Inhibition? Naahhh. That’s why they’re here. Confined to a wheelchair? Charge the battery!

Women wearing body paint and a smile sashay down the street. In my next lifetime I want to become a body paint artist and live in Key West. Want a photo opp? Ask and the subject obliges with a smile. Want to get in the photo? Sure thing. Hand your camera to another photographer and put your arm around the obliging subject. A swarm of photographers of both sexes flash away.

 
Beauty standards are blown to the wind. Shapes, sizes, colors, and ages are in parade mode. Couples from twenties to sixties strip down or costume up. Some would never grace the pages of any cheesecake or beefcake magazine and that is the glory of this. The street belongs to these revelers as much as to the centerfolds.
 
As an astute observer I can say that major impact factors are carriage and attitude. Give me an “I own this street” fifty year old whose body shows signs of gravity over a slouchy twenty something firm body. If you’re out here in all your glory, you don’t want to walk the same way you’d push your cart down aisle six of the Winn Dixie.


People showing off their costumes in Captain Tony’s take photos of each other. There’s a wet T shirt contest at Sloppy Joe’s but the best action is right on Duval Street. Stay in one place for an hour and you’ll see every damn partier in town.


This place is all lighthearted attitude.  Have lots of public nakedness and things can get complicated. The only thing complicated in Key West Fantasy Fest is which nearly naked person to admire.
 

Nudity is often associated with pornography. During Fantasy Fest in Key West, being near naked is an art form, lighthearted entertainment, and good old-fashioned fun. You’d think eyeballs would fall from their sockets from the strain of leering. Doesn’t happen.

When Key West cuts loose, it drifts with a playful sensual sense of fun and flaunting. This has to be seen to be understood. Luckily I am here to report this to you.

 
You don’t have to have a gorgeous body. Attitude goes a long way to improve whatever gifts nature has given you. Out of the way Margarita-ville, here comes Attitude-ville.

The good times are just beginning, three more days to go.
 

The Radio Kings

The Radio Kings at Sally O'Brien's in Somerville,MA
October 27, 2009

There are two things you can be assured of when The Radio Kings hit the bandstand. They’ll surprise you with the breadth of their catalogue and they will play music that begs you to get up and dance.

Last Tuesday’s gig at Sally O’Brien’s was a case in point. Brian Templeton and Company - Mike Dinallo/guitar, Andy Plaisted/drums, Dean Cassel/bass and Templeton wielding guitar and mouth harp, got into a first set groove that veered from swing to blues and ballads.

I’ve known The Radio Kings as a killer blues band that covers Howlin’ Wolf, Little Walter, Slim Harpo and adds their own originals. Tonight they went country, with grit and finesse. When they play a song by Luke the Drifter, a pen name Hank Williams used early in his career, you know they're inquisitive, adventurous, and willing to stray from the well trodden path.

Perhaps incongruous to country-averse listeners or listeners of higly commercial playlists on country radio stations, this genre is a rich source of dance music. The handful of dancers tonight polished their moves in country swing, west coast swing, two step, and slow hold-her-tight ballads.
 
Templeton can croon and growl then pick up his harmonica and stake out the boundaries of the song. Dinallo, innovative and playful, takes up where Templeton left off. Veterans Plaisted and Cassel keep the train on the tracks with steady drum and bass beats.
 
The Radio Kings are right at home in Sally O’Brien’s in Somerville and Toad in Cambridge, two of the best funky neighborhood bars in the area. The regulars respect the music, and the great beer and ale on tap in both places is as rich and varied as the music performed there.
 
First set partial list:
“Hello Trouble” - Hank Williams
“Lovesick Blues” - Hank Williams
“Six More Miles” - Luke the Drifter, (early Hank Williams pen name)
“The Shelf “(Hard To Love Somebody When You Can’t Love Yourself} - Brian Templeton
“Run With The Blues” - Dave Clarke
“Can’t Go On Without You”-  Fats Domino
“Nervous Breakdown” -  Eddie Cochran

 

Key West: Treasures, Trinkets, and Trash

Gentle readers, that summarizes the southernmost town in the USA, Key West, Florida. Forget that it’s Hemingway’s adopted hometown. It is now a tiny retail carnival town aiming for the lowest common denominator to people who’ve come from afar to reduce fractions. This gloriously decadent island winks, blinks, and hardly ever blushes. It’s a ton of fun.

The epicenter of Key West is Duval Street, a 3/4 mile stretch where the sacred and profane spill into each other with worldly insouciance.

On a post-lunch perambulation, I'm hailed from a darkened doorway by a lovely black woman in a paperclip bikini who promises visions of tawny sugar plums if I venture inside. It is 3 PM. My sweet tooth notwithstanding, I decline with a smile and an air kiss, both returned, by the way.

Across the street, a high-end Coach store flashes a wanton display of plush leather and fashion accessories like a retail store gone wild.

Voluptuous mannequins with postage sized bikinis ogle passersby from tiny storefronts.

And shapely girls at The Bull are ogled by enthralled tourists.

T-shirt and knick-knack shops elevate tackiness to an art form and punctuate every block. The best T-shirt logo, at least the best one I can write into this public blog is “Key West is a drinking town with a fishing problem.”

Bars flourish in this town in which the thermometer has been stuck on 86 degrees for several months. Music blares from Sloppy Joe's, and Cowboy Bill’s Honky Tonk Saloon, and the The Bull and Whistle Bar, where clothing is reputedly optional on the roof deck.

Out of the obligation for journalistic verification, I climbed to the third floor and observed well-formed nakednesses at the bar and lying Cleopatra and Caesar style upon chaise lounges one sunny afternoon. Key West is definitely laid back.


St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, the oldest in the Florida diocese, its whitewashed exterior shimmering brilliantly in the afternoon sun, seems to tolerate the frivolity. Sooner or later, penitents may enter to make amends.

An evening stroll down Duval Street is short on nuance and long on neon. Whether you’re straight, gay, or somewhere in between, there’s a seat at some bar for you. Downstairs at The Bull and Whistle Bar, it could be all in the same place. Music pours out of bars and spills into the street, a not too subtle siren call enticing you inside. Not that most of us need much of an invitation.

Parade is the default mode for Duval Street. On any given night, straight piped earsplitting Harleys, bicycle rickshaws, tiny electric glorified golf carts masquerading as mini cars, and ancient convertibles with babes of all persuasions throwing trinkets advertising girlie bars and pole dancing establishments cruise up and down.

This is a Noah’s Ark kind of town. Observe long enough and you’ll see all the species of the known earth: tourists, locals, all manner of certifiable characters, street people, teens with the ubiquitous skate board, shills in front of strip clubs, and very few kids under twelve.

One or two humongous cruise ships are usually docked here. I wonder what the folks from Iowa wearing shorts, white socks and walking shoes make of all this. It’s either Gomorrah or Eden with a guilty conscience. I imagine it might be like walking around a zoo with no bars between the visitors and wild creatures.

Say one thing about Margaritaville, everyone seems to get along. My first night in town, the captain brought me to Mallory Square, THE place to be at sunset in Key West. The seaside bar at Ocean Key Resort and Spa is jammed with patrons, their eyes on the horizon and hands cupping beverages. Great music from a live band hones the edge of the anticipated sunset.

“Have a beer!” A jovial middle-aged couple with enough beers on their table to start a game of checkers offers me a cold one. The sun sets, a million pixels pulse from scores of cameras. And the band plays on.

By the wee hours, Duval keeps humming with the hardiest partiers. By daylight, the whole spectacle begins anew. It never gets old in Key West. More than a few pilgrims have declared this paradise and never left

In case you wonder, there are museums, art galleries and quaint architecture to be seen in Key West. You just have to get Duval Street out of your system first.

Photos by P. Tamburello.

Mallory Square photo courtesy of http://www.sunsetcelebration.org/

The Bucking Toilet: En route to Key West

When’s the last time your toilet acted like a bucking bronco?  Leaving aside that time you hoisted way too many margarita’s, it would be the last time you were attempting to sit on the throne as it was rolling through the swells in the ocean. Like the bronco, the waves are unpredictable. You immediately grasp the reason the “head” in a sailboat is so small.

With no reins to hold onto, you get leverage with your feet against the wall in front of you to keep from pitching forward in your yawing, rocking, rolling, little bathroom on Neptune’s ceiling, then stabilze yourself laterally by pushing against the walls with your arms while doing your level best to ease the release button on one or both of your nether sphincters. 

Your adventure has just begun, matey. There’s the matter of filling and flushing the little apparatus. Since, aside from the accomplished captain,  I am the only crew on this beautifully maintained Valiant 37  blue water sailing vessel, I live in fear that I will, in a careless or flung-around moment, apply too much pressure and break the little intake lever under the pump in/out handle. It does not require a nautical engineer to figure the consequences.

There are many no-no’s aboard a sailboat. Over my ration of grog on the second night out, I confessed my hyper level of concern while operating the ingenious contraption.

Tangle the jib lines? Forgivable - as long as you can untangle them before they’re needed next. Leave a fender over the side after you’ve exited the dock? An embarrassment to the captain, who scoffs at passing boats who’ve been negligent, but tolerates it since I’m on board for only two weeks and will learn fast. Screw up the propane stove? Not good. But, there are always canned goods. 

Render the head inoperable? As the captain, a college buddy who decided two years ago to chuck it all, buy this classic-design sailboat and become a ‘live aboard,’ said, ”That is a walk the plank offense.”

Presently in Marathon Key, 200 miles from where we began six days ago in Fort Pierce, FL, we are about 40 miles from our destination, Key West, FL. The plank has remained stowed.

 

LSU: Hold That Tiger

Louisiana bleeds purple and gold. From September to bowl season, the collective psyches of the citizens of  Louisiana appear to live and die with the fortunes of the LSU football team.

In my twelve day road trip from New Orleans to Baton Rouge to Lafayette to Lake Charles and back, nearly every gas station, market, restaurant, bar and grill pledged allegiance to the LSU Fighting Tigers. Caps, mugs, inflatable tigers, pennants, and t-shirts dangled from hooks, hung on walls, and surrounded cash registers.

While using the Internet connection in the Lafayette, Louisiana, Days Inn lounge I was startled to hear a whoop from the office around the corner. A moment later, Miss Sondra, the usually composed desk manager, apologized for the outburst when she realized I was present. It wasn’t embarrassment that flushed her face. The game was on the line against Georgia. If a  sixty mile shout from Lafayette to Baton Rouge would help, Ms Sondra was gonna shout.

Her loyalty is permanent. She informed me of the large purple and gold tiger tattoo over her right sho ulder blade (which I didn’t ask to see to satisfy journalistic curiosity).

During lunch at Poor Boy Lloyd’s in Baton Rouge three days later, the three plasma TV screens played endless loops of the game’s final moments as Louisiana State University defeated Georgia 20-13. 

The LSU campus in Baton Rouge

The Louisiana State University football stadium in Baton Rouge is on the scale of a Mayan Temple. Even considering the sprawl of the 650-acre, 250 building leafy campus on the banks of the Mississippi River, its footprint is monumental.

Mike is a major attraction. He is the sixth tiger to reside here since 1936.

 The only thing the fans left home was Mike VI, a two-year-old 300-pound Siberian-Bengal tiger who lives in mini-savannah captivity in the shadow of Tiger Stadium across the street. When full grown he’ll close in on 700 pounds. During this reporter’s trip to the campus, a continual stream of intergenerational admirers visited Mike.

Mike's penthouse across the street from Tiger Stadium

Speaking of streams, while two undergraduates and I were admiring him from one of the viewing arches that surround his compound, Mike turned his tail to us and puckered up a certain sphincter. An arch of fine golden droplets sparkled in the late afternoon sun and covered us with Mikey-ness. Perhaps  this is Mike's way of inducting Yankees into the Tiger fold.

 

To quote an LSU web site, "Eight nights a year, Tiger Stadium becomes the fifth largest city in the state of Louisiana as over 92,000 fans pack the cathedral of college football to watch the Tigers play.” It is the sixth largest college stadium in the country.

Immense and meant to impress by sheer weight of concrete and steel, cathedral would be the appropriate term.

Since 2000, the Tigers have a record of 49-7 at home. Visiting teams think of Tiger Stadium as ‘Death Valley.” Tickets for Saturday’s game against Florida are being scalped for one grand apiece.

Most ticket holders would rather live on close rations for a week than give in to the temptation to sell.This Saturday, number 4 ranked LSU faces number 2 ranked Florida. It’s a safe bet that every one of the 21,000 undergraduates and tens of thousands of boosters will pack Tiger Stadium.

Game night at Tiger Stadium

One alumnus informed me that LSU has a reputation as the biggest college tailgate community in the country. Twenty thousand, with or without their tailgates in tow, traveled to the game against Washington in Seattle in September. Is the word fan derived from the word fanatic?

Photos, except night shot of Tiger Stadiium above,  by Paul Tamburello

From cradle to dance hall in Southwest Louisiana

 
When’s the last time you saw six-year-old kids on the dance floor? Or little girls or boys being whirled around the dance floor in their daddy or mommy’s arms?
 
If you lived in Louisiana that would have been last Friday or Saturday night at Randol’s in Lafayette or Saturday afternoon at The Coffee Break in Breaux Bridge.
 
Music and dancing is a huge way of life in southwest Louisiana. Who needs Arthur Murray when you can learn from everybody in the dance hall?
 
Friday night, a young brother and sister alternated sitting in the dining room with their parents and grandparents and skipping hand in hand to the dance hall in the next room.
 

The Cajun band Jambalaya (which played in the Lowell, MA Festival a month ago) kicked out one joyous song after another, all in Cajun French. Some kids sat on one of the wooden benches that surround the hall, visible through the glass partition between the dance hall and the dining room, and watched the adults styling to the music.

A shy blonde eight-year-old girl was busy taking digital photos of every couple that passed by - until her grandfather leaned over, took the camera out of her hands, and led her around the floor in a waltz.

On Saturday night, a pair of six and seven year olds stole the show. Got right out there and did their version of waltzing and two stepping. Adults applauded the two kids as if they were contestants on Dancing With The Stars. They beamed with the attention.
 
Earlier that day at The Coffee Break, the children who came to the Pont Breaux Jam, the weekly Saturday 11 AM to 2 PM celebration of Cajun music, were treated royally. While little brother was being danced around to the Cajun music by his dad, little sister was getting an impromptu waltz lesson by one of the men who’d come in from the Café des Amis.
 
Maybe that explains why places like Café des Amis in Breaux Bridge, Angelle’s Whiskey River Dance Hall, McGee’s Landing, and Pat’s Fisherman’s Wharf, all in Henderson, and many more places throughout the parishes of southwest Louisiana, are so popular.
 
If there’s a zydeco or Cajun band on the stage, you can bet there’ll be a roomful of men and women working up a lather two-stepping, waltzing, and slow dancing for hours at a time.
 
Music and dance are the glue that holds towns together all over southwest Louisiana. Some day, these little shavers will grow up to be the adults teaching their own kids to dance at Randol’s or The Pont Breaux Jam, or a facsimile thereof. 

Floyd LeBlanc: A Cajun Original

Practically all the regulars who come into The Coffee Break at noon in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, know Floyd. A handful of them who’ve been dancing since 8 AM at the Café des Amis drift in here to listen to more Cajun music. Floyd doesn’t miss much when it comes to fun. He was dancing with as many women as he could fit on his dance card at the café.

He certainly didn’t miss a chance to dance with my pretty traveling companion. That’s when he found out we were out of towners.

“I hear you’re from Boston. Ask me anything about Breaux Bridge you want”, he says and shakes my hand with a solid grip.

“Well, let’s start with the Café des Amis. How long has that place been having dances on Saturday mornings? “

“I’ve been coming here for around 12 years since they began the Saturday dance”, Floyd says. “You know, the place used to be a funeral parlor in the early 1900s. They made caskets on the second floor. Did you see the hand crank rig overhead when you walked into the café? That’s how they got the caskets down from the second floor. Did you see the church across the street? The caskets went from there to the church for burial in the cemetery next to the church. Pretty efficient setup. “

Floyd’s a natural born story teller, After listening for fifteen minutes I could tell that there are three things that Floyd appears to love, dancing, women, and living by his wits. He’s been married 55 years to his second wife. He’s flirtatious, rambunctious and, if the stories he tells me are true, a bit of a rascal.

“I was born in Breaux Bridge and raised in Henderson Levee”, he says, and begins to tell stories. Life was hardscrabble when Floyd got out of the Air Force as a twenty year old. No ready resources, no problem. Floyd began running his own card game and playing pool for money. I get the impression he could size up a mark in a few seconds. Beneath his easy going smile is a man completely aware of his surroundings.

In his gambling days, I believe Floyd would have been capable of beating you into the ground if that was the best way he saw to recoup his money, or get the hell out of a place fast, if the odds of getting it were too long. The fact that he’s 83 years old doesn’t mean this is any less true. He’s about 5’9” tall, maybe 160 pounds and hard as nails. His weathered face has the map of Acadiana etched into it.

Like many men from here, Floyd can read the Atchafalaya Swamp in Henderson like a book. “I bought me a shotgun with my winnings and got into the duck business”, he says.  “I carved a duck call out of wood, set up a blind about a quarter of a mile into the swamp right where Whiskey River Landing is now. I’d call in the birds from my duck blind, shoot them down and row out in my pirogue to get them. People in their cars on the levee used binoculars to see how many ducks I shot. I sold the ducks for $1.50 each.”  His eyes twinkle as he talks and reads my reactions.

Supply and demand doesn’t depend exclusively on money. Floyd had a constant supply of ducks. “I bartered for gas, meat, and occasionally for favors from women," he says with a sly grin, leaving me to guess exactly what that barter worked out.

After Sunday mass in Breaux Bridge, Floyd says he stationed himself at a gas station across the street. Two fingers from a passing car, he handed over two ducks from his morning hunt. Four fingers four ducks, and so on, at $1.50 each.

In time Floyd got a steady job, worked on oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico for 13 years. For 21 years after that he signed on with the city of Lafayette, was in charge of maintenance and the town’s electricity.

“I’ve been gone from there for 21 years and the lights are still on, Either I did a good job or they didn’t need me,” he says with another impish grin.

About twenty men and women in the Coffee Break’s next room are playing fiddles, guitars, and triangles and singing traditional Cajun music and here I am listening to the life and times of a Cajun original. I’m not leaving till Floyd gets tired of talking.

“I had my first dance when I was 12 years old, “ he says. “Went to a dance hall in Henderson and watched from a balcony on the second floor. I saw an older woman who looked good and asked her to dance. She said ‘Do you smoke?’ and I said why. ‘Give me a cigarette and I’ll dance with you’, she said.

Floyd pauses a moment. “I said, ‘you wait right here and don’t move.’ I got a cigarette and got my dance with that older woman. (Pause). She was 14.” We both laugh.

Floyd’s father spoke French, his mother French and English.  He went to school when he was five. If he spoke French in school, he got a whipping.

Listen carefully and you’ll still hear thick Creole Cajun spoken around here. It’s certainly kept alive by the songs the players in the next room have been singing all morning and by one woman who sang lyrics to me as we danced in the café this morning.

Floyd married his first wife before he entered the Air Force. He settled in with her in a house next to his mother in law. “She was a bitch,” he says.

One day I told my wife we need to move. She said no. I took off my wedding ring (here he begins to mimic removing his ring) threw it in the wastebasket and said I’m gone. And he was.

When it comes to cards and pool, Floyd calculates the odds. When it comes to women, right from the age of 12, he made his own odds. Floyd first saw the woman who became his second wife at the Catholic church service in Breaux Bridge.

“She was very pretty. I saw her again at a social event and asked who she was and where she lived. I asked a friend to drive me to her house. She was sitting on the porch with her family and walked out to see me in the car. That was it. We’ve been married 55 years.”

The entrepreneurial spirit spreads throughout his family. Floyd helps his daughter run a bed and breakfast place in town, gets on a tractor and mows the lawns of the two houses his son-in-law built nearby.

Floyd’s one of those people who are good at whatever they take on. “I took up golf when I was thirty-seven,” he says. “Been shooting my age since I was 75.”

The jam session is winding down around 1 pm. “Gotta go see the boss,” Floyd says. I don’t know whether that’s an honorary title or whether there’s a power sharing arrangement in the LeBlanc household but I do know that there haven't been many dull moments in Floyd's life.

New Orleans: Donna's Bar and Grill

New Orleans is famous for neighborhood bars where you can hear great music played by local musicians on a postage-sized stage. Some of these places serve unbelievably good food from tiny kitchens. Some people call them dive bars. I call them major attractions.

Drove to Frenchman Street in Faubourg-Marigny  in search of said attractions. Nothing doing for us in Snug Harbor, or The Blue Nile, or Dba's. Not the kind of music to inspire a trip to the dance floor. Might as well be looking for the Lost City of Cibola.

On the way to Frenchman Street, I had happened to look down St. Anne Street to North Rampart several blocks away and saw the dazzling site of the Louis Armstrong Arch.

The arch may not look like much in broad daylight but at night its illumination is as bright as Satchmo’s smile. And a terrific photo opportunity. My travel companion, a Louisiana native who knows the turf, directs me to North Rampart Street so I can salvage the night with some great photos.

 I stand on North Rampart Street’s neutral ground to get a good shot of the arch. Behind me, I hear strains of some funky blues. Must be from a nearby apartment. Whoa! It’s coming from that dimly lit building across the street. Little sign over the doorway  - Donna’s Bar and Grill. Peer in. Live band! Blues! Dance music!

Hustle across the street waving wildly. “Lock the car! We found our dive bar!” I rave.

The next hour and a half approximates a little slice of heaven on earth. Our saxophone savior, Les Getrex and his trio of electric piano, bass, and drums rocks us in the arms of Gabriel with ultra danceable rhythm & blues, swing, and down ‘n dirty blues. Condensation drips down our bottles of cold Dixie beer. No point in wasting time sitting down while St. Les is blowing.

Between songs, Les starts a Q and A with the patrons, “Where y'all from?” The answers astonish. Along with the two twenty-something girls who came from the neighborhood, the answers were Milan, Kentucky, Phoenix, Hawaii, Philly/Atlanta/LA, and Boston. We aren’t the only pilgrims to have found this place.

There’s more. Every Monday night, chef/owner Charlie Sims puts out a table of free red beans and rice and BBQ chicken after the first break. This happens to be Monday night. You’ve heard the expression “died and gone to heaven.” That would apply to us.

Charlie and his wife Donna have owned the place for 17 years. “After a while you want to give something back, “ Charlie says when I see him peering out of a pass through window into the kitchen. “I’ve been doing the Monday night feed for the past 12 years.”

Donna’s went dark for a few weeks recently when 74 year old Charlie was hospitalized with a stomach ailment. The bar re-opened Thursday through Monday when his son stepped in to help keep the doors open. Charlie returned recently to run the business and keep putting out the Monday night dinner.

Donna’s Bar and Grill turns out to have a storied past. I’m not especially religious, but for a place with this much soul I’m praying Charlie, and Donna, stay healthy for a good long time.

Chef/owner Charlie Sims

Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, City-Wide Garage Sale

The biggest draw on a Saturday morning in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana is the zydeco dance from 8 AM to noon at the Café des Amis.

That is unless you happen to drive over there on the day of the annual Breaux Bridge Citywide Garage Sale.  To say this is a popular event is understatement in the extreme.

Bargain hunters, browsers, and people looking for a good morning’s worth of entertainment piled into town from every town within fifty miles of Lafayette parish.   

No wonder. Garage sales, yard sales, neighborhood sales, and parking lot sales were happening on every street leading into Breaux Bridge and peppered in areas around the entire city.

Merchants along Main Street and Bridge Streets set up merchandise on tables on the sidewalks in front of their stores. Oh yes, and an flea market with more than 40 vendors flourished in Veteran’s Park at the intersection of Berard Street and Martin Streets.

Food? This is Louisiana, honey. Nothing, including funerals, happens in Louisiana without food. We’re talking red beans and rice, BBQ pork, po-boys, funnel cake, and home made lemonade to go along with all American burgers, dogs, and snow cones.

The sidewalks are full of friendly chatter. A woman passing a couple having lunch at a table squeezed onto the sidewalk outside the Chez Jacqueline Bar and Restaurant stops in her tracks, leans over and asks the name of the food on a diner’s plate, “That’s cous cous, Charlene!” she says to her fellow shopper. “I’ve heard of it and never seen it!”

This kind of easy camaraderie bubbles along all over town. The teenage girl in front of Glo’s Fashions sells chess pies that her grand mama, who happens to own the store, made for the sale, and shyly tells me the ingredients. People who've never met exchange opinions about sale items arranged on the sidewalks.

Breaux Bridge has morphed into a village shopping mall. You could probably walk up to a resident’s house and bargain for the rocker on the front porch. On sale are antiques, collectibles, lamps furniture, dishes, embroidery, plants, glassware, purses, bows, pottery, antique tools, and anything no longer held hostage in someone’s attic, cellar, or garage.

The best thing about this citywide garage doesn’t cost a cent. It’s the feel of an America in less complicated, less polarized times.

The range of  political views held by the people walking around town might be narrow but it's there. Probably lots of sons, daughters, fathers or mothers from this parish are serving their country in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The sunshine and massive array of merchandise for sale has neutralized the sharp edges of politics. For this one morning in America, the differences of opinion are secondary to finding a good deal or an item you just found out you couldn't live without . Maybe we ought to consider having a nation wide garage sale.

New Orleans: Music for the soul

Like the Mississippi River, music has a profound effect on New Orleans. Walk far enough through the various neighborhoods of the city and you’ll hear just about every kind of music. Take an evening stroll down Royal Street or Chartres Street and the streets crossing between and you’ll hear violinists, accordion players, guitarists, and someone playing a reed or brass instrument.

Walk down Bourbon Street and you’ll hear country, R&B, rock and roll, and Top 40 at decibel levels that you feel in your rib cage. There’s a good chance you’ll see a ragamuffin brass band playing for tips at the corner of Bourbon and Canal Street. Bourbon Street is delightfully and shamelessly vulgar. We’ll leave that for another story.

Dive bars abound. Good ones. Probably hundreds of ‘em. Street buskers like Brother Hank Bartholomew and blind Snooks Eaglund hang out around places like the Café du Monde.

Snooks Eaglund, harmonica legend in New Orleans

Snooks plays for money and pride. Brother Hank for Jesus. One minute he’s blowing some very funky gospel tinged trumpet and the next he’s sounding somewhere between Al Green and Marvin Gaye.

After enjoying Brother Hank’s performance just beyond the edge of the café’s outdoor patio, pt at large walked over to drop some green into the man’s hat - and was offered a CD to take home as a memento. Hank says the proceeds of his work go to his church, and youth and educational programs. I believed him and parted with $20 on the spot.

Brother Hank’s quiz about whether I believed in Jesus was from the heart, not an act of a street hustler. My response satisfied him that I didn’t need saving then and there. I can work it as I play his CD when I’m on the road to Lafayette.

New Orleans: Died and Beignet-d to Heaven

Café du Monde
800 Decatur Street
New Orleans, LA 70116

The Original Cafe Du Monde Coffee Stand was established in 1862 in the New Orleans French Market. The Cafe is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It closes only on Christmas Day and on the day an occasional Hurricane passes too close to New Orleans.
The Original Cafe Du Monde is a traditional coffee shop. Its menu consists of dark roasted Coffee and Chicory, Beignets, White and Chocolate Milk, and fresh squeezed Orange Juice. The coffee is served Black or Au Lait. Au Lait means that it is mixed half and half with hot milk. Beignets are square French -style doughnuts, lavishly covered with powdered sugar. In 1988 Iced Coffee was introduced to the cafe. Soft drinks also made their debut that year. (from Cafe web site)

Ask anyone who’s been to New Orleans about food to try when you visit New Orleans and right up there with po’ boys, muffulattas, gumbo, and crawfish cakes will be a beignet from the Café du Monde.

As with the above exotic items it helps if you have no idea what to expect and you’re willing to try them because that’s one of the reasons you packed your bag and headed to this version of Paris in America.

A rare slack late afternoon moment...

So you find the café’s green and white striped awnings at the edge of the French Quarter and have a seat in the cavernous, covered outdoor patio - the ubiquitous fans whirring high overhead, tourists and locals chattering away inside, and the rest of the world parading down Decatur Street outside, your own little everyday Mardi Gras Parade.

Soon, a waitress swoops over to your French bistro table with the retro green vinyl seats and chrome tubular frame, and sets down a little plate with three delicate looking square pieces of slightly browned fried dough covered with a mountain of confectioner’s sugar. They’re puffy, delicate looking, and you still have no idea what’s in store for you.

At the advice of your travel companion, a Louisiana native, you drape a large napkin over your lap before picking one off the plate.

First surprise, they’re warm! Just the right heft between a cloud and a doughnut. Open mouth, bite off a corner. Notice a cascade of powdered sugar dropping to the table and onto your lap. Feel your taste buds do a jig and holler “Hey, we’ve never tasted anything as softly tender warmly sweet airly-textured - ever!”

Your companion laughs. Says you look like one of those milk commercials, a big white mustache over your top lip. 

Well. The rest of the natural world recedes for the next five minutes as you devour, in slow chewy mouthfuls, these warm little nuggets. By the time you’re done you’re not sure whether you should go to confession or a Laundromat. 

White powder is all over your face and fingers. You’re aware you’ve had a peak food experience that borders on rapture. Oh yes, somewhere between bites you’ve sipped a cup of New Orleans famous cafe au lait but somehow it doesn’t register.

As you get up to leave, you notice that underneath nearly every one of the fifty little white composite round table tops is a dusting of confectioner’s sugar. You visit the rest room to hose down your face and hands .

The remnants of the taste of those beignets has vanished. The memory, ahhh, that’s another story.

Goin' To New Orleans: Tipitina's

TIPITINA'S

501 Napoleon Ave.

New Orleans, LA 70115
September 27, 2009

In the words of Fats Domino, "I'm going to New Orleans….". Yes, pt at large has landed at Louis Armstrong International Airport and his priorities are in order. At the corner of Napolean and Tchoupitoulas Streets is Tipitina's, going strong with a rainbow of musical styles for the past 32 years.

Are we having fun yet?

For music and dance, this place is a mecca. The Sunday night Fais do do (link) brings in a a crowd of people from around the block to around the country.

Bruce plays, dancers twirl.

The ages of people who are two-stepping and waltzing around Tipitina’s well-worn wooden dance floor range somewhere between Tulane students and Grandma Moses.

pt and Grandma Moses

The legendary Bruce Daigrepont revs up his diatonic accordion and cranks traditional Louisiana Frenchmusic with original Cajun and Zydeco material. Everyone who is capable of standing upright is on the dance floor. Abita beer flows from the taps at the chest high mahogany bar. Backed by a fiddle, bass, and drums, Daigrepont has been playing the Sunday Fais do do from 5:00 to 9:00 pm here for nearly sixteen years.

pt at large and Bruce Daigrepont

The bust of Professor Longhair in entryway to Tipitina's is a bronzed pedigree of the beloved place. Longhair, born Henry Roeland Byrd, all but invented the rolling rumba boogie-woogie, blues and southern R&B feel of  the music in this town. He wrote Mardi Gras music for the Tchapatoulas Indians and his own brand of dance music. The former neighborhood juke joint was named after one of Professor Longhairs songs.

Professor Longhair and friend

In 1977, says the burly fellow who took our $7 cover charge for the evening, Tipitina’s was formed from the 501 Club and Longhair, an African American, was given an ownerships share and became one of the first integrated dance clubs in New Orleans.

Performers as disparate as Dr. John, the Neville Brothers, the Meters, Cowboy Mouth, the Radiators, Galactic, Better Than Ezra,  Wilco, Nine Inch Nails, Pearl Jam, Lenny Kravitz, Bonnie Raitt, James Brown, Widespread Panic, and Stevie Ray Vaughan have made music here.

Dancers with spectacular spins and moves made up right on the spot share the dance floor with people who’ve never danced a two step in their lives. As the night progresses it isn’t at all unusual to see one of these high powered dancers take a newcomer by the hand for a turn around the dance floor.It's just the kind of shared exuberance Dr. Longhair wanted his music to inspire in people.

Life Friendly Gardens: Feed Them Love, Not Chemicals

Summer is still splashing around in Watertown. Several of the gardens listed in the Life Friendly Garden Tour last weekend happened to be within walking distance of my digs on Oliver Street. It's inspiring to see how many ways there are to create a garden, large or small, with familiar or unique plants, sculptures, outdoor furniture, or even objects cast away by others, that results in an aesthetically pleasing, even whimsical, space.

Don’t expect to see bags of Scott’s Turf Builder or spray bottles of Round Up on this tour. The Life Friendly Gardens Tour in Watertown today was a showcase of how to garden without using toxic chemicals (see sign at left surrounded by big red finger plants called Amaranthus).

The mini landscapes surrounding several of the 14 houses on the tour within walking distance of my house were impressive. I’m good at growing grass, a few hardy shrubs, and two beds of pachysandra, which, as you know, require the maintenance skills of a sodbuster.

Knowing and accepting my limitations around anything requiring green thumbery is an asset. No longer do I view creative landscaping and plants that appear to be ready for a photo shoot for HG TV with malaise and a sense of insufficient imagination, an utter lack of what George H.W. Bush labeled “the vision thing.”

A walk through these gardens has the same effect on me as it does on their creators. Sort of an earth bound “Tranquility Base.” One gardener calls her space an "urban patch of solace" after a long day’s work. Another calls hers a “healing garden, healing first of all for me, the gardener, who finds infinite renewal in its ever changing beauty through the seasons.”

Entrance to Sharon Bauer's "Healing Garden" at 62 Pearl Street, Watertown (click Life Friendly Gardens Tour above).

Gardeners, like artists of any stripe, enjoy showing their work to fellow gardeners or oooh and ahhhhh types like myself. Cutting in flowerbeds, adding rocks, stones, and outdoor sculpture, tiny hand constructed pools complete with goldfish, and finding the right plants that will flourish in your environment requires patience. Some of the gardens on the tour have been in process for years.

These folks share tips and information. There are no proprietary secrets in this group. They’re eager to give ideas to the neophytes and share cuttings or little starter pots with anyone who asks.

They’ve got Farmer’s Almanac mentalities and plant flowers that will bloom from spring to late fall. Never a dull month in their gardens.

One enthusiast on the tour lived in a large two family house that had been neatly divided into four compact condo units. Where you and I might use their shared, untended, shady back yard as an excuse to pave the whole thing and make a bigger driveway, this gardener saw as an opportunity. Armed with abundant enthusiasm and a vision of Versailles, she got the agreement of the other three owners to have at the bedraggled plot.

 The result is a shade garden (left) chock full of several kinds of hosta and shade loving flowers plus funky, colorful little garden sculptures plonked around the shady stuff - “an urban perennial shade garden,” she says.

The son of one homeowner made a small rock lined pool and filled it with koi (goldfish) and comets and topped it with lilies that Monet would have loved.

The same gardener, Sharon Bauer, printed a pamphlet for visitors. “Wild flowers flourish around the edges, providing food for humans and animals.  Milkweed attracts Monarch butterflies. Goldfinches flock to evening primrose seeds, mockingbirds to pokeweed berries. The pin cherry tree next to our driveway volunteered from a seed dropped by a bird, and now catbirds enjoy a feeding frenzy when the cherries are ripe. Bees love goldenrod.  Plantain heals bee stings. Motherwort, yarrow, red clover, nettle, chickweed, lady’s thumb and many other 'weeds' provide good medicine.”

Henry David Thoreau, legendary naturalist who lived in nearby Concord, MA, would have been right at home in this intersection of random acts of nature and conscious acts of gardener. Maybe this is what he was thinking about when he said,"Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads."

Homeowners like pt at large are shocked, perhaps enlightened, that many so-called 'weeds' can be part of a colorful little ecosystem in the same company with impatiens, nasturtiums, black-eyed susans and day lilies. All a true gardener needs is space.

Vines bearing Mucat grapes cover back porch

The Chemical Use Reduction and Education Task Force (CURE) that sponsored the tour is a project of the Watertown Citizens For Environmental Safety (WCES), which is committed to educating the public about the dangers and safe alternative solutions to chemical use in the house and garden.

Today was a tour de force that showed beauteous gardens can be created without the aid of pesticides. Imagination, patience, and a good work ethic will do it just fine.

Photos by Paul Tamburello

John's Tailoring: Thimble Tradition Thrives

Whether a mom and pop operation, a one-man/woman show, or a whole family, there’s something special about an owner operated business. Teeny little Watertown, weighing in at just 4.2 square miles and 32.000 people, is a hotbed of familial entrepreneurship.
This is the second installment in this series.

There are a few essentials to be stored in everyone’s contact list. You need a good plumber, a good electrician, and of course a good doctor. It may not be a life or death matter, but everyone occasionally needs a good tailor.

Nestled between several unassuming storefronts on a short block on Mount Auburn Street is John’s Tailoring. The small, pinkish neon “Alterations” sign that blinks in the front window is just enough to get your attention. In good weather, there’s a rack of clothing outside the door, enough of a hint so you notice the “John’s” sign over the door.

It registered enough so that when I tore a favorite but quite banged-up pair of shorts earlier this year, I brought them there with high hopes of getting them back for another season of yard work and painting.

The narrow space inside was a throwback to earlier era. Nothing fancy. Plainly painted and lit, it resembled the kind of unassuming watchmaker or tailor or small appliance repair place I visited as a kid.

Racks of women’s clothing line the walls all the way to the back of the store. The one nod to the 21st century is a small LCD TV mutely playing in the corner.

Toward the back stood a woman next to a sewing machine that looked strong enough to repair a tank tread. It’s festooned with a rainbow range of spools of thread. Pincushions seem to be everywhere.

The woman brushes back her short brown hair to inspect what I’ve brought in. “You will see where I fixed but it will do what you want,” she smiles reassuringly and hands me her card.

Here we have Ugur Eskici, owner of John’s Tailoring. Ugur’s road to Watertown is a classic immigrant story. Future father-in-law arrives in Watertown from Harput, Turkey and opens tailoring business. Son follows. Son returns to marry sweetheart in Turkey, brings her back to Watertown. All work in family business. Father dies. Tradition is carried on by family.

The original John of John’s Tailoring was Jan Eskici, Ugur's father-in-law, who operated a successful business on Pleasant Street for more than 25 years. His company specialized in stitching together pre-cut clothing supplied to them by Johnny Appleseed's (now known as Appleseed’s), a Beverly, MA company founded in 1946 that specialized in high quality women’s apparel.

When the building they rented was sold eight years ago, Jan and Ugur looked for a smaller place. “We saw the ‘For Rent’ sign, liked the location and the size, and here I am,” she said. It’s Ugur’s baby now, all on her own.

Women’s clothing, wedding dresses and prom dresses are a specialty but she’ll tackle anything she thinks she can do successfully.

Ugur is one of those people who knew exactly what they wanted to do when they grew up.  She didn’t have to go farther than down the stairs to find her role model. “Every day when I woke up, my mother was sewing for her customers. I learned everything from her. She was the best tailor!” she beams.

Perfectionist tendencies and an ingrained work ethic are paired in this family like a needle and thread. “I don’t want to do it and make bad job,” she says in her new second language, “Better than money for me, you know, I don’t want to do it and just like get the money and bad job, I want to try to do good job.” Don’t you wish everyone felt that much pride in their work?

A darker side of immigration is that it’s often prompted by persecution. Ugur is Armenian, as is her husband. Many of her forbears were wiped out in the Armenian Genocide. It wasn’t pretty. Scars must still linger. She lives somewhere safe now.

 “I want to stay my whole life in Watertown,“ she gushes. “ I love it here. I don’t want to go anywhere else, just here. The people are good quality and they tell their friends about me.”

Right on cue, in walks customer Laurie Kahn. The two exchange warm greetings.

“I needed some alterations done and my teenage daughter Anna said, ‘Mom, you’ve got to this place I found. The lady’s great there!’ Anna’s best friend found this place and she told my daughter about it,” the Watertown film-maker explains.

This is the kind of small business that puts the meat on the bones of a small town. People seek services that are professional in quality and personal in spirit. We spend enough time in big-box stores. We write enough checks to NStar and Comcast. We like paying for an artisan’s quality work or an owner operated diner and thinking that our money will help support someone’s family.

Money is important but what really makes Ugur Eskici tick is looking at the job she’s finished and realizing she’s just the kind of tailor she dreamed of becoming back in Harput around the same time she learned to walk.

Tab Benoit: Louisiana Bayou Champion

12th Annual Rhythm & Roots Music and Dance Festival
Ninigret Park, Charlestown, RI
Labor Day Weekend, September 4-6, 2009

 Tab Benoit is a stealth activist. There he was Saturday afternoon on the Workshop Stage at the Rhythm & Roots Festival singing “Sac-Au-Lait Fishing” and before you can say Lake Ponchartrain he’s saying, ”We’re losing an acre of wetlands in Louisiana every hour, dying from salt water, the Mississippi is being choked, we need to rebuild it the way it was in 1929.”

Benoit talks the talk and walks the walk. In  2003, the Houma, LA resident formed the “Voice of the Wetlands,” an organization promoting awareness of coastal wetlands. He was featured in the IMAX film “Hurricane on the Bayou.” Originally a documentary citing how a major hurricane could impact New Orleans if the wetlands weren’t restored, it became a grim reality while still in production when Katrina devastated Louisiana and New Orleans. The IMAX production is stunning and scary. I've seen it.

“I’m invited to sing at the G20 Summit Meeting in Pittsburgh. They think I’m gonna play. Well, I’m gonna give a workshop!” Benoit said. He's armed with facts. You gotta love a man who uses his guitar as a sledgehammer.

Music and activism cut a path from Woody Guthrie to acts as different as Tracy Chapman, Sting, Bob Geldof, Bruce Springstein, John Lennon, and Ladysmith Black Mambazo.

Tab Benoit is in good company.

Rhythm & Roots Festival:Dance, Listen, Dance Again.

12th Annual Rhythm & Roots Music and Dance Festival
Ninigret Park, Charlestown, RI
Labor Day Weekend, September 4-6, 2009

If you had a zydeeelicious bone in your body, and if you didn’t have an excuse, like, you were getting married or your house just burned down and your car with it, I know where you were last weekend. The 12th Annual Rhythm ‘n Roots Music and Dance Festival in Charlestown, RI.

Spectator umbrellas and tents at rear, seated audience in front of Main Stage (center), and 4000 sq.ft covered wood dance floor at top right

Thousands of music lovers thronged to sun splashed, sprawling, Ninigret Park to hear some of the best zydeco and Cajun bands in the land play their hearts out. Dance-aholics headed for the two huge,  covered dance floor pavilions and sweaty-wet two stepped and waltzed all day long and well into the night.

There’s something about the Red Bull jolt of a zydeco band that cancels out muscle fatigue. You head for a seat to take a breath after a zippy two-step, an accordion starts up on the bandstand and you turn right around and scan the floor for a partner. Trust me, you don’t have to look far.

Variety abounds. It ain't nothing to see college aged girls dancing with silver haired gents or AARP women dancing with men young enough to be their grandsons. This is one of the only places in the dance world where age is just a number.

A few bluesy and country acts were booked, but for the most part you were listening to the crème de la crème of bands straight out of Louisiana. And to prove how sweetly insidious zydeco has become, a few homegrown bands from New York and Rhode Island/MA got thrown into the mix.

Listeners arrive early to stake out territory on the one-acre grass as close as possible to the outdoor Main Stage. And there are rules. Spelled right out in big print on the second page of the free program. As in “No standing in front of the Main Stage. Standing is permitted at the sides.” And “Sunshades, Umbrellas, etc. must be at the perimeter of the concert area. Please do not block the view of others.” It’s environmentally conscious, too. “Help us RECYCLE by disposing of trash and recyclables in designated containers.”

Louisiana musician Tab Benoit plays on the Main Stage

No rowdies, either, unless you count over-energetic people on the dance floor.  For the record, I saw only one clearly intoxicated person from 1 P.M. till I left at 10 P.M. The festival is extraordinarily well thought out. Need first aid? To find the Lost Child Center? Lost and Found? 24 Hour Security? It’s all clearly marked. Staff members were visible all day long.

What kind of a festival would this be without merchandise to tempt you? African baskets, hand crafted jewelry, beads, fragrances, T-shirts, and my personal favorite, a “temporarily air brushed tattoo” parlor are lined up on one stretch.

Ethnic and regional foods along with all-American homemade ice cream are on another section. Pulled pork, seafood chowder, red beans and rice, blackened shrimp, Greek and Thai foods, and vegetarian stuff - they’re all here. 

Another convenience, all food and beverages (including beer and wine) must be purchased with script (dollars called “bayou bucks”) sold at Food Ticket Booths. The music vibe is strong. People chat like NBFs in the occasionally long lines. One couple danced in the line waiting to dig in to regional food at Chili Brothers. The man would have been me.

 Music pouring from the Main Stage is amped via seriously large speakers into one huge, 4000 square-foot, wood floored tent, Dancers occasionally step out to watch the band play. Another band plays directly to dancers on the floor of the Red Hook Ale Brewery and Newport Vineyards Dance Pavilion several hundred yards away.

 I stumbled upon Cajun dancing in 2006.

“Do you dance?” Chris Ash, fiddle player for The Magnolia Cajun Band asked me after I’d interviewed her for a feature story for the The Dartmouth-Westport (MA) Chronicle.

Within a Lafayette minute, she had Dewey Balfa singing on a tape in her home office and I was learning the two-step. “I think you’ve got it,” she grinned, “We play next month in Seekonk, MA. Come on over and dance.”

Cedric Watson & Bijou Creole play at Red Hook Dance Ten

I did show up for that dance - got hooked then and there. Which is why it wasn’t a stretch to drive two hours each way to dance, eat, and dance some more for nine hours today. If you have that zydeelicious bone in your body, this kind of music and dancing is worth driving alot farther than that.

Rhythm ‘n Roots Music and Dance Festival Bands
Great Big Sea(Sun) • Hot Tuna(Sat) • Asleep at the Wheel(Sat)
Jerry Douglas Band(Sun) • Cedric Watson & Bijou Creole(F/S/S)
Steve Riley & the Mamou Playboys(S/S) • Tab Benoit(Sat)
Lee Boys(Fri) • The Travelin’ McCourys(Fri) • The Duhks(F/S)
Mitch Woods & His Rocket 88s(Sun) • Eilen Jewell(Fri)  
Keith Frank & the Soileau Zydeco Band(F/S/S) • Papa Mali(Sat)
Nouveaux Honkies(F/S) • Corey Ledet & HisZydeco Band(S/S)
Big Sandy & theFlyrite Boys(S/S) Preston Frank (F/S/S)
Ed Poullard(F/S/S) • Magnolia Cajun Band(S/S)
Occidental Gyspy Jazz Band(S/S) • Li’l Anne & Hot Cayenne(S/S)
Hot Tamale Brass Band(S/S) • Len Cabral(S/S) • Marc Levitt (S/S)

Want to listen to the concert music? Consider making a donation to mvyradio if you like what you hear.

Ninigret Park Festival Features
Main Stage with Huge Covered Dance Floor • Workshops • On-Site Camping • Dance Pavilion
Dance Lessons Daily • Fun Family Stage • Unique Vendors • Nightly Fais Do Do • Ethnic & Regional Foods
Bike Trails • Swimming Pond • State-of-the-Art Playground • 5th Annual Kids Cajun Academy (pre-register)
Easy access! Just off US 1. Ninigret Park Exit. Entrance half mile ahead.
Minutes from Ocean Beaches & Accommodations

Photos: Paul Tamburello

The Blue Suede Boppers Rock For Tom Taylor

Johnny D's Uptown Restaurant and Music Club
17 Holland Street
Davis Square
Somerville, MA
The Blue Suede Boppers and Tom Taylor
9 P.M.
September 3, 2009

You never know what you’re going to get when you head for Johnny D's but this was a first. A political fundraiser.

You gotta love Tom Taylor. The alderman from Somerville’s Ward 3 kicked off his campaign by inviting The Blue Suede Boppers to put some gas into his drive toward Election Day in November. A ton of his supporters waded into the free food he supplied and the Boppers added the razzmatazz to the event.

Congressman Michael Capuano and Somerville Mayor Joe Curatone supplied the bon mots on Taylor’s behalf. Taylor introduced us to everyone in his family except the dog and to a host of fellow aldermen who’d come to spread the love for him. The guy’s been toiling in the fields of public service for over twenty years. Based on what his brethren said, you’d be hard pressed to find a more earnest public servant. He’s just the kind of guy the late Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Tip O’Neill was thinking about when he said, “All politics is local.”

The Blue Suede Boppers are one of those hark-back -to-the-days groups that specialize in the sound of the fifties and sixties. What is great about them, besides the fact they do fine covers of classic songs of that era, is that several of them lived through adolescence during that period. Real vintage music played by real vintage musicians.

They play rock’ n roll, honky-tonk, rhythm’ n blues, rock-a-billy, and doo wop. This was music to dance to - and in the old days, many a Saturday night the only glow in a car parked on a secluded lover's lane came from the car radio that was playing these songs.

Back then, as musical tastes were changing so abruptly, this was teenager music that adults of the era just didn’t get. It belonged to us then in real time. It belongs to us now with nostalgia bands like The Blue Suede Boppers. We can still dance to it. And we can still think of stuff to do on Saturday night.

The band - electric guitar and bass, electric piano, drums, saxophone - proved their pedigree with some blistering saxophone work and creditable four part harmonies - you had to love the sax man prowling the dance floor wailing on his saxophone then dashing back to the band stand. The Boppers showed versatility when they lit into a version of “I Know,” that had a unique New Orleans rolling rumba beat and the sax player taking up a trumpet and blowing serious smoke in the chorus.

An unexpected treat was the appearance of three members of the Somerville High School Music Program staff, two sax players and electric piano (Rick Saunders the music program’s director), who sat in for the last three songs. The event was a fund raiser for the Music Program, too. Alderman Tom Taylor, bless his heart, has a lot of irons in the fire - he initiated the effort to find funding for the program when he found out it was in jeopardy of folding.

 A fourth guest, Kevin Leppman, one funky trombone player, romped with the style of a veteran second liner. No surprise. Leppman, Saunders, and Bopper drummer Reebee Garofalo are members of The Second Line Social Aid and Pleasure Society Brass Band. The band hosts HONK!Festival in Somerville - this year in Davis Square, October 9-11.

Somerville High School students would have been pretty amazed to see their teachers rock out. Good show. Good music. Good Dancing. And any politician who hosts events at Johnny D's and supports high school arts programs deserves your consideration.

Blue Suede Boppers personnel:
Howie Tarnower, guitar; Pam Swift, bass; Mitchell Kossak, keyboards; Dick Lourie, sax, trumpet; Reebee Garofalo, drums.

Partial Playlist first set
“Run Around Sue”
“Rockin’ Pneumonia”
“Come Go With Me”
“CC Rider”
“Kansas City”
“Let’s Do The Twist”
“I Know (you don’t love me any more)”
“Choo Choo Cha Boogie”

Photo: P. Tamburello

Arty Hill and The Long Gone Daddys: Honky Tonk Heaven

Arty Hill and The Long Gone Daddys
Sally O’Brien’s Bar and Grill
335 Somerville Avenue
Somerville, MA 02145
617-666-3589
Open 11 AM -1 AM
Here’s a clue about the vibe of this place - on the “music” tab of their site - that tells you all you need to know.
“NO COVER. Remember your bartender. We hope you dance.”

Question. What’s a remedy for these last dog days of summer, hot and humid, that are sucking the marrow out of Boston’s bones? If you pointed your pony over to Sally O’Brien’s in Somerville last night you’d have found an answer.

Honky Tonk and cold beer. Arty Hill and The Long Gone Daddys were in town for a night of light-hearted, story-telling, twangy, ultra danceable country western music.

Practitioners of the under-appreciated genre of Hill’s Honky Tonk style don’t get to town often. If you’re a dancer, you get ready to ride hard and get put away wet. If you’re a listener, you order a long neck Corona, pretend it’s Lone Star Beer -‘The National Beer of Texas’ - and feel like you’re in a Lone Star watering hole.

My friend Luster says this place and its music comes as close to Galveston as it gets around here - minus people packing guns in the pickup, attitude, and a reason to tell you to step outside. There is zippo pretension to this sweet pub.

Sally’s isn’t a far cry from the Cheers -Where Everybody Knows Your Name - kind of establishment. Friends hang out at the bar for solace, self-expression, and suds. The occasional loner watches a plasma TV on the wall behind the bar with the same sense of contentment he’d have in his living room, sort of like having company without needing to engage them in conversation.

And of course every night there’s the music and people who come here for the release. Short of confession, music is the best way to let go of your sins or at least forget them for a few hours. I guess we could rename this place Saint Sally’s of Somerville.

Arty Hill writes songs that mine heartbreak, longing, love lost, love found, and rowdy-fun-times that come across as two step operettas. You probably don’t have the twang but I’m betting you’ve felt the ups and downs Hill narrates in his three or four minute musical novellas. Hill’s covers of Hank Williams (“You Win Again” and “Lovesick Blues” complete with yodeling!) and Ray Price (“Crazy Arms”) underline how closely his own songs hew to the tradition set by the masters of the genre.

There’s an uncomplicated honesty in Hill’s honky tonk music. No bubble gum, no syrup, and, thank God, no string section - just straight-up intelligent lyrics. In case you’re wondering, this is not the high-pitched, nasal kind of singing and banjo music you heard on the soundtrack of Deliverance. Just Arty Hill on electric guitar, and the Daddys on a standup bass, drums, and a laptop steel. The chain without the saw.

Hill's well-crafted songs, from uptempo "It Ain't Workin'" to ballad "Hall Of Fame Of Nothin'," are layered with that gritty sense of playful energy and survival that make you tap your feet or take a sip out of that longneck in solidarity with the people he's singing about.

There were a bunch of dancers there last night who only sat down because Hill and The Long Gone Daddys took a set break. I was one of them. At the end of each dance, I had the choice of rushing back to write song titles and tidbits into my pad on the bar or staying out on the dance floor. Full reportage suffered a bit.

The term honky tonk, first used in print in an Oklahoma newspaper in 1894, referred to rough-around-the-edges establishments that offered alcoholic beverages, piano music and occasionally women plying the world’s oldest profession, to miners, cowboys, cattlemen, and laborers. The Galveston Daily News used the term honkatonk in 1892 to describe an establishment in Fort Worth. The music in these honkatonks was more upbeat than classic blues and was and still is rhythmically suited for dancing.

Honky Tonk music eventually influenced ragtime, boogie woogie, rock ‘n roll, hillbilly, country, and in turn was influenced by them. It's now in its present incarnation as western swing. You don’t have to be on a road trip through Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, Nebraska, or Montana to hear honky tonk influenced music these days. It seeps into country stations around America.

In case I haven’t made it abundantly clear, if you have a dancing bone in your body, it will begin keeping time when Hill and the Long Gone Daddys rev up the music. If you know how, you'll dance a Texas Two Step, or any kind of swing, or anything else you think you can imagine leading with a partner.

When I asked a woman who was swaying along with the music if she'd like to dance, she smiled, reached for my hand and said, "I don't know a thing about dancing, can we just make something up?" We did just fine, thank you very much, with a bunch of other happy dancers on the Persian rug sized dance floor at Sally O'Brien's last night.

And yes, Sally, I remembered the bartender.

The Long Gone Daddys (based in Baltimore, MD) who played tonight
Standup Bass - Steve Potter
Drummer - Ed Hough

Special guest
Mike Castellana of Framingham, MA, on pedal steel

PLAYLIST first set partial list
Unless noted as ballads, these were all country swing or two step songs  of varying tempos and singularly danceable to anything else you could make up on the dance floor.

“Living On The Road Again” Arty Hill original, uptempo
“Driftin’ In” Arty Hill original with lines like “Every bar’s a harbor when she comes driftin’ in…” mid tempo
“You Win Again” Hank Williams ballad
“White Lightning” ? not verified, uptempo with big time guitar and laptop steel
“Julie Don’t Get Married” slow tempo with Framingham’s Mike Castellana’s pedal steel wailingly weeping all the way through the lyrics like “Julie, wait for me because someday I’ll be free…”
“I’m Thinking It’s Better This Way” Arty Hill, mid tempo
“Church On Saturday Night” Arty  Hill original
“It Ain’t Workin’” Arty Hill uptempo original
“If You See Me Comin’ Around” Arty Hill original, uptempo
“Make My Wishful Thinking Come True”

Second Set: partial list
“Lovesick Blues” Hank Williams two-step with yodeling!
“Crazy Arms” Ray Price mid tempo
“Hall Of Fame Of Nothing” Arty Hill ballad
“It’s All Your Fault” Willie Nelson
“The Race Is On” Arty Hill
“Bar Of Gold” Arty Hill
“Me And My Glass Jaw” Arty Hill
================
The band played on but ptatlarge had an uncharacteristically early curfew.
Try going to http://www.artyhill.com/v3/ or
 http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/ahlonggonedaddys
to hear some audio clips

===============

To be investigated soon: “This place has the best burgers and fries around ” - from a regular patron, who spoke with great certainty.

The Crown Cafe: Belgian Waffle Alert

Crown Café
106 Main Street
Watertown, MA 02472
(617) 923-9219
Hours Monday - Sunday 6 a.m. - 3 p.m.

Waffle lovers, here’s an unassuming place for a very satisfying Belgian Waffle. The Crown Café in Watertown, MA.

The perfectly embossed, round, lightly browned, high-rise Belgian Waffle arrived with several thick twirls of fresh whipped cream and sliced fresh strawberries. The whipped cream was dusted with spice, just enough to give your taste buds a chance to register a familiar taste and another few moments of swirling it around your mouth before the light bulb registers and my dining companion blurts, “Cinnamon!” Subtle and satisfying.

The batter is home-made, says Owner Karren, native of Belmont and Armenia. This little place on Main Street is his first foray into the restaurant business as an owner. He’s been making a go of it for two and a half years, pretty good considering the economy and the competition in Watertown, which could easily be referred to as Dinertown.
.
The shy man’s gentle brown eyes light up as we tell him how utterly delicious the waffle tasted. When we comment on the rich taste of the syrup, he replies, “I make a mix of real maple syrup with commercial corn syrup.” My taste buds say he didn’t scrimp on the real McCoy.

My own plate of scrambled eggs, bacon, and home fries was unremarkable but I’ll return soon for the lentil soup and the falafel wrap with hummus, tomato, and lettuce on the daily special menu.

Allen Toussaint: New Orleans Roots, American Music

Allen Toussaint
Scullers Jazz Club
400 Soldiers Field Rd
Allston, MA 02134-1805
August 20, 2009

Allen Toussaint. You may not know his name. You know his music. Music that was born in New Orleans and grew up in America. 

Perhaps you’ve heard of The Pointer Sisters, Boz Scaggs, The Rolling Stones, Bonnie Raitt, Manhattan Transfer, Ringo Starr, Gladys Knight and the Pips, B.J. Thomas, Otis Redding, Little Feat, Three Dog Night, Jose Feliciano, Dr. John, Robert Palmer, Sam and Dave, Johnny Winter, The Judds, Lee Dorsey, Al Hirt, Aaron Neville, The Band, Warren Zevon, Irma Thomas, Alison Kraus and Robert Plant? They’ve recorded his songs.

Toussaint produced and arranged for Paul Simon, Patty LaBelle, Paul McCartney and Wings, Joe Cocker and Maria Muldaur traveled to New Orleans to record in Allen Toussaint’s studio.

I knew Toussaint’s name was long associated with New Orleans. I had no idea his musical footprint was so deep.

Last Thursday, Allen Toussaint graced Scullers Jazz Club with a performance that transcended music. A package of dignity, genius, and humanity, he can light up a place as small as Scullers or as big as a few acres at The New Orleans Jazz Fest.

Lights dim. To the stage walks a man in a dark suit, purple and black striped shirt, lavender and rose paisley tie and pocket square. Right away you see the man with the nappy grey hair and salt and pepper mustache isn’t afraid to mix and match in fashion or music.

“All my life I’ve waited for the red light to come on so I could play my music, ” he says after bantering with the audience over our Haavaad Yaad accents. He hasn’t been on stage for more than three minutes and he has us in the palms of his strong key-striding hands.

Toussaint opens with “There’s A Party Goin’ On” and by the time he gets to “You got nothin’ to lose but the blues…” his fingers have pounded or feathered practically every one of the 88 keys on the baby grand.

Toward the end of the song, Toussaint stops, grins impishly at the audience, and says “Your turn…” The surprised silence that ensued for three seconds was the last time this audience would be caught flat eared. “Well,” he says before the next song, “I heard a lot of silence out there when in was your turn.”

He launches into a medley of his songs beginning with “What’s Her Name.” Every time he pauses and nods our way, the audience roars, “What’s her name, what’s her name!” I’m not talking about a subdued, let’s be cool about this, effort, either. This was as unbuttoned Boston as I’ve ever heard. Toussaint kept it up during “Mother In Law” and ‘Working In A Coal Mine” and the Boomer to Slacker-aged salt and pepper audience nailed every chorus.

First, I had no idea he’d penned those songs (and most of the ones that followed) and second, I was blown away by the crowds unfettered collaboration. I mean you practically have to pay a Boston audience to participate in music of any sort.

Maybe part of it is that rollicking sound that’s been called a rhythm and blues rumba crossed with a second line parade. New Orleans’ French, Spanish, Cajun, Caribbean, African heritage is concentrated in Toussaint’s music and he spins it out in his musical centrifuge.

When Toussaint invites tenor saxman Amadee Castenell, a Katrina displaced New Orleans friend who now resides on the North Shore, to the stage for a soulful medley of  “Saint James Infirmary" (Anonymous), “Just Can’t Take It" (Toussaint), “Dirty Water" (Toussaint), and  “Riding On The City of New Orleans" (Steve Goodman), Castanell proves his New Orleans credentials are for real.

“Everything I Do Gonna Be Funky From Now On” (Toussaint) a swampy boogie rhythm ‘n bluesy song with lots of pedal morphed into quotes from Edelweiss, Chopin, a Christmas carol, show tunes, pop songs of his own, Grieg, to “Chattanooga Choo Choo’, “Tea for Two”, Jelly Roll Morton quotes, Irish jigs, Polish polkas -yes, polkas as in “Roll Out The Barrel”! - , “My Foolish Heart” with a New Orleans rumba tempo and back again to “Everything I Do Gonna Be Funky From Now On” all so fast your head hurts from trying to keep up and your jaw is slack with awe and your brain is slapping its knee in joy.

After that, Toussaint settles everybody down again with “So Far Away From Home,” Paul Simon's song built on the architecture of J. S. Bach.

Toussaint often pairs “We Are America, (unknown composer)” a history lesson wrapped in a ballad, with his original of “Yes We Can Can,” (and I couldn’t help thinking of Obama’s campaign slogan) and he does tonight. The piano bench may as well have been a pulpit. The man is preaching what he believes.

When he gets to “The Sweet Touch Of Love,” music used in hot Axe Body Wash commercials, you realize how deeply his music has penetrated the culture.

Toussaint’s “Get Out Of My Life Woman,” a hit by Lee Dorsey in 1966, re-recorded more times than any of his other songs, is an up-tempo song with echoes of Jelly Roll Morton, Scott Joplin, Professor Longhair and the steeped New Orleans tradition. Toussaint’s thin singing voice has never been his calling card but it delivers his songs with infectious energy.

What happened next is spellbinding, and it isn’t even music. Toussaint quietly talks us through a reverie, a tone poem, about childhood trips in which his father packs the family in a 1936 Buick for a trip to visit relatives far far out into the Louisiana countryside. Toussaint remembers his father saying, “You need to know where you came from so you know where you’re going.” His richly detailed, extended description of the trip is filled with a rootsy sense of place and of belonging.

I’ll bet Toussaint has played softly on the keys and retold this story a thousand times and I cant imagine it feeling any more authentic, heartfelt, and spontaneous than it does right now. By the time he sets to playing “Southern Nights,” the song it inspired, my companion is in tears. 

If you’re old enough, you might remember Joel Chandler’s "Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings" which Walt Disney made into the film “Song Of The South.” Toussaint’s final song, “Southern Nights,” is a true Song of the South. 

The audience is on its feet cheering. Toussaint shakes hands with patrons in the first row and doesn’t head back to the piano. Sustained cheering could not possibly have produced an encore that could top "Southern Nights". Allen Toussaint slowly exits the room, shaking hands all the way out.

One vignette: at the merchandise table, Mr. Toussaint, still perspiring, stood up from his chair every time a new person came up to ask him to sign an album or CD.

Like I said, dignity, genius, and humanity.
 

Toussaint's Southern Nights Tone Poem

Allen Toussaint
Scullers Jazz Club
400 Soldiers Field Rd
Allston, MA 02134-1805
August 20, 2009 

At the close of the raucous “Get Out Of My Life Woman,” approaching what I thought was the end of the set, Allen Toussaint began feathering the keys and talking softy. The room’s energy, having pegged the needle from the crowd’s lusty participation with the choruses of the last song, was brimming with energy.

Toussaint’s tone was reflective. It settled the room down as a parent would calm an excited child at the end of a long day. It took a moment to register that this was not Toussaint tossing off some patter. He’d begun to tell a story in which he spun specific childhood memories into an extended reverie, mesmerizing, deeply personal, about family trips deep into Louisiana sharecropper countryside.

What followed was what amounted to a tone poem filled with  love and a rootsy sense of place and belonging. I'll bet Toussaint has retold this story a thousand times and yet I cannot imagine it feeling any more heartfelt, spontaneous, and veined with pride as it was at that moment.  It really deserves to share a space on a future CD.

I began to scribble as fast as I could. I couldn’t write fast enough to get all the details but here’s what I got. Close your eyes and imagine this being told to you by a gentle man softly fingering the keys on a piano while unfolding a story that goes something like this…

“Sunday mornings my father
whose name was Clarence
would pack all of us
my mother Naomi Neville
my sister Joyce and my brother Benson
into the car
a 1935 Buick
'You need to know where you came from
so you know where you’re going…'
he would say to us

we drove on and on
past old weathered gray houses
unpainted, never new
close together
and as we drove farther and farther
into the country
the houses were farther and farther
apart

it seemed like every house had a porch
that seemed to wrap all around
each one
and people were sitting on the porches
sometimes waving
as we drove by

we saw cows, horses, chickens…
(he pauses)
with all their parts intact
wells with water in them
and frogs
and we’d finally get to our porch
all the uncles and aunties there
and cousins running out to greet us
and I’d listen to the language
of the old folks
the patois, the Creole so thick
I could barely understand it
(Toussaint mimicks some Creole conversation)
but
if I saw an eyebrow raise up
it meant I better listen because
it was going to be important

aunties on the porch
always wearing aprons
even to church
would pick you up and
hug you to their bosoms
and some of them were
quite well endowed
and I’d struggle to breathe
in the soft mass
with the scent of
talcum powder
maybe that’s where the expression
love you to death comes from
(Toussaint chuckles)

after eating we’d all sit on the front porch
the old folks told old stories
an auntie would say
I know that old John
died on his mule
but I heard him jabberin’ and cursin’ out in the dark last night
and an uncle would say
you must be hearin things
and she’d say well he say he gonna pay a visit to you next week
so you find out for youself
and over in the corner by the left side of the door
was the matriarch in her  chair
never talkin

once in a while she’d get real still
and we’d get to worrying
then slowly her arm would move and her hand would reach down
to the floor and she’d pick up a small bottle in a sack
bring it to her lips and slowly put it down
and we’d all breathe a sigh of relief

and I knew that I was in the right place
and everything important
in the world was right there
on that front porch
if there was something wrong with something
there was someone there who could fix it

it was dark out there at night
no light no electricity no gas to light anything inside or outside
and quiet
so very quiet outside
pitch black
but I knew that nothing would ever happen to me on that porch

when it was time to drive back home
I sat in the back seat
looking up at the only light
light that was coming down from the moon
as it filtered through the trees
that lined the road

the moonlight turned the leaves silver
and that’s where the next song comes from….”

He began to sing and play “Southern Nights.” I don’t think anyone in the audience could help but think of the ties that bind us, or we wish would bind us, to our kith and kin.

Southern Nights lyrics (written by Allen Toussaint in 1975, it sold over one million copies when country-pop singer Glenn Campbell covered it in 1977)

Southern nights
have you ever felt a southern night?
Free as a breeze
not to mention the trees
Whistling tunes that you know and love so.

Southern nights
just as good even when closed your eyes.
I apologize to anyone who can truly say
That he has found a better way

Southern skies
have you ever noticed southern skies?
It's precious beauty lies just beyond the eye.
It goes running through your soul
Like the stories told of old
Old man
he and his dog that walked the old land
Ev'ry flower touched his cold hand.
As he slowly walked by
weeping willows
Would cry for joy
Joy

Feel so good
feel so good
it's frigth'ning.
Wish I could,
stop this world from fighting.
La da da da da da la da da da da da da da da

Mysteries
like this and many others in the trees
Blow in the night
in the southern skies.

Southern nights
they feel so good it's fright'ning . . .
Wish I could stop this world from fighting
La da da da da da la da da da da da
da da da da da da da da da da da

The Family Jewels: Doo-Wop - Alive and Swell

The Family Jewels
Sally O'Brien's Bar and Grill
335 Somerville Ave.
Somerville, MA  0214
Monday August 10, 2009

If you’re of a certain age, listening to your first live Family Jewels concert can suck you down the rabbit hole and deposit you bam into the midst of memories of sock hops, Clearasil commercials and a type of mellifluous harmonic convergence that poured accelerants into adolescent firestorms that free-ranged through your smutty teenage one-track mind. We’re talking “Doo-Wop,” a style of music that style left a vapor trail that’s still visible. And in this case, audible.

Look in the right places and you can still find evidence of that glorious white contrail. Sally O’Brien’s was the right place last Monday and The Family Jewels band was flying high.

The vibe vivified memories of the Friday night Boys’ Club Dances in my hometown, boys on one side of the gym floor figuring out how, as damn cool as possible, to cross the no man’ land in the middle of the floor to ask a girl to dance, then figuring out exactly how close to dance the slow ones, many of them dreamy doo-wop songs that ionized hormones already in danger of exploding out of the dancers’ pores.

The 1950s was the music industry’s Big Bang. By the middle of the decade, one form of popular music was draining out of the country’s kitchen sink and other forms, like visitations from alien planets, used radio airwaves to penetrate the country’s homogenization shield with a mix of rootsy, country, rhythm ‘n bluesy, rockabilly sounds.

Gurgle, gurgle gurgle…Teresa Brewer, Perry Como, Nat King Cole, The Mills Brothers, Patti Page, hell, even Ol’Blue Eyes Himself began falling off the charts. Up into Billboard’s Top Ten floated unlikely artists like Billy Ward and His Dominoes (Sixty Minute Man, 1951), The Spaniels (Goodnight Sweetheart, It’s Time To Go, 1954), a supernova named Elvis Pressley in 1955,  Sam Cooke (You Send Me,1958), The Platters (Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, 1959).

Elvis Presley took the mix of gospel, rockabilly, rhythm and blues, he grew up with and went one way. Others, vocal groups primarily from big cities like New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Baltimore, and Los Angeles, added pop music, a cappella, ballads, jump blues and swing into an alchemy that threaded in and out of mainstream music from the 1950s to the early 1960s.

This would be the form of smooth, tight-harmony, vocal music called Doo-wop that had its roots in African American communities in the 1940s. The so-called “race music” bubbled through cracks in the mainstream around the time Elvis blew the hinges off the doors of popular American music.

If you want evidence of this peppery genre, there’s the Family Jewels fronted by vocalist Fred Griffeth. These guys channel close harmonied, dance friendly, heart-on-sleeve, neighborhood-boys-standing-on-the-street-corner music that’s at the heart of doo-wop.

By the time I reached Sally O’Brien’s at 8:07 PM, they’d just cranked into their first set and the dance floor was full. These five guys can sing as well as they play. Asa Brebner, guitar, Andrew Mazzone, bass, Steve Sadler, laptop steel, Kevin Shurtleff, drums, are all miked up and deep in harmony with an uptempo “Oh Gosh, Oh Gee.”

Griffeth is the impish spark. He growls, hoots, banters, and teases. Occasionally all you can see of him is the top of his straw snap-brim hat as he winds his way through the dance floor proclaiming, “Monday is the new Saturday night!”

 He’s been known to tap a guy on the shoulder to dance with a woman for a few bars then hop back to the bandstand for his turn at the mike. Nothing forced about it. His rich baritone would have put him at the center of any street corner doo-wop group of the fifties and features him as the gemstone in the Family Jewels setting.

Brebner and Mazzone first hooked up with Griffeth to play for a friend’s wedding in 1990. The show rocketed off so well that Griffeth founded a group called Blue Heaven which still plays locally.

The Family Jewels was born in the early 2000s. Brebner and Mazzone have a huge catalog of rhythm ‘n blues songs. Local laptop legend Steve Sadler and drummer Kevin (Spider) Shurtleff round out the group.

These guys are masters of their instruments but the Family Jewels' main focus is singing those harmonies together. Griffeth puts his own vocal stamp on the songs and The Family Jewels hand-delivers them with five-part harmonies loaded with raw zest and playful energy.

 “Our music has, over the past three or four years become a rich American gumbo of styles and I'm delighted. Sometimes the R&B numbers are more Rockabilly, the gospel tunes get that swampy New Orleans feel in them and the country oftentimes will swing into something jazzy and citified!” Griffeth says. That energy has deep roots.

Niche music, yes. Limited audience, maybe. But happy, rich and rootsy music, definitely.

For more info, check http://fredgriffeth.net/index.html
and click on “You’re So Fine”
http://www.asabrebner.net/index.html
http://www.myspace.com/familyjewelsboston

=======================
Partial Set List
Oh Gosh Oh Gee,  uptempo, sort of rockabilly
You're So Fine, mid tempo, swing or whatever you kind of dance you want
Why I Love That Girl,  uptempo swing
I Saw Her Standing On The Corner,  mid tempo swing or groove
Your Precious Love, ballad (Whew)
It's Time To Rock, Don't Let Go uptempo swing or whatever you kind of dance you want
Oh I Love You Forever, great ballad, Johnny Ace?
Pretty Little Girl ?
Crazy Little Mama, Come Knock Knock Knockin', uptempo swing
Yes Im A Fool Falling In Love With You, ballad i think,
Fine Wine, uptempo swing
Waa Waa Baby, I Aint Gonna Let You Go, uptempo swing

The Spot Café: Left Bank Meets Main Street

 

The Spot Café
385 Main Street
Watertown, MA 617-923-2339
Tues - Sun 7 AM - 3 PM
“Breakfast and Lunch, All Day”
Breakfast $4.95 - $7.95. Lunch $5.95 - $7.95, Lunch Special 1/2 sandwich, cup of soup $7.25, Soups, Muffins, and Crumbcakes all made from scratch

Whether a mom and pop operation, a one-man/woman show, or a whole family, there’s something special about an owner operated business. Teeny little Watertown, weighing in at just 4.2 square miles and 32.000 people, is a hotbed of familial entrepreneurship.

Marco Hanna, baseball cap perched on his head, is likely to pop out of the Spot Café’s kitchen anytime what’s on the grill can sizzle for a few minutes without his direct attention. His co-owner wife Suzan is in front, taking orders behind the café’s counter or circulating the tables in the jewel-box sized eatery.

When he strolls out, wiping his hands on his apron and says, “How did you like the food?” he means it. The man’s wide smile says it all. He loves what he does and he wants to be sure you approve of what comes out of his kitchen.

The trail leading to the hot grill in the Spot Café’s kitchen started in Egypt. But if the food wasn’t good, there wouldn’t be a story so let’s start with breakfast.

Eggs, Pancakes, Waffles, and French Toast - all good choices here. The omelets are generously proportioned.  Many of the egg dishes come with gently seasoned, well cooked home fries and choice of bacon, ham, or sausage. The bacon is crisply pressed and non-greasy. The three egg Tomato and Feta Omelet Breakfast is a tangy treat.

Want to eat and run? Try the Breakfast Omelet Sandwich (egg and cheese sandwich with choice of ham, bacon, or sausage served on breakfast roll, bagel, croissant, or toast) or the Breakfast Quickie (Swiss cheese and pastrami on your choice of bread). And if you’re with your non meat-eating aunt, there’s the Veggie Omelet.

Got an appetite, do you? The pancakes of the Pancake Breakfast are the size of the plate and come with ham, bacon, or sausage and home fries. The Belgian Waffles have some crunch on the outside and softness inside. If you’re in the mood for Buttermilk Pancakes, fire away.

Half a dozen salad plates are on the lunch menu but the best deal is the soup and half sandwich, the sandwiches ranging from turkey, prosciutto, pastrami, tuna salad, steak and cheese, and mozzarella. What lifts them out of mundane are the roasted red peppers, or baby greens, or fresh basil, or Dijon mustard, or other tasty ingredients.

A look into the pastry case is dangerous. Suzan, who earned a B.A. degree in Art at Cairo University, creates  edible beauty in the oven. She makes all the muffins, and, oh yes, three kinds of crumb cake, from scratch. The apple version I tried was covered with a warm layer of light-as-a-cloud whipped cream. The raspberry and blueberry cakes will have to wait till next time.

The bread here is magnifique and requires its own paragraph. Shipped from Au Pain Doré, an exclusive artisanal bakery in Montreal, the dough arrives frozen. The scrumptious bread loafs and baguettes and even the croissants are baked on the premises using doughs from Au Pain Doré.

The Spot Café has an owner/operator pedigree.  The Hanna’s bought the restaurant three years ago from the original owner, who had done a splendid job of designing the interior, choosing the furnishings, the art work hanging on the walls, the terrific paint scheme, and finding Au Pain Doré. The closely clustered ten-table, twenty seat café has the feel of the Left Bank.

And the feel of an American Dream that spanned three continents. Teenager Marco headed across the Mediterranean from Egypt to Zurich in 1974 and found work as a dishwasher.  His culinary fate may have been sealed when the owner one day asked if he wanted to work in the kitchen. He hasn’t been far from a kitchen ever since.

“There aren’t many things in life you can add to,” Marco says. “ l like to break recipes and with food, you can add something and see the results right away. If you write a book, you have to wait to see how many are sold. With food, you can make your own recipe and see right away on the face of your customer whether you succeeded or not.”

Marco leveraged his 1977 degree in Business Administration from Cairo University to open his first restaurant, a pizzeria in Rome in 1982. In 1990 (“right after the world cup,” he recalled), Marco returned to Egypt to be the camp superintendent for a construction company building a tunnel under the Suez Canal. From 1991 to 1997, he was in charge of the food operation feeding about 60 of the firm's ex-patriots. Imagine the creativity he needed to satisfy the palates of men and women from at least seven countries.

Married in Egypt in 1992, Marco and Suzan gathered their two children and emigrated to America on December 12, 1998.

These days, when Marco isn’t working nights as a cook at Boston College, he’s listening to classical music in the tiny kitchen and making sure he connects with the customers. The good comfort food makes a difference but so does the attention of the two owners, living the American Dream by satisfying the appetites the diners who find their way to this cozy little place on Main Street, USA.

Photos by Paul Tamburello

Aurélia’s Oratorio: A Contemporary Cirque Dazzles

This show is advertised for audiences from 8 to 100. The full house on July 22 hit the low range and a handful of patrons were within hailing distance of 100. If the volume of laughter and applause were any barometer of success, the sandaled, sundressed, straplessed, Bermuda shorted, business suited audience was tickled by the Oratorio’s illusions, dance, and acrobatics. This is no circus act. It is theater at its most imaginative, illusory, and sophisticated. A word for you… Go.

Aurélia’s Oratorio
Written and Directed by Victoria Thierée Chaplin
Starring Aurélia Thierrée, with Jaime Martinez
Loeb Drama Center, Brattle Street, Cambridge, MA 617-547-8300
http://www.amrep.org/2009/
Exclusive Return Engagement July 22 - August 2, 2009

So what the heck is Aurélia’s Oratorio? It’s hard to answer that question as you walk out of the Loeb Drama Center at the American Repertory Theater after witnessing this… this… highly refined theater experience. You’ve witnessed a heady mix of ancient theater arts - acrobatics, dance, comedy, aerial arts, and a load of illusions that made you think “Whaaaat?”  It’s like trying to explain a dream.

Everything is slightly - or mightily - out of whack. Kites fly people. Ice cream burns your mouth. People dance on their hands. Coat racks dance a merengué. Just about everything is topsy turvy upside down inside out right side down up sideways. And glorious.

In the place of dialogue and a story line were sound effects and music - gypsy jazz, French cabaret songs and accordion, classical, electronica, - perfectly matched to the core of whatever in a seventy-minute series of vignettes was being acted out.

Performer Aurélia Chaplin Thierrée has the timing, the sense of silent kinetic amimation of her grandfather, the Little Tramp himself. She projects volumes with tiny gestures. And oh, those big-as-saucer eyes that ought to get credit somewhere in the program for their skill at projecting wistfulness, bewilderment, surprise, or fear all the way to the back row of the theater.

Performed is too shabby a verb. Aurélia charms and delights us with her fluidity of movement whether dancing or floating high above the stage, an aerodynamic nymph soaring on swaths of ruby red velvet.

Writer and Director Victoria Thierrée Chaplin displays the meticulous attention to every teeny aspect of performance that her famous Poppa Charlie Chaplin invested in film productions that made him an icon of film history. Even the ruby textured stage curtains have choreographed roles.

The show opens with a worn wooden bureau at stage center. All of a sudden, a drawer mysteriously pops open, a hand appears from one drawer, a foot from another, then all sorts of things happen involving telephones, candles, flying lingerie, from any one of the nine drawers.

How on earth can someone contort herself to stick her head or limbs out of those drawers, And when Aurélia finally emerges after a few minutes of sleight of body tricks, she hauls a fake leg out of the bureau explaining some of the mystery.

The audience responds with laughter and applause. We were fooled and we loved it. Showing us how we were fooled added to the experience. How grand. Aurélia, and later Jaime Martinez, often make no effort to hide the conceit of the illusion then go right ahead and we fall for it hook, line, and sinker.

This show is lovingly put together. Aurélia’s mother, Victoria Thierrée Chaplin was inspired when she found medieval illustrations of just such topsy turvyness and decided to incorporate them into a ‘cirque,’ a contemporary form of theater art with ancient sensibility. The choices of music, the degree of luminousity that bathes the curtains and the performers, are perfectly attuned to each vignette.

Some of the conceits are so subtle it takes your brain a moment to see how you’re being fooled. You never know which part of the audience will get the joke first. More than once I heard a pair behind me tell each other what they just missed.

The dance piece in which Aurélia and Jaime Martinez squeeze into the same coat and pair of pants is the most clever and joyous tango I’ve ever seen. My brain watched them get into the clothing but my eyes kept getting fooled by the illusion. I loved it.

Moments of darkness and mystery give the show depth and range. A vignette with a lace monster is an elegy of longing, unrequited love and implacable fate (that’s my interpretation and I am certain others may analyze the vignette differently). A vignette with little puppets starts with a comic Punch and Judy show and devolves into something more like The Lord of the Flies.

These are the exceptions to an evening of stunning visual comedy and graceful animated movement. At some point in the show I guarantee you will spontaneously clap your hands together in chlldlike wonder at what you’ve just seen…or think you’ve just seen. Aurélia’s Oratorio is a chance to see an updated version of the kind of entertainment that’s been making us laugh for centuries.

Photos by Richard Haugton from the amrep web site.

Westport Friends Used Bookfair: Books Galore

CAPTION for photo appearing on Westport Shorelines edition July 22, 2009

The 48th Annual Friends Used Book Fair attracted hundreds of book lovers and bargain hunters at the Saturday July 11 event held in front of the Friends Meeting House on Main Road. Over 30,000 hardcover and paperback books were donated to the book fair. Volunteers began sorting, cataloguing, and pricing books last fall. “Books for next year began coming in today. We sort, price, and store books from September till just before the book fair,” Meeting Treasurer Deana Chase said as she surveyed the lines circulating around the 80 book-crammed tables under two huge yellow and white striped tents. The proceeds are used to maintain the Quaker property on Main Road and are used for “Benevolences ” - local causes or Quaker causes chosen by a committee. 

CJ Chenier: Zydeco Royalty Visits Johnny D's

CJ Chenier and The Red Hot Louisiana Band
Johnny D’s Uptown Restaurant
17 Holland Street, Somerville, MA 02144
First Set
July 16, 2009

When a lean, lanky black man wearing a two-piece magenta outfit and wielding an over-sized gleaming white accordion steps onto the stage, you can rightly expect the man has attitude to go along with the ensemble. If this apparition didn’t knock you out, the music was about to.

Straight outta Louisiana, CJ Chenier proceeded to light up the stage at Johnny D’s in Somerville last Thursday night. What his Red Hot Louisiana Band - washboard, percussion, guitars - lacked in their own colorful fashion statements they made up for in energy. They played in technicolor.

Know this about zydeco and Cajun music. It’s upbeat and infectious. Even when the songs are in Creole, jubilant or lachrymose, you understand the sentiment and feel compelled to dance to them - whether your’re wiggling in your chair or dancing jam packy on Johnny D’s little dance floor.

You sweat, you begin singing in Creole, you dance with every partner you can find. That ain’t hard because it seems like every zydeco fan in a hundred mile radius has shown up. They’re party people of the first order. The hell with the fact it’s a Thursday night - we’re talking CJ Chenier. We’re talkin’ zydeco  royalty.

Most of these zydecoholics will get home in the wee hours and show up late for work or on time and shuffle across the parking lot in a Chenier beat since the music has a shelf life of several days.

Another thing to know about zydeco and Cajun music. Zydeco is a syncopated eight-count partner dance with lots of room for improvisation and self-expression. You don’t have to be a champ to get out and dance to it. The beat is so insistent that you move with it, sort of like being in the second line in a New Orleans parade. I danced with two women who didn’t know zydeco from zabaglione. And we had fun.

 
Zydeco is a form of American roots music that evolved in southwest Louisiana in the early twentieth century. Accordion and washboard (Frottoir) were all that was needed to produce waltzes, two-steps, blues and rock and roll. Since then, drums, guitars, fiddles and such have been added to the bands but the tang of Louisiana is at the core of the music,
 
The bang tonight comes from the guy with the big grin, one gold tooth prominently glinting in the spotlight as he sings and shouts out to the crowd. CJ (Clayton Joseph) is the Creole son of the late Grammy Award winning Louisiana musician Clifton Chenier, the man who brought zydeco from rural Opelousas, LA to nationally broadcast programs on PBS.

Before accepting his father’s 1978 offer to join him, CJ spent his early years in Port Arthur, TX playing his saxophone to everything from James Brown to John Coltrane to Motown. By the time he took over for his ailing father in 1985, he’d learned accordion. He can squeeze the daylights out of it for a joyous two-step and caress it slowly for a hold-on-tight smoky blues number.

The next time the little 300 capacity Johnny Ds wants to fill the house, all they’ve got to do is invite CJ Chenier and the Red Hot Louisiana Band. The local zydeco community, along with people who just want to ‘laissez les bon temp roulez,” will do the rest.

Westport Friends 48th Annual Used Book Fair

Glorious sunshine reflecting off two huge gold and white striped tents set up in front of the Westport Friends Meeting (Quaker) House on Main Road acted as a homing beacon for hundreds of book lovers from all over the region. The highly anticipated 48th Annual Used Book Fair opened for a two week run at precisely 11:00 AM on Saturday, July 11.

By 10:45, book lovers of every age and description surrounded the tents. A few tantalizing feet away and cordoned off by a yellow rope lay the objects of their desires - large folding tables jam packed with paperbacks and hardcover books of every category.

Enthusiasts behind the ropes craned their necks to focus on titles of books an arm’s reach away to see if they could make out books they might pounce on at the opening.

At the two minute warning, several mothers were seen moving their small children back a pace or two, not wanting to watch them get swept into the sea of books when the crowd surged in. At the blast of a shrill whistle, the yellow ropes surrounding the tents were dropped and a cheering throng descended upon the tables like locusts.

The book sale is one of the biggest on the south coast. “We took in over 35,000 books,” Westport Meeting Treasurer Deana Chase said. “We begin sorting in September and continue through the year. Books are sorted, catalogued, priced individually and stored in cartons. Books are culled if they’re moldy or in poor condition,” Ms. Chase said. The 190-year-old Meeting House was filled with children’s books and the Macomber Community House with overflow from the two tents outside.

A staggering 30,000 books were up for grabs at bargain basement prices. Many hardcover books were priced a tenth of retail cost. Better books were priced at bargain rates, some paperbacks were six for a dollar. Categories ranged from novels and literature, to history, romance, mystery, humor, science fiction, philosophy, reference, cookbooks, large format books, and the newest category, self-help.

Lousy economy or not, people don’t want to pass up good deals. Jolly volunteers hand out paper bags and cartons. Patrons fill them up with gusto. Some fetch an armload and head for home. Many find a place to sit outside the tent and sort through the booty for keepers then return unwanted books back to the table.

“It all started out in 1962 when we needed to raise money to fix a leaky roof at the parsonage across the street,” Dr. Stuart Kirkaldy said. He should know. He was there then and has been at just about every one since. “Our student pastor John Ruth, who’s quite a bibliophile, suggested we organize a book sale to help pay the roofing bill. We raised $410, and fixed the roof.”

Encouraged by the amount of books people donated (and the first year help from the Odd Fellows Library in New Bedford), the committee decided to reprise the book sale.

“John Ruth came up from his parsonage in King of Prussia, PA, to help us price the books. One day, in a calm voice and with perfectly neutral expression, he handed me a book and said, ‘You may want to keep this one. It’s a first edition of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.’ “

If there were any doubts whether the book sale would become an annual event, they were dismissed that day. A reputable book dealer paid $425 dollars for the book.

Over the next thirteen years, the book sale was held on the second Saturday in July. No tent, rain or shine. The volume of books donated and the crowds attending grew exponentially. By the fourteenth year 1974, the committee rented tents and extended the sale. Today’s sale featured eighty tables packed with books, a long way from the dozen or so tables for the first events.

“The money we take in helps to maintain the Meeting House and grounds and for what we call “Benevolences,” contributions to local or Quaker causes we identify,” Dr. Kirkaldy said. Although he lives in Middlebury, VT, the venerable retired Westport physician is a fixture at every year’s fair.

“No one likes to throw away books,” a Dartmouth resident and Westport Meeting member for twenty years Gretchen Baker-Smith said, “ so they all bring them here.”  

And on the second Saturday of every year grateful book lovers from miles around rejoice at this “Friendly” tradition.

PHOTOS by Paul Tamburello

Jimmy Heath: Still Bopping at 82

Jimmy Heath Quartet
Scullers Jazz Club
September 20, 2009
(This review was completed on an airplane to France, mis-filed in LaptopLand, now belatedly published)
Second set

It is quite possible that Jimmy Heath and his brother Tootie have been playing jazz more years than you’ve been alive. Good jazz. On their own or with some of the giants of the twentieth century.

To applause of the full house at the second set at Scullers Jazz Club, here saunter two guys in their late twenties/early thirties, one very spry octogenarian and his 74 year old brother. This is the quartet Jimmy Heath’s been on tour with lately. If you’ve paid any kind of attention to jazz in the past half dozen decades, you know the Heath name.

Jimmy announces he’ll open with a piece from Ferde Grofé’s Grand Canyon suite. “It used to be the theme song of a smoking advertisement. Smoking went out of style but this song is still a happening thing,” he deadpans. Well, it’s happening in a way that you recognize for the first few bars then Jimmy takes his well-worn sax and explores trails into the musical canyon that most musicians couldn’t find with a compass.

The man still loves his music and the business of making it. Big smile as he steps back after his solo to enjoy what the others in the quartet have to say. The brown sport coat he wears fits a little loosely as clothes tend to do as our frames retreat as our age advances. Tootie, in the corner right behind his older brother, sits regally at his drum set as if it were a throne. He sports a red bow tie, white shirt and dark suit - a fashion statement you won’t miss from the back row of Scullers, where I happened to be sitting.

Jeb Patton, whom Jimmy gleefully calls “General” Patton, at keyboard sets expectations for rest of the night high with a wildly imaginative solo and opens the door for standup bass player Corcoran Holt to let it out. By the time what Grofé originally wrote has been genetically altered and returned to its original shape, you figure you’re in for a night of traditional jazz with a distinctively hard bop edge to it. And you get it.

Sometimes Jimmy announces his choice of music, sometimes he doesn’t, which accounts for the sparse documentation below.

The young Turks are on piano and bass. Piano player Patton’s been with Jimmy since he graduated with master’s degree from Queen’s College in Brooklyn, where Jimmy taught music before he retired and took Patton with him on tour. Holt, another protégé, came along later. Jimmy Heath clearly relishes sharing the stage with these two ‘youngsters,’ mindful they’re a living trust that will carry his musical soul well into the twenty first century.

A Billy Strayhorn number is Exhibit A for why Heath was so impressed with Patton. He plays the lovely ballad with light flourishes up and down the keyboard that often stop on a dime and float into keening emotional passages. A whiff of Bill Evans in a melancholy mood, perhaps, but this is all Patton’s signature.  Patton plays with this with elegant, moody restraint.

Heath announces the next song as “Everything Happens To Me,”  Corcoran Holt’s time to shine. Holt bows the ballad with supple tone with Tootie rustling the brushes in accompaniment. Starkly beautiful.

OK, satisfied that we know the quartet can knock mellow out of the park, it’s time for more bop. ’Invitation” jolts the club with up-tempo speedball solos all around. Tootie is tatting expressively. “Invitation” is taken for a wild ride and left at the curb to catch its breath.

Time to slow down again. Jimmy picks up his soprano sax and floats a lovely ballad, Tootie playing just underneath him. Jimmy switches to tenor and the quartet swings with a classic solo swapping finish

Next it’s Tootie Time - a solo with mallets and brushes that percuss muffled thunder off every touchable surface on the man’s drum kit. Halfway through, he gets an idea, holsters the mallets and finds more places to make the drum set talk by using his big hands and fists. By the time “General” Patton gets his solo, it turns into a boogie and stride piano, bass player Holt fingers up and down the neck of his standup bass with nimble speed. Quite a jaunt.

Jimmy announces the last number as “Soul Eyes,” a mid-tempo Mal Waldren composition that goes down real easy. What also goes down so well is watching a legend at work. Jimmy, and Tootie for that matter, have stood on stages all over the world, Jimmy’s 1948 band in Philadelphia included John Coltrane and Benny Golson. He’s played with Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Gil Evans, Art Farmer, and Milt Jackson.

There he is, looking out at the audience over his gold rimmed glasses to see who’s listening out there just beyond the lights of Scullers small stage.  Judging by the twinkle in his eye and the way he listens to Patton, Holt, and his brother, smiling when he hears a new wrinkle in a solo, you’d swear he was just starting out on his career.

 Photo from Jimmy Heath's web site

Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans by Dan Baum

New Orleans is the most enigmatic of American cities, a city in which a stew of culture and cronyism, music and mayhem, racism and revelry, politics and populism, hang out on the city's laundry line for all to see.

The city and its residents are not malleable - but they are durable. Every strata of the population seems to possess a fierce loyalty to 'their own.' After Katrina, author Dan Baum was overcome by the stories of New Orleans residents of every level.

By the time he'd interviewed and drank beers with these people, Baum knew a series of stories in the New Yorker wouldn't be enough. He needed to write a book. Whether New Orleans can revive itself is an open question. By the time you finish this book, you'll care if it succeeds.

Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans -
The Hidden History of a Beloved and Haunted City Told Through The Intersecting Lives Of Nine Remarkable Characters

by Dan Baum

We all know that hurricanes can swallow up New Orleans. What we don’t know, unless we’ve been there, is that New Orleans can swallow up reporters. The New Yorker sent Dan Baum to New Orleans to write about the effect Katrina had upon its residents.

In the course of interviewing scores of people, Baum got into the crosshairs of a benign Crescent City voodoo. He and his wife moved to New Orleans for several months in 2007 to complete interviewing, researching and breathing the air of the city as it began to put its lipstick back on and look for the next party.

Contradictions in New Orleans are as thick as shrimp in gumbo. Baum began to grasp how on earth New Orleanians can accept a culture in which corruption and bureaucracies filled with incompetents are the order of the day.

In the preface to Nine Lives, Death and Life in New Orleans, Baum writes,” Stop thinking about New Orleans as the worst-organized city in the United States and start thinking of it as the best-organized city in the Caribbean.”

While he doesn’t downplay the poverty, lethal crime, drugs, police brutality, he begins to see another face of the city, an attitude that is steeped in but transcends the food, architecture, and music. It’s a story of everyday people who ended up in extraordinary circumstances after Katrina - people including a millionaire Mardi Gras kingpin from the white Garden District, a retired streetcar repairman from the Ninth Ward, a transsexual from St. Claude Avenue, a trumpet playing coroner, a white policeman from Lakeview, a high school band leader who treats the kids as if they were his own, and a bad luck black ex-con from the Goose, a poor neighborhood on the outskirts of town.

They willingly, perhaps gratefully, sat with Baum while he collected bits and pieces of their lives that became part of the book.  As Baum found out, New Orleanians are not linear storytellers. The result is a kaleidoscopic tale, told through the eyes of nine characters, that covers the fifty years from hurricane Betsy to Hurricane Katrina. It takes an effort to keep all the characters straight, but over time they satisfyingly drifted into sharper focus.

It’s a tribute to Baum that he found enough specks of universal humanity in each of their stories to make us care about each of them and root for them to reconnect with their lives in the months after Katrina annihilated what they called home.

The nine main characters identified friends, relatives, and associates whom Baum and his wife interviewed for relevant background. They conducted nearly one hundred interviews and amassed over one million words that they boiled down to the final 120,000-word text. A four-page appendix lists every character interviewed and the dates of interviews. The book is massively authentic.

If you keep turning the barrel of a kaleidoscope long enough, similar patterns emerge. The thread that ties together all of the characters, regardless of race, social class, gender is that they all felt a connection, by blood, friendship, or profession, to “their people” - they didn’t always agree with them but they stood by them through thick and thin.

I spent two weeks in New Orleans and southwest Louisiana last August writing publicity material for an October “Help Re-Build New Orleans” Fund Raiser that was hosted in Boston.  Proceeds of the event were donated to Common Ground Relief, a non-profit group that organized volunteers to rebuild houses in the Lower Ninth Ward.

“The house we’re sitting in was covered in 18 feet of water for 3 weeks. Every single-story house around here was under water,” Thom Pepper, the Operations Director of Common Ground Relief said in his "office," a cramped storage room in a rebuilt house on Deslonde Street. You could count on one hand the original houses still standing on that street.

Looking two hundred yards behind Common Ground Relief’s headquarters, I saw where the barge pierced the levee in the Industrial canal, the gobbled up houses filled with vines and festooned with disgorged refrigerators and dinner plates, and blank slabs of concrete where houses had gone AWOL - floated away or obliterated by the surge from the breach. Eighty percent of the Ninth was under at least 6 feet of water. For months.

The divides in the city, cultural, racial, and geographic, are real. There are wards of the city in which I would have felt like an intruder. But I know that inside those neighborhoods were people like the people I "met" in Nine Lives, people whose stories are the fabric of this city.

Baum’s book is not a polemic or prescriptive. It is a close to the ground story of people who make the city what it is, a city acutely aware of its shortcomings and its past and one that prefers to live in the moment.

Photos

1. (Top) Screen saver in Common Ground Relief office on Deslonde Street, Lower Ninth Ward, New Orleans, in August, 2008

2 and 3: by Paul Tamburello, Deslonde Street 2008, Lower Ninth Ward,  New Orleans