DebThink: The Joy of Jazz Fest II

Books

Ann Patchett: State of Wonder
An anaconda almost squeezes the life out of an adorable, deaf indigenous boy; an ornery pregnant 73 year-old (yes, that's part of the tale) scientist prepares to pass on her legacy; and a middle-aged lipid researcher licks tree bark to maintain her fertility. These odd folks, living near the indigenous Lakashi and a grove of magic mushrooms, grope toward human connection deep inside the Amazon. Easter, the deaf boy saved from his cannibalistic Hummoca tribe, and Anders, the researcher whose mysterious death sets the narrative in motion, seem like the only likeable characters in this tale. Dr. Marina Singh and Dr. Annick Swenson are two of the most odd and least sympathetic female protagonists we have encountered in recent fiction. Yet Ann Patchett snares us into their entwining lives like the vines that choke the unrestrained vegetation they hack through in order to do their work. Her narrative skill is so great that not only did I have the sensual experience of getting lost in the jungle, I developed empathy for these two women. The reader has to remain in a state of wonder to believe the implausible ending, but it is a fairy tale anyway, so why not suspend disbelief for pure narrative pleasure? I do love Ann Patchett's writing and was hungry for a new novel. Nevertheless, Bel Canto remains my favorite, with The Magician's Assistant a close second. You will have to make your own decision about whether to invest in reading these 350 pages.
Emmanuel Jal: War Child: A Child Soldier's Story
Emmanuel Jal brings a creative new voice to the growing genre of former child soldier memoirs, weaving in the role of music in his life. He recounts in riveting detail the first attacks on his village in Sudan, his father's "enlistment" of him with Sudanese rebels, the hardening of his heart to death and killing, fleeting friendships, forced marches, starvation, and revelation in the desert. Having read a number of similar stories, what I liked best about this one were his unadorned descriptions of how music and spiritual belief sustained him. He does not romanticize any aspect of his life story and claims his own ambiguities, doubts, regrets and struggles. Knowing now that South Sudan has finally gained its independence makes reading about the sacrifices one young soldier made in the 1990s even more poignant.
Francine Prose: Caravaggio: Painter of Miracles (Eminent Lives)
As bold in voice as her subject was provocative in art, Francine Prose's brief biography of Caravaggio enlightens, seduces, and delights. She deftly provides artistic and historic context with the right fact, anecdote or image. The reader can smell the streets and feel the hot-headed artist's blood boil when he fails to get the recognition he deserves. The artist and writer share sensitivity, passion, and absolute fidelity to a realist aesthetic.
Timothy Snyder: Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin
This book grabs you by the throat and confronts you with stunning facts that turn Holocaust historiography on its head. In fact, Snyder forces several cognitive shifts by coining the term "Bloodlands" to describe the region where both Nazi and Soviet crimes of mass murder occurred in the same period (1933-1945). He places the murder of 6 million Jews in a larger context of mass murders, neither denying nor reifying the uniqueness of the racial murder of the Jewish people. He documents that the Nazis murdered more Jews with a shot to the head over ditches in occupied Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus than in Auschwitz and other killing sites. He illuminates the dialectical relationship of Nazi and Stalinist policy. These shifts force us to think regionally and holistically, rather than, as Synder suggests, allowing this history to be hijacked for individual nationalist purposes--country by country, ideology by ideology. Extremely well-written with crisp chapter-openings and sweeping synthesis, "Bloodlands" is almost impossible to put down. That is until you get to descriptions of intra-familial cannibalism during the Soviet's forced starvation of three million Ukrainians. What does it mean that the Nazi and Stalinist regimes murdered 14 million noncombatants in 12 years? Snyder insists on the individual humanity of each of these 14 million people, citing victims' last documents to bring their voices to life. As an American Jew, the Holocaust history I learned consisted of "Arbeit Mach Frei" ("work makes you free" on the gates to Auschwitz) and the guilt-inducing "never again." Then I worked for a decade in post-soviet space, desperately trying to understand the region's history without the taint of cold war historiography. It was as if the two most critical histories of the 20th century ran parallel to each other. Timothy Snyder has healed my cognitive dissonance and judging by the book's surprising success, we all may just learn a few salient lesson's from the 20th century.
Mary Johnson: An Unquenchable Thirst: Following Mother Teresa in Search of Love, Service, and an Authentic Life
As a secular Jewish girl growing up in 1960s Brooklyn, I was fascinated by the nuns who swooped into our public school class on Wednesday afternoons to gather Catholic students for two hours of weekly religious instruction. The Dominican Sisters of the Congregation of Our Lady of the Rosary of Sparkill, New York ran St. Edmunds, a gothic church and girls prep school plunked down in a middle-class Jewish and Italian neighborhood. The austere majesty of the nun’s black habits and wimples convinced me they were teaching my classmates esoteric things and I felt envious. With her powerful and compulsively readable new book about her 20 years with Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity, Mary Johnson has satisfied my own unquenchable thirst to lift the veil and see how nuns really live. Although I was always frankly a bit suspicious of Mother Teresa and annoyed at her position on abortion, I was shocked at the life she created for her nuns. The order’s near-medieval austerities included self-flagellation, severe prohibitions against any human touch, rigidly controlled daily schedules, eating what the poor ate, and physically hard labor. Poignantly portrayed is19-year old Mary’s yearning to create a pure, authentic, and meaningful life by serving the poor. She joined the order in 1977, the same year I started down a parallel secular path—to make the world more just by working for women’s rights. The grand goals and culture of the 1960s were gone and it was hard for intelligent, strong-willed young women to know how to contribute. I identified with her desire for ideological purity and a totalizing living experience that embodied one’s values. Mary went through a rigorous process to become Sister Donata. A very spiritual person with insuppressible leadership qualities, when she follows her instincts for compassion or right action, she invariably breaks the rules and takes the punishment. Heartbreaking is her belief that she is not working hard enough to be a good sister. She constantly tries to be obedient but cannot eliminate her critical thinking. Her attempts to subtly reform the order’s foundational text and internal politics are inspiring and doomed. The sexually naïve Sister Donata also has confusing connections with a predatory lesbian nun and her own caring confessor, Father Tom. She is courageous and honest in portraying these relationships as well as taking the difficult step of demystifying Mother Teresa and her Sisters. Ultimately it is love that propels Sister Donata out of the order—not specific love of one person, but love of life and freedom. I highly recommend this intimate, multi-layered portrait of a woman’s life—it will be released in mid-August 2011. As a writer and one of the founders of AROHO—A Room of Her Own Foundation, perhaps Mary Johnson has found her current vocation in encouraging all women to write and tell their truths.
Lynn Nottage: Ruined
Lynn Notage won a Pulitizer Prize for her play based on interviews she conducted with Congolese women in eastern DRC and Uganda. Set in a mining town in the Ituri rain forest, the story gives agency to women survivors of sexual violence. With tough love, brothel owner Mama Nadi shelters the tragic young women who work for her. Impertinent Josephine waits to be rescued by her Lebanese merchant client. Salima's rebel husband returns to make amends for rejecting her after her sexual violation but it is too late. Sensitive, beautiful, and educated Sophie is "ruined" so she cannot service men. The ability of Mama Nadi and the girls to shelter Sophie seems contrived. Mama Nadi inevitably gets caught in a vise grip between the rebels and government troops. This plot crisis best captures the overall DRC conflict with its complex cycles of violence, revenge, and side-switching. At the play's end, Mama Nadi takes a well-deserved chance at personal happiness, but like the play itself, it seems a bit too good to be true.
Paul Auster: Sunset Park: A Novel
With his crisp, disconsolate sentences, Paul Auster portrays our collective brokenness through the stories of four lost young squatters in Sunset Park, a liminal neighborhood below Park Slope, soon to be inhabited--inevitably, inexorably from the Brooklyn real estate point of view--by those who can no longer afford this precious privileged village or those who can no longer stand the entitled strollers on Seventh Avenue. Auster reminds us that as the oblivious breeders carry on, many of their socioeconomic brethren are suffering in the country's crisis of money, meaning, and mobility. Miles Heller, the book's protagonist, sends himself into an exile of underachievement after a juvenile act ends in unintended tragedy. His parents and step-parents represent the creative and thinking professions sputtering to survive in a sorrowful era gone out of control--an actress, an academic, a book publisher, and a documentary filmmaker. When his mother asks why he embarked on his 7-year exile, Miles says he wanted to become a better person, "got addicted to the struggle," and forgot "why I was doing it any more." Does this represent the exhaustion of the Boomers' quest for self-knowledge and enlightment? With "Sunset Park," Auster proclaims 2010 the Year of Ennui. Rendered with accuracy and sensitivity, the quartet of primary characters in their late 20s clutch at art, sexuality, and relationships to grab onto meaning. The only hopeful character in the novel is the luminous Cuban-American Floridian, Pilar--a smart, sensitive high school student who represents the future's untapped potential.
Lan Samantha Chang: All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost: A Novel
This graceful metanarrative about writing, choice, loss, and life lulls us into caring about seemingly unlikeable characters--the icy poet/professor Miranda; the handsome, arrogant student Roman; and his friend, the humble ascetic poet Bernard. Chang, director of the Iowa Workshop, courageously portrays the treacheries of seeking professional success through art. Like Franzen, she carries us through melancholy and comes out--clear-eyed-- on the side of love and loyalty. Chang writes of the reunion of now middle-aged grad school friends: "Bernard, at 48, was as good as a stranger, but at the mere sight of him Roman became aware of the compendium of his own life, organized by time as if in separate rooms of a house, precious items left to gather dust along with the clutter of years. A door had opened, old possessions uncovered, a part of himself." While enjoying the trappings of his compromised "success," Roman constantly thinks of Bernard, writing poetry in his bare studio apartment. "More than once, while be driven along some unfamiliar highway somewhere in the middle of the continent, he recalled images from Bernard's manuscript: the delicate, pale light of the north, the sky coruscating with migrating birds, the green earth sloping, tumbling down to the great river." Authenticity triumphs quietly over regret in this beautiful novel.
Jonathan Franzen: Freedom: A Novel
Damn that Oprah for hyping this book before I had a chance to love it just for itself. It's been a long time since I've stayed up late inhaling chunks of a narrative. I kept trying to resist this 562-page juggernaut because Franzen was everywhere. But the man deserves all the accolades he is getting plus my own gratitude. This is the first novel I've read that captures the slow drip moral water torture of coming to adulthood alongside the Reagan Revolution. Talkin' about my generation. Just a few simple (ha) characters--the protagonist Walter Berglund, a very decent man; his co-protagonist and wife Patty; and his best friend and foil, the bad boy rocker Richard Katz who "bore a strong resemblance" to Muammar el-Qaddafi. This was one of many times I just laughed out loud and would have high-fived Franzen if he had been in the room. Was there a resonance with my own absurd obsession with the anti-communist, Heritage Fund-backed Angolan rebel leader Jonas Savimbi--just because his name, often in the news, rolled trippingly off the tongue? Franzen peppers the book with a million references that resonate with our disconnected, disenfranchised, disenchanted post-baby-boom generation: a wedding at Mohonk Mountain House; Walter's dylanesque roots in Hibbing; Patty's New York Jewish shrewish feminist politician mother; young East Asian reformer Lalitha's deadly earnestness, and so many others. My own, admittedly perverse, subjective favorite detail was the name of a band: Tutsi Picnic. I howled, my decade of human rights work threatening to go the way of Walter's morally compromised environmental stewardship. There were just a few distracting didactic sections. Franzen should have trusted the reader to understand how all this culminated in the catastrophe that was George W. Bush. He captured the zeitgeist as one long, slow demoralization/ennervation. The women characters were astonishingly well-drawn. Patty's wry autobiography, which moves much of the plot forward, is emotionally authentic. Male and female characters combine strength and sensitivity, including the interesting permutations of the next generation. Walter and Patty's Republican capitalist son (worst nightmare) displays emotional generosity and protectiveness toward his complex, tortured parents. Those of us who decided not to be yuppies tried so hard to be good. The more we tried, the worse the world got. It was scary to start missing the original tricky Dick--we'd trade him in a second for the evil Cheney. After a while, Walter and Patty got tired of being good. To their children's horror, they rebelled--and suffered for it. Franzen proved his genius by carrying the reader to what could have been a saccharine ending--and wringing just the slightest bit of hope and redemption out of many betrayals--large and small.
Cathleen Schine: The Three Weissmanns of Westport: A Novel
Like "Sex and the City" for the female intelligentsia, this novel is a perfect evocation of the collective existential crisis of three female Weissmans--two sisters and their mother. When the father takes off with a younger woman, the three women go into a tailspin based on their individual circumstances, but they try to weather it together. They move into the funky summer cottage of Cousin Lou, a holocaust survivor and successful businessman, whom Cathleen Schine imbues with all the infuriating and adorable characteristics of the quintessential Jewish relative. Living together for the first time since the girls' childhood, the three women grieve and survive and try to reconstitute themselves. Betty, the mother, has the greatest struggle because she has never had to take care of herself before. High-powered Miranda nixes the melodrama and softens up. Overly-serious Annie finally stops taking care of everyone long enough to recognize her own needs. This sweet and sour novel is both tender and agonizingly real. Cathleen Schine brings this early 21st century female world of love and ritual to life with enormous skill. A great summer read.
Lucette Lagnado: The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: My Family's Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World
Though we were female Jewish teenagers in Brooklyn at approximately the same time, Lucette Lagnado and I could not have had a more different life experience. Born into a large elite traditional Jewish family in Egypt (with roots in Aleppo, Syria), Lagnado writes lovingly of the world she and her family left behind when they fled the Nasser regime's increasingly hostile environment in the early 60s. She writes evocatively and lovingly about her father's fall from life as a man about Cairo in his white sharkskin suit to the humiliations of immigrant life, misunderstood even by well-meaning Ashkenazi Jews in Bensonhurst. Lagnado's greatest achievement is portraying the relationship between her father's touching piety and his utter willfulness as a traditional family patriarch desperately trying to protect his family against many odds, including illness. It helped me better understand the world my Uncle Sam Gindi grew up in. I'm proud to know him as the black sheep of the wealthy Gindi clan--who was shunned for choosing to marry outside the clan for love; my Aunt Dottie was neither Syrian nor wealthy. The reader cannot fail to be swept along with Lagnado's rich, mesmerizing, heartbreaking, and redemptive journey. A very compelling read, highly recommended.
Achy Obejas: Ruins
This slim and suspenseful novel has a great deal of heart. The deceptively simple narrative conveys the dawning of post-communist disillusionment in Cuba when the second great wave of immigrants took to their flimsy rafts while the U.S. prepared to invade Haiti to reinstall Aristide. It was particularly poignant to read this book in the Caribbean, just six days after the earthquake decimated Haiti. Usnavy, the protagonist, a tender and ideologically naive veteran of the revolution, is drawn toward his own destruction by the siren song of early capitalism. He engages in trade purely to make life a little easier for his beloved wife and daughter. A number of historical threads are woven throughout the book, including a surprising encounter with a highly-skilled crafts tradition maintained by Jews. Having spent ten years working in early post-soviet societies, I had both sympathy and dread for the few remaining idealists in this lovely, sad story. They/we are an endangered species today under all types of political regimes.
Colum McCann: Let the Great World Spin: A Novel
For a tale that winds around one act of extreme hubris, this novel is as pure and still as Philip Petit up on that wire. Yet the story is full of the brio and energy that is New York. We taste the grit in our teeth, cram against each other in collective craning bliss, and revel in the fact that a hundred stories can emerge from each subway car. The narrative follows the inter-twined lives of a diverse set of 1970s New Yorkers: an Irish hippie priest and his brother, a mother daughter hooker duo, an artsy heiress, four mothers grieving their sons lost in Vietnam, a Jewish judge, and the omnipresent cops, doormen, and hack drivers whose subjectivity we rarely pause to recognize. But the main protagonist is New York City, in all its noisy, smelly, crazy beauty. I understand why September 11 might have catalyzed this novel, but it’s beside the point. Colum McCann’s lush writing would help non-New Yorkers understand our fierce love of this city even if that world-changing event had never happened. Coming to care about his characters heightens my own 70s memories: my father making whiskey sours for backyard barbecues; watching the Watergate hearings with my mother as she reviled Richard Nixon; my constantly stoned homeroom teacher; the thrilling terror I felt driving past the Son of Sam murder sites; thousands of gay men dancing to Gloria Gaynor on the Christopher Street pier; driving to high school so we could dash over to Nathan’s for lunch. Pivoting his narrative around the events of one day, Colum McCann illuminates the lovely density that could characterize any day in the city.
William Zinsser: On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction
This book is a writing-coach-in-a-box. William Zinsser has a calming effect and offers some very useful suggestions to enhance one's writing practice. He demystifies the life of a working writer in encouraging ways, while at the same time revealing with warm humor why the path is so challenging. I wanted to hug this book and thank William Zinsser personally. I'll probably have to get in line with the one million people who bought this book in the last 30 years. Zinsser will write a corny line like the one that precedes this sentence if it conveys his mood and meaning. He models comfort in his own voice and that's a gift.
Monique Truong: The Book of Salt: A Novel
Written from the perspective of Binh, the saucy Vietnamese cook of Gertrude Stein and Alice B, this delightful novel allows the reader to indulge in the sensual pleasures of 1930s Paris. As someone who could care less about the cooking of food and its related movements--slow, fast, meandering, etc. what I found most enjoyable were Binh's subversive yet loving digs at the royal couple. I started this book on a plane and devoured it in a hammock.
Colm Toibin: Brooklyn: A Novel
Eilis Lacey grows up in 1950s Ireland in the shadow of her gregarious older sister Rose. Family circumstances dictate that the more reserved Eilis will accept Father Flood's offer to help her get a job and re-locate to his Brooklyn parish. Expertly paced, the story of Eilis' adjustment to her new environment unfolds with calm, beautiful, simple language. Torn between the old world and the new, Eilis must make a choice between two men she has grown to love. Colm Toibin portrays the inner life and social world of Irish women with great mastery, insight and affectionate respect.
Louis Maistros: The Sound of Building Coffins
Wandering around the Fauborg Marigny, I came upon the gay bookstore and went in search of a book I had read about. I couldn't remember the name, but the review had said, "No novel since 'A Confederacy of Dunces' has done such justice to New Orleans." That is how I described it to the skeletal man behind the counter, standing indifferently amid claustrophobic piles of books. He immediately pointed down to this one and I grabbed it. I didn't start reading it until weeks later, eagerly anticipating wry, knowing chuckles a la "Confederacy." No chuckles ensued. The book opens with a boy rebirthing fetuses in the moonlit Mississippi River. The boy's name is Typhus Morningstar, brother of Malaria, Cholera, Diptheria and Dropsy. Louis Maistros, a former forklift operater, has woven a very dark and complex tale that is really unlike anything else I have read. He captures that very thin vibration between vice and beauty that is the essence of New Orleans. The story is set in 1891 and ends with a flood. Bodies rise; time is circular; curses are lifted at great expense; and the water trumps all--inexorably.
Lisa Mullins: Diane Nash: The Fire of the Civil Rights Movement
This slim and humble volume underscores the glaring lack of recognition for Diane Nash as a key leader in the early civil rights movement. Without her courageous confrontation of Nashville mayor Ben West over segregation and her even more pivotal insistence on continuing the Freedom Rides despite massive repression, we might not be patting ourselves on the back for having Barack Obama as president today. SO, it is very clear that while we have made enormous strides in confronting racism, we have a long way to go toward challenging the insidiousness and intimacy of sexism. If anyone's story could inspire the nation to do so, it is Diane Nash. While Lisa Mullins has laid down the basics of a biography, I would love to do a full-scale biography of Diane Nash, using the insights of women's history and intersectional analyses.
Peter Carey: His Illegal Self (Vintage International)
Wow, this book took me in a completely unanticipated direction. I thought it would be a romantic romp with seventies radicals, but it was actually a wild, heart-breaking tale told from the point of view of the seven year old son of one of those radicals. Che Selkirk, yes, that's his name, goes on a physically challenging journey that is also a quest for self, roots, and mother-love. This narrative picks you up and runs with you, haunting even after the last page is turned.
John Lewis: Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement
This is one of the most moving memoirs I have ever read and I read it feverishly. "The boy from Troy" (Alabama), as Martin Luther King called him when they first met, is an exquisitely sensitive and honest moral being. John Lewis gives me hope in humankind--not because he is a living saint, as Time magazine once dubbed him--but because he shows his feelings and flaws in a way that only heightens the courage of the many correct stands he took at pivotal moments in movement history. How did John Lewis become who he is? His job on the farm was to tend to the chickens, and after he took care of them physically, he tended to their spiritual needs by preaching to them. His earnestness is leavened by a dry wit that hasn't left him yet. We get many nuanced portraits of people we think we know. His account of the fight over his speech during the March on Washington is priceless--several of the big guns arguing behind Lincoln's back (literally) to get him to make his speech less radical. MLK is also demystified, which in no way diminishes Lewis' reverence for him, even when SNCC radicals castigate him for that stance. The memoir recounts many poignant instances when John Lewis paid a price for sticking to his beliefs. The most painful to read was what he calls his "de-election" as SNCC chairman. His close friendship with Julian Bond is also compromised in the rough play of Georgia politics. A combination of vision, tenacity, hard work, commitment, willingness to suffer, stubbornness and faith made him who he is--and our country has benefited enormously from every time he was willing to go back into the fray after being beaten, jailed, and disrespected. While the memoir is exceptionally moving from a personal perspective, it is also one of the best histories of the movement I have ever read. So run out and grab this 500 page tome--you will be glad you did.

May 10, 2010

The Joy of Jazz Fest II

God bless the child who's got Jazz Fest to attend!

I just had the good fortune to attend my third post-Katrina Jazz Fest and my fourth ever.

After a stroll through the French Quarter Wednesday night (including beignets for dinner), we woke up ready for four days of Fest. Though I hadn't quite recovered from Coco Robichaux's rooster sacrifice on Treme, seeing him open the Fest ignited a swamp boogie.

Ivan Neville, bearing a chiseled version of his father Aaron's beautifully bruised face, did not quite bring the requisite energy to the Acura Stage with his band Dumpstaphunk. On the other hand, the newly-recommended Sunpie Barnes and the Louisiana Sunspots rocked the Congo Square stage with zydeco, though he prefers to call his work Afro-Louisiana music--"a combination of zydeco, rhythm & blues, Caribbean, West African, gospel and spiritual." He was fabulous--I didn't even need my frozen coffee after that performance. Then the Soul Rebels kicked it up a notch with an irresistible blend of New Orleans jazz and hip hop. Again, at my friend's recommendation, I dashed over to the Lagniappe Stage to wade into a small, dense crowd of beautifully aging NOLA hipsters to hear the charming Paul Sanchez in porkpie hat with a fantastic band and backup singers. It was a pleasure to end the first day to the mellow sounds of Elvis Costello, who loves NOLA and looks great.

That night, despite exhaustion and starvation, I finally saw Kermit Ruffins in the flesh (yes, it's hard to believe that a person could be starving in New Orleans but the half-hour wait at The Joint might have jeopardized getting a good spot at Vaughn's). We were about five feet away, clinging to a step in the tightly packed one-room club. A jazz trumpeter with a memorable twinkle in his eye, Kermit played on and on very amiably despite a drunken woman dancing in his face and continually touching him, which drove me mad because I do not like invasion of people's space. He proclaimed his love for the mood of Jazz Fest -- "this ain't Mardi Gras." The party spilled out into the street and was going strong when we left after a couple of hours.

Friday required a slow start. We arrived at the Book Tent to say hello to Barb Johnson, who was signing copies of her book More of This World or Maybe Another--while wearing a pin that said "on new medication." We spent most of the afternoon in the Jazz Tent listening to The Astral Project (a modern jazz quintet playing together since 1978); the Nicholas Payton Sextet (he is yet another magnificent trumpet player); and finally, the vocalist John Boutte, my favorite from last year. Unfortunately, we could not hear him very well, and my intervention with the sound engineer yielded only the comment--"he doesn't sing that loud." Well, I heard him last year, ripping my heart out with City of New Orleans and Paul Simon's American Tune. I vowed to get tix to see him at Preservation Hall with Paul Sanchez at midnight on Saturday night. We did.

I closed out Friday with Derek Trucks and my revered belting broad Susan Tedeschi at the Blues Tent. Trucks, slide guitarist for the Allman Brothers Band, came out on crutches, but he had no trouble stunning the crowd with what looked like effortless blues guitar. That evening we chilled out at Bacchanal, a restaurant in the 9th Ward. You walk in, pick out your wine and cheese, pet a black cat, and proceed out to a lovely garden, where a local singer/songwriter is crooning under the stars. Then you order your food at the grill, to be prepared by chef Joaquin Ronas, originally from El Salvador. In a city that has the best food in the world, it surprised me to find skirt steak and asparagus seasoned so perfectly that it merited praise. The cheese came, plated beautifully with olives and bread. We shared a table with Alex, who runs the Music Tent at Jazz Fest; she knew everyone and everything. Her sister and boyfriend very kindly drove us to Frenchman Street, where I stood amidst one hundred drunken youth, mad that we had not bought tickets sooner to Ellis Marsalis at Snug Harbor. I refrained from screaming at the hipsters, "I lived in the Fauborg Marigny before you were born!" (for one summer).

New Orleans is true grit. Like the grit we had to wash off every night after staggering out the Fairgrounds--a layer of race track dust clinging to SP50 sunscreen.

Saturday was the most perfect music day. It just kept getting better and better, the horns lifting me higher. I witnessed the truth that "there ain't no party like a Rebirth party because the the Rebirth Party don't stop." But I had to stop--to pull away from the brass rap rhythms to get into an entirely different mood--my annual pilgrimage to hear Aaron Neville in the Gospel Tent. At this point, he feels like family. There is something very still and serene about the way Aaron Neville claps his hands to the beat while swaying in his stiff-legged side-to-side bop. I can feel the notes he hits in Amazing Grace take physiological effect on my central nervous system--for the better. Even he couldn't resist a shout-out to the Saints at the end of his gospel set--the Saints have achieved religious significance in and for NOLA this year.

We took the Mystery Street exit out of the Fairgrounds, waited on an extremely civilized taxi line, and drove down the ever-lovely Esplanade back to our motel on North Rampart, a street that has enormous historical significance for music, and, I'm happy to say, for my own modest adventures as well.

Then it was off to Irvin Mayfield's new Jazz Playhouse in the Royal Sonesta on Bourbon Street. Only for him would I break my No Bourbon Street rule. Another jazz trumpeter keeping Satchmo's tradition alive, Irvin Mayfield knows from whence he comes; he filled my little historian's heart with joy. I also love the way John Boutte reverently referred to Pops as if he was in Preservation Hall sweating with us.

Maybe that's why I was so happy--because this city IS the history of this country, and certainly the birthplace of the best music we gave to the world. Perhaps the fact that slaves brought the African rhythms and New Orleans incubated them and gave them back to the world demonstrates the triumph of culture over brutality. I'm a weary world citizen in the battle for human rights, pondering whether international institutions like the ICC can ever bring real justice, and then I hear this music and take the very long view, and I feel better. The spirit is renewed to fight again for people. New Orleans is about survival of the spirit. And I feel like the world is finally catching up to what a treasure it is. Whether or not Treme fulfills its educational mission, I could feel the city has turned a corner. The trees in City Park were green again, not the naked ashen gray I saw the first year after Katrina. Now of course there is the horror of the BP oil spill, which happened just as we arrived, but it did not spoil Jazz Fest. The local musicians I heard did not refer to it, and thus it was left up to Pearl Jam to make a political statement there, which is fine.

How to describe Irvin Mayfield and the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra? He is a little guy who emanates power--not just from his horn, but from his consciousness. The musicians he assembled that night were so hot, he said, he could not himself believe they were actually there to play together. The group included Bob French, leader of his family's Original Tuxedo Jazz Band founded 100 years ago; Shannon Powell--the coolest wildman on drums--his own jazz orchestra is famous; an older man on the slide trombone who looked like he just stepped out of Storyville--his solos were unbelievable --I think he may have levitated off the miniscule stage. I regret that I cannot remember his name or the names of the excellent saxophone player, piano player, and electric fiddle player. This New Orleans Jam Night was, as I said thanking Irvin Mayfield in the cafe after the performance, a religious experience.

And as if that were not enough, we dashed over to Preservation Hall to catch John Boutte and Paul Sanchez at a midnight show. Something was up with Boutte==we still could not hear him very well even though we were in one tiny room together. But to watch him is to see some kind of other-worldly energy running through him. Even when he was sitting relatively still, the music was always alive within him, it was almost as if you could see pure tradition flowing across his face and through him. Paul Sanchez, of whom I am starting to feel quite fond, was very protective of John Boutte as if he was a fragile treasure (maybe he is? what's up with this man? need to know more).

The following day we collapsed in a heap listening to Irma Thomas. I was beyond exhausted but there was no way I was leaving without hearing BB King close the Fest. Especially since I had to make the diabolical choice between him and the Neville Brothers. I sat on the floor in the aisle, reading Gambit and waiting for him to perform in the packed tent. He is 84--and still funny, sassy, adorable. But when he picks up Lucille and plays, there really are no appropriate words to describe that sound and that feeling. I just felt privileged to be there. I felt that way about almost every performance.

What better way to end the weekend than watching Treme with real folks at the R bar in the Marigny. People brought their dogs and the bartender screamed for silence as Boutte's theme song started up. Words came to lips, hips loosened, and it felt good. You really do not need substances to feel good in this city.

I spent my final day with lunch at the Lake, bopping around Mid-City, sunset over the Bayou St. John, a glorious fried shrimp boy boy, and the end of a perfect trip.

I've been coming to this city since I was two. I love it dearly. It loves you back.

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DebThink

Reflections of a social change historian

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May 10, 2010

The Joy of Jazz Fest II

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