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New Orleans Rocks

03.25.09 | 10:17 AM ET

It’s 2 a.m. on an Uptown New Orleans street corner, and taxis are descending by the dozen to drop off passengers at the music club Tipitina’s. A sidewalk bartender pulls drafts, while a purple catering truck pedals grit fries, goat quesadillas and catfish po’boys. I’m here for the night’s hottest ticket: a sold-out performance by Galactic, a hometown funk band that in 2007 started collaborating with nationally known progressive rappers.

I’ve come to New Orleans during its annual Jazz & Heritage Festival, but this week I’m trying to break out of my jazz rut. During earlier visits, I’ve always zeroed in on a handful of favorite acts, like the buttery trumpet tunes of Kermit Ruffins. This time, I want to soak up the other music this place has to offer—the blues, gospel, rock, and funk that fill out New Orleans’ musical canon.

The doors open. Inside Tip’s hang posters of the stars who have played here, including local greats like Fats Domino. We press in close and befriend the strangers around us—and then at 3, Galactic takes the stage. “Good morning to the ‘Tina!” bellows saxophonist Ben Ellman as the band dives into an instrumental jam so rollicking that the floor quakes and our internal organs seem to vibrate. Jumping in place—it’s too crowded to dance—we lose ourselves in an explosion of horns, harmonica and guitar. Just when I think the energy has peaked, Chali 2na of the hip-hop group Jurassic 5 takes the stage. “Everybody put your hands up!” shouts the towering rapper. And we do.

I linger until the encore, intoxicated by the crowd and the sound. Outside, the sky has turned the color of the purple truck, which is still open for business. It’s now 6 o’clock, and Galactic has been playing for three hours without a break.

There’s something primal about listening to music in New Orleans. The beat here has been present almost from Creation. As an international port, “you had so many cultures colliding in one place,” says music historian and honky-tonk singer Michael Hurtt. Settlers from France, Spain, Italy and Germany contributed their own musical styles; so did the West Indies and Latin America. And unlike more Protestant cities, Catholic New Orleans allowed slaves to play their drums on Sundays in Congo Square, just outside the French Quarter. The result is a rhythm that’s unique to the city and inseparable from its steamy weather.

That rhythm traveled well beyond jazz. New Orleans enjoyed a thriving R&B scene as early as the 1940s—a hard-driving sound, heavy on the horns and flavored by the Caribbean. The city produced a guttural blues that thrived mostly underground. And its tradition of brass-band funeral processions called second-lines lent a syncopated backbeat to the Crescent City’s own brand of funk. “Rock ’n’ roll as we know it would not have developed without the New Orleans sound,” wrote the late music critic Robert Palmer.

I think about this history during Ponderosa Stomp, an annual festival that celebrates the roots of rock. Usually the Stomp draws fans more hardcore than me: the ones who collect vinyl records and can name their favorite producers and sidemen. But I’m intrigued by the prospect of hearing Ronnie Spector, whose girl group, The Ronettes, topped the charts in 1963 with “Be My Baby.” In her 60s, Spector still possesses her big hair, big voice and ability to whip up the crowd at the French Quarter’s House of Blues. But she’s not the artist who moves me most.

That distinction belongs to Wardell Quezergue, who worked behind the scenes starting in the ’50s to produce hits like the Dixie Cups’ “Chapel of Love.” Known locally as the Creole Beethoven, he is now legally blind and living in an Uptown nursing home. Still, tonight he conducts an orchestra that includes Fats Domino’s sax player, Herbert Hardesty. For almost two hours, a parade of legends pays tribute to Quezergue’s genius. Jean Knight, decked out in purple bangles, sings her (and Quezergue’s) 1971 hit “Mr. Big Stuff,” while we, the starstruck audience, point and sing, “Who do you think you are?” A pianist named Mac Rebennack comes out wearing shades and red pinstripes—then plays greasy R&B-inflected rock ’n’ roll from the days before he became Dr. John. Listening, I feel more than nostalgia: Four and even five decades after their debuts, these living treasures have lost little of their radiance.

See Barry Yeoman’s New Orleans slideshow.

I try to focus on the music. But I can’t travel around New Orleans without seeing ample evidence of Hurricane Katrina and the levee breach that inundated much of the city in August 2005. Even today, whole neighborhoods remain plagued by boarded-up, water-stained and abandoned houses. These images haunt me and are supplemented every day of my trip by conversations, stage patter and radio interviews on the iconic WWOZ. I know that many of the musicians I’m catching—like Little Freddie King, whose back-alley blues I hear at the bar-cum-laundromat Check Point Charlie—have only recently returned home from post-Katrina exile.

Even the music itself is suffused by Katrina-related themes: tragedy, survival and resurrection. At Carrollton Station, an Uptown bar, I find myself unexpectedly listening to a voice from my childhood. Susan Cowsill was the littlest member of the Cowsills, a bubblegum band that in the ’70s inspired the Partridge Family. Now a roots rocker, she has built a following for her monthly “Covered in Vinyl” series, in which her band covers a classic-rock album from start to finish. Before revving us up with a throaty “Born to Run,” Cowsill shows off her original material, including a tribute to her brother Barry, who went missing during Katrina and whose body was finally recovered at the Chartres Street Wharf four months later. “I can still look you in the eye,” she sings, imagining his reincarnation, “when I see dragonflies.”

Several people had assured me that New Orleans is still a solid gospel town, partly because of Jim Crow’s long legacy. “When black people were coming up, we were restricted as to what we could do,” Brazella Briscoe, a tenor with The Zion Harmonizers, told me. “One thing we looked forward to was going to church.”

After staying out late Saturday, an early church service isn’t exactly in my plans. Instead, I head for the Jazz Fest’s Gospel Tent to hear the Zion Harmonizers. They’re a snappy-looking bunch: seven men, from their 50s through their 80s, dressed in black suits with burnt-orange ties and matching pocket squares. “You’re looking mighty good today!” Briscoe tells the audience. Then the group dives into an upbeat “If I Had a Hammer,” with harmonies perfected by seven decades of practice. They slow it down for an a capella “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” but then the tempo picks up, and up, and up. “Let me sing it one more time, church!” shouts Sherman Washington, the group’s 83-year-old leader, from his wheelchair.

By the hour’s end, we are on our feet, clapping to “When the Saints Go Marching In.” A misting machine envelops us in spray. Often I despair about New Orleans’ future, but right now this music feels like an omen of survival. I think about Briscoe, who lost his Lower Ninth Ward home in Katrina, along with his lawn-care and freight-hauling business. Somehow he remains optimistic, because the Harmonizers have reunited, and he hasn’t lost the chance to sing. “It’s in your blood,” he says of the music. “It’s like Jeremiah said: It’s like fire burning in your bones.”

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