FoodMusicJustice.com

From Dan Baum’s “New Orleans Journal” published by the New Yorker.

It’s rare that I quote extensively from an article, but this “outsider” has so successfully described a fundamental truth about New Orleans that he deserves some props:

“Before living here…I’d imagined that the jazz scene was a closed, exclusive world of too cool cats in wraparound shades, dissolute men and women contemptuous of the daytime world and aloof in artistic arrogance.

What a dope I was; that’s what you get for learning about “jazz” from watching sixties movies with Quincy Jones soundtracks.

The jazz scene in New Orleans turns out to be a warm, welcoming family, and we’ve been privileged to drift around its edges. We see the same musicians over and over again, often in different configurations, and it always strikes me both how tender and supportive they are with one another—and how accepting they are of atonal squares like me.

(The jazz scene also appears, to my eyes, to be the only New Orleans milieu in which race is genuinely irrelevant.)

The musicians whom we can hear on any given night, just by walking up the street, are musical giants, artists and technicians of breathtaking soul and technique, and here they are slouching around town like the rest of us, always ready to stand around and gab, generously handing out their CDs and inviting us to shows.”

Yeah, Dan…

Anyone who loves live music - especially jazz - is depriving themselves of one of the 21st centuries greatest pleasures by failing to bring themselves to New Orleans right now. It’s happening and you won’t find a scene like it anywhere else in the world.

Baum’s New Orleans blog is on the New Yorker site. I kind of hate to send you there because they just canned him. Dumb move on their part.  New Orleans is the story of America’s future if we all don’t get it together. We can’t focus on it too much.

Dan Baum’s blog

Cherice Harrison Has a New House!

“May this home be blessed with love, warmth, happiness, laughter, friendship and peace.”

Please honor me with the gift of your presence at my traditional West African, Christian, Mardi Gras Indian house blessing.

Saturday, June 21, 2007 – 6 p.m. to 8 p.m.

1941 Alvar St.
New Orleans, Louisiana

The ceremony begins at the Harrison compound at 3632 N. Johnson St.

Participants are asked to wear white (if you choose) and bring percussion instruments.

23rd Annual Back to School Picnic

Saturday, September 1, 2007 – Noon to 6 p.m.

Free school supplies, food, drinks, games and health screenings

1600 N. Robertson (between St. Bernard and Annette)

For more information or donations contact Sylvester Francis at the

Backstreet Cultural Museum
1116 St. Claude Ave.
New Orleans, LA 70116
504-522-4806

Quotes from a 7/20/07 New York Times article about formaldehyde-laden FEMA trailers provided to evacuees :

“We were not formaldehyde experts.”

- R. David Paulison. FEMA Adminstrator.

“Do not initiate any testing until we give the O.K. Once you get results the clock starts running on our duty to respond to them.”

- Unnamed FEMA lawyer sent this e-mail in response to concerns expressed by field staff about toxic levels of formaldehyde reported in FEMA trailers.

“What we have is indifference to the suffering of people who are already suffering because of Hurricane Katrina (note: actually the federal levee failures), and this from an agency that’s supposed to serve the public.”

- Represenative Henry A. Waxman, D- California

Economically, the most successful music coming out of New Orleans today is rap and hip hop.

Here’s a video about post-levee failure New Orleans by a rapper named Juvenile. Though he has a high profile, this particular track got no airplay on radio and the video was for all practical purposes banned from MTV etc.

I wonder why…

Master bass drummer Dwayne Williams and multi-instrumentalist Jason Slack jamming for fun before their performance at the Hudson, NY Harborfest sponsored by FoodMusicJustice.com’s “Two Rivers, One Heart” Tour.

Dear Friends:

The Backstreet Cultural Museum, a community institution and 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation, and the Fi-Yi-Yi Mardi Gras Indian tribe are proud to announce their 23rd annual Back to School Picnic for New Orleans school children. This event, which this year takes place on Sept. 1, is held to provide school supplies, health screenings, food, drinks and recreation for school children at the beginning of each school year.

The annual picnic provides these necessities to over 350 area children. It also serves to connect children with community leaders who speak with them on issues of nonviolence, drug avoidance and local cultural traditions.

We would greatly appreciate any support that you are able to provide to our school children and this event. Donations of money or supplies such as notebooks, pencils, pens, toothbrushes, toothpaste, deodorant etc. would be sincerely appreciated. All donations are tax deductible.

Please send any donations to the following address:
Backstreet Cultural Museum
1116 St. Claude Ave.
New Orleans, LA 70116

Or contact Sylvester Francis at 504-522-4806

Thank you in advance for your support.

Sincerely,
Sylvester Francis
Tax ID# 72-1488658

July 5th, the band played at J. Maxon’s bar in the South Bronx near the 138th and 3rd Avenue stop as part of the FoodMusicJustice “Two Rivers, One Heart” Tour.

Some preliminary photographic reports from the FoodMusicJustice.com “Two Rivers, One Heart” Tour in New York. (More coming soon.)

From zero to a big audience in 15 minutes in Union Square

This is how people get around in New York City

Smoking it up in Brooklyn on July 4th

Pictured (left to right): Brandon Franklin (alto sax), Joseph Maize (trombone), Glenn Preston (trumpet)

There’s no word in the English language for malicious incompetent criminality, but there should be and when it’s coined, the first use of it should be to describe the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in New Orleans.

Over 1,000 people were killed, hundreds of thousands were made homeless, tens of billions of dollars of property damage occurred because of the Corps shoddily-built levees. Levees they knew were substandard all along.

Now the Corps has announced that their “rebuilding” plan has re-structured the levee system in such a way that the oldest and formerly most protected parts of New Orleans - key elements of its economic engine - are now at risk of devastation should there be another major storm.

What areas are we talking about? Nothing special…just the French Quarter and the Garden District.

If you’ve never been to New Orleans, let me make it plain: If these parts of the city are devastated by levee failures the way places like Lakeview and the Lower Ninth Ward, there will be no New Orleans as we know it left and one of the greatest cultural gems of North America and the world will be gone forever.

The French Quarter is not all there is to New Orleans, but without it New Orleans is just another struggling, down-at-the-heels US city without a tourism magnet.