Treme Brass Band sings "I'll Fly Away" at a Jazz Funeral January 16, 2009

Why New Orleans ? For more reasons than can be listed here. It starts like this:

New Orleans. Old city. The oldest city in the U.S. City of roots and traditions. City of ghosts, spirits, saints, dreams and nightmares. City of Heart and Soul. City of Pain and Joy. The city where all opposites coexist and wrestle in the natural order. This is the city where all the obscure threads of any American bohemias originated. Here such things have always been and still are. Here it is never a fashion it is always a fact. The great American metropolises: New York City, Chicago, San Francisco ? They can only muster unsustainable pale facsimiles of the spirit of this place. They are stopping off places, places to gig and make some cash, man.

Here, in New Orleans, this is the real sweating, suffering, down in the muck and mud place. This is an entrance to the real afterlife underworld. The place where the native Americans danced in their sacred burial grounds. They called it Tchoupitoulas. The place where later the slaves joined in and danced with them.

Without this city the world would not have Jazz. There would be no R &B, no Blues, no Soul, no Rock and Roll, and none of the other musics which have dipped a finger into the well of the actual blood, sweat and tears of this place. Voodou meets Hoodoo ... spells, charms, medicine bags and mojo bags filled to the brim ... the beats and the musics all congealed here. They mixed and mingled, the first mash-ups, and the sounds that were born here in this humid nexus traveled up the rivers, on the railroads and the along the many dusty roads leading to Memphis, St. Louis, Kansas City, Chicago, New York ... spreading out across America and overseas to England, to the capitols of Europe.

Here, too, at the same time as the Colonies were fighting for freedom from their oppressors the first movements towards Civil Rights and Human Rights were born. Here these struggles have never been sidelined.

Think about it.

Meanwhile, in this place traditions are kept alive on a daily basis. The Jazz Funeral honors the dead and celebrates life. The bands somberly play the dirges and then changing tempo they'll joyously sing "I'll Fly Away". If you are alive, if you are a human being with a heart it will tear you apart and lift you up high over the little miseries we call life.

Peace.