A poster with special recognition to the People of Qatar welcomes the most peculiar neighborhood of New Orleans, a new one, which is called the Village of the Musicians and is home to many musicians who still are but hardly practice, old trumpeters and pianists, jazz players, and carnivals, former local glories, depositories of a thousand stories, real and apocryphal, who lost their homes in Hurricane Katrina. A group of organizations helped by Qatari money built this urbanization of palm trees and homogeneous houses, painted in different pastel colors, which is crying out for someone to stir it up with a ball or a skateboard.
CANADA
Minneapolis
Minnesota
saint Louis
Missouri
Memphis
Tennessee
Winfield
Alabama
Clarksdale
Mississippi
Birmingham
Alabama
Oxford
Mississippi
New Orleans
Louisiana
Gulf of mexico
500 km
MEXICO
THE COUNTRY
CANADA
Minneapolis
Minnesota
saint Louis
Missouri
Memphis
Tennessee
Winfield
Alabama
Clarksdale
Mississippi
Birmingham
Alabama
Oxford
Mississippi
New Orleans
Louisiana
Gulf of mexico
500 km
MEXICO
THE COUNTRY
CANADA
Minneapolis
Minnesota
saint Louis
Missouri
Memphis
Tennessee
Winfield
Alabama
Clarksdale
Mississippi
Birmingham
Alabama
Oxford
Mississippi
New Orleans
Louisiana
Gulf of mexico
500 km
MEXICO
THE COUNTRY
One of its most illustrious inhabitants is Alvin Lee Johnson, who was born in 1939, learned to play the trumpet almost at the same time as to walk, but ended up earning his bread with the piano. He earned it, although he didn't make a lot of money. One more story from the world of music, another typical New Orleans story: in 1960 he composed what would be the success of his life, Carnival Time . When the subject began to sound everywhere, they called him up. Upon returning from Fort Bliss (Texas) in 1964, the song was already a Mardi Gras anthem, but it had to become entangled in a long legal battle for the collection of rights. Of course, he tied the song to his name forever.
At 'Carnival Time' Johnson now lives in one of those houses, the work and grace of the people of Qatar. There are hardly any cars parked on the sidewalk and no children play in the street. The town of musicians, what a name for a place so quiet, so empty. Suddenly, the sound of a wind instrument escapes through one of the doors. Impossible to guess which one. It's just two notes and, again, silence.
"Al Johnson? Al Johnson is a legend! He is a great person, ”said the musician Troy Andrews, alias Trombone Shorty , a celebrity of the city who achieved international fame with the Tremé series , David Simon when speaking of the appointment .
A few moments after knocking on the door, on the last Tuesday in July, the legend opened. He wore a brown fur cap, a black mask, and a white T-shirt from a New Orleans music clinic. The dining room table to the right was laden with drugs. He is 81 years old and has a house full of photographs and trinkets that bear witness to it. Al Johnson with his idol, Fats Domino; Al Johnson playing Mardi Gras; Al Johnson in the White House, with President Barack Obama and Michelle, the first lady; Al Johnson at the last festival. Next to the piano, a guitar. Do you also touch it? "I got it in 2005, as a result of Katrina, because I was left without a piano, but it's not my thing."
On the fifteenth anniversary of the bloodiest hurricane in its history, New Orleans is living through the coronavirus. The pandemic has turned off the sound in a city that cannot be understood without its clubs, its parades, without the permanent revelry on Bourbon or Frenchmen Street, and many artists who live from day to day have been left homeless.
Devin de Wulf, founder of the nonprofit Read Beans, has raised funds for young musicians to do grocery shopping for older musicians, like Al Carnival Johnson, so they don't have to leave home and avoid risk contagion. "It is a way of helping from various points of view, we hire young musicians to do it and the older ones receive, in addition to free food, a visit, someone to talk to for a while, something they are very grateful for."
“He is a lagniappe ... I would like to teach him this word”, continues De Wulf sitting on the porch of his house, “it is a French word adapted from Quechua that the Creole Spaniards brought to New Orleans and it means a gift, a free extra with the one that they give away, for example, in a restaurant. These people have spent their lives enriching this city and it is a way of giving something in return ”.
In New Orleans the Mississippi, the river that runs through the United States from top to bottom, dies and spills out, which served to transport slaves arriving at the port and also for them to escape. EL PAÍS begins a series on the past and present of black Americans that begins in this unique piece of America and ends in Minneapolis, where the death three months ago of an African American named George Floyd in a brutal arrest caused the largest wave of mobilizations against the racism in half a century.
French, African and Hispanic, New Orleans lit up the first black neighborhood in the entire country, Tremé, invented an unusual cuisine of its own, a new music. Everything is painful and lively at the same time. Congo Square, where black people were bought and sold, was also the place where from time to time the masters gave them free time to hang out and dance. Today he is inside a park whose name pays homage to an African-American man, who learned to play the trumpet in a correctional facility at the beginning of the 20th century, when he was a teenager, and became an eternal star: Louis Armstrong.
“There is something wrong with this city and it is that many of the things that make it special came from something horrible like slavery,” summarized Jordan Bridges, having coffee on the terrace of a new Tremé location, Old Road Coffee. Bridges, 32, suffered from Katrina as a teenager. He had to go out on legs with his mother and brothers while his father, Joe, stayed in town building another house. He spent a few months in the city of Washington, where his mother, who was studying law, was given a scholarship to continue her studies and also a house to live in. Now he works in a social organization and is also a musician. I had arranged to meet him so he could tell me how life was going, how he saw the city. He gave me to listen to the song he recorded just before the pandemic and it sounded good. The lyrics read “Have we not seen enough? These are not illusions ... "
After coffee I attended the first private concert of my life, very close, in the Marigny neighborhood, which was an old plantation. Since the pandemic, Jeremy Kelley's band Bon bon vivant has performed every Sunday afternoon from his home and broadcast it live on social media. They play a curious Indie Gypsy music, Cabaret Nouveau, also some blues, and they pass the virtual cap through Venmo, a payment application between individuals. There is no applause, of course, and the final apotheosis, although it makes the pans hanging on the kitchen wall rumble, is anticlimactic.
"It's funny, in this way we can know many things about those who follow us: when they connect, when they disconnect, from where ... But without seeing their faces that is very difficult to interpret, it is like not really knowing anything about them", says Kelley, 42, sipping bourbon after the show. He moved a few years ago from California with his wife, Abigail Cossio, 38, and his sister Glory, 39. Why do you leave the West Coast for Louisiana? “Because this is a place with a musical culture and a tradition that does not exist elsewhere. Here, when a concert is over, an old musician comes to talk to you and gives you advice, and relationships like this are created, ”explained taking. "Someone makes you sick and then someone helps you."
Shorty , the famous musician from Tremé , assures that this is a hallmark of the city: “Totally spontaneous and genuine, that's how I grew up. It's a tradition that is rarely talked about but it still happens to me today, it's something magical the way that New Orleans musicians treat each other like family. Lagniappe, as Devin de Wulf said, the great word invented by New Orleans.
As we left, another band was playing in the middle of a gazebo near Jeremy's house. In the absence of bars, musicians manage to perform anywhere, as when water claims its place in the city. Hurricane Katrina took 2,000 lives and destroyed 60% of the housing stock, but the musicians got to work again very soon, there was no other choice. There was no truce on Bourbon or Frenchmen Street. The show must always go on in New Orleans.
The French Quarter, the music, tourism, and hubbub district, recovered relatively quickly, and gentrification has completely renovated much of the historic Black Quarter. Hurricane wounds, however, are still visible in the Lower Ninth Ward in the form of lots where no one built anything again, for lack of money or for fear of another disaster. Michelle Williams, 44, acts as a makeshift guide around the area. "There was my parents' house," he says, pointing to a brush at the end of Flood Street, a name that sounds like a bad joke because it means flood. So, as now with Covid-19, the crisis has exposed the gap between blacks and whites, between rich and poor.
“I think I can say that I have enjoyed music a lot, I haven't earned a lot of money, but I have enough to live on. Last night I listened to one of my recordings, Lower Ninth Ward Blues, and I think it was good. I've really enjoyed playing and I think I've done well, ”said Al Johnson from the Musicians' Village. The world was still an unfair place, he said, when the subject of George Floyd came up. Al Johnson traveled many years on buses where signs indicated where blacks could sit. “My parents taught me to be kind in an evil world. We had to be good in a bad world, "he added. Years later, he would end up in the White House posing with the first African-American president in history.
When the interview was over, he raised his hand: "Wait a minute, I'm going to play something for you." He sat solemnly at the piano and performed Blueberry Hill by Fats Domino. He did it very serious, concentrated, as if he were on a stage. The lagniappe of the day, the second private concert that the city gave me. It sounded loud, it was probably heard throughout the street, and that was finally the Village of the Musicians.
The next stop will be Birmingham, Alabama, known as Bombingham for the Ku Klux Klan hacks, the birthplace of Angela Davis and some old barber shops that look like Civil Rights museums and, in addition to cutting your hair, they register you to vote.