Still Singing Those Post-Katrina Blues

You hear it in the music, from trumpeter Terence Blanchard's funereal "A Taste of God's Will: A Requiem for Katrina" to Cowboy Mouth's CD, "Voodoo Shoppe," to Boutte's melancholic cover of Annie Lennox's "Why."

You read it in the death notices.

In the past year, New Orleans's music community has buried at least 19 of its own -- and everyone seems to keep a running tally from the obituaries. This summer, within a week of each other, five musicians died: R&B singer Oliver Morgan; jazz saxophonist Earl "the African Cowboy" Turbinton; musician and jazz poet Eluard Burke; R&B vocalist Issachar Gordon; jazz percussionist John Thompson.

George Brumat, the owner of the legendary jazz club Snug Harbor, died in July of an apparent heart attack at 63. Jazz virtuoso Alvin Batiste passed in May, also of a presumed heart attack, at 74. Just after Christmas, Dinerral Shavers, 25, a drummer with the Hot 8 Brass Band, was shot in the back of the head while driving with his wife and children through the streets of New Orleans -- a victim of the city's crime rate, which escalated at an alarming rate after the hurricane.

"These are Katrina deaths," WWOZ's Freeman contends. "It's stress. They were fragile. And this pushed them over the edge."

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There are, of course, programs created to help musicians and to "preserve" the legacy of New Orleans, efforts both private and public. There's the Musicians' Village, where native sons Harry Connick Jr. and Branford and Ellis Marsalis partnered with Habitat for Humanity to build 70 single-family houses in the Upper Ninth Ward. There's Sweet Home New Orleans, a collective of 14 not-for-profit agencies serving New Orleans musicians. And there's a grandiose, but so far stalled, $716 million proposal that involves restoring the Hyatt Regency Hotel and building a massive National Jazz Center and park.

"We have to think big," says Irvin Mayfield Jr., artistic director of the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra. "Build an institution that's going to survive any hurricane. The country needs to get behind something audacious."

But the hardest thing to preserve is something that can't be purchased. It is that which New Orleanians so desperately want to preserve: the feel of the city, that NOLA mojo, the likes of which can be found in Bullets, a crowded little Mid-City joint. Inside, trumpeter Kermit Ruffins and his band, the Barbecue Swingers, are jammed against the window. A steady stream of sports is playing on the TV, but no one pays much attention.

In spirit, Bullets is as far from the tourist-laden French Quarter as you can get. Here, it's buckets of Miller Lite and chicken wings served alongside Ruffins's gritty, greasy swinging "trad jazz" -- traditional jazz. The crowd is more boomer than youthful, with seasoned souls sporting tees that read "We Survived Hurricane Katrina" and "New Orleans: Proud to Call It Home." A grizzled gent leans over a newcomer, slyly uttering the post-Katrina pickup line du jour: "I really want to show you the Ninth Ward."

As the sun sets, a man comes in peddling homemade tamales; another hawks cellphone covers and disposable cameras. Tattooed white kids arrive, while a contingent of Creole matrons stands in the center of the room, arms folded, looking just a little bit aloof. Until they start to dance as one, getting down and dirty with the beat.

A man scratches away on a washboard as band members sing in Creole and English, catcalling and ululating. Everybody, it seems, knows the words, and they sing along, loud and strong, filling the tiny club with a sense of goose-bump-raising communion.