Memorial to The Big Easy

by Mari Nicholson

(former secretary of the NFJO way back when).

I’ve been a jazz fan since the 1950’s when as part of the burgeoning jazz scene, I sweltered in cellar clubs in London to listen to New Orleans music played by Ken Collyer and his band, the Chris Barber Band, the Mick Mulligan Band, and Humphrey Lyttleton and his band. I listened to Beryl Bryden sing the blues at the old Creole Club and Cooks’ Ferry Inn, and I knew I’d get to the Big Easy one day. And I did.

The annual New Orleans Jazz Festival 2002, and I finally made it. Me, struttin’ my stuff in Basin Street, walking down Bourbon Street, queueing up outside Preservation Hall to listen to jazz legends I’d only read about in the pages of the musical press. Hailin’ a taxi after midnight to go to Funky Butt’s on Vaughn to listen to the sweet trumpet playing of Kermit Rollins and to eat red beans and rice with the other regulars at 3 a.m. Then to play pool at Donna’s on North Rampart Street opposite Armstrong Park on the Sunday mornin’ before heading off to the Court of the Two Sisters for a Jazz buffet lunch and then an evening session with the funky rock band led by long-time New Orleans resident, English musician Jon Cleary and his Monster Gentlemen Band.

And now it’s all gone. With it has gone a style honed over centuries, a style in which Afro-Caribbeans and Creoles mixed and mingled to produce a culture not found in any other city in the USA. New Orleans wasn’t just like another country, it was another country. For millions of Americans from the straight-laced towns of the mid-west, this was the place where they glimpsed another world, a shocking but fascinating world. Deep in the southern part of the Bible Belt, the girdle came unbuckled, and prostitution, gambling, booze, corruption, and a subversive and revolutionary music – jazz - walked through the cobbled streets and shadowy corners of magnolia hung courtyards.

The crocodile lines of tourists that trawl the streets, the garish and gaudy paintings that hang around Jackson Square, the normally well behaved matrons who sashay down Chartres with a “bourbon to go” in a plastic glass, and the throbbing music, were all part of what made New Orleans such a great place. For of all of the cities in the USA, this was the one where the saints shared pavements with the sinners, each one fascinated by the other.

What now will replace Ole Mis, streetcars, paddle-steamers, zydecko on the bayous, itinerant musicians busking along the levees, and the green, purple and gold plastic beads that are almost obligatory wear? Where will we go to honour the spirit of Tennessee Williams now that the Stella Shouting Contest will be no more? The Streetcar named Desire hasn’t run to Elysian Fields for many years but the souls of Stella and Stanley still haunt the route as do the ghosts that have always belonged here (15% of the population seriously practice voodoo).

Billie Holiday used to sing “Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans?” I think I do. I feel devastated at its destruction, and I’m surprised.

And when the live oaks have become fossilized and the French Quarter is just something seen on postcards, what will there be to remind us of the Big Easy?

New Orleans’ shining Memorial will be her music and songs, the musicians and singers, and the happy, sad, tortuous blues, that is the basis of popular modern music.

The End ….