As the afternoon approaches and it gets dark, the lights in the arched portico come on.
The entrance to Louis Armstrong Park stands out at the bottom of St. Ann Street, visible from three or four corners, if not more.
On Thursdays, the authorities celebrate the history and musical vitality of New Orleans with a recurring event and with the right tone.
Taking into account the profusion of instrument players and vocalists, just in the city and surrounding areas, as well as the bands they form, the Jazz in the Park It was done and is done by itself.
Creative work in a modern art house in New Orleans
Because of the genuine desire of local musicians to show off, to captivate spectators, many of whom are also instrumentalists, with the Big Easy's recycled and renewed jazz.
When it's not Jazz in the Park, There are other concerts, festivals and exhibitions that liven up the myriad of bars and concert halls, especially those in the French Quarter and the “rival” Frenchmen Street.
Not only.
Dances that frequently appear on Bourbon Street.
“Buddy” Bolden and Louis Armstrong: New Orleans' First Names
It dictated Louie's fame and relevance – or Pops or Satchmo, as he was also called – that the green space was named after him.
As New Orleans international airport received, the only one in the world named in honor of a jazz musician, one of the few that maintain the sound system playing jazz classics, including the most famous, by Armstrong.
These baptisms could have happened to other important figures on the jazz scene in Cidade Crioula.
One of the many musical murals in New Orleans
Starting with Charles “Buddy” Bolden, Louis Armstrong's predecessor, considered, more or less unanimously, the creator of the original music that, after some time, would come to be called Blues and Jazz.
Between 1898 and 1906 – the year Louis Armstrong turned five – “Buddy” Bolden was considered the king of black music in New Orleans.
At that time, he was playing a cornet, not even the trumpet with which Pops came to recalibrate and refine Jazz. Armstrong considered “Buddy” Bolden “a genius far ahead of all others, too prodigious for his time.” And this, without “Buddy” Bolden ever recording his music.
King “Buddy” played his horn with such rhythm and intensity that it took the dancers and those accompanying him into an ecstasy that was difficult to control.
The talent of “Buddy” Bolden, of Jelly Roll Morton and disciples, reached the ears of the brothel owners, saloons and dance halls of New Orleans. Especially those in Storyville, the local red-light district, between 1897 and 1917.
This year, the US Navy and Army, concerned about the corruption of their military personnel, forced New Orleans authorities to close the brothels.
Jazz musicians entertain customers at a restaurant
The cabarets, restaurants, dance halls, speakeasies and gambling and prostitution houses focused on evading frequent police raids.
It was in this still chaotic environment, in a style forever associated with jazz, that Louis Armstrong perfected melodies that he filled with his rough voice, later described as Scat.
From the next jazz generation, “King of Swingers”, Louis Prima, of Italian blood.
Bronze Musicians, on Bourbon Street
Jazz experts consider this black and white duo “Louis” to be responsible for the recognition of jazz around the world.
When, the next day, we walked around the lake at the heart of the park, above and below the bridge that crosses it, we came across the statue of Armstrong, trumpet in his left hand lowered, a scarf in his right, raised.
Statue of Louis Armstrong in the park named after him.
Congo Square and the Beginnings of Orleanian Music
On the border with Congo Square, we come across another bronze statue of one of the street bands that often roam the streets of the French Quarter and, there, between birthdays, Mardi Gras and funerals, generate frenzies reminiscent of King's. Buddy.
If “Buddy Bolden’s” bugling act proved to be pioneering, we must also emphasize that it emerged from a context dating back to 1719, the year in which slave ships landed on Dauphin Island (east of New Orleans), “Aurore" it's the "Duc du Maine” with the first of approximately 12.000 slaves forced to serve in the colony of Louisiana, a good number of them in New Orleans.
There is a centuries-old reason Louis Armstrong Park included Congo Square.
Over the years, this was the place adapted by slaves and their free descendants to meet, on Sundays, the day they could do so.
There they were, equipped with drums, cattle bells, banzas (precursors of the banjo), balafones, mbiras, maracas and others.
Gifted with the freedom that that retreat granted them, they combined sounds and rhythms evocative of the African lands from which they came.
With songs introduced by white settlers, often work hymns and field cries, animist spiritual themes and Christian gospels sung in church choirs.
Over time and the abolition of slavery, the influences of the region's Indians, the arrivals from Cuba and the thousands of European immigrants, dictated the genesis of prolific Orleanian music: the style dixieland.
Statue pays homage to the street musicians who have long animated New Orleans.
The tradition of charangas.
With the 20th century, the Emancipation of Blues and Jazz
From 1910 onwards, its “cataloging” as jazz placed the sounds and rhythms of New Orleans on a different stage than the ragtime, then hyperpopular in the United States.
The freedom and artistic profusion of New Orleans resulted in a surreal number of bands.
At one point, they were so abundant and strident that the city's daily newspaper published a lamenting article, complaining about their guilt in making the city hell.
Now, for the sake of music admirers around the world, Terra, this infernization became more accentuated and diversified.
The Preservation Hall Sign, New Orleans
With the participation of so many emblematic venues such as the unmissable Preservation Hall, jazz gained previously unexpected adulation.
We also detect it expressed in an assortment of bright and hyperbolic street murals that dazzle us.
Mural displays Jazz musicians above a New Orleans parking lot.
The Current Musical Reality of the Big Easy
Today, the city's jazz musicians charge well to play with diners.
Or, as we witnessed on the occasion of the birthday of a foreigner gifted by her better half, while First Lines were wandering around.
They are so respected that two police officers on motorbikes guarantee them and their followers safe passages around the corners of the French Quarter.
Police clear the way for a street band hired to honor a birthday girl.
The least renowned musicians settle on the streets of the French Quarter.
They play for the pleasure of playing and for a few dollars. In search of fame that New Orleans earned for so many others.
On our way out of shopping, we see a trio of double bass, viola and clarinet set up shop between the supermarket and the most famous house in the city, LaBranche House, with balconies full of plants that emerge from the iron frames.
In its entirety, the place would be perfect. It's just that work is going on. The street is full of scaffolding.
Even so, hundreds of passers-by stop and watch.
A few reward musicians.
Band plays next to one of the most photographed buildings in New Orleans
Jazz in the Big Easy has been renewed and is renewed day after day, in the streets, bars and rooms.
From Jazz to Funk, to Rap, to Hip-Hop and Everything Together
From jazz, the city generated a series of new styles. The artistic and commercial devotion of its people to music led to the multiplication of recording studios and agents.
Artists from other parts of the US recognized New Orleans' talent.
Exuberant singer livens up one of the many bars on Bourbon Street.
They resorted to their recording rooms again and again.
Half-walled with emerging homegrown talents such as Fats Domino, the talented and multifaceted Allen Toussaint who provided creativity to countless other names, Aaron Neville and The Meters, who are considered pioneers of funky, on par with James Brown.
On a wall on Frenchmen Street, we come across a huge mural.
It pays homage to a more recent city idol (1941-2019), Dr. John, a musician without borders who moved through blues, jazz and funk, to R&B.
Mural honors Doctor John, on Frenchmen Street.
With the city's “son”, Lil Wayne, New Orleans made an unforgettable contribution to the affirmation of southern rap in the USA
As we were able to see at the city's Fried Chicken Festival, Big Freedia stars in and promotes Bounce, a style of hip hop danced with the hips and butt that is said to originate from the Big Easy.
In the field of Indie Pop, The Revivalists have stood out.
On two different stages, one outdoors and the other in a dark room, we also have the privilege of discovering names and sounds that seem the most peculiar and unexpected.
Flagboy Giz, and Hip Hop with Génese Indía from New Orleans
Both shows are led by Flagboy Giz, an Orleanian with Indian blood who idolizes New Orleans, Mardi Gras and everything that sets the city apart from the rest.
With obvious contempt for gentrification and the excess of outsiders who use it without genuine interest.
Flagboy Giz sings at a screening at the Nola Festival.
We saw performances by Flagboy Giz, accompanied by The Wild Tchoupitoulas and his own son, not yet a teenager.
Despite the humid heat, we admired them dressed in traditional Mardi Gras costumes, under bright and huge headdresses and face masks that evoke how feared the Tchoupitoulas were in their fight against the European invaders.
Flagboy Giz, The Wild Tchoupitoulas and the Indian musical reality of New Orleans form a theme that we cannot resist.
Soon, we will dedicate their own article to them.
HOW TO GO
Book the flight Lisbon – Miami (Florida), United States, with TAP: flytap.com for from €820. From Miami, you can take the connection to New Orleans (1h30) for from €150, round trip.
Where to stay:
The Mercantile Hotel:
themercantilehotelneworleans.com
Tel.: +1 504 558 1914-1914
