New Orleans – CODA

It is Sunday 9/26/10, the glorious 9th annual Ponderosa Stomp has ended and we are spending our last day in NOLA. We begin the day with a 2 hour “Cradle of Jazz” tour by John McCusker. This is my second tour with John who possesses that wonderful combination of knowledge and passion when it comes to traditional jazz and New Orleans. Amazing as it seems, John is the only person (to my knowledge) who does a jazz tour in NOLA and it is a must do event for anyone interested in the “Cradle of Jazz” in New Orleans. McCusker also has a great DVD of his tour called “The Story of Jazz – New Orleans Stomp” that you can buy on Amazon.com.


After a lunch of po-boys we went to see Fats Domino with his biographer and music historian Rick Coleman, who is hard at work on his forthcoming history of New Orleans R&B. Unfortunately Fats was taking a nap so we visited with his son Antoine Domino III for a while. Antoine was in the garage running Fat’s 2 Rolls-Royce Cornish automobiles (1 gold and 1 baby blue) to keep them in “ready to go” shape in case his dad wanted to use them, parked in the driveway was Fat’s Mercedes 600S, his daily driver, as well as a Cadillac.

Next up was a wonderful visit with New Orleans music legend Frankie Ford (“Sea Cruise”). Frankie has a wonderful home full of fascinating memorabilia from his 50+ years in music. He regaled us with stories of his career and antidotes of many of the legends he worked with and knew. During our discussion he spoke of Ernie “The Emperor of the World” K-Doe and he said something fascinating; that Ernie (who was an unrepentant alcoholic) suffered from “that New Orleans disease.” When I asked him what he meant he said simply: “here is my foot, someone get me a gun to shoot it.”

This comment hit me like a ton of bricks, as it struck me as a real truism of our beloved city. New Orleans does seem to have an odd propensity to shoot off its own foot in so many ways. You see this in its lack of support of the music it professes to love so much, you see it in the post-Katrina rebuilding of the city and the incompetence of city government (not that government incompetence is any more endemic in NOLA then it is elsewhere, it just feels more accepted). New Orleans seems at times to work hard against its own self-interest, but maybe that is just part of its quirky character that we all love so much. It is a hard city not to love, with all its faults, so I will end this by saying God Bless New Orleans and its great people, music and food!