Eddie Gabriel (1910-2005) - One of the casualties of Katrina, 67 years at @PatOBriensBar

Liz Stone, Eddie Gabriel and Barbara Bennett
perform at Pat O'Brien's Bar in New Orleans
late 70s, early 80s

"It is home." - Chris Rose

To be engaged in some small way in the revival of one of the great cities of the world is to live a meaningful existence by default.

I'm not going to lay down in words the lure of this place. Every great writer in the land, from Faulkner to Twain to Rice to Ford, has tried to do it and fallen short. It is impossible to capture the essence, tolerance, and spirit of south Louisiana in words and to try is to roll down a road of clichés, bouncing over beignets and beads and brass bands and it just is what it is.

We dance even if there's no radio. We drink at funerals. We talk too much and laugh too loud and live too large and, frankly,we're suspicious of others who don't.

It is home.

-Chris Rose- Author - One Dead in Attic

Tom Piazza on the secret life of live music in New Orleans

“Mac Rebennack, better known as Dr. John, once told me that when a brass band plays at a small club back up in one of the neighborhoods, it's as if the audience--dancing, singing to the refrains, laughing--is part of the band. They are two parts of the same thing. The dancers interpret, or it might be better to say literally embody, the sounds of the band, answering the instruments. Since everyone is listening to different parts of the music--she to the trumpet melody, he to the bass drum, she to the trombone--the audience is a working model in three dimensions of the music, a synesthesic transformation of materials. And of course the band is also watching the dancers, and getting ideas from the dancers' gestures. The relationship between band and audience is in that sense like the relationship between two lovers making love, where cause and effect becomes very hard to see, even impossible to call by its right name; one is literally getting down, as in particle physics, to some root stratum where one is freed from the lockstop of time itself, where time might even run backward, or sideways, and something eternal and transcendent is accessed.” 
― Tom Piazza, Why New Orleans Matters

"... there was something about that city ..." - Charles Bukowski

“there was something about
that city, though
it didn't let me feel guilty
that I had no feeling for the
things so many others
needed.
it let me alone.” 
― Charles Bukowski