• Articles

  Blog

  About Me

  Contact Me

  Mailing List

  Friends

  Slut

  AirBitch.co

           Once I get over the fact it’s been made with ‘hand reared turtles’ I decide it’s one of the greatest things that I’ve ever put in my mouth. Rich, intense, light and all enveloping and with a tragic heritage. It’s a sort of a metaphor for the city itself.
Breakfast is a two-hour affair. Eggs with gargantuan lumps of crab follow and then bananas sautéed in butter, sugar and rum, are flambéed at the table.
By the time I head out for a day of antiquing and a visit to the bug museum where you go into rooms filled with giant butterflies I can hardly move. The bathroom attendant, an ancient black lady, dressed in a crisp white nurse’s uniform sighed, ‘This is New Orleans. You’ll never be hungry and you’ll never be lonely.’ And so far that seemed to be very true.
New Orleans is a city that has been devastated by Hurricane Katrina. Almost wiped out but through the kindness of others and the strength of itself it’s been able to rebuild. Part of its rehabilitation has been a burgeoning music scene.
The city that was built on blues and jazz has been rebuilt on the strength of the horn. The Soul Rebels are one such band. (They are about to headline at the London Jazz Festival). Some of the members’ entire homes were wiped out and they lost everything. Somehow they have emerged stronger.
Julian Omari Gosin, 26, drives me through the city down to the fêted 9th Ward. It’s been rebuilt with solar-powered energy saving housing built by Brad Pitt – he helped with the finance and the architecture. They are stark in shape, pink, yellow, blue in colour, and with none of the fancy French colonial influence of the rest of the city. Back near the French Quarter there are giant houses that look like wedding cakes. ‘These were slave houses,’ says Julian, matter of fact.
For a city that was built on slavery there’s a weird absence of prejudice and class structure. Brad Pitt and Angeline Jolie can walk through the city without being tracked by paparazzi. Nobody cares about status. People care about being alive. It’s a paradox because the city is also famous for its dead. You walk the same streets that Interview With A Vampire was shot. You can buy a voodoo doll at the many voodoo emporiums. No one seems ill wishing. Even the bums have a certain charm. They’ve seen it all. They accept their fate. They may be homeless but they can be philosophical.
Not that you see bums in the French Quarter. You do see fortunetellers and old ladies who live for the price of a voodoo spell. The main streets in the French Quarter are Bourbon Street, Royal Street, Decatur Street and Frenchman Street. They are elegant streets, filled with elegant old-fashioned restaurants and antique stores. On Royal Street there are many ornate French colonial style antique shops, eccentric chandeliers, quirky cufflinks and vintage gold. Moss Antiques was my absolute favourite with its selection of hand-painted enameled gold and excessively beautiful home ware.
It’s a city for walking. Perhaps that’s why there are so many Thai foot massage shops, as common as mani-pedi premises on Sunset Boulevard.
Streetcars still run through the city. In fact you could take in the leafy oak trees and drive by the parks. The Treme neighbourhood is a district just north of the French Quarter and has come into the spotlight recently because of the various HBO series.
Every Thursday The Soul Rebels are at Le Bon Temps Roule club on Magazine Street, named after the bar in the movie The Big Easy, 1970s looking building which gets packed to the roof when they play. Julian and other band members started off in marching bands. There are many churches and funeral homes in New Orleans. Life and death side by side. And that’s how they play. It’s a mixture of tradition, of jazz, of hip-hop. It’s a fusion of everything in their life that’s inspired them or hurt them.
On their album Unlock Your Mind they do a version of Sweet Dreams. It’s very powerful and seems to capture the vibe of the city – bitter sweet.
On Bourbon Street every building is a jazz bar. Not all of it great music, but all of it passionate. The Rebirth Brass Band – it’s traditional but also modern - plays at the Maple Leaf. Tipitina’s is another famous landmark music venue. It is on the corner of Napoleon Street. It is a music mecca. Many jazz greats have played there and still do.
Church is a big event, so Sunday brunch at Lil Dizzy’s café should be hit before the church comes out. There’s also the Golden Feather Mardi Gras Indian restaurant there. And at the back of Congo Square you’ll find the building that housed the J&M recording studio where Little Richard and Ray Charles recorded. Catch the Charles Avenue streetcar for an overview of the new trendy neighbourhoods.
Audubon Park Zoo is opposite an endless array of vast mansions. It’s a research zoo. After Jefferson Avenue you find Magazine Street with a huge array of boutiques, art shops, jewellery shops and coffee shops. It’s the one place in the universe where Starbucks has not taken over. New Orleans residents prefer their own local coffee shops – there’s CC’s and PJ’s and instead of Submarine or McDonald’s you’ll have Po’boy shops. They originated when the streetcar workers were on strike and to support them the sandwich shops would give them French bread with French fries and gravy because they were poor boys. Now Po’boy sandwiches are filled with oysters, shrimp, roast beef. But they still have the French bread.
Igor’s Buddha Belly is a laundromat bar and grill so you can do your laundry, shoot pool and get a drink. The Neville Brothers started there.
The Soul Rebels have become ambassadors for New Orleans. Most of the band had been evacuated after the storm. Erion Williams, saxophone player and MC, remembers the night they came back after the storm. ‘A generator had been hooked up and there was cold beer. I’ll never forget the drive from Baton Rouge. It was in complete darkness. No street lights, no power, no nothing. I made it down Magazine Street, got to the club, I walk in and it’s packed. It was a crazy night because people hadn’t seen each other for so long, and the band needed to lift their spirits as well.’
It’s as if that’s what they’re still doing. Lifting spirits and rebuilding houses. Julian is still rebuilding his house,. It has been a long process. It was completely devastated. No one had realised the impact of the storm. He had left carrying ‘just jeans, a few T-shirts and my CD player.’
In New Orleans everyone does not have an iPod. People are poor and they don’t seem to embrace technology the way the rest of the world does. My iPhone broke and Julian took it to be repaired at the one phone shop which is at the back of a supermarket.
My friend who was born in the south recommended that I go to Galatoires on Bourbon Street if I wanted to see the real south. The real south is very old school. Very nice. Properly dressed gentlemen offering cocktails and turtle soup for nicely dressed ladies. They don’t take reservations so to get in speedily you have to look good – dress old fashioned smart. Even movie stars wait in line and won’t necessarily be seated before a charming smile. Downstairs is chicest. It’s pale cream and colonial in its décor but it’s not stuffy, it’s bustly. In a city where everything changes very quickly Galatoires is a piece of history. In a city that’s been devastated and been rebuilt it’s interesting to have a part of that that remains untouched. It’s famous for it’s shrimp remoulade and oysters en brochette. I ate a seafood okra gumbo. Okra is big in the south. The slaves brought it from Africa. I like to think of it as drinking slave soup.
The Soul Rebels took me to The Praline Connection on Frenchmen Street for a huge dinner. It’s all plain white tablecloths and soul food. It was as if a sack of fried shrimp in thick batter had been emptied on to my plate. It came with cornbread that was sweet and moist and “mac n cheese” that was sharp and creamy and collard greens which had a mystical way of feeling extremely filling and unhealthy. The boys had gumbo which is different in every restaurant. Sometimes spicy, sometimes thick, sometimes fishy, sometimes meaty. I suppose that’s why people are endlessly fascinated by it. It’s the soup equivalent of the cocktail.
Next door is a shop that sells praline based confectionary. Something else that seems to have been invented in New Orleans along with the cocktail. You can imagine someone in New Orleans inventing the cocktail; someone needing an altered state so quickly that they like to combine as many possible alcohols in one drink and disguise them in sweetness. That seems to readily translate to the hurricane cocktails that were pink and long and sweet that I sampled further down Frenchmen Street at the Blue Nile. It’s a music venue mostly showcasing new talent.
Also on Frenchmen Street is one of the strangest Japanese restaurants ever – Yuki Izakaya. Imagine combining the cuisine and culture of minimalist Japan with maximalist New Orleans. You get Japanese soups that are incredibly hearty, curry on French fries and sushi that has a swamp feel. You also get sake cocktails. Imagine sake, rum, green tea and pineapple all together. They call it a Green Lagoon.
The cocktail is quite an important metaphor. New Orleans like to mix everything up – black, white, rich, poor, life, death, brass, funk…
The city is very proud of Trombone Shorty. Julian and Troy Trombone Shorty went to the school for musically gifted children. Troy was taken under the wing of U2 and Lenny Kravitz and singled out as a new superstar. He has a blend of distinctive brass, very modern and cool, and seems to be constantly on the US talk show circuit. Both The Soul Rebels and Trombone Shorty know the capabilities of New Orleans and the power of music.
When I meet Trombone Shorty he’s a tiny delicate man with huge charisma. He describes how he lost the bottom of his house. His family had a letter from President Bush the first which they tried to save. Everything else was just ruined.
‘And the swamp smell was terrible. We had to put on masks. We felt sick. A lot of local people got wiped away. They could never come back. Music opened doors, even for those who didn’t have a fan base. We all tried to help each other as much as we could. Everything that happened to me I deal with, every emotion, in my music.’ And he manages to make you feel that.
I stayed at Hotel Monteleone. The walls were pale yellow and cream striped. The walls seemed to talk. The dead are buried in crypts above ground because New Orleans is only a few inches above sea level and that does seem to make a difference. It’s as if they walk around with you in the streets. The hotel is a literary landmark boasting that Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams and William Faulkner not only stayed there but wrote there. Every one of the staff seemed to be exceptionally informed ad new everything about everybody. Knowledge forms the base of their charm and also they are non-judgmental. It’s a city of possibility. Everything can be done with ease and without spite.
Downstairs within the hotel is one of the most beautiful bars. It’s called the Carousel Bar and it is built from an old fairground carousel. You actually revolve as you sip martinis giving the impression that you are drunk before you start. The carousel is old brass and painted flamboyantly. The cocktails are playful, traditional and heavenly. As you circle around you feel you are in a circus for adults.
There is interesting shopping. Trashy Diva on Charles Street mixes lingerie with cocktail ware. The kind of clothes you wear if you’re not sure if you want to be in or out of bed. If you are inspired by New Orleans cuisine, Kitchen Witch on Toulouse Street is a vintage inspired kitchen store.
Christine DeCuir of the Visitors Bureau took me to dinner at The Palace Café Restaurant on Canal Street. We had an amazing array of food that was both old-fashioned and modern. We had Cajun cosmopolitan which involved rum as well as vodka, which was strangely warming as well as uplifting. We had oysters in rosemary cream and herb breadcrumbs, giant creole shrimp and rib eye the size of an armchair and as soft. The blue cheese salad had grilled peaches and candied pecans and a whiskey vinaigrette. It too is typical of the rebirth.
Christine told me that when the city was being evacuated she hadn’t taken it seriously. By the time she got home to collect some belongings she and her family could hardly drive over the bridge. Old people and women with small babies were begging for a ride. 1,200 were drowned, including an entire old people’s home.
When she eventually got back to show journalists around the devastated areas they were all crying. There was nothing. It was a nuclear waste ground. Eventually she got to her house, found furniture floating in the water. Somehow she didn’t cry.
‘Some people were devastated by this and never got over it. Others it was just the turning point they needed. It was the opposite and they made a better life.


- For further information contact: New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau. Phone: 001 504 566 5090

- The Soul Rebels Brass Band are performing at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, on November 16 as part of the London Jazz Festival.
- Trombone Shorty’s album For True is out now.

- Hotel Monteleone, 214 Royal Street, New Orleans, LA 70112. Phone: 001 504 523 3341