New Orleans Jazz

HAPPY BRASS BAND — NEW ORLEANS — AUTOPRODUIT — STUDIO TAMARA — 2010

A band of five, enough to transport an old Romano-Gothic church up in the mountains to the sky of our craziness? and the trip starts with the first notes, the first chords, and every single tune brings the same pictures, the same visions, and they are not only taken from Christopher Rice’s novels, some of them, nor from Anne Rice, his mother, and her vampires, witches and voodoo performers.

New Orleans, I visited you twice in my life. The first time I was on my way to California, and I was waiting for the bus to Los Angeles, the one that eventually gets on and follows Route 66, and I only had enough time to walk some steps of some polka swinging like a boy when he drinks his first liquor deeply hidden in some dark shed, alone or with some more infringers of the rule that says you can drink as much as you want, provided no one notices you’re drunk on your chair, and you better not piss yourself nor vomit it out: it has — you know — to get out of your orgasmic organism. A few steps, I said, in the French Quarter, but not much more. That was in 1973, and I was arriving from New York with a couple of stops in North Carolina, Winston Salem, some gay acquaintance in the tobacco business, and Dunn, some old friends there and I already knew that my long passage in Dunn in 1969–70 had…