Music on the street
It is such a musical town, sweeping the sidewalk you heard the lilt of a lone clarinet from someone practicing on their balcony, taking the dog for a walk , half a block ahead a thin man is singing an old school rhythm and blues number so perfectly it makes you want to follow him way off your regular route. A few weekends ago on my way to the drugstore I heard a group of tubas with a heavy beat thumping up behind me, when I turned around there were four battered horns swaying like drunk elephants in a ragged line marching into a small bar across the street from the CVS. Even the clinking of the streetcar lines has a staccato beat which gets you tapping your feet.
In a small restaurant in the Treme there is a funky three piece band playing New Orleans standards, it metamorphoses into a hip-hop beat and the surly waitress who seconds before placed a steaming plate of red beans and rice before you slowly moves towards the band stand, takes the microphone in her hands and a voice with a depth and range found among a selected few begins a soulful rap about her New Orleans neighborhood, it is hard to take the richness of her lyrics in as her delivery is so striking. When the song is over she steps off the stage and picks up the used glasses on the tables near her.
Little boys with trumpet cases jumping off the school bus, teenage girls walking along Baronne Street with snare drums slung over their shoulders like Coach purses, old men singing along with voices like virtuosos. Our music is not something0 packaged for the tourists, it permeates the city, heard at traffic lights, through open windows, filling most nights standing on a sidewalk creating the backdrop against which we conduct our lives and I would not have it any other way.
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