Jazzy Day

[ateolf]

Okay so picking back up on Sunday. After The Music Box Village...I think we would have eaten something. I'm having trouble remembering right now. Or did we eat after the museum? Ach. Anyway, we went to the New Orleans Jazz Museum which is also the museum for the Mint. It was pretty decent, what you'd expect. There was one little section tucked away in the back corner (right next to the little display for women in jazz) for "modern" jazz, with, among two other more modern people mentioned, there was a little thing for Ed Blackwell (who played with Ornette Coleman) as the single stand-in for free jazz from NOLA. Most of the days on the trip I was dressed up much fancier than usual for some of the fancier places we'd be eating, and since we'd generally be out and about all day, I was dressed up for everything we did. Sunday was the first of those days. I was wearing my suit (usually I kept my suit jacket off until dining) throughout the day. It was much cooler this day. I don't think it was the crazy-cold day (for NOLA) yet but still a lot cooler than when we got in. Oh yeah, and their gift shop was a little satellite of the nearby record store Louisiana Music Factory, focused on their jazz stuff of course. I picked up some cds: John Coltrane: A Love Supreme: Live in Seattle and Eric Dolphy: Musical Prophet: the Expanded 1963 New York Studio Sessions, and also a Sun Ra t-shirt. We had a teensy bit of time to kill so I walked over to Louisiana Music Factory's main store (just around the corner). It was a hurried look, but man, I did pick up a motherlode of an unbelievable trove! I got: Cecil Taylor: Dark to Themselves, Pharoah Sanders: Izipho Zam, Cecil Taylor & Günter Sommer: Riobec, Cecil Taylor: In East-Berlin, Cecil Taylor: Erzule Maketh Scent, Cecil Taylor & Louis Moholo: Remembrance, Cecil Taylor & Tony Oxley: Leaf Palm Hand, Cecil Taylor with Tristan Honsinger & Evan Parker: The Hearth, and Andrew Hill: Point of Departure. That run of Cecil Taylor in the middle there was all part of this series of a whole bunch of shows he put on at a festival in Germany in 1988, and I've BEEN meaning to get more into his later stuff and fuck if this wasn't just the perfect treasure trove (there's still a bunch more in this series I need to track down too)! We had brunch reservations at Commander's Palace so we went over to there. It was jazz brunch with upright bass, guitar (the bluesy steel resonator acoustic kind), and trumpet and they played requests, I think there were some Christmassy numbers. Oh, a weird thing on this trip was people would say "Merry Christmas" and stuff and we're all going to somewhere even warmer and less Christmassy than we came from and we're on vacation so all that isn't in my mind at all and it was kind of a weird juxtaposition and I'm just like, oh yeah, I guess it is almost Christmas? Anyway, the food was really good. Then it was back over to the French Quarter. We did some more book shopping. First we hit up Faulkner House (actually, we tried to go to Arcadian but it wasn't open...or did we try the first night...well, it wasn't open so it didn't happen...yet). At Faulkner House I picked up: A Girl's Story by Annie Ernaux and Shame by Annie Ernaux. Then a dash to Dauphine Street (which is decidedly not on Dauphine St., though of course it used to be at one point). I got some more books: MaddAddam by Margaret Atwood, The Foot of Clive by John Berger, John's Wife by Robert Coover, The Word "Desire" by Rikku Ducornet, I Will Have Vengeance by Maurizio de Giovanni, Aftershocks by Grete Weil, 99: the New Meaning by Walter Abish, and Amédée • The New Tenant • Victims of Duty by Eugène Ionesco. Then it was over to the Preservation Hall for a jazz show. I wasn't sure what to expect with this one. It was definitely a lot tinier than I was expecting. You're in this little tiny dilapidated room with wooden benches. They really keep the old-school feel (even if in a museum-piece kind of way, it works and still "feels" a bit more "authentic" than other kinds of simulacra). So the band plays traditional kind of New Orleans jazz numbers for a pretty strict hour time slot. The trumpet player also does double duty on vocals. This was true of the jazz brunch band too, and you can tell that Louis Armstrong really messed things up for all trumpet players in NOLA and you simply cannot play that instrument without singing in a low, gravelly voice too. But the band was him and clarinet, trombone, drums, piano. They were good musicians and I enjoyed it. I mean, obviously not my first choice for types of jazz but it was a pretty cool experience. Okay, we've reached a point again and I'm going to jump off into another post. (Dang, looks like we're at less than a post a day, this may take a while!!)