Features

New Orleans' second-line parade culture and Mardi Gras Indian culture share a number of attributes.

Both emerged as casually formalized neighborhood practices in the post-Reconstruction decades of the late 19th-century, with Indian imagery likely influenced around that time by the popularity in the U.S. of traveling 'Wild West' shows.

While the corruption-and-reform message that would dominate post-Katrina rebuilding was being crafted in the arena of national politics—delivered through the combined strategies of federal inaction and rabid crime enforcement—the tourism industry in New Orleans emerged as the second gatekeeper of post-Katrina message delivery, energized by a void of local political leadership.

This is the 5th and final part of Roger Hahn's "New Orleans Culture at a Tipping Point." Part 4 is on the home page. You can find Parts 1-3 elsewhere here by searching the site—ed.

Our Man in New Orleans Roger Hahn concludes his report from the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival 2009 and meditates on its future. You'll think you went!-ed.

New marketing trends had begun to establish an exploitable connection between highly educated consumers with gobs of disposable income and their fascination for the aura of “authenticity” naturally connected to the “roots” music world.

Corporate leaders began to understand this, too. In 1996, one of the world’s largest software vendors, Computer Associates, began holding its annual trade show in New Orleans and by 1998, had specifically connected attendance at the trade show with a Jazz Fest hospitality tent on festival grounds, spawning an unlikely influx of logo-bearing, polo-shirted Computer Associates employees.

The subscription based vinyl-only jazz label Newvelle Records, which just finished production of its fourth season's recorded offerings (the first title, Noah Preminger's Preminger Plays Preminger shipped last week), held a special event a the label's "home base" studio: EastSide Sound in NYC today, March 23rd.

Sundazed's recent mono After Bathing at Baxter's reissue, reviewed here (www.musicangle.com/album.php?id=381) prompted bassist Dan Schwartz to send this remembrance —ed.

There has never been a great rock band without a great drummer. Ringo took a drubbing from clever pundits and know-nothings as if he was not in the league of the other Beatles. But Ringo, "the greatest," changed the world in a most crucial moment in modern history with his sheer explosive and contagious joy in playing.

This story, posted last fall, wondered about the fate of our Tracking Angle New Orleans correspondent Roger Hahn. Mid way through January, Hahn found us through a friend who\'d done an internet search on his name and came upon this piece, originally published in the Summer of 1998. Hahn will once again contribute, this time online at musicangle.com.