My wife is from Laurel, Mississippi, and she has a lot of relatives down in Louisiana, Baton Rouge, and Shreveport, Louisiana. We go down there a lot. We got married in New Orleans. She has a cousin who introduced me to swamp pop, which is sort of zydecoCajun music with a little uptempo pop swing. Now I'm a big zydeco fan, I'm a big swamp-music fan.
Although I miss my family and friends when I'm away from Amsterdam, I've never had that feeling of missing a city like I have with New Orleans. Especially for the music.
There is a velvety sensuality here at the mouth of the Mississippi that you won't find anywhere else. Tell me what the air feels like at 3 A. M. on a Thursday night in August in Shaker Heights and I bet you won't be able to say because nobody stays up that late. But in New Orleans, I tell you, it's ink and honey passed through silver moonlight.
I'm from New Orleans. There's a lot of vampire mystique and mythology that resonates there, and I was fascinated by it. I always wanted to play one.
New Orleans jazz is a complex and embracing art form that began about the same time as the blues and encompassed many of its excellences.
One of the things that's beautiful about New Orleans is how culturally rich we are and how well we have worked together. People call us a gumbo. It's really important that we get focused on the very simple notion that diversity is a strength, it's not a weakness.
It is evidently known, beyond contradiction, that New Orleans is the cradle of Jazz and I, myself, happened to be the creator in the year 1902.
It is wonderful to hear of the relief efforts that are finally coming to New Orleans and the rest of the region, but as well all know, it is simply not going to be enough.
There is nothing that will discombobulate and degrade [more] the lives of people near the margin on this planet. You don't have to look much past New Orleans to see that. Who took the hit? Some of the poorest people in the U. S.
Leaving New Orleans also frightened me considerably. Outside of the city limits the heart of darkness, the true wasteland begins.
When I finished my residency in New Orleans, I went to L. A. where I would work as a doctor during the day, and then at night I would actually go to The Improv and do standup, all the while kind of cultivating my comedy resume.
The rest of America, with some small exceptions, has been bulldozed and rebuilt and then bulldozed and rebuilt again. Our places have become interchangeable. Here in New Orleans, everything from the architecture to the way in which people eat, the way in which they talk, the way in which they do business, the way in which they dance, the manner in which everything is set to a parade beat, they're all from here. There's no place like it.
I am so proud to be from New Orleans and to be one of those people who had been displaced. I wasn't there during that time, but that's where I come from, that kind of poverty, and I'm very, very proud of that because it's given me my history.
The inconveniences we faced within this state are minor compared to. . . New Orleans.
As many bands as you heard [in New Orleans], that's how many bands you heard playing right. I thought I was in Heaven playing second trumpet in the Tuxedo Brass Band -- and they had some funeral marches that would just touch your heart, they were so beautiful.
The Meters are, I think, the most influential group in our time to come out of New Orleans, to have changed and introduced us all to a way of playing, and to a groove and a level of feel in playing funk-jazz.
To be engaged in some small way in the revival of one of the great cities of the world is to live a meaningful existence by default.
New Orleans makes it possible to go to Europe without ever leaving the United States.
I fell in love with the place! You know, the people, the bourbon, the music. . . it's in the air. It's something you can't describe on camera.
The feeling of New Orleans is so pervasive. It's such a strange and decadent and enchanted embrace that that city has. There's a dark magic present. It's no wonder that it's been the hot bed for so much vampiric folklore. The city has got an ancient quality. It's one of the oldest cities in North America.