<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Via </span></i><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Frenchquarter.com</span></i></p>
<p><em><strong>In New Orleans, Music is a civic constant. </strong></em></p>
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<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">New Orleans has never needed an excuse to celebrate. On any weekday at any time, you could wander into an impromptu parade, stumble upon a jazz bar, or find yourself among a gathering of strangers, drawn by a brass band&#8217;s pull. On Bourbon Street, children beat drumsticks against overturned buckets, adding their own rhythms to the city’s unrelenting commotion. Music is less of an attraction of this city than an inevitability. It permeates the streets, spilling from the open doors of crowded bars, tumbling from balconies, and pouring out of the jazz clubs of Frenchmen Street, where passersby become audiences and then participants. After you’ve been here a while, the music becomes a sonic backdrop to the city, like traffic or rain. Here, celebration is not reserved for special occasions. It&#8217;s more of a civic constant. </span></p>
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<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Having spent three years in this city, I like to think I am now reasonably well versed in its brand of revelry, though that is probably impossible. This place has a remarkable ability to make what would elsewhere feel extraordinary seem ordinary, just a part of everyday life. The spontaneous street performances, the brass bands, the crowds that materialize, disappear, and then reappear are all part of the city&#8217;s daily rhythms. Alice Dunbar-Nelson captures something of this in “</span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">A Carnival Jangle</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">,” a portrait of a city swept up in the intoxicating disorder of Carnival. More than a century later, I feel that same spirit of spontaneity animating its streets. </span></p>
<p><img class="aligncenter wp-image-18549" src="https://tulanemagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/Image-9-29-26-at-3.25-PM-1.png" alt="" width="511" height="515" /></p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">“A Carnival Jangle” via Spreaker on iHeart Radio </span></i></p>
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<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">It&#8217;s hardly surprising, then, that a city so devoted to celebration should have given America so much of its music. Jazz was born in New Orleans, and the city has played a crucial role in developing rhythm and blues, funk, rock and roll, and hip-hop. New Orleans has long been a breeding ground for musical invention, a port city where African, Caribbean, French, Spanish, and American traditions met and mixed, long before anyone thought to call the result jazz. The music made here has since spread across state and national borders. </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">I am proud to say that, that impulse lives on today. While the familiar sounds of trumpets and trombones continue to pour from the city’s jazz clubs, new genres, artists, and festivals are finding their way into its ever-expanding repertoire. </span></p>
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<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In October,</span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> NOLA Funk Fest</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> will celebrate Louisiana&#8217;s funk, soul, and brass traditions, while also supporting a planned museum dedicated to the state’s musical history. It&#8217;s the kind of festival that feels like New Orleans looking back at itself fondly, a remembrance of where all of this came from. </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">A month later, the city will welcome </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">We Belong Here</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">, an electronic music festival making its New Orleans debut on the Mississippi Riverfront. My friends and I are already excited. On paper, it couldn’t be further from a brass band on Frenchmen Street, and yet, I’m not so sure it actually is that different. Whatever happens in New Orleans seems to unfold in the same vein, with the same looseness and the same pull toward the crowd and the music. </span></p>
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<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Perhaps that is why music keeps finding its way here. The city takes in the old and the new, the familiar and the foreign, and somehow makes room for it all. A trumpet on a street corner, a DJ by the river– New Orleans makes itself a host and a home to all of them. </span></p>
<p><br style="font-weight: 400;" /><br style="font-weight: 400;" /></p>
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The City That Sings
