Album Reviews

Having been drowned to within an inch of its life, New Orleans, source of great musical innovations and revivals, birthplace of early jazz and classic rock, purveyor of fundamental funk, and mother of idiosyncratic geniuses beyond number, is still in the process of washing off the mud and putting the pieces back together again.

And the cultural wetlands of the city, neighborhoods that previously housed more than 125,000-plus black working-class inhabitants, remain mostly silent, decimated by an enforced migration unequaled since the Dust Bowl.

But it is precisely from that population, those families, those neighborhoods, those hands and voices, that some of the most-valued cultural contributions of the city have emerged: jazz parades and Mardi Gras Indians, Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong and Antoine “Fats” Domino, The Neville Brothers and the Dirty Dozen Brass Band.

So what will happen now? Civic leaders are busy pumping life back into the tourism economy, but making far less headway in revitalizing black neighborhoods. Musicians, for the most part, still face towering challenges. The real danger now is a reconstituted New Orleans luring visitors with a facsimile culture.

Rounder Records producer and vice president of A&R Scott Billington understands both this real and potential loss all too well.

For more than a decade, he used New Orleans and New Orleans musicians as a base of operations, recording local artists, zydeco bands, and national R&B stars like Ruth Brown and Solomon Burke. The recording venue he called home, Utrasonic Studio, was located in a neighborhood hardest hit by floodwaters and now exists no more.

So City of Dreams: A Collection of New Orleans Music is Billington’s personal, 4-CD memorial to the city’s rich musical legacy, compiled from his own efforts as well as a host of other recordings Rounder began making in the early 1980s, when New Orleans music was flying well below the national radar and no one dreamed of a 1990s renaissance that would return it to national prominence, a renaissance fueled, in part, by the contributions of independent labels like Rounder.

The Real New Orleans: A Graduate Seminar

As Billington recounts in the set’s spare but nicely illustrated liner-note booklet, Boston-based Rounder had already releases several albums of Cajun music from southwest Louisiana in the late 1970s when hit it big with George Thorogood and the Destroyers, a hard-rocking roots-and-boogie act with a significant following in New England that’s still touring and recording today.

That success gave Rounder the financial resources to expand its New Orleans-based activities. The label began with a Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown recording that garnered a Grammy, and followed that with releases from keyboard alchemists James Booker and Professor Longhair as well as more-mainstream R&B masters like the late Johnny Adams and still-reigning Queen of Soul Irma Thomas.

In the mid-1980s, inspired by Sam Charters’ landmark 3-LP series of Southside electric blues recordings, Chicago/The Blues/Today (released by Vanguard in the late 1960s, and available as a CD reissue today), Rounder produced Modern New Orleans Masters, a set of shared-billing LPs (subsequently reissued as a single-CD compilation) that artfully mixed modern jazz and funk-flavored blues, eventually earning a full-page story in Newsweek.

City of Dreams… mixes tracks from that set of recordings along with tracks from a wide variety of other projects produced in the 1980s and 1990s, with each of the release’s four CDs devoted to a single aspect of New Orleans music: old-time R&B; brass band and Mardi Gras Indian music; funk-flavored R&B and jazz; and keyboard masters.

In that light, City of Dreams… represents a diligent and intelligent attempt by an independent New England roots label to document the best of New Orleans’ popular-music riches. And as such, it can be counted among the most-coherent “graduate seminars” on the sources and refined expression of some of the most soulfully moving American music produced in the 20th century.

From Juke Boxes to Piano Professors

The first CD in the City of Dreams… set conjures the ambiance of the neighborhood barroom-slash-community center, and especially those still in existence where entrance is restricted to those over the age of 30. It’s old-time, classic R&B at it’s rocking and swinging best, the sound you’d hear from a well-stocked jukebox anywhere in the city the past 20 years.

The R&B set is greatly enlivened by hits from the 1960s and 1970s that Rounder acquired in the 1980s when it bought the catalogue of a local record label.

The second CD, “Street Beat,” brings together Mardi Gras Indian and brass band recordings with some Professor Longhair and modern jazz. It doesn’t work quite as well as the first CD and that’s a shame, because Rounder has some of the best Indian and street-savvy brass band tracks in existence, but in this case tried to pad the sequencing from other parts of their catalogue.

Still, for those unfamiliar with the street sounds of New Orleans, this chock-a-block assemblage serves to capture the only-in-New-Orleans vibe and then some.

“Funky New Orleans,” the third CD, works much better than the second, with the single exception of one track featuring Solomon Burke attempting his best Barry White imitation. Otherwise, the funk ethic of New Orleans is amply illustrated in track after track filled with the sounds of R&B experts and masterful back-up musicians, many of whom have since passed on to that great, funky dance floor in the sky.

“Ivory Emperors,” the set’s fourth CD, is, in some ways, the most amazing, since the prevalence of piano maestros in the Crescent City musical tradition is often noted but rarely so well and fully illustrated.

In this case, David Torkanowsky’s six-minute solo take on “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most” seems completely at home with eccentric legend James Booker recorded live in a local bar or senior funkmaster Art Neville bringing his unique gospel flavor to a solo keyboard performance.

And the CD ends in a classic manner with Professor Longhair’s New Orleans anthem, “Go to the Mardi Gras” followed immediately by mid-century master Tuts Washington’s expansive, barrelhouse version of “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?”

A Requiem for the Living?

Drawing from Rounder’s catalogue of 100-plus New Orleans releases, City of Dreams provides much the same pleasure, enjoyment, and sense of intimacy as leafing through a well-kept family snapshot album, recalling a place and time that exists now mostly in memory. In total, the set represents a highly concentrated tour of the vital traditions of New Orleans late-20th century renaissance.

So, is this, in any way, a definitive New Orleans box set? Not really. In fact, Rounder abandoned its activity New Orleans in the late 1990s as the market for black roots music, which had been newly invigorated in the early 1990s, started to ebb. Instead, the label redirected its resources, riding the popularity of white roots artists like Alison Krauss, from blues to bluegrass.

Besides ending in the late 1990s, City of Dreams contains no traditional jazz (except for brass bands) and no gospel music, either. The label’s vision of R&B might also be described as somewhat narrow, compared, for example, with the Black Top and NYNO labels recording in New Orleans around the same time.

And in sharp contrast is Doctors, Professors, Kings & Queens: The Big Ol’ Box of New Orleans, the 4-CD set released by Shout! Factory in 2004, which covers kaleidoscopic range of New Orleans music and represents a more comprehensive, and in some ways more accurate, overview of Crescent City musical culture.

But putting those concerns aside, there’s another, more serious question City of Dreams… raises: why release what feels mostly like a requiem right now for a culture that’s still very much struggling to stay alive?

The memories are nice to have and the sincerity of the sentiments attached to them unmistakable, but shouldn’t Rounder be back in the city right now documenting a new cultural renaissance made possible, in part, by its support?

As someone who’s lived in the city for a decade and cares deeply about its great musical traditions, City of Dreams… strikes me mainly as a carefully crafted and thoughtful condolence card from a close friend who once helped enliven the local music scene, and who really ought to be here now helping it get back on its feet.

And given the likelihood of enormous profits from its recently released Raising Sand, the killer Alison Krauss/Robert Plant collaboration, Rounder just might have the kind of resources right now to make a real difference.

Why not reprise its early 1980s efforts, which were also supported by profits from other activities, and do some new recording of the master musicians still working in New Orleans, those who have returned to help revive the city’s musical culture, extremely talented local musicians hampered by a downturn in tourism, and a younger generation just now making its impassioned presence known?

Why not direct resources and attention to the current struggle? Or, to put it another way (with reference to a signature line from premier New Orleans blues pianist Champion Jack Dupree): Never mind the flowers; instead, what about lending a hand?



How about it, Scott?