Stuck in a minor key

New Orleans

THIS is a town so inextricably linked to good times and revelry that a musician could practically make a name with one celebratory anthem.

That’s the case with Al “Carnival Time” Johnson. Since 1960, “Carnival Time,” the song and the singer, have been mainstays of New Orleans’ Mardi Gras celebrations. Even at other times of the year, his upbeat party tune, a musical tour of the Big Easy on Fat Tuesday, is played on the radio and performed at event after event by Johnson himself.

Now he’s singing a different tune. Johnson has released a new single, “Lower Ninth Ward Blues,” which gives a very different tour of the city, a solo, gospel-ish piano accompanying his account of the devastation that came when the levees broke after Hurricane Katrina struck on Aug. 29, 2005. Many neighborhoods were left largely lifeless, including that of Johnson -- who describes the ruins of his house in one particularly moving verse.

Twenty-three forty-nine Tennessee Street

We shared good and bad memories

I don’t know which way to go

Because my home is not there anymore.

The song reflects the other half of the essential duality that is New Orleans, a city as adept with funerals as it is with partying. “It keeps me going,” he says of the new song. “It brings me through a whole lot. Katrina was very devastating to us. It’s different, and it’s my story and exactly how I feel.”

Johnson is hardly alone. The Louisiana Music Factory, a French Quarter store specializing in New Orleans music, now stocks CD after CD on which local artists have dealt with the post-flood experiences in song -- some expressing anger, others celebrating the prospect of renewal, some conveying nostalgic shout-outs to people who’ve passed away or simply moved away, some looking ahead, some beginning in sorrow and ending in life-affirming joy, just like a New Orleans funeral second-line parade.

The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, led to some profound musical statements, but predictions that the horrific events would somehow introduce new meaning across the pop landscape evaporated within months.

Two years after Katrina, the landscape of New Orleans music, like the landscape of the city itself, is radically different. Where the scene was dominated by party tunes and decades-old standards, where some of the most popular local acts could count on weekly gigs without having to stretch too much, now there’s something deeper.

And in a city where music more than anything -- except maybe food -- is its identity, something handed down from generation to generation, from Neville to Neville, Marsalis to Marsalis, this is crucial. The very repertoire of New Orleans music has undergone a sea change.

“It’s meaningful change,” Johnson says. “It’s bringing a new part, a new part to go along with the old part. It’s not that it’s changing anything old, it’s adding on, expanding into what’s going on now and that’s the way it should be. Katrina was devastating and we have to talk about it and sing about it.”

The number of live-music clubs in town is pretty much back to where it was before Katrina, says Alex Rawls, editor of offBeat, the New Orleans music monthly. He mentions the Mermaid Lounge, TwiRoPa and the Dixie Taverne among those that are gone. But the new Rusty Nail took over the Mermaid Lounge location and other new clubs such as Chickie Wah Wah have filled the gap left by others.

As far as the number of musicians who have returned, solid figures are hard to come by. Aimee Bussells, interim executive director of the Renew Our Music Fund, says that a comprehensive count of music figures -- including members of Mardi Gras Indian groups and the Social Aid & Pleasure Clubs that are the backbone of the city’s famed parades -- was somewhere between 4,500 and 5,000 before the flood.

Information gathered by her organization and others, including the New Orleans Musicians Clinic, indicates that about one-third of what she calls the “culture community” has returned and are in “stable” situations in terms of housing and steady work. Another third is also back, but in unstable circumstances, while the final third has yet to come back.

Losses still mounting

Trombonist Lester Caliste and sax player Ernest “Doc” Watson are among those who are gone; the last two original members of the venerated Olympia Brass Band both moved to Texas. Clarinetist Alvin Batiste, a key figure in New Orleans music performance and education circles, died in May shortly before his scheduled performance at the annual Jazz & Heritage Festival. In some cases, veteran musicians died as a result of the added stress of losing homes and being forced to move so late in life.

That gives old standards new meaning in seemingly dozens of recordings: “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans” and the lament “St. James’ Infirmary,” most commonly, while Randy Newman’s “Louisiana 1927,” in various new versions, is no longer about a flood of 80 years ago.

Veteran R&B; singer Irma Thomas’ 2006 album, “After the Rain,” brought the first Grammy Award of her 49-year career. Dr. John and Harry Connick Jr. put out albums responding to Katrina, while local legend Allen Toussaint teamed with Elvis Costello for the wide-ranging album “The River in Reverse.” Jazz trumpeter-composer Terence Blanchard turned his music from Spike Lee’s documentary series about the floods into a new album, “A Tale of God’s Will,” with the subtitle “A Requiem for Katrina.” And next month, the all-star “Goin’ Home: A Tribute to Fats Domino” is being released to generate more money to help rebuild Domino’s home, which was destroyed by the storm, and to support rebuilding other neighborhoods in the city’s devastated Lower 9th Ward.

Juvenile, the biggest star to emerge from the New Orleans rap scene, incorporated Katrina-related lyrics into his 2006 album, “Reality Check,” and now has teamed with local funk band Galactic for a tour of the affected streets with the title song of the latter’s upcoming album “From the Corner to the Block.”

Ivan Neville, son of Aaron Neville, anchored the post-Katrina all-star benefit album, “Sing Me Back Home,” by a gathering dubbed the New Orleans Social Club with a smoldering version of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son,” turning it into an indictment of the inequities exposed in the wake of the flood. And now Neville is releasing a new song, “Meanwhile,” with his band Dumpstaphunk, suggesting people party amid the rubble because “there might not be a next time.”

“The song has a sense of humor,” says Neville, for many years part of Keith Richards’ and Bonnie Raitt’s bands and a regular in recent years playing alongside his father and uncles in the Neville Brothers. “People are out playing and obviously a lot of songs have been written by people expressing how they feel, what hasn’t been done and what should be done. Basically, New Orleans has changed forever.”

The Preservation Hall Jazz Band, whose home has for decades been ground zero of New Orleans jazz traditions, put out “Made in New Orleans: The Hurricane Sessions.” The wide-ranging box of recordings and video, much of it salvaged from a flooded storage facility, includes material produced from nearly 50 years ago up to weeks before the flood. A limited-edition package also includes pieces of memorabilia that survived the rising waters and encroaching mold, turning the presentation into a veritable artifact of Katrina’s devastation.

To Benjamin Jaffe, owner and manager of Preservation Hall and a musician who performs with groups involved at the club, the release marks a turning point and is intended to honor the past and look to the future.

“We won’t fully understand the impact for a long time, the effects and aftermath of the hurricane,” he says. “I know one thing is we lost an older generation of musicians. They’re simply gone. You lose one of these guys and the impact affects all the different wings of the music community here.”

That’s just a small sampling of the relevant releases by acts ranging from world-famous stars to those unknown outside the again-vibrant clubs that line Frenchmen Street or dot the French Quarter and uptown wards.

OffBeat’s Rawls has listened to hundreds of songs that try to deal with the devastation -- the vast majority well-meaning (many benefiting such causes as the Habitat for Humanity Musicians’ Village or the Tipitina’s Foundation) -- but, in his view, missing the mark. Johnson’s song, released as a single on a CD that also contains digital video and photo images of his ruined house, is his pick for the best of the bunch, along with “Poor Man’s Paradise,” the title track of a new album by local roots-rocker Johnny Sansone.

“The ones that don’t work try to dramatize it, and it was already incomprehensible and dramatic beyond belief,” says Rawls. “Trying to frame Katrina in poetic language makes the language look poor. Trying to fit a hurricane in the rhyme scheme makes the whole experience seem small. These songs, the best of them, catch the details of how someone’s life changed.”

The full effect cannot be measured through individual songs or albums, though.

“The music is responding to the new conditions here, because the music, the culture in New Orleans is a living culture,” says Dave Freedman, general manager of WWOZ-FM, a noncommercial radio station devoted to the sounds and traditions of the city. “People live the music.”

Key, he adds, is that many people are gone.

“We’re still missing 200,000, minimum,” Freedman says. “It’s hard for people to really grasp how important this neighborhood business is in the city of New Orleans. Every high school marching band has its own sound and rhythms. You can tell where Mardi Gras Indians come from if you have the knowledge of the geography that’s expressed in their chants. The problem is we don’t have neighborhoods anymore.”

Severed link to future stars

Many churches and schools, which Freedman calls the “incubators” of New Orleans music, were destroyed or remain closed. Once-ubiquitous scenes of kids walking around with sousaphones wrapped around them, looking for someone with whom to jam, are relatively scarce.

That, Freedman fears, will spell an end to the process that’s created and pushed along the great traditions of the city’s music, an unbroken chain from the Congo Square drumming of 19th century slaves through trumpeter Buddy Bolden, Jelly Roll Morton and Louis Armstrong to the vibrant contributions of such current local leaders as young Troy “Trombone Shorty” Andrews. But at the same time, the new conditions have created a crucible for music of new depth.

Blanchard got a stark sense on his early returns to his hometown after the flood.

“When I was in the neighborhood I heard silence,” he says. “No cars, no people, no insects. Music wasn’t coming to me. If I wanted to really give the impression, I should have had three minutes of silence on the album.”

Local players have scheduled a Musicians Solidarity March through the French Quarter today, many planning to hold, but not play, their instruments to symbolize how many feel that the city’s musical heritage is being silenced in the wake of Katrina.

Blanchard is doing what he can to fill that silence, having been instrumental in bringing the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz to Loyola University in New Orleans after it recently left its home at USC.

The nonprofit organization was founded by the composer-bassist’s family with the mission of promoting public school-based jazz education. The move is accompanied by a specific commitment to help renew the city’s music-education infrastructure, with such national figures as Herbie Hancock joining Blanchard in leadership roles.

Among others struggling to keep the music going is Lumar LeBlanc, snare drummer of the Soul Rebels, a leading force in the city’s new generation of brass bands, mixing hip-hop into the traditional, funky street-ensemble sounds.

LeBlanc and his family moved to Houston after Katrina wrecked their house. But now he and bandmate Marcus Hubbard make the six-hour drive to New Orleans every week to play regular gigs at the local clubs. Both the circumstances and the commitment are reflected in new songs the band has written for a new album, “No Place Like Home,” which it hopes to have released in conjunction with the Katrina anniversary.

“It’s definitely made some of our songs more -- how should I say it? -- emotionally attached,” he says during a drive in from Texas. “There’s more of a concerted effort to say something with meaning. We feel like really all of this could have been lost and now we’re blessed to be doing it again.”

How will this figure as the traditions evolve?

“You’re going to see in the coming decade a profound shift created by what’s gong on,” Blanchard says. “It’s going to take that amount of time to fully take in and assimilate the entire experience.”

But it is going to go on -- though for many with the fear that what happened once could happen again.

“Katrina is going to be forever in the eyes and souls of all who experienced it,” LeBlanc says. “Both of my sons feel the sting of it. And they are going to pass it to their children, how one day New Orleans could almost be wiped off the map.”