My first impression of the Crescent City was that it's like the Bronx, only French. It's a remarkable city, thick and gritty and massive, the first place we'd been that felt truly urban. The architecture is solid, ornamental, cosmopolitan, and dingy. And yes, there is that lingering smell in the French Quarter of a never-ending "morning after". Most structures in the city (other than the buildings themselves, for some reason) are elevated, and in a region where dozens of miles of freeway are built hovering above swamp, bayou and open lake, the tangle of flyovers that web the sky in the downtown area seems like just another day's work for the highway engineers.
We walked through the Quarter, past Jackson Square to a cafe near the river. There I ate gumbo, and a man played the keyboard and sang, sounding like a cross between Satchmo and Bob Dylan, with the occasional one-handed trumpet solo thrown in. At the riverbank, we watched an upstream tow of barges being steered around the bend and under the Crescent City Connection bridges. Dinner was by the fire fountain in the courtyard (really the combined backyards of an entire city block) at the famous Pat O'Brien's, home of the Hurricane drink. I had everything else Cajun: jambalaya, crawfish étouffée, red beans and rice. It was Halloween and we had the night off, so we took in Bourbon Street (along with some of the other things that go with it). After dodging the costumed revelers in the street, trying not to spill our legally carried open containers (hooray for street beer!), we finally ended at a jazz club to see what the deal really is with New Orleans music.
The bandleader, a trumpeter, was a round, bald, goateed man with brusque eyebrows, who resembled nothing so much as an inflatable boxing doll. On the bass was a diminutive, withered old cat who probably could have slept inside his fiddle, and looked ancient enough to have invented it. The drummer sat stock still and bolt upright most of the time, his paunch preventing him from collapsing forward. He twitched his right stick around distractedly, hitting his traps at odd angles and seemingly at random, and yet somehow sounding remarkably tasty. On piano was a slightly intense-looking slender fellow whom they called "the Professor", and who occasionally seemed unsure how he'd come to be sitting at this instrument. And the sax player was a clean-cut chap who looked as if he could be from the Marsalis clan; when he blew his clarinet the wind flowed with such dexterity I thought it must be greased. This hodgepodge of characters somehow imagined all of the same notes and took turns playing them, with a result so concordant you couldn't imagine it had come from this drawer of mismatched socks.
We walked back toward the hotel, grabbed a late-night bite to eat, endured the aroma a little longer, and then I took of my beads and went to bed. In the morning, we were headed back to Texas.
View Larger Map
No comments:
Post a Comment