Jason Berry

New Orleans is a city of sounds.
She has a beat, street rhythms, her own pulse. And the evolution of music in the cradle of jazz is partly an underground history of how sounds influence artists, aural shadings, murals of sounds in a good-times town. The slang-studded speech of honky-tonks, oral riffs by radio deejays, recitations of children in games they play, melodies of Scripture in sermons of preachers - there are many spoken sounds with dialects varying from one neighborhood to the next.

The single best show I saw at [Tipitina]'s (...) in the dead heat of summer, the air conditioning system conked out when Fela, the Yoruba pioneer of AfroBeat was on stage. His band uncorked a long groove, Fela - the political firebrand from Nigeria - began his speech in all that heat. Cigarette in hand, index finger upright he lectured the minions: "Do not worry about the air, people of New Orleans. Fela has come to speak to you!"