On falling in love with New Orleans:
TH: My first experience in New Orleans was postering for a band called the Dhamba 8 that would visit my hometown. I was 17 years old, two weeks off high school, and I’d just found out about Jazz Fest.
I tagged along with these guys down to New Orleans, and whatever gigs they had, I followed them to and they let me sit in. The city didn’t really have the drinking age thing going yet when I was 17.
I went out to Jazz Fest one day and lost connection with the band. They were going to play at Café Brasil that night, but I didn’t have any idea where that was. I only had this weird, warped tourist map where the things tourists want to see were big, and the things that didn’t count—like whole neighborhoods—were squished.
So I somehow walked all the way back from Jazz Fest, all the way down Elysian Fields to Frenchmen Street. I think I had to stop in some little store and ask directions halfway. When I finally ended up on Frenchmen, I’m like, “Now this looks like a place they might have some music.”
I go to see my buddies play at Café Brasil, which I didn’t know anything about. A band called the Iguanas was going to play after. My buddies start to play their set. Now, they’re from Chicago, and like me, they didn’t have any frame of reference for anything. The Iguanas come in… and shut them down. They somehow felt that the band was going to take their cover, or try to get some of it, or something. It was kinda funny.
Anyways, that was my first memory of Frenchmen Street. When I saw it for the first time, I thought, “I made it.” I could tell right away. I fell in love with Frenchmen and New Orleans on that trip, and I moved a year later. That was 1994.
A walk down Frenchmen in 1994:
I got a job as a busboy at a restaurant at the other end of Decatur. It was called Café Giovanni, right near Canal Street. After work, I’d walk the whole length of Decatur in my busboy clothes to go see some reggae music at what was then called Café Istanbul on Frenchmen.
Once you got past Café du Monde at night, you were looking both ways and behind you the whole time. There was pretty much nothing between Café du Monde and Café Brazil.
You’d walk up Decatur, past what’s now called the BMC. It was was a drag bar then, called the Mint. It became the Matador later. Dragon’s Den across the way was open, and they’d have all indie rock bands up there on the second floor.
Checkpoint Charlie was exactly the same as it is now.
Once you got past Checkpoint Charlie, it was dark. A blind corner; you didn’t know where you were going. You’d go past what’s now Maison, and that was this hippie commune. Where the window is, they’d have some futons and rugs out. They had an avant-garde jam session in there sometimes. It wasn’t a venue—there was no cover—it was just some bunch of hippies who lived in there, in the little nooks and crannies of the building.
Bamboulas was a left-wing printing press, this ancient printing press, and what’s now 30/90 was an empty lot with a fence in front of it. You’d look back in there and see—I think there were some old horse stables back there.
The first club that you’d come to on that side of the street was Café Istanbul; now it’s called Blue Nile. Across from there was Café Brasil. What we thought of as “Frenchmen” back then was really those two clubs. There was no jazz—like, traditional jazz—on Frenchmen then, and there were no cover bands. It was pretty much those two clubs, and you’d go back and forth between them.
Istanbul had reggae music, and Wanda Joseph, who plays around, would be the bass player. She was the star of that, to me. To see the Shepherd Band at Café Istanbul, and this amazing woman bass player… Wow. That happened every Friday night, I think. Then they had merengue, a Honduran kind of music.
Café Brasil would have a salsa band, Mas Mamones, with Hector Gallardo. Michael Skinkus was his understudy. He’s still around town. This guy named Hart McNee, he was kind of one of the mayors of Frenchmen. He’s passed away. And Kufaro [Mouton] would be in some of those bands.
As far as the next block, the bookstore was there on the corner. Apple Barrel was there, but I don’t remember music at first. I don’t remember music there until about 2000. No Spotted Cat, nothing in that building at all. For music it was just Snug Harbor down that end, and that was kind of it’s own thing back then. You went in there, saw the music, and left. On the very end of the street, where the Brasserie is, was a lesbian bar called Rubyfruit Jungle.
And that was Frenchmen. None of the other things were there. No tourists at all. Only international people, and grad student-type kind of people, and a little bit of college kids that were in the know. That was all there was to it.
The Mayors of Frenchmen
As far as I was concerned, the mayors of Frenchmen in the ’90s were Wanda, Hector Gallardo was still around, Kufaro, who played percussion… He was originally from New York, but he was just everywhere. He played drums with some of the trad bands in the French Market. He’d be just around on his bike, and he’d play with different people. Eventually, he played with some of the bands I was in.
I remember seeing Kenny Claiborne‘s band at Dragon’s Den, way back then, playing his original rock, whatever he wanted. Hart McNee would play baritone sax and flute in Latin bands. When I did see music at Apple Barrel, it would be Coco Robicheaux with Michael Sklar. Michael Sklar passed away a couple years ago. Super nice guy. That was Frenchmen, to me.
Giggin’
I had a jam band [Idletime] in the late ’90s. We played at Café Brasil for the millennium. Packed it out. People were flooding out into the street. You hear people complain now that they don’t make money on Frenchmen Street? I think the whole band—for the millennium—made $200. We chased Adé, that was the owner of Café Brasil, upstairs and got a couple of $100 bills out of him. The place was completely packed, but there was no money to be made. At all.
We’d play Dragon’s Den, get $100 for the band to split up, that was about it. Towards the end of my first tour of New Orleans, I’d play with Warren Batiste at the Matador, which is now BMC. We’d make $20, $30, $40 for the evening.
But you know, we did other things. All the horn players did Latin gigs, merengue gigs out in Kenner or something on the weekends. Or things at the convention center, something like that. We did Café Brasil for fun, and it was all either original music or international music. Really, really cool. One time Adé told me I should get an award for playing in Café Brasil with the most different bands. (I never got that award.)
When the Spotted Cat first opened, my friend Blake Amos got a Friday night there with Brazilian music. All Brazilian. And that caught on; we got voted “Best Happy Hour” by Gambit Magazine. That was probably 2002. There’d always be a big flood of people outside, which was typical of Frenchmen in those days.
(Not just) “a bunch of hobos singing Tin Pan Alley songs…”
And after us at the Spotted Cat on those Fridays, it was first incarnation I remember seeing of the Jazz Vipers: Joe Braun, Jack Fine, Neti Vaan on violin. There was a young lady that played trombone; I don’t know if she’s around anymore. Bart Ramsey would sit in. Linnzi Zaorski would be in that band. Sophie Lee would sit in. I’d sit in a lot. It was Clay [Windham] on bass before Robert Snow. And John Rodli.
I’d been living in New Orleans seven or eight years before I heard them, and it was different than any music I’d heard before. What I thought of as trad music—traditional jazz—it’d be at the French Market. Kind of oldies. Or something like Preservation Hall, where they’d be on the boats. And that was about it.
But this was something else. Everybody sang; that was new to me. There was a lot more singing than I’d ever heard in a trad band. They did more songs, and funnier songs. Joe found all these funny old songs to sing. Now everybody does them, but they didn’t back then. They were kind of like a jug band off of Royal Street. It was somewhere between a jug band and a trad band. It was just more folksy, more earthy.
And the thing was, that’s what everybody wanted to hear. People would come to New Orleans, and they wanted to hear that kind of trad jazz. It just caught on. One of the guys that was in the more regular trad scene told me once, “It’s like a bunch of hobos singing Tin Pan Alley songs from the ’20s and ’30s. Nobody wants to hear that now.”
But they do. They do want to hear that. It caught on, and that style of music became a Frenchmen Street thing. And not just Frenchmen; when I moved to New York, a guy listening to me play in the park could tell right away I was from New Orleans. Soon it was popular up there too.
Once the concierges and stuff caught on, they started sending people down to the Spotted Cat to hear the Vipers. Eventually the Vipers split into all these different trad bands we have now. Linnzi Zaorski got her own band, Sophie Lee has a band… We have a whole bunch of different things now.
To me, it all started back in 2002 with Joe Braun and Jack Fine and those guys in the Spotted Cat, which was a brand new venue at that time.
