This past Sunday evening (Jan. 5), I hosted the first "Breaking Jazz" of the new year, which gave me the opportunity to present KSDS listeners with the music and musicians resonating most acutely with me right now, in this first week of 2025.
Hours before most of us woke up to a new year last Wednesday morning, a man whom authorities say was “hellbent on destruction” turned an everyday pickup truck into an instrument of warfare, plowing it through a dense crowd of New Year’s party goers on Bourbon Street in New Orleans. Claiming allegiance to the Islamic fundamentalist terror group ISIS and flying its flag from the back of that pickup truck, this man had seemingly come to believe that he could find spiritual repair for whatever had profoundly broken in his life by killing a bunch of people he didn’t know in a place that’s internationally famous for celebrating everything — and, maybe more meaningfully, nothing at all — to excess.
If you’re reading this post or listening to our radio station, you likely have at least some vague notion about the nationally, religiously, and ethnically diverse mixture of things that coalesce to constitute the spirit of New Orleans. It’s hard to articulate but it’s easy to feel. You can feel it whenever you listen to Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday sing, “Do You Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans.” Whatever your feelings on the social and cultural issues that divide our society, know this: In the supposed paradise… or under the demented brand of morality this terrorist sought to reference or glorify through his violence, none of the things any of us love about New Orleans would be tolerated or even possible.
The tune I opened "Breaking Jazz" with this past Sunday evening (Jan. 5) comes from the 21-piece Ryan Middagh Jazz Orchestra and was composed and arranged by Middagh, a baritone saxophonist and bandleader based in Nashville, not New Orleans. But from the moment I heard the opening bars — that overture of horns followed by the signature second line rhythms of New Orleans — I immediately felt the spirit of the Big Easy.
Play "Wiley Roots" by Ryan Middagh Jazz Orchestra
Listening to it through the prism of last week's horrors, Middagh's tune, "Wiley Roots," struck me immediately as embodying the sound of defiance...when defiance is carried out with a smile. A smile closer to spiteful than servile. A smile more like a snarl. But a smile, all the same.
Middagh is based in Nashville, where he’s the director of the jazz studies program at Vanderbilt’s Blair School of Music. But “Wiley Roots,” the opening cut from Middagh's new album "Tenor Madness," hits with the force of a Hurricane...the kind you'll find at Pat O'Brien's, in the heart of the French Quarter. Photo by Alex Chaloff, courtesy of the artist.
After a horrible few days of picking up the pieces, New Orleans and Bourbon Street teem with life and music again, in spite of New Year's Day's terror attack and because of New Year's Day's terror attack — but, mostly, because this week marks the start of Carnival, the two months of devoted indulgence culminating with Mardi Gras. To allow a climate of caution and prudence to prevail during these eight weeks — that would be the true heresy, fatal to the soul of a city whose tenuous topographic existence is some kind of miracle to begin with. Even if the entire world were to give way to some sordid reproduction of eighth century fundamentalism, I'd bet on New Orleans being the last rebel stronghold. New Orleans will not abide moderation or forbearance imposed from without. Its customs are inherently self-regulating; self-denial is already programmed into the calendar, beginning on Ash Wednesday — with the caveat that this programming isn't actually imposed on anyone. It's but one plate in a vast cafeteria, to be taken or left, and you can always get it cooked to order. Put it this way: if a campaign of global re-education is your dream, New Orleans is the last place on earth you oughta start. Even Napoleon didn't have the gall to invade Russia without a few victories under his belt.
New Orleans is joyful and debaucherous. But what may be underrated is its spirit and tradition of defiance.
But I digress...
“Wiley Roots” is the first track on the Middagh Big Band's brand new album,Tenor Madness, which is set to release this Friday, Jan. 10, on Ear Up Records, the label founded by the prolific saxophonist Jeff Coffin. Coffin, known most widely perhaps for his work with Dave Matthews Band and Bela Fleck and the Flecktones, is also a professor in the jazz studies program at Vanderbilt, where his colleague is Middagh, the bandleader here. Coffin and Don Aliquo solo on tenor saxophone, and Roy Agee is featured on trombone.
Play "Wiley Roots" by Ryan Middagh Jazz Orchestra
And if you enjoyed that one, maybe you'll indulge me one more riff on that theme.
A few months back, KSDS celebrated Bud Powell's centennial by presenting three of the best contemporary interpreters of his work live in concert. Joshua White, Alan Broadbent, and Bill Mays revealed the Powell songbook to contain layers, colors, and textures most of the mere mortals in the audience couldn't have even imagined. Everything I heard that night was worth preserving and revisiting...often. But, given the opportunity to present that program again, in a world without budgetary constraints, I'd make one addition to the bill.
In the hands of pianist Chihiro Yamanaka, Bud-o's music isn't just alive, it struts — with the purposeful insouciance of a Mardi Gras krewe's grand marshall marching down Magazine Street. On her latest album, Carry On, released this October past from Blue Note, Yamanaka's krewe, as it were — Yoshi Waki on bass and John Davis on drums — plays so much larger and fuller than its piano trio configuration would suggest. Kind of like New Orleans, a sub-sea level city, with a population approximating Bakersfield's, punching way above its weight class. If you think extinguishing the spirit of New Orleans is realistic, you may be suffering from the kind of "Hallucinations" Yamanaka's referencing here.
And while we're on the subject of New Orleans and psychoactive stimulation, be sure to tune in each Friday evening from 5 to 7 p.m. PT for "Jazz Across America: New Orleans" with DJ Smoke-a-Lot, better known as Kermit Ruffins. There is no greater authority than Kermit on the Crescent City's psyche and the role of music in shaping and maintaining that psyche. If there can be such a thing as the quintessential personfication of New Orleans, this native son and outsize personality — and trumpeter and bandleader and barbecue pitmaster (he smokes meat...what did you think I was talking about?) — is it. Broadcast from the Mother-in-Law Lounge, the famed redoubt in the heart of the Tremé that Ruffins now owns, each week is an aural window into the soul of a place that, in the face of the monoculture prevailing all around it, somehow remains itself.
