Music
New Orleans without music is like Washington without politics: inconceivable. In this city of appetites, music feeds the soul. The city’s history can be traced in its music. The French and their Creole descendants gave the city two opera companies before any other US city had one. Meanwhile, slaves and free persons of color preserved African music in Congo Sq. These influences came together when French-speaking black Creoles livened up European dance tunes by adding African rhythms. From there, jazz was an inevitability.
The Rise & Fall (& Rise) of Jazz
A proliferation of brass instruments after the Civil War led to a brass-instrument craze that spread throughout the South and the Midwest. Many of the musicians, white and black, learned to play music without learning to read it. Instead they operated by ear and by memory. Improvisation became the default baseline for playing music.
One of the most problematic figures in jazz history is Charles ‘Buddy’ Bolden, New Orleans’ first ‘King of Jazz.’ Some said Bolden ‘broke his heart’ when he performed, while others mused that he would ‘blow his brains out’ by playing so loudly.
Successors to Bolden included Joe ‘King’ Oliver, whose Creole Jazz Band found a receptive audience in Chicago. Oliver was soon overshadowed by his protégé, Louis Armstrong; working together, Oliver and Armstrong made many seminal jazz recordings, including ‘Dippermouth Blues.’
Although jazz went into decline for several decades, the genre has experienced a renaissance since the 1980s. In 1982, then 19-year-old Wynton Marsalis stormed onto the scene followed by his older brother Branford. Other musicians, who were studying with Wynton and Branford’s father, Ellis Marsalis, at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, formed the nucleus of a New Orleans jazz revival.
Brass music is distinct from jazz; it’s less improvisational and far more danceable. With that said, many brass bands still play traditional music inspired by marching band arrangements of the 19th century. Others, like the streetwise Rebirth, fuse styles from trad jazz to funk, R&B and modern jazz. Rapping trombone player Trombone Shorty jumps between genres like a frog, sometimes bouncing into hip-hop, R&B and even indie rock.
R&B & Funk
New Orleans owes its reputation as a breeding ground for piano players to Henry Roeland Byrd – also known as Professor Longhair. His rhythmic rumba and boogie-woogie style of playing propelled him to success with tunes such as ‘Tipitina’ (for which the legendary nightclub is named) and ‘Go to the Mardi Gras.’
In the 1960s, R&B and New Orleans fell under the spell of Allen Toussaint, a talented producer who molded songs to suit the talents of New Orleans’ artists. The formula worked for Ernie K-Doe, who hit pay dirt with the disgruntled and catchy ‘Mother-In-Law,’ in 1961.
Aaron Neville, whose soulful falsetto is one of the most instantly recognizable voices in pop music, began working with Toussaint in 1960, when his first hit single, the menacing but pretty ‘Over You’ was recorded. The association later yielded the gorgeous ‘Let’s Live.’ But ‘Tell It Like It Is’ (1967), recorded without Toussaint, was the biggest national hit of Neville’s career.
Art Neville, a piano player from the Professor Longhair school, heads up the Meters, whose sound molded modern New Orleans funk.
Today, New Orleans funk is undergoing both reinvention and renaissance. Contemporary bands like Tank & the Bangas blend hip-hop, trippy arrangements, razor-sharp lyrics and deft instrumentals into full-on musical feasts for the soul. Jon Cleary, a New Orleans piano-man who came to the city by way of Kent, in the UK, won the Grammy Award for Best Regional Roots Music Album in 2016 via his album Go-Go Juice.
Bounce
While outfits such as No Limit Records and Partners-N-Crime, and artists like Lil’ Wayne and Dee-1 represent New Orleans in the hip-hop world, bounce is the defining sound of young black New Orleans. It’s a high-speed genre distinct to the city that involves drum-machine-driven beats, call-and-response, sexualized lyrics and extremely raunchy dancing. Shows are led by DJs, who play a role similar to a selector at a Jamaican dancehall concert.
The genre was invented in the early 1990s, when bounce became the default dance music in many New Orleans clubs, with DJs calling out over the hyperquick ‘Triggerman’ rhythm that has been sampled into a thousand-and-one tracks. Then and now, dancers get freaky on the floor and call out wards (subdivisions of the city) and projects (subsidized housing tracts). Pioneers include Juvenile, Soulja Slim, Mia X and DJ Jubilee, whose track ‘Get Ready, Ready’ is a good introduction to the genre.
External media has dubbed the music of transgender bounce artists including Katey Red, Sissy Nobby and Big Freedia ‘sissy bounce’ (‘sissy’ is local slang for gay African American people who grew up in poor neighborhoods); while the label has stuck, Katey Red has said she simply considers herself a transgender bounce artist.
Zydeco
Cajun music is the music of white Cajuns, while zydeco is the music of French-speaking African Americans who share the region. They have plenty in common, but the differences are distinct.
Zydeco ensembles originally comprised a fiddle, diatonic button accordion, guitar and triangle (the metal percussion instrument common to symphony orchestras and kindergarten music classes); the rhythm section usually included a frottoir, a metal washboard-like instrument that’s worn like armor and played with spoons. The end result is a genre of music that is made for dance accompaniment; the Thursday-night zydeco party at Rock ‘N’ Bowl is not to be missed.
Zydeco, it should be noted, is not a static form of music restricted to country dance halls. Innovators from Clifton Chenier, the father of zydeco, to Beau Joques, Buckwheat Zydeco, Terrance Simien and Keith Frank have incorporated the blues, R&B, funk and soul into the zydeco sound. Baton Rouge rapper Lil Boosie uses zydeco music to propel his lyrics on the appropriately named track ‘Zydeco’ on the mixtape 225/504.
Rock And (Almost) Everything Else
Between jazz, brass and hip-hop, you’d be forgiven for missing the impact of rock on the New Orleans music scene. And to be fair, maybe New Orleans has had more influence on rock than the other way around. Folks like Robert Plant will occasionally show up in town just to jam with local guitarists, and the entire genre of rock ’n’ roll owes its existence to New Orleans rhythms.
Plus, there are so many genres of rock, it’s hard to properly categorize. Straight-up Americana rock has emerged via ’90s darlings like Better Than Ezra and Cowboy Mouth. And did you know NOLA has a fierce homegrown metal scene? ‘Sludge metal’ emerges like a howling muck of distortion and rough vocals, best epitomized by Louisiana bands like Acid Bath and Crowbar.
On the softer side, New Orleans is now a home base for Arcade Fire and local indie darlings like Alexis & the Samurai and Hurray for the Riff Raff. Blurring the lines of many genres are bands like Debauche, which blend zydeco, klezmer, punk and Russian folk music into exuberant live performances that are a highlight of many a New Orleans night out.
Voodoo (Voodoo Fest; www.voodoofestival.com; City Park; 
hlast weekend of Oct) is the highest-profile rock festival in New Orleans, but it now contends with BUKU (www.thebukuproject.com; Blaine Kern’s Mardi Gras World, 1380 Port of New Orleans Pl; hMar) for both name recognition and Electronic Dance Music (EDM) cred. EDM, house and techno experience hills and valleys of popularity in this town; excellent shows often pop off at Republic and the Dragon’s Den, and there’s a hybrid scene that draws on local EDM fans – some of who have been DJing for decades – and students from Tulane and Loyola.
Even classical music has a piece of the pie in New Orleans. The local symphony orchestras are lovely, but the big draw is the small outfits that make the most of the city’s famed instrumental talent – check out the Birdfoot Festival (http://birdfootfestival.org; hlate May) if you want to get schooled in New Orleans’ small chamber-music scene.