The wheels had touched down smoothly and the braking had slowed our plane to its familiar slow roll to the terminal as the flight attendant began her animated announcement. “I’d like to take this opportunity to welcome you to the city of New Orleans.” And then, after a pause: “Think about that!”

Is there another American city that would merit that kind of declaration?

In fact, I’d been fairly consumed thinking about that for more months than I’d probably care to admit, meticulously planning and plotting my attempt to feel like something akin to “local” during a 3-week New Orleans Residency. The way I ended up designing it, though – essentially hosting four distinct mini-trips within the duration, one group running into the next, and thus creating heavy, self-imposed pressure to optimize each segment’s shorter itinerary – left me, at least at times, with a feeling I had hoped to avoid: that I was executing the trip as much as enjoying it.

The well-recognized spiritual motto for the city is “Laissez les bon temps rouler” (let the good times roll). But within that familiar phrase, maybe my takeaway is that instead of scrupulously charting the “bon temps” I might be better served focusing on “laissez.” Let things happen. Let the game come to me, as my friend Duck often likes to say. That works in a place like New Orleans.

Sure, I think I’ll plan to do that in the future!

Nevertheless, enjoy it I most certainly did. Really, how could one not in the city that care may have forgotten, but unrivaled cuisine, libations, a joyful essence, and, of course, wondrously funkified music certainly have not.

Do I feel any differently about what it’s like to exist in a place like that for an elongated stretch of time? Well, maybe I gained a little perspective. That, and at least five pounds.

Nevertheless, here are some of the many NOLA highlights (along with a couple lowlights, most of which still turned out okay), a series of vignettes, lists, and pics from the just-concluded excursion that I’ve been thinking about roughly since entering college.

⚜ 21 Days in Louisiana

The room I’d reserved in The Refinery building was carefully scouted to include a sleeper sofa to maximize sleeping arrangements. So just after settling in I thought I must have been missing something when I inspected the piece to find that it was…just a sofa. The management company was quite apologetic, but “It’s Jazzfest, y’all, we’re all booked up.” They did, however, manage another property, The Little Lagniappe, a smaller operation just outside the Warehouse District, and after some short back and forth we were re-packing and headed for a slight upgrade for the trip’s first half: from a 2- to a 5-bedroom unit. With a pool. Lagniappe, in local tradition, translates to “a little something extra.” That must’ve been it.

My friend Petey wanted to ride the famous New Orleans streetcar, with no particular destination in mind but just to see the city, though not wanting to eat up the whole day. Entering in a chaotic scene at Canal Street for a ride uptown on St. Charles and Carrolton Avenues, he queried the beleaguered trolley operator, “How long until we get back to the Quarter?” “I don’t know!” she shot back with eyes agog. “Anything can happen!”

When I wandered into Felix’s Oyster Bar just before 6:00 thinking I might catch an early set at their new 2nd floor music spot, Mayfield’s 208, my eye was immediately caught by a solitary figure, all dressed in white, sitting at the corner of the bar. I approached and asked “You playing here tonight, Kermit?” The man looked up, smiling under his oversized newsboy cap. “Yessir, but not until about eight. First I’ve got a gig over in Lafayette Square.” He seemed in no hurry to get there, and I offered to buy him a beer. For the next half hour I hung one-on-one with quintessential New Orleanian Kermit Ruffins – one of the most identifiable figures on the New Orleans music scene of the last 20 years – talking music, drinking Bud Lights, and swapping ludicrous stories connected to his appearances in HBO’s revelatory New Orleans-based series “Tremé.” Eventually he said he needed to prep for his show and got up, leaving his trumpet resting entirely unattended on the bar. “Nobody’s gonna touch that,” he chortled as he stole away to the bathroom to smoke some weed. I was so jazzed I left without paying the bar tab, sheepishly returning moments later to cover it. But the bartender waved me off. “Oh, don’t worry about it,” she said, followed by words I want to frame and put on my wall: “You’re with Kermit.” Twenty minutes later I watched him ascend the stage, stylishly late, and wow a reveling crowd at his gig across town.

⚜ Musical High Notes (Part I) ⚜

    • Jeremy Davenport @ Ritz-Carlton Lounge – Refined playing in a sophisticated setting by the long-time trumpeter in Harry Connick Jr.’s Big Band.
    • Chris Ardoin & Zydeco Nu-Step @ Festival International de Louisiane – Lafayette locals really turned out for what was likely the most native-feeling big stage set we attended.
    • Flow Tribe @ French Quarter Fest – Definitely got us into the flow.
    • The Pine Leaf Boys @ Hideaway on Lee – The discovery of the trip. Cajun party music with a rock and roll edge. Like nothing I’ve heard.
    • Charley Crockett @ Saenger Theater – A Charley Crockett pilgrimage somewhere is now a near annual for Zing, Messiah, Marc Jr. and I. His performance, and our pseudo-Western wear, was as outstanding as ever.

Charley’s Angels

    • Samantha Fish @ Jazzfest – Fiery guitar work, to match her stage presence in a fire-red leather jumpsuit.
    • The Pine Leaf Boys @ Jazzfest – 48 hours after finding them at a club in Lafayette, they were playing the Fais Do-Do stage at Jazzfest. Accordionist Wilson Savoy is a star, guitarist Jean Bertrand had the coolest look of anyone all trip, and Marc Jr. vowed that they’ll play at his future wedding.

Jean Bertrand, in his natural habitat

After being brought there earlier in the trip by my friend Bobby, an actual local, I was seated back at hole-in-the-wall Ernst Cafe and ordered a plate of red beans and rice along with my primary beer of choice for the trip, an Abita Purple Haze. The Abita arrived immediately, the food unfortunately did not. “Whatchoo waitin’ for, dahlin’?,” the bartender eventually came to inquire. When I informed her, she admitted she’d forgotten to put the order in to the kitchen. “Can I get ya another beer, hun?” Soon thereafter a serving of creamy beans and spicy andouille sausage arrived, which I devoured quickly, then approached the bar to settle up. My tab had the food, but listed neither of the beers, which I felt obliged to point out. “Oh no, dear, that’s on us for the wait. Now, can I get another one for the road?,” she asked rhetorically as she began emptying a Purple Haze into a plastic cup (“go-cups,” of course, not only being permitted in town but seemingly mandated). A short delay on food in a hectic bar environment translated into three comp beers. A solid Crescent City swap.

⚜ Food Highlights (Part I) ⚜

    • GW Fins – For 25 years I mistook this name for some schlocky chain. Instead, it’s an exquisite setting for both seafood and service. And delicious biscuits (which are free and plentiful).
    • Jacques Imo’s – Mammoth servings of high-end Creole soul food – my friend Ike’s dish was called The Godzilla – and a quirky atmosphere vibrant enough to make my heart race.
    • Willie Mae’s – Now in a new Warehouse District location, but still known for having “America’s best fried chicken.” I left fully convinced.
    • Delacroix – Brunch of shrimp & grits with smoked sausage, spicy sauce, and sunny-side eggs was one of the best dishes of the whole trip. All within steps of giant paddlewheel boats steaming down the Mississippi River.
    • Crawfish bread, oyster po-boy, catfish meunière, seafood mirliton, fried crab cake, seafood au gratin, filé gumbo, red beans & rice with sausage…all consumed out at The Fairgrounds during Jazzfest (and I barely put a dent in their offerings).
    • Celebrating my sister-in-law Nancy’s belated birthday, Laurie & I ushered her and bro-in-law Gus to what I’d consider the classic New Orleans restaurant trifecta: breakfast at Brennan’s, Friday lunch at Galatoire’s, and dinner at Commander’s Palace (not on the same day). At 80, 120, and 133 years old respectively, none have lost a step.

Brennan’s, before Banana’s Foster

When Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote “Into each life a little rain must fall” he was not talking about New Orleans, for if he were it would have read as “a lot of rain.” The weather isn’t really unpredictable, it’s completely predictable that it’s going to rain like crazy. Especially during Jazzfest. Following a day where extreme conditions had already shut the Festival down early, my friends Duck, Cek, Matty and I trekked out to the Fairgrounds, bought $3 ponchos and $20 umbrellas, and slogged through an absolute driving storm to see a curtailed list of artists, culminating with The Black Keys. Their guitar-groove set wasn’t that memorable, but surviving the violent downpour was. And the Fest closed early for a second straight day, for the first time in its 56-year history.

Festin’ in the Rain (Click link for video)

Together with the regular sense of Bacchanalian merrymaking, the city also contains so much historic beauty: The sprawling grove of colossal Live Oak trees draped in Spanish moss in City Park, some dated as much as 500-900 years old; the storytelling iron work in the ornate balconies of the Vieux Carré; and the stately columned antebellum homes in the Garden District, most preserved since the early 19th century.

⚜ Musical High Notes (Part II) ⚜

    • Dwayne Dopsie & the Zydeco Hellraisers @ Jazzfest – An impressively sweaty mix of Zydeco with James Brown. Later that night his niece was our bartender at Walk-On’s, a sports “bistreaux” owned by Drew Brees. New Orleans is, in many ways, a small town.
    • Tyler Childers @ Jazzfest – Superb set by a breakout neotraditional country star, highlighted by his tune ‘Bitin’ List’ (lyrics: “To put it plain, I just don’t like you / Not a thing about the way you is / And if there ever come a time I got rabies / You’re high on my bitin’ list”).
    • ‘Duppy Conqueror’ by Bob Marley & The Wailers, as blasted in an Uber by our proud Jamaican driver.
    • David Byrne @ Jazzfest – All the Talking Heads hits, in an appropriately wacky presentation.
    • Sue Foley @ Jazzfest – An unexpectedly scorching Texas-blues set, as well as a temporary savior from the rain under the Blues Tent.
    • Nth Power @ Republic NOLA – An all Earth, Wind & Fire show: a remarkable triumph given EWF’s complicated arrangements and impossible singing, and as fun as anything all trip (for the second year in a row).
    • Doreen’s Jazz New Orleans @ Jazzfest – Playing an astounding clarinet atop old-school orchestration, Doreen Ketchens graduated from decades of busking on Royal Street to playing a Festival headline set. The unbridled adoration from the audience, and vice-versa, was chills-inducing.

A Seinfeld scene come-to-life: a rental car reservation, but no rental car. Twice. “We’re actually about 200 cars underwater,” a clerk on location told me nonchalantly, as the color began leaving my face. The ensuing fiasco led to a semi-wreck of my single most scheduled-out day, aborting a Lake Pontchartrain passage, taking an 80-mile Uber ride, and ultimately some major solids from my cousin Jeff and his lovely Louisianan wife Leslie to get us back on track in Baton Rouge. Two days later, a probably too-forthcoming Enterprise rep explained their stated company policy at our drop-off: “Book, don’t look.” That’s right, they take (and take and take!) reservations without consulting available inventory. I’ll never approach renting a car the same way again. Or doubt Seinfeld’s all-knowing sapience.

⚜ Drink Highlights ⚜

    • Lavish cocktails on the porch/garden of The Columns Hotel.
    • A spin, or two, on the famous Carousel Bar at Hotel Monteleone.
    • Frozen Irish Coffee and just a bit of French Quarter relief at Erin Rose.
    • A far dumpier look (and odor) than I’d recalled existed at Cooter Brown’s, but it became oddly tolerable after a few cheap beers.
    • Dragon Blood shots at one-of-a-kind The Dungeon, where my son Max and Marc Jr. agreed that the greatest song of all time is ‘Black Sabbath’ from the album “Black Sabbath” by the band Black Sabbath.

The Judge Sisters + wine

Despite many previous attempts, I had never taken the traditional Louisiana swamp tour before, then took two on this trip. One was in the Atchafalaya swamp, the largest in the U.S., where the canopy of Bald Cypress trees and vegetation overgrowth could make you forget you were on water. The other was in the bayou wetlands outside Westwego, where numerous alligators crept right alongside our boat looking toothy and menacing, until our captain lured them a safer distance away with his veteran seamanship: tossing marshmallows into the water.

This is water

This is close

Just a couple hours after my arrival in town, I was sitting at a table with my wife and daughter at Brooklyn-esque French Quarter restaurant Sylvain when I heard a loud thump beside me. I looked down at the floor to see a man’s face, eyes closed and motionless, practically touching my left foot. “Oh, stop being so dramatic,” I heard the woman accompanying him utter dismissively from their table. But acting, he was not. Nor, as I initially figured, was he merely “overserved.” The clichéd call of “Is there a doctor in the house?” went out, and sure enough a woman seated across the room hustled over to attend. After a few tense minutes the fallen man was revived and strode out uneasily. And I returned to my sautéed redfish, with only occasional glances around the table for dropping bodies.

Nearly three weeks later Duck, Cek, Matty and I were sipping Corona’s and chatting with bikers at the Mona Lisa Lounge on the West Bank, a divier dive bar than the diviest I know (a sign behind the bar reads “Please do not feed the whores drugs”), when a few feet away a woman went limp at her table and then into apparent seizure. Authorities arrived, impressively quickly to a seemingly remote location, and she, too, was resuscitated with minimal fanfare. Another positive outcome for a very nearby near-death experience, yet we still opted not to stay for a second round.

An unexpected watershed was the opening ceremonies at Festival International de Louisiane, celebrating its 40th anniversary and drawing around 400,000 visitors to southwestern Louisiana, where I finally came to understand the cultural meaning behind the event: it’s a celebration of the music of Acadiana’s French history (which became “Cajun”) but also that of various (up to two dozen) French-influenced and French-speaking nations throughout the world. All the announcements and signage were bilingual, c’est vrai.

⚜ Musical Sour Notes ⚜

    • St. Vincent @ Jazzfest: Pretentious and booooring.
    • The Radiators @ Jazzfest – It was like watching a baseball old-timers day game: fun to see them and remember what they used to be able to do, but at this point looking – and sadly, sounding – ragged.
    • Galactic @ Jazzfest – I’ll always be grateful that this band stepped up in 2018 to literally save Tipitina’s, the most important live music club in town. But over recent years their performances have veered from polyrhythmic funk to pop-filtered junk.

Bourbon Street is a lot of things, and most of them smell bad, but it’s still got an abundance of free live music. The days of Dixieland jazz are long gone, when titans like Pete Fountain and Al Hirt had namesake clubs on the main drag. But rock cover bands practically litter the area (along with plenty of litter), most, by my estimation, providing reasonably impressive musicianship (in addition to a buoyant backdrop for 3-for-1 beers and test tube shots). A few surprising and somewhat striking choices, from among multiple Bourbon Street strolls, could have formed an estimable ‘90’s MTV set: ‘Killing in the Name’ by Rage Against The Machine, ‘Drive’ by Incubus, ‘What’s Up’ (commonly misidentified as ‘What’s Going On’) by 4 Non Blondes, and ‘Zombie’ by The Cranberries. All those in addition to the required renditions of ‘Sweet Caroline’ and ‘Country Road,’ of course.

⚜ Food Highlights (Part II) ⚜

    • Mosca’s – Roadside, in the middle of nowhere, devoid of gimmickry, and pungent garlic you can smell through closed windows when you pull into the dirt parking lot. A wondrous place, not limited to but if only for the Oysters Mosca (which 45 years ago my dad called oyster pie, so I do too).
    • Camellia Grill – My friend Chin, his partner Debbie, and I returned to this college favorite: well worth the trip uptown, and the wait, for a chili-cheese omelette and oreo freeze.
    • Acme Oysters – As a midday snack, four of us handled six dozen buttery, cheesy, still best-in-town, chargrilled oysters. “They hot,” was all our waiter said each time another sizzling platter was delivered. I burned my mouth anyway.
    • Pêche – An impossible-to-get-a-table hotspot that still feels like a neighborhood joint once you’ve entered, which I did no fewer than three times on the trip.
    • A breakfast place where in order to use the facilities you literally have to walk through the very small kitchen, within easy range of all the exposed food and cooking surfaces, to reach a tiny bathroom stall practically connected to the grill. No name, for fear the Board of Health will come calling (and the meals were quite good – yes, plural, Petey, Ike, Uncle Tony and I went back even after the disturbing bathroom discovery).

Unlike the overwhelming vibe of the city, my afternoon spent at The National WWII Museum was not exactly an uplifting time. Yet it was unquestionably an extraordinary and indelible experience that I would do again (in a few hours you can’t possibly take it all in) and that I’d highly recommended. It is, perhaps surprisingly, the top visitor attraction in the city of New Orleans. Next week, a premier screening of the first episode of World War II with Tom Hanks, a new landmark documentary series on The History Channel, will be hosted there, by Tom Hanks.

I was standing outside The Refinery, the Warehouse District building in which I’d been staying, awaiting an Uber pick-up to take me to closing day of Jazzfest on the closing day of my Residency, when Derek Trucks walked right by me. I called out his name tentatively, still in partial disbelief that my favorite guitarist on earth was just strolling by, alone, carrying a tray of four coffees. He stopped, reversed field, offered an immediate fist-bump, and then posed cheerfully for my photo request, even directing our position relative to the sun and jokingly offering consolation to my doubt that our faces might be visible through the glare in the shot: “We’re there in spirit!” Then he turned and entered the Mercantile Hotel, fewer than fifteen paces next door. About five hours later I’d see him lead the almighty Tedeschi Trucks Band through their closing slot on one of the main Festival stages. A shocking brush with greatness. And the man gets his own coffee.

On this trip, as on any venture to New Orleans, live music is going to be the centerpiece. And yet, despite being utterly surrounded and saturated by performances at three different gigantic music festivals as well as throughout the city, possibly the most memorable musical encounter of my entire time occurred on Spotify. My daughter Mary had recommended a brand-new album entitled “This Music May Contain Hope” by British singer-songwriter Raye. Who I had never heard of. But for whatever reason Mary thought I’d dig it, and I set aside an afternoon – one of the only two unscheduled days of my 3-week trip – to fully engage with it.

Mahony’s grub

I started out at Mahony’s midway down long-stretching Magazine Street, where I polished off a crispy fried oyster po-boy and a dripping-in-gravy roast beef po-boy (with a side of onion rings) – man cannot live on music alone – before plugging in my earbuds and setting off on a long, leisurely walk, accompanied by Raye. Roughly an hour-and-a-quarter later (the album’s run time is an almost absurd 73 minutes), this is (a portion of) the “review” I texted my girl:

“THANK YOU! I don’t even know where to begin. But I’ll just say that it was one of the most memorable musical experiences of my life. That was like a 3-act play, a 5-course meal, all over the place but incredible throughout. So theatrical, and dramatic, and eclectic, and so well sung, arranged, performed, and produced. I have to admit when it first got started…I wasn’t sure. There was a lot of street noise where I was, and I couldn’t settle into it for a while. But then, it really clicked, maybe around the song ‘I Know You’re Hurting.’ Then so many other great ones! I’ll never forget hearing this album for the first time, and I also can’t wait to listen to it again. It’s just such an incredible, special compilation of work. Thanks again from Raye’s newest fan (I have to go research her now; I don’t even know what she looks like).”

Among the first things my exploration revealed was this: she’d just played at Jazzfest! Mere days before, but then still unknown to me, she’d closed out the Festival’s opening day, on one of its biggest stages. Crazy. And the stealing-the-show reviews of her set that I subsequently found were beyond gushing. Still, maybe it’s for the best. My walk with Raye was truly unforgettable; it’s hard to imagine her doing even live renditions that could’ve topped it.

But perhaps that’s one reason to come back next year and try to find out.

…highly recommended for listening on long walks.