‘Reminds them of home’: African and Caribbean artists are reviving New Orleans’ musical spirit

Hammered by hurricanes, rutted streets and rising insurance rates, the metro New Orleans area saw 45,000 people leave between 2020 and 2023 – a 4.3% outmigration worse than any other US urban area.

Those departures seemed a surreal idea as vast crowds streamed into the annual two-week Jazz and Heritage festival sponsored by Shell, set to conclude Sunday. Thursday marked the main event at the sprawling array of stages and food booths at the Fair Grounds race track – the Rolling Stones concert, sold out at $225 a ticket.

However, while the ageless Stones capture high media before jetting off to the next mega-gig, for some time now a musical diaspora has been flowing into the city where jazz began. From Cuba, Morocco, Honduras, Congo, Ivory Coast among other countries, these artists are rejuvenating New Orleans roots culture.

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It is complex for them to secure residential status, especially in the harsh political climate over migrants at the border. But musicians with credentials also find local groups assisting.

“New Orleans is the most exciting musical city in the world,” Ariana Hall, director of the CubaNOLA Arts Collective, which sponsors programs for visiting artists and cultural tours of the island, recently said in an interview.

“About 10 high-level Cuban artists have moved here so far with several others in Baton Rouge. We are starting to see Venezuelan artists arrive here. There’s a lot we don’t know”.

“Papa” Titos Sompa, a Congolese master drummer and revered cultural figure, had legal status when he moved from Detroit to New Orleans in 2020 after working on a film here, finding projects to sustain him.

Dr Michael White, the prolific New Orleans-style clarinetist, collaborated with Seguenon Kone, a multi-instrumentalist and teacher of traditions from Ivory Coast, on the Basin Street Records album Adventures in New Orleans Jazz, Vol I.

“While New Orleans’ musical importance is recognized the world over, people from the Caribbean and Africa say it reminds them of home,” White told the Guardian. “People from Japan and Europe come here for the traditional jazz idiom. The city is a spiritual place and a creative center. Musicians don’t make a lot of money, but they get richer interacting with artists of different genres.”

Perhaps the leading light of Afro-Cubano culture in New Orleans is Yusa, 50, conservatory-trained in Havana, with a string of songs on Spotify. A warm resonant singer, Yusa is as adept on guitar and bass as she is on keyboards. She reached New Orleans in 2018 after a long residency in Argentina, established a new career base and is a featured act at Jazz Fest.

New Orleans has a long piano tradition colored by “the Spanish tinge”, as Jelly Roll Morton called the Cuban habanera rhythm of syncopations. The pulsing line of piano professors, weaving New Orleans parade beats into the root sound, rose with 1950s rhythm-and-blues maestros Professor Longhair, Fats Domino, James Booker and Art Neville, unto contemporary stars Tom McDermott and Jon Cleary.

“It is Booker and Professor Longhair for me – they are playing the same clave Cubano rhythms, the same 3/2 rhythm I heard growing up,” said Victor Campbell, 30, a pianist with blond dreadlocks and an ear lobe dangling a crucifix. He grew up in a farming community near Camaguey, a seven-hour drive west of Havana.

“My mother taught piano, and my father, who did architectural construction, sang in a Baptist church,” Campbell said. “I began on piano at five years old”.

Campbell added: “My neighborhood had the folklore of the congas” – Yoruba and Kongo rhythms transplanted by the enslaved. “And the farmer playing a guitar, improvising like a poet. The classical, choral, the guitar of the campesino – all the music in my brain I want to put on records.”

Campbell entered the National School of the Arts in Havana at 15. At 17, he visited New Orleans with a school band for the Louis Armstrong Jazz Camp, staying at Loyola University. Kent Jordan, a flutist and teacher from a storied musical dynasty, befriended Campbell. Kidd Jordan, Kent’s family’s patriarch, taught at the camp, too. Several years later, when Campbell finished a US tour, he headed to New Orleans where the Jordans helped him settle.

Like Yusa, Campbell is melding into a culture of musical variations that was well rooted by the early 1900s. Orchestras with European dance repertoires adapted Creole quadrilles amid “styles from west and central Africa and fusions developed over centuries in the Americas”, writes Elijah Wald in Jelly Roll Blues, just out.

A cameo of today’s myriad crosscurrents surfaced recently at a New Orleans Jazz Museum concert as Campbell sat in with a band of locals backing Anne Paceo, a Parisian drummer and composer. Paceo, who has nine albums and three Victoires de la musique (French Grammys), performed as part of her two-month local residency at Villa Albertine. Sponsored by the French embassy in Washington, the program sends French writers, film-makers and musicians to work in one of ten US cities, interacting with local creatives.

Campbell at the piano spun off shimmering strokes that fused with Paceo’s percussive lines, casting a circular melody as vocalist Sarah Jordan sent up chant-like lyrics, harmonizing with Paceo like floating clouds, an echo of John Coltrane’s “sheets of sound”.

Two days later, sipping tea in a cafe on leafy Esplanade Avenue, Paceo spoke of Coltrane’s impact in “the hours and hours I spent, at age 14 in Paris, listening to Coltrane in my room, so much beauty in A Love Supreme, rising, ascending”.

Paceo spent her early years in Daloa, a town in Ivory Coast. Her French parents were school teachers. “These percussionists next door played all the time, day and night,” she said. “I’ve heard that the music you hear in the womb of your mother changes the person you are going to be. So it was natural for me to become a drummer.”

Playing with Victor Campbell, she continued, “took me deep into Cuba, that African root. Victor is like Yusa, very spiritual, strong with the rhythms.”

Reflecting a few days later, Campbell recalled “listening to Coltrane at age 12. I cried. Because his music, the voice, cries to God, praying to God like a prophet.”