Some serious New Orleans Jazz

A few days ago I realized that I was living right in the middle of one of the coolest music scenes in the country and I wasn't taking advantage of it. So last night I took a break from the whole standing around in frat houses with hundreds of sweaty people and trying to come up with increasingly elaborate excuses for why I'm not drinking the horrible cheap vodka mixed with kool-aid, (It's free! Come on, man!) and headed downtown with a fellow music lover. I was lucky enough to find a fellow music lover who also happened to be a devastatingly cute sophomore girl, so I was feeling optimistic about the night.

After a surprisingly uneventful streetcar ride we arrived in Downtown New Orleans, which I'm increasingly convinced is the coolest place in the world. I had no plan in mind really, I just knew that Decatur, Frenchman and Bourbon had tons of live music. So we started up Decatur, and stopped at the first place with a band. It was the Crescent City Brew House, a cool restaurant that brews its own beer. The band was pretty good, there was a drummer, an electric bass, a dude wailing on a Gibson L-4 CES ( the guitar George Thorogood played a lot), and a tenor sax player. The waiter seemed kind of put out when we just ordered water and watched the band.

After like half an hour of that we decided to go see what else was up. Further down the street there was this cool outdoor restaurant with a jazz band, and we caught the end of their set. Further up the street there was this really divey honky tonk that we went in for about two songs. There was a pretty decent blues band playing tunes that made me want to sit at the bar, smoke a cigarette and drink a couple domestic beers, but after I looked around and realized that we were the youngest people there by about 20 years and had the most teeth by about 7 or 8 we decided to cut out.

We passed up a reggae bar that had a cover charge and decided not to go to Snug Harbor, a fairly famous venue, because you had to pay 20 bucks to get into the concert hall. After wandering around some more we headed for Bourbon, and it turns out there's actually some really good venues there, in addition to the places where cover bands are doing passable renditions of Mötley Crüe songs for legions of drunken partyers. This one place, Fritzel's, was awesome. The Fritzel's Jazz Band, which consisted of a drummer, a piano player, a clarinet man, and a guy on the string bass totally ripped. The bar was really cool too and the band played at a totally reasonable level so my ears weren't ringing when I left. There was a one drink minimum, but they didn't price gouge too badly. 4 dollars for a bottle of water and live entertainment is pretty reasonable.

After we left Fritzel's the night was only marginally musical. Bourbon was crazy, the Mississippi was pretty, and powdered sugar got everywhere.