Start your day on the intimate Bourbon Street stage with the wonderful jazz saxophonist Ed “Sweetbread†Peterson. He is a professor of music at UNO and plays regularly at Snug Harbor, but I don’t remember him doing an outdoor festival gig. He will most likely feature some of his great students from the Jazz Studies program.
Derrick Freeman’s Smoker’s World tore the roof off the Howlin’ Wolf last Halloween. Freeman is best known as Kermit Ruffins’ drummer, but he fronts this band with a great cast of musicians supporting his vocal efforts. Look for percussionist Marc “Buddha†Balsam to be helping lay down the groove.
Dr. Michael White (pictured) is a New Orleans- Senegalese supergroup that features Dr. Michael White on clarinet, Matt Perrine on electric bass, Jason Marsalis on vibraphone, Margie Perez on vocals and Matt Perrineon pedal steel guitar among others. Seguenon Kone, a multi-instrumentalist and dancer, leads them. This band is one of the more interesting musical hybrids to emerge in New Orleans in years. Last year they were stuck inside, upstairs at the Mint. This year they have graduated to one of the main stages.
Brazil is a huge country with a massively diverse musical culture. I have been digging into it for years, and have barely scratched the surface. After a trip to Bahia last year, I suspected that I would never figure it all out. Every so often a new band appears that helps to put the country’s musical bounty in a new perspective. Pernambuco is a state in northeastern Brazil. Its biggest city is Recife and its biggest musical export is forro- I style that is similar in instrumentation and temperment to the zydeco of Louisiana. Tonight another band from Pernambuco, Orquestra Contemporânea de Olinda is playing at Dixon Hall on Tulane University’s campus. The show is at 7:30 PM and it’s free. I have heard some of the band’s music and I concur with a writer in the New York Times last week who wrote that the band has a lot in common with the brass bands of New Orleans, specifically The Dirty Dozen.
