When visiting New Orleans, you’ll probably want to check out some music when you’re in town. While this may seem to be an easy task in a city filled with live music, you can easily enter the land of information overload.
The last time we visited New Orleans, we wanted to make sure we heard some authentic NO Jazz so we headed to Preservation Hall. While planning this most recent trip to NOLA, we were happy to see it had reopened with a limited schedule and reserved seating so we booked seats for one day of our trip.
While that would have been sufficient for a normal trip to New Orleans, we had a week to seek out some more music. My college buddy hooked me into the music calendar hosted by the local radio station WWOZ. They list every local music event and to an outsider, it’s information overload. I know none of these venues or any of the performers and it’s like reading a foreign language.
Fortunately, I had an insider who fed me tips. On one afternoon, I received this text:
Not sure what your evening plans are. But tonight from 8-midnight st Mahogany Jazz Hall on Chartres St in the FQ Ronell Johnson is performing. He’s a younger member of the Pres Hall Jazz Band and he is super fun and engaging and a great musician. We caught his set a few weeks ago and didn’t disappoint
I didn’t know where the Mahogany Jazz Club was located or who Ronell Johnson was but if I had a recommendation, we were going to check it out. I looked online and the club had no cover and a 1 drink minimum per set (45 min.) I figured for the price of a beer, we could take a chance. The club didn’t look like much from outside but you can’t judge a book from the cover.
We took some seats along the back wall, which was only 4 seats from the band. We paid between $5-$10 per drink and stayed for 2 sets.
After those two experiences, we felt we had seen our share of music for the trip. However, if you’ve been following the details of our New Orleans trip, you’ll know we had our troubles meeting with my best friend from college.
On the last day of the trip, he texted me that if we didn’t have plans, there was a zydeco concert happening at a brewery and would we like to check it out.
I got the OK from our group and that night we headed to the Zony Mash Beer Project to see Dwayne Dopsie and the Zydeco Hellraisers. We saw the band on our last trip to town at the Treme Fall Festival and had no problem with seeing them again.
We spent almost two hours in the outdoor beer garden catching up on the past two years, drinking some amazing beers and listening to some awesome zydeco music.
If it wasn’t for our local intel, we would have only visited Preservation Hall, as we did on our last trip. While that was a great experience, it’s a tourist’s taste of the music scene. Checking out some of the local places gave me an idea of what else is out there if you only know where to look.
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1 comment
🙂