The liner notes to House Party New Orleans Style: The Lost Sessions have Quint Davis, Al Kaslow and George Wein going to see the Wild Magnolias, wandering next door to play Go to the Mardi Gras on the juke box and then spending almost a year tracing Fess in his own home town.
In the wake of Hurricane Katrina we saw unforgettable footage that showed the soft underbelly of American prosperity where even someone like Fats Domino was missing presumed dead for a couple of days, and that happened in the semi-enlightened twenty-first century.
Go back thirty years before New Orleans became the party capital of the USA and maybe it’s no wonder that someone whose playing had influenced later generations from his home town could fade into obscurity.
However, once he’d been found and scrubbed up, his career restarted. Maybe not as successfully as it could have done, but there were live recordings from London and Paul McCartney’s birthday party on the Queen Mary, as well as various studio recordings. Although he wasn’t keen on travelling there were frequent live appearances in New Orleans.
Somewhere along the line I caught some footage from a film called Piano Players Rarely Ever Play Together on TV one Sunday afternoon. Featuring Tuts Washington, Professor Longhair and Allen Toussaint it gave an idea of a continuing tradition of New Orleans piano that stretches back at least as far as the beginnings of the jazz era.
And it’s a tradition that continues to this day, despite the ravages of Katrina. Every year the New Orleans community radio station WWOZ’s Piano Night features an impressive array of the Crescent City's masters of the keyboards as they radiate the eighty-eight.
So, What’s on the playlist?