Wayne Shorter turned 75 in August and decided to celebrate with a Carnegie Hall concert last night. I’d help you blow out the candles, Wayne, but you left me breathless.

On the program were the Imani Winds, a classical quintet of four women (flutist Valerie Coleman, oboe player Toyin Spellman-Diaz, clarinetist Mariam Adam, and bassoonist Monica Ellis) and one man (French horn player Jeff Scott), who performed a brief piece by Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos. The quintet followed with “Terra Incognita,” a chamber piece composed by Shorter, originally commissioned by the La Jolla Music Society in 2006. Lively and flecked with phrases and harmonies distinct to Shorter’s oeuvre (was that a snatch of “Water Babies”?), it offered merely hints of things to come.

The stage quickly reset, Shorter’s working quartet, with pianist Danilo Perez, bassist John Patitucci, and drummer Brian Blade, followed with a set that was brief yet fully satisfying. As they’ve been doing for seven years, the group essayed tunes from Shorter’s catalog, perhaps the most subllime in jazz’s library, within a continuous flow of music — more structured than an extended improvisation, less formal than what would be termed a suite. It’s as if Shorter has simply liberated each song from its beginning and end, allowing each to extend and even blur into one another, free of given duration. The cliche when describing a band as strongly in sync as Shorter’s is that it moves as one: But these musicians don’t. And they don’t follow the leader, either, beyond taking his song cues –”Zero Gravity,” “Sanctuary,” “Joy Rider,” among a few others –and adjusting to his rhythmic and dynamic shifts. Perez, Patitucci, and Blade are like ensemble actors in a story that Shorter, a film devotee, exploits for its most potent and believable drama. Blade’s outlandish crashes and tumbles on cymbals and drums, seemingly out of nowhere, somehow make sense, serving as jump-cuts. (Elsewhere, Blade kept rhythms, sometimes just suggestions of a beat, cunningly soft.)

Perez and Patitucci took nearly nothing in the way of conventional solos. Instead, they spilled their individual ideas into forceful lines and insidious grooves that shaped a collective mass of sound which bore the general shape of a given, often recognizable, tune yet expanded, contracted, and morphed, moment to moment. Perez, already a commanding presence before he joined this quartet, continues to grow and thrive in this setting; his every gesture seems to ripple through the band with force. Even Shorter, alternating between tenor and soprano, played few extended solos. Often, he simply celebrated the triumphant intent of a theme, like the one from “Joy Rider,” jiggling its place in the rhythm on each utterance.

This band is the most interesting and beautiful animal in jazz’s jungle, has been for several years.

After the quartet’s performance, Shorter stepped briefly up to the microphone. He quoted his boss of nearly a half-century earlier, Art Blakey: “You don’t have nothin’ to prove.” He then went about proving that all music, even his best, is open to interpretation and better for that effort — and that we’ve far from heard all that his fertile imagination can conjure.

Finally, the Imani Winds were seated, along with Shorter, in front of Perez, Patitucci, and Blade, for a closing segment. Sounding like some fantasy big band from fictional world, with Shorter on soprano sax and Imani’s Coleman often playing piccolo, the nine musicians played three Shorter pieces, each containing stunning elements, the best of which was an extended version of “The Three Marias.” This was dense and finely arranged music, full of wildly creative counterpoint, interlacing melodies, and exquisite harmonic shifts.

The arrangements were like gardens that had grown over to an absurd yet startlingly beautiful point, yet somehow retained the logic of their original plantings. And even in such elaborate context, seated the whole time, Shorter was prominent without being dominant, playing upward-pointed lines, high-register squeals, well-placed single notes, and, at one point, soft blues phrases with obvious glee and no signs of slowing down.

“I’m trying to express eternity with my music,” Shorter told me the last time we spoke, a few years ago. Already with his quartet, he’s erased any temporal limitations — of a given tune’s duration or its association with a particular era (his 40-year-old compositions could not have sounded fresher at Carnegie).

If this is 75, who knows what he’ll sound like at 150.

Above all else it was a homecoming: The Neville Brothers performed at the annual New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival for the first time since Hurricane Katrina. More good news: The event returned to its full pre-Katrina seven-day schedule. Still more: Though the heavy rains of the first weekend made a muddy mess of the Fair Grounds infield, they didn’t dampen spirits or attendance much. According to event officials, nearly 400,000 people attended the festival, held April 25-27 and May 1-4.

Given the emotional heft of their return, the Nevilles were the big story. Their presence built throughout the fest’s final weekend: first Art, in his debut solo set, inviting Aaron up to the stage at one point; then, Aaron, bringing many in a packed gospel tent to tears, his saxophonist brother Charles at his side; finally, all four — Art, Aaron, Cyril and Charles — together on the Acura stage to close the festival’s final day. Before that last performance, producer Quint Davis spoke of “families being torn apart, brothers separated from brothers all over New Orleans.” “The Neville family’s coming back together,” Art said from the stage. The crowd roared. The four then reprised the three decades of hits that made them such beloved stars in the first place.

It was an important symbol, no doubt. Though Charles has lived in Massachusetts for more than a decade, Aaron, Art and Cyril all lived in New Orleans before Katrina. These brothers in fact became separated from each other — and from the city that identified so powerfully with them. I remember being struck by Aaron’s son, Ivan Neville, on Sing Me Back Home, a CD by displaced all-star musicians recorded in Austin, Texas, six weeks after the storm: Covering John Fogerty’s Creedence Clearwater Revival hit, Ivan snarled, “I ain’t no fortunate son!” — and meant it. (If a Neville wasn’t entitled by birth, I recall thinking, who in New Orleans was?)

The effects of the floods that followed the levee failures are deep and lasting enough to strain even the Nevilles’ relationship with their hometown. Though Art returned to his Valence Street home as soon as possible after Katrina, Aaron remained in Tennessee, just outside Nashville, until his recent purchase of a home in Covington, La., near New Orleans. Cyril, the most outspoken of the four, is repairing his New Orleans home, and hopes to return soon. He’s been in Austin since Katrina.

In the days after Katrina, Cyril pressed many a sore nerve. He wore a homemade T-shirt emblazoned with the phrase “Ethnic Cleansing in New Orleans” during his appearance on the televised “From the Big Apple to the Big Easy” benefit concert. His comments some months later to a Chicago Sun-Times reporter were widely repeated in national media: “A lot of things about life in New Orleans were a myth,” he said, largely in reference to the music industry. “Would I go back to live? There’s nothing there.”

Cyril is coming back to live, he says now. And when one considers the time frame and circumstances, his utterances seem perhaps excusable or even necessary. Still, the bitterness over all that, combined with frustration over the Nevilles having stayed away, led to resentment in some quarters of the city: The Never Brothers, some cynics (though I know none personally) called them. It may have been undeserved or overstated, but it was enough to prompt both columnist Chris Rose and music critic Keith Spera to rise to the brothers’ defense in the pages of the New Orleans Times-Picayune during the days preceding Jazz Fest.

“The decision by any individual — doctor, lawyer, homemaker, hotel maid, Neville brother — on when to return to post-Katrina New Orleans,” wrote Spera, “is based on what is perceived as the best option for their family’s mental, physical and financial well-being.”

But what about those who don’t really get to make a decision? All this Jazz Fest-prompted talk of “home” and “reunions” echoed in varying ways, depending upon where you were in New Orleans, and what was your situation. For many, three years after the floods, Cyril’s 2006 comment didn’t sound outlandish: There really was nothing there.

It seemed a cruel indignity, some mash-up of Dickens and Orwell, when, five days before Christmas last year, the New Orleans City Council unanimously approved a HUD-ordered plan to tear down some 4,500 units of public housing. I was in New York, watching CNN as residents assembled outside near barricades and police lines. “If you know New Orleans, you’ll know how dilapidated these housing developments are,” said anchorwoman Kyra Phillips. “They’ve been crime-ridden, very popular for drug-running. … According to the mayor, this is an effort to clean up the city, have better housing for folks.”

Meanwhile, like some bizarre B-roll footage, we saw a live shot of protesters, mostly New Orleans residents who did not share that sentiment, being turned away with pepper spray; one woman fell to the ground after being Tasered. But we heard only Phillips. The residents were voiceless, as they’d been in the debate about demolition and rebuilding of public housing in a city hard-pressed for affordable homes.

By the time of Jazz Fest, and even as the cloud of impropriety that would cause HUD Secretary Alfonso Jackson to resign was gathering, bulldozers were unleashed on the city’s “Big Four” projects — B.W. Cooper, C.J. Peete, St. Bernard and, finally, despite an outcry from not just housing activists but also architects and cultural leaders, Lafitte. With them went those 4,500 public housing units, many of which are unlikely to reappear through the “mixed-income” developments on tap.

With those buildings — nearly all of which were structurally sound after the floods — now almost completely gone, there’s a notable deflation of energy among the ranks of activists who protested loudly last year. “It’s difficult not to be discouraged,” said lawyer and housing activist Tracey Washington. “There just isn’t the groundswell of support for this issue that there was before the demolition began. But it’s important to understand that this is about even more than rights and basic human needs. With the tearing down of Lafitte, we didn’t just tear down viable affordable housing for our working poor and working class, we removed a huge part of the culture of the city of New Orleans.”

She’s right to conflate housing and culture, as was Marshall Truehill Jr., pastor of the First United Baptist Church and former chairman of the city’s planning commission, when I interviewed him. He mentioned how much the housing projects meant to Mardi Gras Indian culture and vice versa. “When you destroy neighborhoods, you tear apart a culture too,” he said. “Once you tear down these buildings, you can’t put them back.”

“Under the Bridge” used to refer to the shadowy space beneath the Claiborne Avenue overpass for I-10, where Mardi Gras Indians convene on appointed days and where brass band music echoes mightily when a “second-line parade” finds its way there. That phrase now holds a different meaning, as it did splashed across the cover of the local weekly, Gambit, earlier this year, headlining a piece about the growing encampment of some 200 homeless underneath the freeway.

Half the working poor, elderly and disabled are still estranged from New Orleans, according to Bill Quigley, who directs the Loyola University Poverty Law Center.

“The demolition of public housing has of course greatly exacerbated the problem we’re dealing with,” said Angela Patterson, who focuses on homelessness as director of the nonprofit UNITY Welcome Home of Greater New Orleans. She estimates the homeless population in the city at 12,000; according to a UNITY survey done in collaboration with Common Ground, more than 95 percent of these people lived in New Orleans prior to the floods.

As for the city’s overall population, July 2005 census reports estimated a population of some 450,000 — a little more than the total of Jazz Fest attendees. Greater New Orleans Data Center estimates, based on an analysis of homes receiving postal service, yields a new population figure of 325,000. Yet it’s near impossible to determine how many of this number are new residents, and there are no reliable figures for former residents of New Orleans who still wish to return home.

One thing that is clear: The changing population of the city will have political implications. An April 24th Times-Picayune piece by Michelle Krupa cited a recent study by University of New Orleans political scientist Ed Chervenak, based on voter turnout in the 2003 and 2007 gubernatorial elections. The results, Krupa wrote, “confirm what election-watchers have suspected since Hurricane Katrina: The number of voters in the New Orleans area has fallen sharply, with African-Americans and registered Democrats losing the most ground.” According to Christine Day, chairwoman of the political science department of the University of New Orleans, “It has really important implications for the redrawing of districts — congressional districts and all the way down.”

These facts and figures may have been lost on or irrelevant to many of those who charged from stage to stage, softshell crab po’ boy in hand, at the Fair Grounds, the horse-racing track that transforms into a music stadium once each year. Yet in many ways, politics were in the air during The New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival Presented by Shell (as it’s officially titled) — literally, in fact, at one point. While the Neville Brothers played the Acura stage, a plane circled above the Fair Grounds towing a banner: “Shell, Hear the Music. Fix the Coast You Broke.” Not all the commentary was so overt, and none as visible, but it was there if you kept your eyes and ears open. Mind you, it’s easy in New Orleans these days to read meaning and purpose into every lyric or song choice — was Sheryl Crow commenting on the housing crisis by covering “Gimme Shelter,” or was she just doing a Stones tune? Also, it’s impossible to take in all the music and all the messages emanating from the event’s 10 stages. Still, a good deal of what I did catch was timely, topical and worth remembering.

Stevie Wonder flat-out endorsed Barack Obama’s campaign at the start of his show: He decried the racism that could threaten the senator’s run for the White House, then segued into “Love’s in Need of Love Today,” biting down hard on the line, “Hate’s goin’ ’round.” And how’s this for a slogan Obama’s campaign manager didn’t think of? When Mardi Gras Indians Bo Dollis and the Wild Magnolias reached the climax of their Jazz & Heritage stage set, an election-year twist on an Indian chant, best known via a pop song, could be heard a football field away: “Iko, Iko, Obama!”

Perhaps no song speaks to the Katrina experience as well as Randy Newman’s “Louisiana, 1927.” Written more than 30 years ago, the song has, as Geoff Himes wrote in a recent and insightful New York Times piece, become a modern-day folk song, its chorus — “Louisiana, they’re trying to wash us away” — bearing new relevance. Yet it was Newman’s “A Few Words in Defense of Our Country” that elicited the most knowing chill, especially with its final verse:

“The end of an empire is messy at best/ And this empire is ending/ Like all the rest/ Like the Spanish Armada adrift on the sea/ We’re adrift in the land of the brave/ And the home of the free/ Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye.”

If trumpeter Terence Blanchard’s statements at the jazz tent were political, they were also wordless, as he performed selections from his Grammy-winning CD, A Tale of God’s Will, with his band and members of the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra. The music, drawn from Blanchard’s score to Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke, called up indelible images of Katrina’s aftermath and their associated emotions. Violins voiced the storm’s fury, woodwinds the foreboding calm of its wake, his horn the anguished cries and later rage of those left stranded. Blanchard’s requiem contains tightly composed passages but also moments during which he pushes his trumpet beyond its comfortable range. Not screeches, exactly-nothing close to Abbey Lincoln’s screams on Max Roach’s 1960 We Insist! Freedom Now Suite, but angrier and more daring than anything in his previous work. And, like Roach’s music almost two generations ago, meant to make a point.

Among the Mardi Gras Indians at the festival, I noticed Eddie “Big Easy” Vanison, “gang flag” of the Hardhead Hunters, passing by with an elaborate suit, including one embroidered patch that could have been a news story. “Chocolate City,” it read along the top. Underneath was a detailed image: a sign reading”Club Treme,” in memory of one among many long-gone neighborhood venues; a bleeding body with numbered shell casings alongside; a police cruiser and yellow police tape; Mardi Gras Indians and neighborhood kids on the sides, watching it all. In context, amid the other patches on Vanison’s suit — second-lines and the Superdome, among other things — it was just one element of a panorama of New Orleans life. “But it was a piece that needed to be shown,” he told me later, “and that we live with.”

The neighborhood known as Treme is under siege these days from not just criminals, but from the very police charged with protecting it — at least in terms of the cultural traditions celebrated at Jazz Fest. At trombonist and singer Glen David Andrews’ performance, not long after he drifted in and out of the lyrics to Dr. John’s “Right Place, Wrong Time,” he dedicated the hymn “I’ll Fly Away” to Kermit James. He wasn’t just honoring a dear departed friend and tuba player: He was referencing the evening of October 1, when police cars converged on a Treme corner, busted up a funeral procession for James, and slapped cuffs on Andrews’ wrists. Months later, the charges against Andrews and his brother, drummer Derrick Tabb — parading without a permit and “disturbing the peace by tumultuous manner” — were dropped. But the ante had been upped up in the fight over the city’s culture, which has intensified amid the long struggle to rebuild. With his tribute hymn at Jazz Fest, Andrews was completing that cut-short ritual-free, onstage, employed and empowered.

Funeral processions are an essential element of New Orleans culture, and the impromptu variety in particular — honoring the passing of someone of distinction, especially a musician — is a time-honored tradition in neighborhoods like Treme, which some consider the oldest black neighborhood in America. For black New Orleans residents who have returned to the city, these and other street-culture traditions — second-line parades and Mardi Gras Indian assemblies — offer perhaps the only semblance of normalcy, continuity and community organization left. It’s good fun, even educational, for these traditions to be on display at Jazz Fest-Mardi Gras Indians and brass bands play on stages, mock second-lines weave through the Fair Grounds at appointed hours — but it’s important to remember that their real venue is the streets, where they’re functional aspects of daily life.

Just as the festival was swinging into action, another funeral procession was cut short in Treme. Sirens blared. Children, musicians and mourners were commanded through bullhorns to disperse. Jerome Smith, who runs the Treme Cultural Center, called this latest episode an “attack on culture” when interviewed by Katy Reckdahl of the Times-Picayune. “He found the timing ironic,” she wrote. “At about the same time that police had scattered an authentic funeral march, near Esplanade and Claiborne avenues, Jazz and Heritage Festival-goers were lined up behind a band at the Fair Grounds, ready to follow a second-line recreated for tourists.”

Such irony is no new twist: Last year, three days before members of the Nine Times Social Aid & Pleasure Club danced their way through the Fair Grounds — second-lining with the Mahogany Brass Band — they were represented in federal court. A lawsuit on behalf of a consortium of social aid and pleasure clubs, aided by the ACLU, protested the city’s hiking of police security fees — triple or more from pre-Katrina rates — for second-line parades held September through May. The suit invoked the First Amendment right to freedom of speech and expression, claiming that parade permit schemes “effectively tax” such expression. “Should the law not be enjoined,” the complaint stated, “there is very little doubt that plaintiff’s cultural tradition will cease to exist.” The city settled without a trial and the fees were lowered (but not to their original level). Though the issue remains a source of consternation to second-liners, at least the parades have rolled.

At this year’s Jazz Fest, Mac Rebennack, best known as Dr. John, offered up a few songs from City That Care Forgot, his artful yet angry rant of an album set for release June 3. He drew more than a few knowing nods with his lyrics to “My People Need a Second Line,” which referenced both the October Treme arrests in particular and the embattled parade culture in general.

“You know it ain’t right to charge people for a second line,” he sang. “It’s something spiritual, ought to be kept out of politics. Sending 20 squad cars to stop a second line/ sending musicians to jail instead of stopping crime.”

Rebennack’s new album takes on a wide range of issues — from disappearing wetlands to oil-industry greed, the Iraq war to the botched response to Katrina (and connects the dots between these problems). But Rebennack’s deepest ire is saved for recent challenges to the culture he grew up with. When I met with him at his management company’s Harlem office, he recalled reading about the funeral-parade arrests in Treme. “I called up the woman who wrote the article, and she gave me the skinny,” he said. “And it was even worse than I thought. There were kids watching, and the guys they hauled off were their teachers. Can you imagine that?”

Near the end of saxophonist Donald Harrison’s jazz-tent performance, after his masterful displays of bebop and funk, the band vamped as Harrison disappeared from the stage. He returned in full regalia, as Big Chief of Congo Nation, which he named for Congo Square, the spot where, two centuries ago, enslaved Africans would drum and dance on Sundays: Their bamboula rhythm, essential to any Mardi Gras Indian gathering, still courses beneath most of the homegrown music at Jazz Fest.

But for the past several years — even before Katrina — Congo Square has been off limits. Thick chains and a padlock greet visitors at the gates of the surrounding Armstrong Park, just off North Rampart Street. A few days before Jazz Fest, I’d seen those gates open. A few dozen people wearing identical T-shirts were hard at work painting fences and sprucing things up around Congo Square. My heart nearly leapt. Turns out it was a volunteer group sponsored by the National Tourism Foundation. Their shirts read “Tourism Cares.” Yet the city that derives much of its tourist appeal from Congo Square’s legacy has quite uncaringly cordoned off the place: We’re left with a freshly painted fence that, except for an occasional special event, stays locked.

President Bush couldn’t stay for Jazz Fest, but just prior he hit New Orleans for a few days. The trip had a focus: a press-worthy summit with Mexican President Felipe Calderon and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, to shore up free-trade spirit in general, and to defend NAFTA from critics like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

On Earth Day, Bush and his new friends took to Lafayette Square, to plant an oak tree. When I got to Lafayette Square the next evening, I found a small granite monument left by our president: “Planted a Summard Oak Tree on April 22, 2008, in honor of Earth Day and the Cresent City’s hosting of the North American Leaders’ Summit” — just like that, with the word Crescent misspelled. By the next day when I returned, camera in hand, a new, corrected granite block had been installed. The gaffe received surprisingly little attention around town. But a local satirical newspaper, The New Orleans Levee, ran a front-page piece, with a photo of an in-between moment I’d missed: Someone had spray-painted a proofreader’s caret and the letter “c” on the monument. If only the president’s more damning blunders in New Orleans could be so swiftly and easily fixed, and not set in stone.

One politician who showed up at Jazz Fest with a purpose was Louisiana Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu. He gathered notable local musicians, painters, even a celebrity chef, along with reporters, in a trailer between stages. As the music of the nearby Fais-Do-Do stage thumped mightily, Landrieu, a pleasantly animated bulldog of a man in a T-shirt and khakis, began a conversation about local culture. Though the city of New Orleans does more to inhibit than to nurture its arts through uneven enforcement of arcane and vague zoning and permit statutes and police-led intimidation, the state, behind Landrieu’s lead, has fostered a more positive climate — mandating music and art in schools, for instance, and establishing tax incentives for the film and music industry. Landrieu is organizing the next edition of his World Cultural Economic Forum, in October, and it’s a right-thinking affair. “I don’t know that we did not take for granted the cultural riches we have here,” Landrieu said at last year’s event, “until after the international community gasped when they thought about what might be lost. A focus on how culture holds important keys to many aspects of recovery, be they economic, civic or spiritual, is essential for productive conversations about recovery.”

On that count, the Jazz & Heritage Festival might be considered a mighty conversation-starter. Festival producer Quint Davis once told me he thought of the event as “this big soul-generating battery.” Surely the $300 million in estimated revenue the seven-day event generates in the city can’t hurt. And apart from the national pop acts on Jazz Fest’s bill — from Al Green to Tim McGraw to Billy Joel — there is a dazzling range of homegrown artistry, the breadth and depth of which is stunning. The musicians and Mardi Gras Indians and second-liners at Jazz Fest who were born and raised in New Orleans tell the city’s truth beyond the Fair Grounds fences, for those who care to listen thoughtfully. And it’s even possible that something necessary, perhaps instructive, was conveyed during that first weekend-some basic feeling that locals understand — when we all had to slog through the mud just to get where we were going.

Larry Blumenfeld is working on a book about cultural recovery in New Orleans based on his research as a Katrina Media Fellow with the Open Society Institute. His writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal and The Village Voice, among other publications. His essay “Band on the Run in New Orleans” is re-printed in Best Music Writing 2008 (Da Capo). He is editor-at-large of Jazziz magazine. This piece appeared originally on Truthdig.com.

If a film were made of guitarist Lionel Loueke’s career to date, the master shot sequence would be his 2001 audition for admission into the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz Performance, then housed at the University of Southern California. “He started playing rhythmic patterns and vocalizing off a tune’s melody,” recalled trumpeter Terence Blanchard, the program’s artistic director, “and we were floored.” Pianist Herbie Hancock and saxophonist Wayne Shorter were also members of the audition jury. “I turned to Wayne, just as he was turning to me,” Hancock said. “We didn’t even have to say it; we just knew: We’re going to hear more from this guy.”

And we have. By the time Loueke, who is 35, arrived at Joe’s Pub in Manhattan in March to celebrate the release of his new CD, Karibu (Blue Note), he’d earned a reputation as one to watch. Blanchard and Hancock were so enamored with Loueke at the institute that they both quickly recruited him for their own endeavors. The guitarist recently concluded an impressive six-year stint in Blanchard’s band. He helped create the subtle textures of the Grammy-winning album The Joni Letters (Verve) for Hancock, with whom he regularly tours. And Loueke is a sought-after collaborator for up-and-coming musicians, including vocalist Gretchen Parlato and drummer Francisco Mela.

Yet at Joe’s Pub, the spotlight was squarely on Loueke’s well-developed trio and the duality within his singular style. Singing soft wordless melodies, his tongue clicking out rhythms, his long fingers sketching elegant single-note patterns then stopping to sound unexpected chords, Loueke had the crowd entranced. Born and raised in the West African country of Benin, he evoked connection to a line of African troubadours, from traditional griots to modern pop stars, weaving narrative from threads of melody and groove. Yet he seemed just as much a jazz bandleader, negotiating tricky harmonic and rhythmic terrain, balancing consistent authority with sensitivity to the moment.

In jazz, why shouldn’t these roles meld? Loueke’s trio includes drummer Ferenc Nemeth, who was born in Hungary, and bassist Massimo Biolcati, who grew up in Sweden and Italy; together, the three press the issue of jazz’s globalization in general. And yet all are, notably, products of the best American institutions devoted to jazz education. Increasingly, musicians who have mastered jazz technique and absorbed its legacy are telling stories that span oceans.

Loueke’s story begins in the city of Cotonou, in Benin, a small nation of roughly six million people tucked between Nigeria and Togo. His father was a mathematics professor; his mother, a high-school teacher. As a child, he soaked in everyday Beninese songs, with vocals accompanied by beats on hand drums and an occasional sanza (thumb-piano made from a gourd and metal strips). At age 17, he began playing a beat-up, borrowed guitar — a far cry from the Godin electric with built-in synthesizer he now favors, or the hollow-body Yamaha on which he often taps out percussion.

When a friend brought him a George Benson album, he developed an ear for jazz. He left home on a scholarship to attend the National Institute of Art in Ivory Coast, where he learned to read and notate music, and, following that, the American School of Modern Music in Paris, whose jazz-savvy faculty is drawn largely from Boston’s Berklee College of Music. Loueke earned a scholarship to Berklee, where he first encountered his future trio mates, Biolcati and Nemeth.

“He came like a lightning bolt into Berklee and shocked everybody,” recalled Nemeth. “The rest of us had learned music mostly the academic way. His path was more creative. He’d taught himself first. I felt like he was showing us the real way to learn.” The three musicians auditioned separately for the Monk Institute; all were accepted into the two-year program. While there, they began practicing intensely together — at first playing standards, then Loueke’s compositions.

As a musician, Loueke is endlessly challenging, even reinventing, himself. In college, he began favoring the odd meters — 11 beats, or even 17, to a measure — that show up in most of the new CD’s songs. At the Monk Institute, he studied classical acoustic guitar and, forgoing his pick, decided to play with his fingers. Four years ago, he devised a new tuning scheme for his instrument, yielding improvisational lines that often suggest the kora, a 21-string African harp, and close-set intervals that sound more like a piano than a guitar.

Loueke’s music is unmistakably jazz, in that it is harmonically sophisticated and flexibly swinging, informed by bebop and blues repertoire, and highly adaptive to each player’s improvisations. Yet even in odd, extended meters, the music never sounds overly cerebral or complicated. Its rhythms are based on overlapping cycles, as in African music, which turn in easeful fashion. And even Loueke’s furthest-flung solos are staked to simple melodies that float through nearly all his music, recalling, he says, the songs he heard as a child.

Loueke’s previous recording, Virgin Forest (Obliqsound), combined trio studio sessions with recordings of percussionists he’d made in Benin. The new CD blends influences more organically. Loueke set Hoagy Carmichael’s “Skylark” to a Central African groove; he inserted paper beneath his instrument’s strings for one section of John Coltrane’s “Naima” to mimic a thumb-piano. Hancock and Shorter play on two tracks each; one, “Light Dark,” demonstrates the guitarist’s comfortable role within one of jazz’s closest and most productive dialogues. But the album’s truest focus is the trio’s interplay, especially the connection between Nemeth’s light-touched rhythms and Loueke’s delicately stated lines.

Is it coincidence that all three musicians were born outside the U.S., or is that a key ingredient?

“If you asked me that question years ago, I would have said coincidence,” said Loueke. “But today, I don’t believe in coincidences. What brought us here was jazz improvisation and harmony. Yet we didn’t forget our backgrounds.”

“Maybe the answer is not musical,” said Biolcati, “in that, as foreigners, we all found each other by being outsiders.”

“Everyone talks about Lionel in terms of the world-music aspect he brings to jazz,” said Blanchard. “But what really makes him special is that he does something different every night and plays from an honest place.”

By now, Loueke must be considered a jazz insider, extending the music’s legacy through his own personal story. “When I was a kid, I was happy just to make a collection of Blue Note albums,” he said. “But, a world away, I never imagined I’d be part of the collection one day.”

Larry Blumenfeld is editor-at-large of Jazziz and a regular contributor to The Wall Street Journal, which originally published this article.

For years, Arturo O’Farrill says, his wife would ask as he left for work, “Is this a ‘Gon-ki gon-ki gon-ki’ gig? ” Meant as an inside joke — they’re both musicians — the question couched a simple truth: Much of what passes for Latin jazz is caricature, exemplified by a single watered-down rhythmic phrase to approximate a vast sea of musical culture.

“A lot of times, frankly, the answer used to be ‘yes,’” said the47-year-old Mr. O’Farrill recently, sitting on a sofa near his piano in his Park Slope, Brooklyn, home. If those days are long gone, it’s the result of the circuitous path Mr. O’Farrill has followed toward his rightful inheritance, and to the particular sense of mission he feels now more strongly than ever.

When Mr. O’Farrill brought his 18-piece Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra to Manhattan’s Symphony Space for three nights in March, he led it through an expansive set of pieces whose composers hail from Puerto Rico, Brazil, Peru and Argentina, among other points. This was anything but a narrow conception; it was a statement of purpose for a five-year-old band that is, in some ways, starting anew.

Those March concerts closed the orchestra’s first season at its new home, just seven blocks north of the Upper West Side apartment in which Mr. O’Farrill, the son of a legendary Cuban composer and bandleader, Chico O’Farrill, grew up, and a short subway ride uptown from Jazz at Lincoln Center, where the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra was housed for its first five years. If the tenure at Lincoln Center established the need for and contours of a canon of seminal Afro Latin jazz pieces, this last program hinted that the orchestra’s future is in large part devoted to stretching that repertoire and its implications.

“Latin jazz is a misnomer,” Mr. O’Farrill said. “It doesn’t exist. It’s part of the same tree as jazz. Jazz and Latin are intertwined in ways that nobody has yet to even understand. In the music drawn from Latin roots we can find keys to both jazz’s past and its future.”

Jazz itself won recognition and funding from American mainstream cultural institutions only within the past two decades. But as new jazz programs at Lincoln Center, the Smithsonian and elsewhere began to pop up, the lineage and influence of Latin jazz often drew only passing mention. Most jazz musicians, listeners and critics in the U.S. recognize basic signposts to the intersections of Latin music and American jazz: trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie’s work with the Cuban bandleader Frank “Machito” Grillo and with percussionist Chano Pozo in the 1940s; Louis Armstrong’s 1930 recording of the Cuban song “El Manisero”; Creole pianist Jelly Roll Morton’s even earlier assertion that jazz had to have a “Spanish tinge” to be authentic. Still, Latin culture has widely been regarded as an exotic “other,” despite its elemental value to so much American music.

If the U.S. was not quick to accept Latin jazz as its own, neither was a young Arturo O’Farrill. “When I first began to play music, I rejected my father and my inherited culture,” he says. “I was into John Coltrane’s music. I was hanging around Manhattan’s downtown loft scene, as far from my father’s scene as possible. I didn’t want to play no clavé,” he said of the elemental five-beat pattern of Afro-Cuban music. Mr. O’Farrill frequented the musicians’ lofts of Manhattan’s East Village back then. His first significant professional job was in the big band led by avant-garde composer Carla Bley. “But a magical thing happened when my father got elderly and he needed help. I got past all the resistance and the fear, and I heard the music as if it was new to me.”

Chico O’Farrill died in 2001 at age 79. Toward the end of his life, with his son’s help, his music was played at Lincoln Center, his arrangements published and distributed. But others spurred the younger Mr. O’Farrill’s embrace of his roots. Andy Gonzalez, a New Yorker of Puerto Rican descent and a standard-bearing bassist, is the pulse and the anchor for an astounding number of Latin recordings during the past 25 years, and a close friend and colleague to Mr. O’Farrill. He pushed Mr. O’Farrill to do some remedial work.

“I remember Andy telling me that it was OK to play clavé, that it was part of me,” said Mr. O’Farrill. “And he urged me to check out the long line of great Cuban pianists who have established a great tradition, my father among them. I realized that the music we call ‘Latin’ is unbelievably important, unbelievably beautiful, and unbelievably hard to play — and as worthy of attention as any genre. In fact, in some ways it’s more so because it is a music that harkens closer to Africa than anything else in the current jazz pantheon. And people who do it well should be commended for being truly multilingual in their approach to music.”

Initially, the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra fulfilled a lofty corrective ambition in terms of Lincoln Center’s mission, and it grew out of a specific practical need. Mr. O’Farrill recalls being impressed by trumpeter Wynton Marsalis’s championing of jazz repertory at Lincoln Center. In the mid-1990s, he approached Mr. Marsalis with the idea of creating a repertory group specifically for Latin jazz.

“There was a benefit performance pairing Wynton’s orchestra with Tito Puente’s,” he says. “Wynton had me lead a rehearsal of the Latin numbers. I wanted them to play a Cuban phrase, but they just could not articulate it authentically. They would ‘jazz’ it up. They could not Afro-Cubanize it. Wynton had this faraway look in his eye. I think that’s when he realized that it takes a specialized group of musicians. It’s a different approach — artistically, mentally and emotionally. It’s a different approach in terms of your embouchure and your tonguing.” Not long after, according to Mr. O’Farrill, Mr. Marsalis told him: “I’m going to do your idea, put a Latin group together. And I want you to lead it.”

Much like the organization’s flagship orchestra led by Mr. Marsalis, the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra led by Mr. O’Farrill was a working band meant to reinforce and extend historical repertory: Where Mr. Marsalis championed the jazz of Ellington and Armstrong, Mr. O’Farrill showcased the classic mambo of Machito and Puente, as well as more ambitious orchestral suites written by his father.

But after five years, the orchestra and Lincoln Center have parted ways. Mr. O’Farrill will always feel a sense of pride and appreciation toward Mr. Marsalis and Lincoln Center, he said, but ultimately he sought better promotion and greater freedom. Mr. O’Farrill’s orchestra was paid per performance, rather than on salary, and he wanted to tour more often than he felt he could under the terms of his agreement with Jazz at Lincoln Center. Perhaps most of all, he wanted a stronger focus on education. “Ultimately, as in the larger American culture, the Latin group became nothing more than a stepchild,” he said.

So Mr. O’Farrill established his own nonprofit organization, The Afro Latin Jazz Alliance, to govern the orchestra’s activities and to map out a more broadly conceived future. Last year, he met Symphony Space’s artistic director, Isaiah Sheffer, when both were being honored by their alma mater, Brooklyn College. Mr. Sheffer invited the orchestra into its new home. The Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra rents Symphony Space for its concerts, at a favorable rate. This past fall, under the direction of Erica von Kleist, an alto saxophonist in the orchestra, the alliance began an ambitious education program in association with the Brooklyn Bridge Academy, an alternative public high school in Brooklyn, N.Y.; at a recent Symphony Space concert, members of this inaugural class augmented the orchestra’s rhythm section for one brief tune.

Mr. O’Farrill wishes to educate on another level as well. “The word ‘jazz’ is simply that — a word,” he wrote in the liner notes to Song for Chico (Zoho Records), the orchestra’s powerful new CD. “But the cultural tide that resulted from European harmony, instrumentation, and from colliding with the rich African musical traditions, call and response, polyrhythms, and vocal-inflected performance took place wherever African slaves and their white captors interacted.”

In conversation in Brooklyn, Mr. O’Farrill extended the thought: “Wherever that experiment took place, there is jazz. And to deny it is to limit yourself to an extraordinarily small view of what jazz could be. But as a statement on the cultural transformation that took place in the New World, it’s bigger than any one of us can imagine.”

The season-closing concert expressed that sentiment through new works by worthy if somewhat unheralded composers. Guillermo Klein’s “El Minotauro” further developed the tango-based inventiveness of his 11-piece band, Los Gauchos. Michael Webster’s “Bomba” was named for the Puerto Rican folkloric rhythm at its core. Paul Shapiro’s “One World” mined a longstanding bond between American Jewish and Afro-Latin cultures. Fernando Otero’s “Milongo 10,” a highlight of the evening, drew the orchestra gracefully into avant-garde abstraction. And Mr. O’Farrill’s “Tabla Rasa” reached furthest of all, employing the jazz-savvy tabla drum player Badal Roy to marry classical Indian rhythmic patterns with mambo beats. Though not seamless, the union made a compelling and surprisingly swinging musical case.

With his orchestra and his new organization, Mr. O’Farrill extends a broad legacy by dreaming big.

Larry Blumenfeld is a frequent contributor to The Wall Street Journal, where this piece originally appeared.

“Condoms. Tampons. Excess hair. SMALL AN-I-MALS!”
So sang the dozen folks forming a circle within a tiny cabin last July, holding that last syllable until Arturo O’Farrill dropped his right hand with a conductor’s authority. I’d just made the nine-hour drive from Brooklyn, New York, to Deer Isle, Maine, but my bleary eyes found strength to widen. I laughed.

I’d walked in on a rehearsal for Haystack, The Opera: An Afro-Cuban Jazz Odyssey — and it was no joke. O’Farrill’s wife, Alison, sat at a keyboard, his eldest son, Zack, before a set of conga drums. His youngest, Adam, held a trumpet, awaiting his cue. Soon various rhythm instruments — hand drums, cowbells, guiros, clavés — were handed out.

Before long, O’Farrill had these painters and potters and sculptors, all of whom had come to the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts for a summer session, creating four layers of rhythm and sounding pretty damn in-sync.

O’Farrill had come to Maine to headline at the annual Deer Isle Jazz Festival, for which I’ve been volunteer producer since its inception, in 2001. Each summer, one festival musician serves as artist-in-residence at the Haystack School. O’Farrill, a celebrated pianist and bandleader, the son of a legendary Cuban composer, met this challenge by bringing his whole family and creating an opera, with lyrics drawn from Haystack Director Stuart Kestenbaum’s work — not his celebrated poetry, but his school manual, the part about “what not to flush down the toilet.”

I’d grown accustomed to such odd surprises. Hell, this unexpected turn in my own career stemmed from, well, an unexpected turn. A decade ago, my wife, Erica, and I were driving around Stonington, Deer Isle’s southernmost town, tracing curve after curve, gawking at cove upon cove, when one right left us facing a dilapidated circa-1912 opera house bearing a “For Sale” sign. I mumbled something about quitting our jobs and selling our co-op. “We could turn it into a nonprofit arts center,” I said, to which Erica flashed a look that’s come to mean something between “My, that’s a fascinating idea” and “Shut up already.”

It was, and I did. A year later, four women bought the place, cleared out the dead raccoons, and renovated. The Stonington Opera House — at various points, a dance hall, vaudeville theater, and high-school basketball arena — was now home to the nonprofit Opera House Arts. I introduced myself. Linda Nelson, the indefatigable executive director, suggested we mount a jazz festival. Artistic Director Judith Jerome talked with me about improvisation in all its forms. We sat until sunset, when the island sky turned blue and pink and cast eerie reflections on the water that changed with each passing moment. Whitney Balliett famously called jazz the “sound of surprise,” I thought, but this place looked the part.

We were off. There were jazz fans hidden in the hills, literally. Several opened their homes to visiting musicians and didn’t stop there; they baked blueberry muffins, demonstrated lobster bisque recipes, lent Subarus. Saxophonist Dewey Redman, our first headliner, sent yearly Christmas cards to his hosts. I recall indelible images: Romero Lubambo sitting on a porch after breakfast, strumming his guitar as Luciana Souza slapped soft percussion on her thighs and sang bossa novas into the morning mist; William Parker’s band members dotting the sloping hill near Lindsay Bowker’s stately house, grinning giddily as they carried bright-red lobsters in varying stages of dismemberment; Greg Osby and his wife heading off to Nervous Nellie’s Jams and Jellies.

There were silly, touching moments (Jason Moran lifting his pant leg onstage and thanking his host, Stan Bergen, for the dress-sock loaner), and scary stretches (driving from the Bangor airport through pounding sleet and blinding fog with Randy Weston cramped into my Saab, praying not to be scripting his bio’s final line).

I’d come to Deer Isle 10 years ago to be refreshed. Yet even more invigorating then the brisk air and chilly water was the attitude of these audiences. The morning after Parker’s 2004 concert, I asked Perry Hunter, who had offered to drive the band to the airport, whether the music sounded too “avant-garde.”
“Only an old man would say that,” he shot back. With that, the 75-year-old slammed the van door shut and drove off. I felt transported.

Larry Blumenfeld is editor-at-large of Jazziz, where this piece originally appeared.

by Larry Blumenfeld

“It’s amazing how much joy and hope these beads and feathers bring.”

The Sunday before Mardi Gras in New Orleans, Donald Harrison Jr., Big Chief of the Congo Nation, son of Big Chief Donald Sr., lay on the living-room floor of his mother’s house in the Ninth Ward, cutting leopard-print fur in a pattern as he spoke. Nearby, a sofa and chair were covered with beads and rhinestones, along with ostrich and turkey feathers that had been dyed a golden yellow. Harrison was preparing to “mask,” to enact the city’s least-understood tradition, and these days, perhaps, its most essential: Mardi Gras Indian culture. These rituals, which date to at least the mid-1800s, are an African-American homage to the Native Americans who once sheltered runaway slaves and to the spirit of resistance.

The calendar was pointed in its irony this year: Elsewhere, February 5 marked Super Tuesday. All attention was squared on would-be elected leaders with practiced battle cries, competing to prove themselves fierce and attractive. But in New Orleans, Super Tuesday was Fat Tuesday. Uptown, in the limelight, the various well-publicized krewe parades (a throng that included Hulk Hogan, King of Bacchus) lorded over the city, riding high on floats and tossing down beads. But on less-traveled streets, more in the shadows and announced mostly on a need-to-know basis, Mardi Gras Indian Chiefs, possessors of strictly inherited thrones, asserted their authority. Dressed in 10-foot-tall, 6-foot-wide feathered and beaded suits and accompanied by “queens,” “spy boys,” and others, they were announced by drumbeats and chants, lending voice and hope to New Orleans residents who’d been all but ignored this primary season. The Big Chiefs competed with words, too. And in a ritual that once frequently did turn violent, they battled to win hearts and minds, competing through elaborate suits to “kill ‘em with pretty.” The presidential candidates were selling change, but in New Orleans, a city all but ignored by that lot (except for John Edwards, who stood in front of the Ninth Ward’s Musician’s Village as he dropped out of the race), the message from these local leaders was continuity.

Sunday night, when most Americans were watching the Giants and Patriots do battle, Big Chief Darryl Montana of the Yellow Pocahontas — son of Allison “Tootie” Montana, known as “chief of chiefs” — was completing his own suit out in Kenner, the suburb he’s called home since Katrina drove him out of the city. Such work is all-consuming, not to mention expensive and physically demanding. It’s not uncommon for a chief’s hands to be scarred from needle cuts; while affixing one section of his crown to its backing, Montana had run a drill into his finger.

The brass-band second-line parades endemic to New Orleans culture draw on the same African-rooted bamboula rhythm as do Mardi Gras Indian chants, derived from Congo Square, where enslaved Africans were once permitted to dance and drum on Sundays (and for which Harrison’s tribe is named). These days, that site, on the fringe of the French Quarter, sits behind a gate to Louis Armstrong Park that’s been nearly always locked since Katrina. On Lundi Gras, the Monday before Mardi Gras, the New Orleans Social Aid & Pleasure Club Task Force, representing some 30 clubs, held its third-annual unified parade at that spot. The police had tried to cancel the event just days earlier, the latest in a series of city-sponsored challenges to this tradition. But aided by the ACLU, the Task Force took the city to federal court-the second time in a year that they’ve resisted and scored a legal victory. The clubs were saying, in effect, what the Indians sing in their traditional song “Shallow Water”: “We won’t bow down.”

Early Mardi Gras morning, I was back in the Ninth Ward, waiting for the Young Guardians of the Flame, led by six-year Big Chief Kevin Cooley Jr. and organized by Cherice Harrison-Nelson, Donald’s sister. This year, Cherice wore orange, red, and yellow. Last year, her suit was emblazoned with a beaded likeness of her father; above it, covering her heart, was a beaded American flag, its stars represented by crystals shaped like tears. “Something deep within your soul calls you to do this,” she said. “And you’ve got to do it, for your mental and physical survival, and for the welfare of those around you.”

Midday, Victor Harris of Fi-Yi-Yi showed up in front of the home of Joyce Montana, Tootie Montana’s widow. I recalled how he’d looked fierce in his African-inspired green-and-red mask two years ago, when the wake of Katrina threatened to swallow all such traditions. “They spit us all over this land,” he shouted then, amid drumming. “They told us we had to evacuate. But they didn’t say we had to stay away.” Now, Indians in a rainbow of colors passed through, did mock battle, embraced, moved on. A small crowd had assembled. Around 3 p.m., Darryl Montana came out of Joyce’s front door, looking regal in his tall, broad, lavender, feathered suit, which rippled gently in the growing breeze as he headed up to Claiborne Avenue, where Indians generally convene on Mardi Gras, beneath the overpass for I-10-”Under the Bridge,” as they call it.

That phrase holds a different meaning these days, as it did splashed across the cover of the local weekly, Gambit, headlining a piece about the growing encampment of some 200 homeless underneath the freeway, just a small portion of an estimated 12,000 cast-out residents. And not far from view on Claiborne was the darkened façade of the Lafitte Housing Projects, its doors and windows covered with steel plates. It seemed a cruel indignity, some mash-up of Dickens and Orwell, when, five days before Christmas last year, the New Orleans City Council unanimously approved a HUD-ordered plan to tear down some 4,500 units of public housing. I was in New York, watching CNN as residents assembled outside by barricades and police lines. “If you know New Orleans, you’ll know how dilapidated these housing developments are,” said anchorwoman Kyra Phillips. “They’ve been crime-ridden, very popular for drug-running. . . . According to the mayor, this is an effort to clean up the city, have better housing for folks.”

Meanwhile, like some bizarre B-roll footage, we saw a live shot of New Orleans residents being turned away with pepper spray; one woman fell to the ground after being Tasered. But we heard only Phillips. The residents were voiceless, as they’d been in the debate about demolition and rebuilding of public housing in a city hard-pressed for affordable homes. On Mardi Gras morning, Gerard Lewis, Big Chief of the Black Eagles, led his tribe in a prayer outside the B.W. Cooper projects-once their coming-out spot, now slated to be destroyed.

As the week rolled on, and Super Tuesday’s primary results proved inconclusive, sure enough, New Orleans made its way into the election-year discourse. “Suddenly, candidates are paying attention,” read the subhead to Thursday’s front-page coverage in The Times-Picayune. Barack Obama spoke at Tulane University that day, mentioning slaves at Congo Square and their “dances of impossible joy,” but not public housing. However, the subject was raised later in the day at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, in a panel discussion of architects who bemoaned the loss of sturdy and historically significant structures.

From the audience, historian Nick Spitzer commented, “Let’s not lose sight of these as what they are: homes.” Marshall Truehill, pastor of the First United Baptist Church and former chairman of the city’s planning commission, mentioned how much the housing projects meant to Mardi Gras Indian culture and vice versa. “When you destroy neighborhoods, you tear apart a culture too,” he said. “Once you tear down these buildings, you can’t put them back.”

The next day Jerome Smith, an activist who runs the Tremé Community Center, compounded the thought: “Even though we had a good turnout for Mardi Gras, it’s not the same, and I wonder if it ever will be. The great sorrow is that the people from those projects, especially the children who have been cast out of this city, can’t receive those rituals they way they’re supposed to.”

The Sunday before Mardi Gras, Donald Harrison had told me he was going to wear his suit, but that he would stay close to home, holding court as it were. He wasn’t going to take to the streets, to “come out.” I told him I didn’t believe him. “Wasn’t ritual important?” I asked.

We waited and waited, a group of us, in front of the Holy Faith Temple Baptist Church on Governor Nicholls Street. Finally, near dusk, Harrison arrived, driving a yellow Penske truck filled with the parts of his suit. As the sky darkened, he made his entrance from church to street, arms folded, concealing the detailed beadwork in the image of his father, feathers rippling as he walked, chants and beats following him. He looked spectacular, and moved tall and proud.

The following weekend, he was playing saxophone alongside pianist Henry Butler. Harrison, who is not only a Big Chief but also a world-class jazz musician, talked to me beforehand about the connections between Mardi Gras Indian rhythms and the drumming of Art Blakey, his early employer. He related the beadwork of his suit to the intricate patterns in the Afro-Caribbean music of pianist Eddie Palmieri, whom he was about to join on tour. He spoke of the lessons of leadership he soaked up as a Big Chief, which he passes on to the musicians he teaches through the local Tipitina’s Foundation.

“So you came out after all,” I said.

“Yeah,” he shot back. “Ritual matters.”

Since Katrina, Harrison’s attitudes have transformed. He’s no longer comfortable with the term “Indian,” which is a complicated matter. But his purpose remains clear. “I’m going to continue to mask in beads and feathers,” he added. “I’m going to play my saxophone. If enough people do their part, everything will endure. But that’s the question: Will people be allowed to do their part?”

Larry Blumenfeld is a frequent contributor to The Village Voice, where this piece was originally published.

If any music label’s identity is staked to that of American jazz, it is Blue Note Records. Beginning with its launch in 1939, and especially since the 1950s, Blue Note has chronicled jazz’s progression, while becoming an intrinsic element of the American musical landscape. The musical ferment of New York City from 1950-70 among a close-knit cadre of jazz players can be fairly well-depicted by a succession of the distinctive album covers designed by Reid Miles, often featuring iconic black-and-white photographs taken by Francis Wolff. The two men behind Blue Note’s formation, Alfred Lion and Wolff, were immigrants from Germany, a detail especially worth noting in light of the fact that, so far this year, the Blue Note banner has been waved most emphatically by two musicians born and raised outside the United States: pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba, from Havana, Cuba; and guitarist Lionel Loueke, from Benin, Africa.

Rubalcaba’s new Avatar is his 13th release on Blue Note; whereas, Loueke’s Karibu is his label debut. Rubalcaba, 44, and Loueke, 34, should each be familiar to jazz fans for their distinguished music making as leaders as well as for their work with standard-bearing players. As pianist and arranger, Rubalcaba was largely responsible for the gorgeously restrained ambience of bassist Charlie Haden’s Nocturne and Land of the Sun discs. Loueke was a subtle but provocative element of the core-group sound on pianist Herbie Hancock’s dazzling River: The Joni Letters. He’s toured widely with both Hancock and saxophonist Wayne Shorter, and he made indelible contributions during his years in trumpeter Terence Blanchard’s band.

These associations were far from random; Rubalcaba and Loueke made instant impressions on the American musicians who would become key boosters and collaborators.

Haden recalls first hearing Rubalcaba perform, at a 1986 festival in Havana. “Gonzalo’s band came on, he took a piano solo, and I nearly fell off my chair. I told the organizers, ‘Take me back to meet him.’ He spoke very little English at the time. But we played for hours.” Haden brought Rubalcaba to the attention of Blue Note label president Bruce Lundvall, who, similarly impressed, signed the pianist — first through Toshiba/EMI in Japan (due to embargo restrictions), then later to Blue Note (once Rubalcaba had moved to the United States).

If a film were to be made of Loueke’s career to date, the pivotal scene would be his audition in 2001 for admission into the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz Performance. As Blanchard, the program’s artistic director, recalls, “We asked Lionel to play ‘Moment’s Notice.’ He started playing rhythmic patterns and vocalizing off the tune’s melody, and we all looked at each other. We were floored.” Hancock and Shorter were also members of the audition jury. “I turned to Wayne, just as he was turning to me,” Hancock says. “We didn’t even have to say it; we just knew: This guy is bad! We’re going to hear more from him.” Soon after, Hancock and Blanchard found themselves competing for Loueke’s touring time.

Rubalcaba’s Avatar in some ways reprises the many facets of his celebrated career to date: the muscular technical displays of his early albums, the inventive electronic haze of projects such as 1998′s Antiguo; the space and economy of recent work with Haden, and the dips into classical Cuban repertoire found on 2005′s Solo. Yet the pianist challenged himself by assembling a brand-new band of New York-based players and settling into the studio after only three weeks on the road. (The group sounds cohesive enough to have been together for three years, rather than weeks.) Meanwhile, Loueke’s Karibu leans mostly on the trio he formed a decade ago, while at Berklee College of Music. Gilfema includes Loueke, Hungarian-born drummer Ferenc Nemeth, and bassist Massimo Biolcati, who grew up in Sweden and Italy. Karibu features Hancock and Shorter on a few tracks. When they both play on “Light and Dark,” listeners can glimpse how much Loueke’s presence has infused the relationship between these two — one of jazz’s longest and strongest in recent years.

Rubalcaba’s new disc contains a direct link to the Blue Note legacy: a meditative version of “Peace,” first recorded by its composer, pianist Horace Silver, on 1959′s Blowin’ the Blues Away. Loueke’s CD bookends 40-plus years of Blue Note jazz: the last time Hancock and Shorter appeared as sidemen for the label was 1967, on Lee Morgan’s The Procrastinator.

Indeed, this legacy inspired both musicians early in life. Rubalcaba assimilated American jazz during the dawn of the Cuban embargo through scarce but treasured recordings. Among the many Blue Note issues were Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, and Art Blakey. Loueke remembers gathering up Blue Note albums as soon as he hit school in the Ivory Coast. “When I was a kid, I was happy just to make a collection of Blue Note. But, a world away, I never imagined I’d be part of the collection one day.”

Larry Blumenfeld is editor-at-large for Jazziz, where this piece originally appeared.

Hancock and Mitchell’s history together began on shaky ground. Not long after Hancock established himself as a leading force in modern jazz — initially through his work in Miles Davis’ quintet, then through his own recordings — Mitchell rose to unparalleled stature as a singer and songwriter, a poet and painter, a Renaissance woman the likes of which popular music had never before known. But Hancock was largely unaware of Mitchell’s artistry back then. “I remember hearing about her,” he says from his Los Angeles studio. “And I heard some of her songs on the radio. But my focus back then was on jazz and classical music. I wasn’t really paying attention to any pop or rock or folk music at the time.”

Hancock was eventually drawn into Mitchell’s orbit by a 1979 call from bassist Jaco Pastorius, who invited the pianist to work on Mingus, the album Mitchell developed with Charles Mingus during the legendary bassist’s final days. Shorter was also involved in that project, and had previously worked on Mitchell’s 1977 album, Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter. Hancock recalls: “Wayne had told me that Joni was willing to go out there, to not worry, to just be creative.” Still, the pianist figured that he and the other jazz musicians in Mitchell’s company would be “restricting themselves to play in a certain way.” Instead, he was pleasantly surprised at how free the musical environment was, and at some inherent qualities in Mitchell’s songs. “It wasn’t jazz, you know, but the DNA of it was there.” During the Mingus sessions, a friendship bloomed between Hancock and Mitchell that would grow richer through the years. Hancock would occasionally perform with Mitchell, sometimes at benefits thrown by the San Francisco-based Bread and Roses organization. He played on another Mitchell album, the 2000 orchestral collection Both Sides Now.

The relationship among these musicians and their spouses grew throughout the 1980s, with much of the socializing taking place at a now-defunct restaurant on Melrose Avenue in West Hollywood called the Nucleus Nuance. “We’d all hang out there,” says Larry Klein, Mitchell’s ex-husband and close musical collaborator, who was Hancock’s partner in arranging and producing the new CD. “And every New Year’s we’d be the band — Herbie, Wayne, Joni, myself, and assorted characters.”

When Verve Records executive Dahlia Ambach-Caplin approached Hancock with the idea of tackling Joni Mitchell tunes, Klein was the natural choice for collaboration. “And the next call,” says Hancock, “went to Wayne.” A devastatingly accomplished core band was assembled: Hancock, Shorter, bassist Dave Holland, guitarist Lionel Loueke, and drummer Vinnie Colaiuta. Guest vocalists were enlisted: Norah Jones, who sings “Court and Spark” with casual ease; Tina Turner, whose worldly wise and proudly funky “Edith and the Kingpin” is among the album’s highpoints; Corinne Bailey Rae, who purrs and croons through “River”; and Luciana Souza, who elegantly mines the meditative core of “Amelia.” The gravelly bass voice of Leonard Cohen speaks “The Jungle Line” to Hancock’s accompaniment and, on “The Tea Leaf Prophecy (Lay Down Your Arms),” Mitchell herself provides a vocal so agile in phrasing and color that it nearly steals the show.

Yet Hancock’s River is hardly a showcase for singers. There are four instrumentals among the 10 tracks, including two songs that were early obsessions for Mitchell: Duke Ellington’s “Solitude,” which she experienced as a child through the Billie Holiday recording her mother favored, and Shorter’s “Nefertiti,” which she listened to again and again on Miles Davis’ 1967 album of the same name. More to the point, the arrangements and playing here are woven so well with the words that they turn the tunes into seamless tone poems.

Time and again, Hancock and Shorter seem to complete a sung phrase. Over and over, the rhythm section adds perfect punctuation. And though this is ostensibly an album of Hancock considering Mitchell’s art, it is as much about the pianist’s relationship with Shorter, whose tenor- and soprano-sax playing turns out to be the most human voice in the cast. Shorter whittles “Court and Spark” into a five-note mantra, tosses out a delicate lullaby-like figure near the end of “River,” and, during an instrumental version of “Both Sides Now,” lands eventually on just breath.

For Hancock, the approach to this recording was both a revelation and a challenge. As Klein explains, “The big overview was that the record should emanate from the words and everything should be subservient to the poetry.”

“I’m just not used to looking at words,” says Hancock. “We just don’t pay attention to them. We’re dazzled by textures and timbres and colors and chords.” Klein was Hancock’s guide to Mitchell’s lyrics. “Her imagery is incredible,” Hancock continues, “and some of it is pretty deep and hard to get into. I’d have to ask Larry, ‘What does she mean by this?’ And for the most part, he knew the connections.”

“It was great watching him discover,” Klein says, “just like it is when you turn someone on to a great book and watch it set off sparks.”

Before each session, Klein would play Mitchell’s original version of a song. He’d pass out the lyrics, and the band would discuss them. “To one degree or another, I’d give my synopsis,” says Klein, “and people would have questions of their own about what this or that meant.”

Hancock was fascinated by the story behind “The Tea Leaf Prophecy,” which foretold Mitchell’s parents’ marriage. Mitchell sang the tune for Hancock’s album just one month after her mother’s death, adding new drama to the lyric. He was blown away by the powerful imagery of “Amelia” — how, for instance, Mitchell conflated the vapor trails from six jet planes with the strings of her guitar. And, according to Klein, when Shorter heard the narrative of “Edith and the Kingpin,” about a small-time pimp and his minions at a club, he lit up with inspiration and said, “‘I’m going to be the guy at the end of the bar, taking this all in.”

There’s a line in “Edith and the Kingpin” when Mitchell’s narrator, describing the club’s “sophomore jazz,” says, “The band sounds like typewriters.” Maybe Klein and Hancock had that in mind at their earliest meetings, as something to avoid, when they decided together another rule of thumb for the recording: less is more. “The most typical thing that people in jazz do is that they reharmonize the hell out of everything with [chord] substitutions, and yank out all of the main pillars of the structure,” Klein explains. “Herbie knew that wasn’t the right approach here. And Joni can’t stand that sort of thing.”

Sure enough, on “Court and Spark,” the familiar four-chord pillar is intact. And there is a marvelous economy to nearly everything on River. Hancock and Shorter don’t so much take solos as offer concise counterpoint to the vocals. On instrumental tunes, they seem to converse.

The one substantially reharmonized treatment is “Both Sides Now,” the first tune that Hancock worked on, and one performed sans vocal. That was the only arrangement that he wrote out. (Klein did most of the others, which were more sketched than composed.) “I had all these chords in my head,” says Hancock, “all these tonalities that the lyric suggested to me.” When he played a fragment of his treatment at a meeting, Klein nodded. The song is about changing perceptions and evolution. With that in mind, Hancock reasoned, the chords could also change.

For Hancock, the recurring musical cycle of “Amelia” presented a particularly vexing challenge. “How do you make musical variety with six or seven verses, where each one has the same shape? Lyrically, Joni did it. Musically, I wasn’t sure how.”

Luciana Souza, who sang the tune, believes Hancock not only met the song’s challenge, but also understood its essence. “I felt myself very calm, trusting that we were all telling that story together, all in the 23-measure cycle of her song,” she says. “I felt like we were fishermen who trust the tide that rises and empties out.”

Souza, who has mined the poems of Pablo Neruda and Elizabeth Bishop for her own repertoire, appreciates River on a deep, extra-musical level. “Herbie’s record translates Mitchell’s music very well to a more abstract context. Even where you do have lyrics and a singer, things are implied and not literal, leaving room for the listener to complete the thoughts. In this way, it is the purest form of poetry.”

When the album was completed, Klein played it for Mitchell, who loved it. “I told her we wanted to make a record that was a conversation about the poetry. She said, ‘That’s what I was trying to do on Mingus.’”

Hancock, who’s known Mitchell for decades and has long recognized the poetic qualities in even her everyday conversation, feels that through this newest project he’s discovered his friend’s art anew. “Now that I’ve had a chance to study these lyrics, to live with them, I have to ask myself: ‘How could I have missed out on all this? Where was I when all this was happening?’”

Larry Blumenfeld is editor-at-large of Jazziz, where this article originally appeared.

Around 1960, Larry Borenstein first began inviting musicians to perform in the art gallery he’d created within a c. 1750 building, once a private home, in the French Quarter. But when Allan Jaffe, fresh out of Wharton Business School, and his wife, Sandra, took over the operation in 1961, the place became a full-time music hall dedicated to a style that was, then as now, threatened with extinction. Mr. Jaffe hired standard-bearing players and paid full union scale (a rarity in those days). He began making recordings and assembled bands that toured under the Preservation Hall name.

Always a strong tourist attraction, the hall has also held special appeal for some locals, occasionally with life-altering effect. In his book, Song for My Fathers: A New Orleans Story in Black and White, Tom Sancton, a New Orleans native and former Time magazine Paris bureau chief, offered this 2005 reflection upon returning to Preservation Hall:

“I placed my hands on the wrought-iron gates and peered into the carriageway. It looked just like it had on that hot summer night when my father first took me there, more than forty years earlier, and opened the door to the most profound experience of my life. . . . I immediately fell in love with the music, the people, and the funky atmosphere — and decided to become a jazz musician myself.” Mr. Sancton, who once studied clarinet at the feet of one of Preservation Hall’s masters, George Lewis, still plays his instrument. Now a visiting professor at Tulane University, he occasionally performs at Preservation Hall (billed as “Tommy”), often sitting in the same chair Mr. Lewis once occupied.

For those who’ve never visited the place, the touring band is the face of Preservation Hall. Yet, good as the group is — little can rival, for instance, the two-beat-to-the-bar swing conjured by drummer Joe Lastie on his stripped-down kit — there’s more to Preservation Hall than just music: There’s a sense of place and purpose, history and context.

All this comes alive through Made in New Orleans, a fascinating new boxed set created by Ben Jaffe, the 36-year-old son of Allan and Sandra, who has run the hall and all its associated activities ever since he graduated in 1993 from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio. Most will purchase Made in New Orleans: The Hurricane Sessions for its 17-track CD of old and new recordings and its companion DVD. But many will end up treasuring the package as much for the accompanying memorabilia: publicity photos and casual snapshots; business cards and invitations; even the first artist contract issued by the hall in 1961 — $13.50 per musician and double for the leader, Punch Miller. Mr. Jaffe created 504 collector’s editions — the number signifying the local area code — each of which contains some original photos and an unreleased seven-inch vinyl recording; he sold them for $150, initially only in New Orleans, through the annual Jazz & Heritage Festival and at the hall. The collector’s edition and a deluxe edition ($70, sans only the original photos and bonus seven-inch disc) are now available nationwide.

Mr. Jaffe plays tuba in the Preservation Hall Band, as did his father. But arriving for an interview at a favorite coffee shop on his bicycle, his unruly tangle of dirty-blond curls swaying in the breeze, he didn’t look much like a traditionalist. “My father was always conscious of the tender tension between the past and present in New Orleans and in this music,” he said. “The name ‘Preservation Hall’ never meant that things should not evolve.”

Indeed, the new CD masterfully blends old and new: Some tracks predate even the hall’s name (via 1959 recordings by street poet, painter and singer Sister Gertrude Morgan), while others introduce both new voices and new repertoire (Clint Maedgen sings a version of Ray Davies’s “Complicated Life,” a song made famous by the British rock band the Kinks). Yet there’s fascinating continuity from, say, the DVD’s gorgeous c. 1960s clip of George Lewis playing “Red Wing” to the current band’s 2006 version of “Last Chance to Dance.” The studio trickery that mixes banjoist Carl Leblanc’s vocal on “Over in the Gloryland,” recorded last year, with a 1976 instrumental version emphasizes this point.

Like Mr. Jaffe, trumpeter John Brunious, who has led the Preservation Hall band since 1996, was born into this tradition. As a boy he watched Paul Barbarin, who didn’t read or write musical notation, hum “Bourbon Street Parade” as his father, also a trumpeter, transcribed; even today, Mr. Barbarin’s song is a staple of the Preservation Hall repertoire. “We all have our own styles,” Mr. Brunious said recently after a performance, “but we strive most of all to play the music as correctly as we can, to keep the music honest and going strong.”

Preservation Hall’s traditions — its very existence — are important keys to recovery in New Orleans. “There aren’t too many places left near Bourbon Street where you can play traditional jazz,” said trombonist Glen David Andrews, whose Lazy Six Band often plays there on Sundays. “And playing this one means that you’re authentic.” The hall has aided rebuilding in more direct ways, too. Shortly after the floods, Mr. Jaffe co-founded a musicians’ relief effort now known as the Renew Our Music Fund, supporting the New Orleans music community with everything from gig subsidies to “community leader” grants. That fund was, in turn, instrumental in creating Sweet Home New Orleans, an umbrella organization helping musicians and other tradition-bearers with a range of services, including relocation and housing assistance.

“It always comes back to what the musicians want and what the music needs,” says Mr. Jaffe, sounding quite a bit like his father, as glimpsed on the new DVD, during a 1961 episode of the “Brinkley News Hour.”

“Jazz here on Bourbon Street is what people seem to think is going to sell drinks,” Allan Jaffe says on camera. “What we’re trying to do here is just present the music the way they want to play it. . . . The people come here to hear just the music, and I think the men realize this. The men play it the way the want to play it, and the people hear it.”

Larry Blumenfeld is editor-at-large for Jazziz and a contributor to the Wall Street Journal, which originally published this article. He is currently working on a book on New Orleans.