The Batiste family is a large musical family in Louisiana, out in New Orleans. People go to New Orleans, and if they go to any club, four days out of the week I guarantee you that you will find a Batiste playing in the ensemble.
You know, for 300 years it’s been kind of the same. There are restaurants in New Orleans that the menu hasn’t changed in 125 years, so how is one going to change or evolve the food?
I love New Orleans physically. I love the trees and the balmy air and the beautiful days. I have a beautiful house here.
I started travelling doing shows everywhere to make people feel like a sense of New Orleans wherever they may be.
I spent so many summers and New Years and fun times in New Orleans. It was always a place where I felt I could go and actually let go and enjoy the spirit of something.
I had just gotten a job on ‘Preacher’ on AMC and was in New Orleans starting work on that. My agent called and said ‘Are you sitting down?’ and I said ‘No’ and he said ‘Scott Rudin wants you to do ‘Hello, Dolly!’ and all I could say was ‘Oh my God, I’ll have to call you back.’
You’ve got different people that have different views of New Orleans. When you say ‘New Orleans,’ you have people who just think of the Neville Brothers. You’ve got people that think of Louis Armstrong. You say ‘New Orleans,’ and you’ve got people that think of Lil’ Wayne.
We come from New Orleans, so everything is emotional – for, once the music takes over, and we start blowing, we go into a different zone that takes over our whole body.
My family is from New Orleans. My grandma is French. Everybody else is from Mississippi – Creole people.
My mother worked for a white family that lived in one of the mansions on the beach. The husband in the family was a lawyer; he worked for a firm in New Orleans.
I really got back to my New Orleans roots – my grandfather played with Fats Domino. We had to leave after Katrina, but I feel like, spiritually, I’m back there.
I love New Orleans. I love jazz. I grew up practicing jazz piano, and that’s just been such a cool genre to me. There’s a lot of talent there.
I think New Orleans is such a beautiful city. It looks like a fairytale when you walk through the French Quarter or the Garden District. There is such a lush sense of color, style, architecture – and the people themselves.
New Orleans is my kind of city. I think there’s a lot going on, but it’s also very calm. It’s a place where I can actually drive a car without being stuck in traffic for for 40, 50 minutes. It’s my kind of city. A lot going on but still calm.
To be playing in my first Super Bowl in New Orleans, it’s special.
There’s a great deal of disturbance in this country and how black feel about what happened in Katrina, and, you know, many of the comics, many of performers are in Las Vegas and New Orleans trying to raise money for what happened there.
I think The Meters are like The Beatles to us in New Orleans, you know.
I think, you know, people think of the city of New Orleans as a parochial place where it’s a lot of folks who are from there and a lot of big families, a lot of musical families, a lot of history, a lot of tradition, but I like to think of New Orleans as an idea.
We’re not really trying to do anything besides represent where we come from, and that’s New Orleans.
I really did have this powerful sense, when I was in New Orleans after the storm, of watching all these profiteers descend on Baton Rouge to lobby to get rid of the housing projects and privatise the school system – I thought I was in some science-fiction experiment.
I did grow up in New Orleans. I grew up right on the lake, right across the levee.
In the early 1980s, I burned my Social Security card at the New Orleans Investment Conference in protest of the state pension system.
Beale Street is a very famous street in the history of America. You know, American music in particular. From the blues to jazz, it’s a connecting city from New Orleans that goes all the way up to Buffalo through New York.
New Orleans people love their weekends.
Everything changed after Katrina. It’s a new New Orleans now and I think it’s better. It was a wake-up call and it rebuilt and cleaned up the city. It all happened for a reason. I’m now grateful for Katrina.
New Orleans is like the bad-kid island in ‘Pinocchio.’
New Orleans just wasn’t anything for me. I didn’t fit in. I just couldn’t get adjusted.
When I was growing up, I did not exercise at all. I was raised in the French Quarter in New Orleans. If I saw someone running, I would call the police because I thought they stole something on Royal Street.
New Orleans has to learn to live with water rather than in fear of water, and we need a master plan that shows us how to do this. It’s so critical that we send a signal to everyone in the country that we’re serious about rebuilding New Orleans.
New Orleans just embraces people who love music.
I can eat a lot of pizza. And I can cook. I’m from New Orleans, so it’s just in my blood.
You can’t vote that water out of the city of New Orleans.
I chose New Orleans because New Orleans chose me. This city gave me my dad and my love of life.
New Orleans reminds me of Romania because New Orleans is very corrupt politically.
I grew up within New Orleans; my greatest concern is rising water. But I think life is a process of moving items from the ‘scared of’ to the ‘not scared of’ list.
But I’m not an Atlanta Falcons fan. Nobody is. Sure, the team has its followers, its adherents, in Atlanta. But they don’t follow the team the way fans from other teams follow their teams – the way, say, fans of the New Orleans Saints follow the Saints.
What’s weird is the Hot Boys and the whole New Orleans Cash Money thing had a really big impact on the Bay when that was popping off. I don’t all the way understand it. I mean, I know that they were big everywhere and had a lot of commercial success in the mid to late ’90s, but they were really, really felt in the Bay Area.
I’m obsessed with how people talk! Accents, dialects… So whenever I go someplace where an accent is extremely distinct – Minneapolis, New Orleans, Jamaica, Vancouver – I always find myself trying to pick up the subtleties of their patterns.
After the destruction of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the shutdown of much of New York City by Sandy in 2012, and now the devastation wrought on Texas by Harvey, the U.S. can and should do better.
My family’s business was actually an amusement park in New Orleans. My grandfather had started that, and my grandmother was a dance maven in New Orleans. It was just the theatricality and the Mardi Gras and the pageantry that I fell in love with at an early age.
New Orleans may well have been the most liberal Deep South city in 1954 because of its large Creole population, the influence of the French, and its cosmopolitan atmosphere.
I’m really getting to appreciate traditional jazz now – the New Orleans stuff – a lot more than I did before.
There’s no such thing as ‘sissy bounce.’ We don’t separate it here in New Orleans at all. It’s just bounce music. Just because I’m a gay artist, they don’t have to put it in a category or label it.
We owe it to the flood victims of New Orleans to give them truthful answers as to why this event took place and to assure our citizens that tragedies like this will never happen again.
We have a very transient population. We have a lot of people that live here and work or play in New Orleans.
I’ve been all over the world. I love New York, I love Paris, San Francisco, so many places. But there’s no place like New Orleans. It’s got the best food. It’s got the best music. It’s got the best people. It’s got the most fun stuff to do.
Chris Paul is one of the brightest stars in the National Basketball Association, a must-see player with the New Orleans Hornets whose deft ball skills and eye-popping speed have attracted admirers all over the world.
I suppose when I was a kid, and I went to movies, and later went to some plays on my own when I got a little older, in New Orleans, where I was living then, I zeroed in on the actor.
The New Orleans I knew ain’t no more.
It’s hard to believe President George Bush gave a speech in New Orleans about disaster recovery and failed to mention the word ‘farm’ or the word ‘rural.’
New Orleans is great for a lot of the old-school charm and character.
And if citizens of New Orleans who are really contemplating coming back heard that we’re really intent upon making the place secure again – regardless of whether the levees held or not – then I think a rebuilding process would really take shape.
I just want to spearhead and lead a new style of New Orleans music.
I’ve known Emeril for more than 20 years from when I featured him on ‘Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous’ from his days at Commander’s Palace in New Orleans and from when I helped start the Food Network where he subsequently hosted an amazing 2,000-plus shows.
I was on a strict diet to stay in shape for ‘Jack Reacher,’ but each day on set in New Orleans, catering dropped off delicious food at my trailer.
I come from a long line of strong and confident women out of New Orleans. My grandmother and great-grandmother were women who ran their homes and were leaders in their communities. I was never taught that there was anything that I couldn’t do, and I believed that.
