I’ve grown in tremendous ways with enhancing my music, my ability to perform on stage and travel all around to spread bounce music. I’ve come so far from being that little black boy growing up in New Orleans to now.
The immediate, highest priority need, in my humble opinion, is that we build quickly the interim structures that can channel water away from population and businesses in the New Orleans area.
And you find as a writer there are certain spots on the planet where you write better than others, and I believe in that. And New Orleans is one of them.
I always wanted to be an actor, but I always loved design, and growing up in New Orleans there was such great style, great architecture. I would decorate my little apartment in New York over and over again, because it only had a couple of rooms. And I did it for friends and family on the side just for fun.
Football has very direct and strong connections to New Orleans. The game of football has served as a positive beacon in our city. It has given our citizens hope in tough, trying times.
Watching the scenes out of New Orleans, if you turn down the sound it could be the Sudan or any Third World country. But it’s not. it’s the United States of America.
I’ve always had a love for music, and it developed as I learned jazz, blues, and gospel. And I performed with jazz singers in New Orleans.
Everywhere I go around the world, we have fans of New Orleans. Sometimes we go places, and people don’t really know who we are, but they know New Orleans, and once we say we are from New Orleans, we have a lot of supporters.
I live in New Orleans, because it’s the strangest city in the United States. It has the highest murder rate in the country, the highest incarceration rate, and often we have to boil our drinking water, but there’s nowhere else remotely like it.
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.
Man, I was scared. I didn’t know what to think. All of a sudden, I got a record climbing the charts, and I’m out in the streets. You know, workin’ on the docks. And the first week, it sold something like 40,000 in New Orleans.
The people of New Orleans have gotten to rock bottom. And the only way out in my mind is for them to really understand it, and then to really choose to get better.
We’re setting up an urban farm for kids on more than 20 acres in New Orleans. We want to make this a world-class educational center for the community.
We all have our own party fantasy that we’ve either lived or wanted to live in New Orleans.
I live in Connecticut, but eventually I’d like to move back to New Orleans. I grew up there; the pace is a bit slower. Plus, I love crawfish and po’boys.
The Meters are, I think, the most influential group in our time to come out of New Orleans, to have changed and introduced us all to a way of playing, and to a groove and a level of feel in playing funk-jazz.
I’ve always wanted to sing and to be an entertainer. After high school, I moved from New Orleans to Los Angeles and started songwriting. But I didn’t really get serious until then.
You can’t vote that water out of the city of New Orleans.
I get a lot of comparisons to Daniel Bryan, and trust me, I am flattered by all of them because we mentioned New Orleans and WrestleMania; I watched it at home and watched Daniel Bryan in the main event of WrestleMania achieve his dreams.
The history of New Orleans was always a fascination to me – such a blend of light and darkness and plague and pleasure and hedonism and fear and death. It’s just a very, very intriguing city. I have this strange love relationship with it.
In New Orleans, bounce music was prevalent. That was all they wanted to hear. It was new and trendy, and it was hot, and it was taking off. Artists were coming out of everywhere. They did some great songs, some really catchy, fun songs. That was just the feel of New Orleans music.
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.
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.
We have been working with Habitat for Humanity and we have built eighty homes, 80% of which are being lived in by New Orleans’ musicians. It is called the Musicians’ Village and at the center is the Ellis Marsalis Center for Music.
My first introduction to New Orleans was from the air, flying high over the city with a view of the land – and water – below.
My whole way of looking at entertainment and audience engagement – and my ability to go from one genre to another – comes from my experience in New Orleans.
I got my start in small dive bars in New Orleans.
I’ve been very proud of a lot of the work I’ve done in New Orleans.
New Orleans just wasn’t anything for me. I didn’t fit in. I just couldn’t get adjusted.
One of the best moments I’ve ever had in New Orleans is seeing Bourbon Street filled on a weekend night not long ago. Just watching the city breathe again.
Creole is New Orleans city food. Communities were created by the people who wanted to stay and not go back to Spain or France.
I was in the orphanage in New Orleans until I was almost a year old. I don’t think I ever got held by my mama, so that was completely and utterly traumatic. I think it was trauma from the first breath, and I think I’ve spent my whole life trying to heal from that trauma. So it shaped my brain.
I’m from New Orleans, which is all about direct engagement out in the street with all the parades and Mardi Gras Indians and jazz funerals. I’m trying to take that and put it into my generation, a group that doesn’t have enough joy and celebration in their lives.
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?
The people who couldn’t get out of New Orleans to escape the storm were predominantly Black.
George W. Bush was good as his word. He visited the Gulf states 17 times; went 13 times to New Orleans. Laura Bush made 24 trips. Bush saw that $126 billion in aid was sent to the Gulf’s residents, as some members of his own party in Congress balked.
When a sports team is doing well in a city that’s going through tough times like New Orleans, like Detroit, it bolsters this real sentiment of ‘we can get through this.’ And when you have that sentiment, it becomes more than feelings: It’s transported into action.
I’m from New Orleans, Louisiana. It’s not a black-and-white type of thing down there. It’s a very cultural place. Everybody has the same accent. It’s not like if you’re white we can’t hang with you or anything like that. So it’s easy for us to call each other out on our things.
People don’t play music in New Orleans for the reasons they do in Nashville or L.A. – to become stars or to get rich – they play because they’ve got to. It’s in the streets, in their family, in their blood.
New Orleans, more than many places I know, actually tangibly lives its culture. It’s not just a residual of life; it’s a part of life. Music is at every major milestone of our life: birth, marriage, death. It’s our culture.
Well, my dad was the district attorney of New Orleans for about 30 years.
From the food to the Mardi Gras Indians to the brass bands and the second liners parading through the street, Jazz Fest presents New Orleans in one place.
I really wanted to give people that tool, that thing, that answer, ‘Well, what are you going to do after Katrina? How does New Orleans come back?’ And I’m thinking to myself, New Orleans is back. We’re the definition of ‘back.’ We’re the definition of ‘rebirth,’ of ‘renaissance.’
Four months after we finished shooting, I’d been in New Orleans shooting another movie and my agent and I were having a bite to eat – actually in London – and he’s sitting there and goes, ‘Wow, I just can’t believe how ripped you are.’
I’m originally from New Orleans, Louisiana, and I just feel like it’s something that always been inside of me.
New Orleans is home. That’s where the heart is.
There was this rapper from New Orleans, Mystikal, who when I hear his music, I hear myself. Whenever I wanna get hyped, I put on Mystikal.
I have held the following jobs: office temp, ticket seller in movie theatre, cook in restaurant, nanny, and phone installer at the Super Bowl in New Orleans.
I think the rebuilding of the city has to start with the spirit first. So the music, the vibe, the connection spiritually with the artists. Everybody out here is the main key. A lot of people are still in a lot of tough situations. My heart still goes out to the people of New Orleans.
New Orleans jazz is a complex and embracing art form that began about the same time as the blues and encompassed many of its excellences.
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.
