Disaster: New Orleans: The City of Jazz bamboozles a rebuild, but jazz itself was hurt, more than a below-water urban insanity

There's a lot of bamboozling going on right now about rebuilding the City of New Orleans. Not a good idea. But let's parse what we mean by "City" in this instance, and for starters let's distinguish 1.) the City, 2.) the Port, and 3.) the Cultural Capital of Jazz as a now world-artform.

My idea is that the City not be rebulit. On the other hand, the Port of New Orleans should be reconstructed and enlarged as the down-Mississippi world-port of national and international trade. Beyond that, the Old City which went relatively unscathed because it sits on hi-ground, and the transMississippi zone of Algeria both should also be restored - perhaps in conjunction with one another, the complex being explicitly re-designed as a tourism mecca around Jazz, its musical parents, its sibs, and its cousins (leave rap out, as it has other civic matrices and points of origination). And, when I say "jazz," I definitely do not have songs and lyrics in mind, but instruments and instrumentalists, and the styles the instrumentalists invent, proliferate, and perpetuate.



Let's support the Port and all that Jazz!

If you want to donate to relief for jazz muscians in New Orleans, and to do so thru the fund for that purpose set up by Preservation Hall in the Old City, you can do so at the Hall's relief website. Thanks to Jason Kottke for the Hat Tip! - Owlb

My earlier comment on New Orleans, Katrina, the response, and rapper Kanye West has been rewritten a bit.