Our New Orleans: Benefit Album for the Gulf Coast

Nonesuch Records is releasing a benefit album of newly recorded songs featuring artists from the New Orleans music community – across a wide variety of styles – to document the depth, richness and profound musicality of that unique city. Funds from the sale of the record, titled Our New Orleans, will be donated to Habitat For Humanity to aid those affected by the recent Hurricane Katrina disaster. A number of New Orleans’ best known musicians have been asked to record songs that are integral to their lives and that express their feelings about the city and the recent events there. Sessions began in New York on September 20, with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band and the Wild Magnolias recording at Clinton Studios. Later the same day and on September 21, Allen Toussaint, Irma Thomas and the Dirty Dozen Brass Band recorded at New York’s Avatar Studios. Further sessions in October included Dr. John, Buckwheat Zydeco, and Randy Newman, among others. Nonesuch’s parent company – Warner Bros. Records – is donating all of the production costs for this record, as part of the Warner Music Group’s larger efforts on behalf of the hurricane victims. Many others involved in the project are also generously donating their time and services.

Hurricane Katrina may have devastated New Orleans and surrounding Gulf communities in 2005, but it was also a forceful reminder of the Crescent City's world renowned status as the epicenter of much American musical heritage. This benefit album (all net proceeds will be donated to the local relief efforts of Habitat for Humanity, with a portion specifically set aside to provide housing for local musicians left homeless by the disaster) picks up that latter thread, a sometimes bittersweet reminder of how deepy ingrained, yet all-too-fragile, that cultural legacy really is. Allen Toussaint's succulent reworking of his "Yes We Can Can" sets a rhythmic, optimistic tone that parallels his city's own historical resilience, while Dr. John turns in a bluesy, laid-back "World I Never Made" that's a sharp contrast to the flashes of anger he showed on Tab Benoit's earlier benefit collection, Voice of the Wetlands. Irma Thomas gives a swampy, timely edge to Bessie Smith's "Back Water Blues" while others pay tribute to the region's history of gospel (Davell Crawford, Eddie Bo), indigenous cajun folk (Buckwheat Zydeco, Beausolei, Carol Fran) and legacy as the Birthplace of Jazz (vibrantly disparate contributions from Dr. Michael White, Dirty Dozen Brass Band and the venerable Preservation Hall Jazz Band). The Wild Magnolias' medley "Brother John Is Gone/Herc-Jolly-John" is a joyous, African-rooted gumbo of musical possibilities, while Donald Harrison's sax work with The Wardell Querzergue's Orchestra's on "What a Wonderful World" is a fine preamble for Toussaint's elegiac solo piano rendition of "Tipitina and Me." Randy Newman's closer, a melancholic new version of Good Old Boys' "Louisiana 1927," is a tribute to his own N.O. roots whose refrain--"Louisiana, they're trying to wash us away"--is also a forceful, tragic reminder that history does indeed repeat. --Jerry McCulley