If Ever I Cease to Love (Part I)

I don't know quite what it is or how it happened, the love affair that is. We went to New Orleans in 1989 during April before Jazzfest and it rained most of the week. New Orleans won us over from the start. People talked to us standing in line at restaurants, on the street, in clubs. We got into a great conversation about politics at a bar with a hard-drinking reporter from the Times-Picayune. Everything we experienced was steeped in sweet melancholy and beauty. The food and coffee threw us into an unknown state of longing for more. With the exception of Sicily, the coffee in New Orleans was the best we had ever had. The Spirit of New Orleans is what it is and luckily we felt that. A few years later, we went to Guadeloupe in the Lesser Antilles. This was our first visit to the Caribbean. Let me tell you if you haven't been, they're not lesser by a long shot. We stayed in Gosier, a tourist haven outside of Pointe-a-Pitre, the capital. The energy in the capital amidst the humid torpor was a surprise. You have to get there in the a.m. or else... The food was hot, the sand was hot, the music was hot, the women were hot and the gays were hot. The latest fashion from Paris was on the street. The wrought iron balconies reminded me of New Orleans. We rode a bus from Gosier into Pointe-a-Pitre and were blown out by the sounds. The sound quality in the buses in Guadeloupe was much better than many home audio systems in the USA that I'd heard. They were probably the best dollars we spent. It was on the buses that I first heard and felt cadence, the precursor of zouk. One day we were on a bus that happened to be playing a venerable old Typical Combo track, "Machine". We looked at the rest of the bus. They were singing and swaying like the palms to a timeless cadence. We were struck by the Antillean lightening and were zoukified on the spot. That was the beginning of a love affair for the music of the French Antilles. I was ravenous. When I got back to  the USA, I wanted everything zouk and Haitian. But, there were lean pickins' in the record bins in the early 90's. There were no Internets then for me to search. When we went to NYC I went to Brooklyn and sought out the Haitian record stores. I picked up Beat magazine and found that Gene Scaramuzzo from Covington, LA (he and his family evacuated and are now back repairing) wrote a colume called "The Other Caribbean" (Brian Dring now authors that excellent feature spot). After the initial electronics of zouk, I realized that I was blind to the other traditional musical styles coming out of Guadeloupe and Martinique. It was another universe of rhythms and sweet melodies. It was only much later that I realized that this was one of the many rich streams that flowed into the great port of New Orleans. The gumbo is very rich with many facets and nuances. The wealth of influences still floors me today. It's a confluence of a myriad cultural diamonds that I find it overwhelming. Your native son? The wealth of culture that this city has seen and accepted and made its own is astounding. The acceptance is the key. New Orleans rejected nothing into her arms. She is a(the) mother of the USA. Why can't people see this simple truth? It's there to be seen by all. I'll try to post more on this later. Long live the people of New Orleans.