NICK DERISO: The story goes: Someone asked Fats Waller what jazz is. His reply? “If you don’t know, don’t mess with it.” Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown messed with it on “Just Got Lucky,” and with fine results. In fact, it seemed his string-bending solos found themselves most at home in theRead More

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS — Musicians in white shirts and black pants led a hearse carrying the body of clarinetist Alvin Batiste through the streets of New Orleans on Saturday, and hundreds of mourners attached themselves to the jazz funeral honoring one of the city’s most revered musicians. In the morning,Read More

NICK DERISO: This release came in the wake of an ambitious year that saw Connick issue both a big-band swing record and a three-piece jumping jazz record without vocals. Not only do I not have to tell you which one sold, I don’t have to tell you which style HarryRead More

In anybody else’s hands, this new Mavis Staples album would have been a museum piece, interesting but ultimately dust-covered and remote. Not that “We’ll Never Turn Back” (to be issued on Tuesday by Anti- records) doesn’t have plenty of right things to say, and certainly plenty of righteous things, inRead More

The lead-off track from Anders Osbourne’s Grammy-nominated ‘Living Room’ is a rootsy jam and a helluva good time.

NICK DERISO: Guitarist Buddy Guy, a Baton Rouge-area native, has a presence hardly in need of defining. From bar-walking solos (thanks to that old 150-foot amp chord), to his clean, percussive style on a polka-dot guitar, Guy has since the 1960s cut a wide swath, image-wise. Yet “Southern Blues” illuminatesRead More

Cowboy Mouth — announced this week as one of the many featured bands at the 2007 Jazz and Heritage Festival in New Orleans — emerged in the early 1990s as a rugged, but distinctly popular rock alternative to the typical fiddle-and-rubboard fare associated with Louisiana music. Not that its NewRead More

NICK DERISO: On this, their second release, the Bluerunners were not so much tinkering with their tough southern-Louisiana sound, as they were utterly revamping it. “Chateau” (on the terrific old Monkey Hill label) was to traditional Cajun what punk music was to rock — a whole new version, but bornRead More

NICK DERISO: As Mardi Gras dawns in a reborn New Orleans, we provide your cool-rocking road map to some recommended local hot spots. Now, most will say Preservation Hall, next to Pat O’s. But that’s overrated, and too crowded for our tastes. A sampling from elsewhere — though the listRead More

by Pico We were, of course, a little saddened that the historic season of Louisiana’s NFL team, the New Orleans Saints, came crashing to an ugly end last Sunday. With apologies to U2 and Green Day, the song most associated with this team remains “When The Saints Go Marching In”.Read More