⚜️All Roads Lead to New Orleans⚜️
Everything is connected—to Italy and beyond
I’m glad I went around the world before I reached New Orleans.
After my recent—and first-ever!—rendezvous in the Big Easy, I’m convinced one needs to build foundational knowledge about the world before she can make sense of New Orleans. And even then, it’s hard to be sure if you’ve visited it at all. Did I dream it?
I had to travel around the world to learn about amor in Roma and I had to do some living before I could understand both the pleasures and pains of love, necessary homework before New Orleans hits you up with a pop quiz.
Of course, if you go to New Orleans, you should know and love music. Otherwise, what’s the point?
The Birthplace of Jazz, New Orleans was also America’s First City of Opera, where works by Verdi, Rossini, and Bellini had their American premieres. Other genres to spring from New Orleans's deep well of musicality include gospel, blues, and (my favorite) bounce. “Wait…I’ve heard that before.” In New Orleans, you can hear the original music and its samples reverb off one another in real-time.
The unmistakeable string intro on Juvenile’s “Back That Azz Up” (aka “Back That Thang Up” if you’re a prude), utilizes the plucking technique known as pizzicato, which was invented by Italian composer Claudio Monteverdi in 1624. Born in 1567, Monteverdi is also known as the world’s first major opera composer. If you listen carefully to his “Madrigals, Book 8: Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda,” you’ll be able to hear both the lively operatic flourishes that influenced Mozart’s “Die Zauberflöte” (the first opera I ever saw), as well as the pizzicato of Juvenile’s BTAU.
Meanwhile, Niccolo Paganini developed the left-hand pizzicato style. When I lived in Italy, I lived off of Piazza Verdi, a neighborhood in Roma Nord where all the streets were named after composers. I lived between Via Paganini and Via Rossini on Via Guido d’Arezzo, a street named after the Italian composer credited with standardizing musical notation. I would catch the bus to work around the corner from Via Claudio Monteverdi.
“I would rather be moderately praised for the new style than greatly praised for the ordinary.” —Claudio Monteverdi
The music-loving people of New Orleans—both the “cultured” Europeans who brought classical music across the sea, to the enslaved and native populations who took to the streets with drums, voice, and other instruments on holy days when the French colonial set of laws known as the Code Noir granted them a day of rest—transformed the soundscape of the universe by tapping into personal longing and human spontaneity while mastering their musical craft. Paganini, the violin virtuoso known for his complicated, frenetic, and largely improvised playing style, did a similar thing in Italy. Perhaps, you could consider it an early form of indigenous Italian jazz?
According to scholar Maiko Kawabata at the Royal College of Music in London, that is kind of the case:
“The note-perfect performance of Paganini’s music – a particular ideal of virtuosity promoted at many competitions and conservatories – is a modern notion, one that Paganini himself would have hardly recognised. Among other reasons for this, he would have been astonished at the idea of performing without improvising at all; this was completely alien to his thinking. He called it playing ‘in the Italian manner’ or ‘preluding’…
“Paganini’s approach was similar to how jazz musicians perform when they play standards and improvise solos on written chord changes…
“Being the 'demonic' virtuoso was key to Paganini’s identity - as I argued in my book of 2013. I put the word demonic in scare quotes because it was far from clear what this word really meant: it seemed to have different meanings and connotations for different people at different times. For many, it signaled the presence of a force beyond the ordinary - supernatural, even paranormal - to take violin technique beyond known human limits. The speed, the range, and the agility of both his hands and the communicative power of his performances had to be seen to be believed. For others, it signaled his wizard-like ability to mesmerise audiences and hold them captive. Part of this was his cadaverous appearance – the original Goth musician, long before Alice Cooper and Marilyn Manson popularised the look (there is no evidence Paganini ever Maiko Kawabata 3 wore makeup). For yet others, it signaled his masculinity, blending taboo metaphors of violin playing as a form of sexual domination with his reputation as a libertine.”
I’ve always been fascinated by Paganini and the saying “Paganini non ripete” (Paganini doesn’t repeat, i.e., he improvises—no performance is the same). I am also a person who likes to meander without a schedule while listening to music. So, it’s not surprising that I found myself drawn to New Orleans, its jazz clubs, and its ability to improvise and go with the flow.
“Gypsy Jazz,” also known as Jazz Manouche, originated in 1930s within the Romani community of Paris. Django Reinhardt being the best-known guitarist of the subgenre. And where did Django like to get his guitars? That’s right, baby—from Italy. Reinhardt preferred the Selmer-Maccaferri, which was the first guitar to have a cutaway and a steel-reinforced neck. From 1932 to 1933, the Selmer company manufactured a guitar designed by Italian master luthier Mario Maccaferri, who studied under Luigi Mozzani, a guitar maker whose 6-string instrument was a favorite of Andreas Segovia. 2024 marks the 155th year since the birth of Mozzani; he died on August 12, 1943.
“There was an ancient tradition, now in disuse, in Italian violin making of incorporating some of the architectural motifs of their region into their instruments in order to indicate the provenance of the maker and in some way the history of the instrument. In Baroque guitars, for example, the builders inserted elements of the stained glass window of the church of their own city in the soundhole. In the curl of the Cremona violins it is said that the curls of the facade of the city’s cathedral are referenced.
“I have always suspected that Maccaferri’s guitars were at least partially inspired by this tradition. I studied the architecture of Ferrara for years looking for design features that may have served as inspiration. One day, after many years with no success, I was walking absentmindedly in front of the Verginese Castle, one km from my house, and I turned around and it was all there! The building which most resembled the aesthetics of Maccaferri’s guitars had been sitting under my nose the whole time and I had never noticed it.” —The Birth Of The Maccaferri Guitar In Its Historical, Geographical, and Cultural Context
“Si tu vous ma mere,” performed by Sidney Bechet. Woody Allen chose this song for the opening of “Midnight in Paris,” a film that is set between modern-day Paris and Paris in the Jazz Age. This is one of my favorite films and is, in fact, the film I watched—twice—on the plane when I moved from Italy to Sri Lanka.
Allan Stewart Konigsberg, who chose his stage name after his idol, the clarinetist Woody Herman, chose Bechet’s sweet clarinet to set the tone for the beautiful film to come. Allen’s other famous jazz film, Sweet and Lowdown, which is set around the mythology of Romani-Belgian guitarist Django Reinhardt introduced me to the sounds of Jazz Manouche (and the awesome name Django). That film came out in theaters on September 3, 1999, five days before I flew off to live in Rome for the first time. By the way, the plot of Sweet and Lowdown is loosely based on Fellini’s La Strada.
Hold Tight, Hold Tight (Want Some Seafood Mama) by Sidney Bechet in 1938 is known for its suggestive lyrics.
My growing interest in New Orleans began last year when my DNA results were updated to include DNA from Sardinia(!)—the very last place I visited on my own for pleasure. This trip to NO was with my sisters and my mom for her belated 75th celebration, but it afforded me a certain freedom to roam. I was the only one who had never been before, so I’m sure it was fun to observe me from afar as I met one friendly stranger after another, joking with them and learning their stories.
I can be extroverted around the right people and in the right (and wrong :-) ) places. In New Orleans, as in Rome, I was in love with nearly everyone and everything and they were in love with me, too. Or, at least, it felt that way. I felt super relaxed, curious, grateful, observant, joyful, and imbued with an angelic glow, the result of smiling a lot. A lot.
I’m sure you are thinking, “Oh sure, that’s the alcohol talking.” And, well, that certainly lubricated many moments. It couldn’t have just been the alcohol—I never felt sick or had a headache even though I was sipping on this or that throughout the day. I was also the first one up and the last one to bed. Ok sure, I was the youngest of the group. But, I bet most of New Orleans runs on the placebo effect. There’s no way any of those slushies had the amount of alcohol they claimed they did.
“New Orleans is generally 1–2 feet below sea level, or 0.3–0.6 meters,” explains this CNN report. “However, a 2003 study by the US Geological Survey found that the area around New Orleans is 1.5–3 meters (4.92–9.84 feet) below sea level. The study also found that the ground is sinking at a rate of 1 centimeter per year.”
Ironically, there was something about NOLA that made me feel like I was on a higher plane, kind of like in that one Looney Toons cartoon scene where Daffy Duck sleepwalks from steel beam to steel beam. But I had no fear of falling or failing. It felt dreamy and right.
Before leaving, a friend asked what I planned to do in New Orleans. “Oh, we’re just going to eat a lot and follow the sounds of music,” I said. And so we did.
IMDB says the soundtrack of “Skyscraper Caper” features this song by New Orleans native Fats Domino. The original version of this song was recorded by Guy Lombardo, the Italian-Canadian who ,.lived in Freeport, Long Island, when he was the band leader at the Jones Beach amphitheater.
Is it obvious that I am inammorata with New Orleans? Maybe it’s just a temporary affliction—I know that the thing with which I’m smitten is the touristic veneer of a lifestyle. And yet, even though I know that New Orleans is far from perfect (and that I’ve only begun to scratch the surface of this surreal ville), it felt to this first-timer like a temporary portal to heaven on earth.
Rome has always felt like that, too. But, in Rome, the heavenly glimpse is more often of the nobility, i.e., the people who were able to write erase history. The portal to the celestial plane above which New Orleans levitates is the cooks’ lounge after-hours or a block party.
The Italian cities that feel most like New Orleans in temperament are Naples and Palermo. New Orleans reminds me of Napoli because both cities have so-called “Swords of Damocles” dangling over them in the form of natural disasters from lava and (broken) levee, fire and flood.
Then there’s Palermo. New Orleans is second only to New York City when it comes to its population of Sicilian-Americans.
Starting in 1884 and continuing through to 1924, an estimated 290,000 Italian immigrants -- a great deal of them from Sicily -- arrived in New Orleans, fleeing economic and political turmoil. In short order, their indelible influence would be felt on the city. With the French Quarter no longer a fashionable address, many of the city's more well-heeled residents moved Uptown, leaving the city's newcomers to set up shop there and in surrounding neighborhoods. In fact, they did so literally: So many Italian-owned mom-and-pop corner groceries dotted the French Quarter, and so many Italian farmers sold their wares in the French Market, that the Quarter eventually became unofficially known as "Little Palermo," after the Sicilian capital.
—The Sicilian Surge: When the French Quarter became 'Little Palermo'
Roma, NOLA—whoa, it’s crazy, but you add a “g” in between and you’ve got Romagnola. Romagnola(o) is a typical surname of someone from the Romagna, the southern part of Emilia-Romagna that includes Ferrara and Cento, the areas where Maccaferri and his mentor Luigi Mozzani perfected their instruments. Romagna (the “land of the Romans”) is the countryside outside of Bologna, the very city I discussed with my friendly seatmate on the way to New Orleans.
The WWII historian and his wife were in town to go to the "Women of World War II” talk and exhibit at the massive World War II Museum, New Orleans’s number one attraction. Charles had never been to Italy, which surprised me. So, I recommended several places for him to visit—Anzio and the WWII areas south of Rome; Orvieto for its peacefulness and culture; and Bologna for its ancient academic pedigree. At the time, I wasn’t even thinking about it, but both Orvieto and its region of Umbria and Bologna are known for their cultivation of jazz in Europe.
I do hope he and his lovely wife, who married the year I was born, can take that trip.
“...inside of us, we're just one person out of seven billion people, and how can we matter? And we think about this as like a container relationship, where all the goodness comes from the outside to the inside, and there's nothing really special about us.
But the Palette of Being says the opposite. It says that the way that we are in our lives, the way that we affect our friends and our family, begin to change the way that they are able to paint in the future, begins to change the way that communities then affect society, the way that society could then affect its relationship to the biosphere, and the way that the biosphere could then affect the physical planet and the universe itself.
And if it's a possible thing for cyanobacteria to completely transform the physical environment of our planet, it is absolutely a possible thing for us to do the same thing.
And it leads to a really important question for the way that we're going to do that, the manner in which we're going to do that. Because we've been given this amazing gift of consciousness. And because of this gift, we have the ability to deeply understand our connectedness, in the way we haven't seen other animals having the opportunity to do so. And because we can deeply understand our connectedness, we're the ones that have the decision on how we're going to go use that knowledge, how we're going to go use it to build our societies and to shape our lives.
I think the reason that all the spiritual traditions have got this concept of "we are all connected inside of it" is because the societies that actually deeply adopt this idea are the ones that over time deepen their level of consideration, deepen their level of expression, deepen their level of understanding for each other. This is the reason that this idea pops up over and over at the core of spiritual traditions.
And I hope through this talk you see that the reason that it appears at the core of science is it's actually something that is just literally true of the physical universe at every single level of organization and every single manifestation of matter, energy, and life.
So I'd like us all to come together with this knowledge and understand this truth about how the universe is, that because our hearts, our breath, and our mind are connected in this way, we need to challenge ourselves to understand what it means to live from this truth.
Top Lesson Learned in New Orleans
In case you can’t tell, I am still sipping on the cocktail that is New Orleans even though I’m down to the ice. I need another round of NOLA. And soon.
I’m not sure when, but I am certain of my return thanks to an intensely magical moment:
Very early in our trip, as we were walking around the French Quarter, a Buddhist monk offered me a bracelet. I know the deal—I’ve been to Thailand, I’ve lived in Sri Lanka—I know the monks subsist on charity and I had not gotten a bracelet from one in a while.
So he put two beaded bracelets on my wrist and asked for $40. “You know what? I’ll give you $20,” I said. My mom was shocked.
“Mom, you know how I’m always Even Steven? I’m getting a good vibe from this place already. If I’m meant to be here, I’ll get that $20 back. Just watch.”
Walking home from The Maison on the last night, guess what I found…?! More than $20. Just lying there. And not a soul was around to claim it. When I remembered what I had said two days before, I started to cry. Is it really that easy? All I have to say is what I want, believe it will happen, then it will come true? Are New Orleans and I on the same frequency—is that why good things were happening to me? Is that why I temporarily felt like part of the city’s force field?
We all have to come from somewhere. I was born in rural Alabama and I’ve spent my whole life getting as far away from the “uncultured” South as I could. But no one ever told me about New Orleans. Or they didn’t tell me about the cool parts. I never thought to go to New Orleans because I assumed it was a bunch of young white kids partying, that it had been overtaken by the commercial schlock that makes parts of New York City and nearly all parts of everywhere else in this great yet godforsaken country so bland these days.
And, though I have always adored all kinds of music—especially the kind that makes me want to get low—I didn’t realize there was a place I could go and just dance in the street. Yeah yeah, Mardi Gras and all that—I’m not a fan of big crowds nor was I raised Catholic, so Mardi Gras—the biggest and most famous Pre-Lenten Carnival in the world outside of Venice—didn’t hold much appeal to me.
Learning that New Orleans was much more than Bourbon Street was a pleasant surprise. I did not expect to find authenticity in New Orleans. History bubbles up from the gutters of the French Quarter and along its best-known thoroughfare, you can’t help but pay attention. What is Bourbon Street but the Decumanus of the French Quarter? Walking up and down Bourbon Street, at whatever pace you want and without care or judgment, is a Southern passeggiata.
Even more pleasant was learning that Bourbon Street is more than it seems. Come to think of it, I don’t remember seeing any fast-food chains or a glut of pharmacies or banks taking up every corner. It was just club after club of live music, some better than others and some featuring the most amazing sounds you’ve ever heard in the most intimate venues. I am so very smitten and I want to go back. The sooner the better.
I learned a valuable lesson while in New Orleans—if you want others to give you money, or anything, you have to ask for it. When you get clear about what you want, then it’s easier for the universe to give it to you.
So here goes—I want 100 new subscribers!
One hundred new subscribers could help fund another (and another?) research trip to New Orleans. I want to learn more about the Sardinian connection to New Orleans and how my distant roots were possibly watered in the bayou. Or not. I want to follow in the footsteps of Lafcadio Hearn, the prolific Greek-Irish journalist who chronicled New Orleans in more than 2,000 stories before reinventing himself in Japan.
I also want to open up a technicolor jungle dream hotel in New Orleans. What do you think? Would you stay at my salon? Because of family commitments, I can’t stray too far from the USA. But New Orleans isn’t very far at all.
Maybe I could work remotely from there a few times a year? But I would need to work. Even if I got every one of you to buy a yearly subscription via Substack, I wouldn’t be able to quit my day job. Unless!—Unless I find a wealthy patron or several who could fund my expedition into southern self-discovery. Could that be you?
Back That Cash Up
Folks, you have been a great audience! If you’ve appreciated this post and want to see more, why not throw in a few bucks or five? You can become a paying subscriber of this newsletter by using the button below. Or, if you don’t want to give money to Substack, I also take Venmo and Paypal (but not Cash App, even though that would have worked better for the heading…)
I will also entertain offers of free places to stay, in New Orleans or Italy. But in a hotel, not at your house. This ain’t that kind of party lol.
Also, would you like an encore? I had to cut this post short because I wrote past Substack’s limit. The next post, which will look at Italian art and its influence on New Orleans is already halfway written and I’m burning to write more. Writing is my jazz and I just keep riffing and riffing and riffing. Thank god for New Orleans and Italy for giving me an endless and varied soundtrack.
I had no idea what way I was going to take this letter. I just kept finding more and more dots to connect. This whole writing exercise has been a trip. Everything really is connected, including you and I. And, I hope we stay that way.
Thank you for reading this long post about New Orleans, even though you signed up for a newsletter about Italy. I can’t wait to tell you more.
But right now, let me let you go. I love you.
-Melanie
Wow-- that's amazing stuff about Paganini. I went to Berklee College of Music (as a guitar player-- lots of Paganini exercises) but never knew anything about his view of improvisation, or his wild personal style. Fascinating. Great job on the research. Sounds like it was a pleasure :)