A week in New Orleans

My Sunday Substack this week is a little late because it’s evening for me and I’m coming from US time — I’m in the Gulf of Mexico, an hour or so out of New Orleans into Mississippi, spending a couple of days by the coast before I head back to the city and then north. 

I’ve been in New Orleans since early last week and and being here, and Montreal before, is the first time in a long time I’ve travelled for an extended period on my own. I’m out of the habit, an old muscle I’ve forgotten how to flex, but it’s surprised me, how quickly it’s come back — that particular courage you have to work up to enter a new city alone, walk into a coffee shop or a bar and strike up conversation.

New Orleans is an incredible city, people here are eccentric and warm and proud of their history’s complex and rich cultural history. It’s hot and humid and there is music and chaos spilling out of every corner.  The legacy of colonialism and of the slave trade is heavy here — there are bars that still have their old wrought iron signage from when they were slave exchanges, the neoclassical architecture of the historic French Quarter opening out into wide, three-lane streets filled with Chevrolets and lined with palm trees. You feel it, this violent legacy, and the extremes of poverty that exist in a nation that has such a flimsy network of social security, through which people are left to slip unchecked into abject poverty and ill health.

I’m here for the history and the culture, and mainly I’m here for the music: jazz was born in Louisiana in the late 19th and early 20th century, traceable back to Congo Square, an outdoor space in what is now Louis Armstrong Park in Tremé, where enslaved people would gather on Sundays to socialise, sing, dance, and play a blend of African and Caribbean and church music. Here were the seeds of a rich and beautiful cultural tradition, planted and nurtured in the midst of extraordinary violence.

This weekend was special for New Orleans because it’s the birthday of Louis Armstrong, the great trumpeter and one of the city’s most beloved and influential figures. Satchmo Festival was down by the port, spilling over onto Frenchmen Street, musicians with unbelievable talent filling every bar. People who love music and dancing tend to love it because it’s a way of communicating without needing to use words, without needing to navigate social cues or to self-present in any particular way. This, at least, is the reason I love music and dancing.

Dancing, I feel as though simply I can exist, and I know from the people around me who are bar-hopping Frenchmen Street that they feel it too. For the last five days in New Orleans, a city of musicians with next-level talent, dancing in bars and clubs where the emphasis is not on the performer but on the collective experience of listening to and performing music, has brought me back to a version of myself I really treasure, and to a way of connecting to people that feels more pure and more free than just about anything I can think of.

I’m on the coast a couple of days for some space and some quiet and I went this evening to a fish restaurant right on the beach. Almost every time I travel alone I get a bit nervous when I turn up in a new place. I get nervous about finding my bearings, going out, who I’ll meet and how easy it will be for me to feel safe. Almost every time I work up the courage to get over those worries and to go out, I meet good people and see wonderful things and I come home feeling like my world has got just a little bit bigger.

Tonight, I sat with a couple of beers and shared a cheesecake with the couple sitting next to me and we talked to the barman about the Lord of the Rings and I thought about what I was going to write this week in my newsletter, what I want to pocket and take with me to the next place I go, and hopefully, eventually, all the way back to London, and it’s a promise to myself to spend more time dancing, and a little less time worrying.