With UK Poet Grevel Lindop

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A book of poetry by Grevel called “Luna Park” devotes a prose chapter to his trip to New Orleans not long after the flood and features Jazz on the Tube’s own Ken McCarthy.

You can learn more about Gravel’s book here

Scenes from the New Orleans video:

1. A quick salsa lesson out in front of Fats Domino’s house with rebuilding volunteers from Brooklyn
2. Marie Laveau’s tomb
3. The Treme: A horse in front of the Candlelight Lounge
4. Modern jazz at the original Spotted Cat on Frenchman Street
5. Chuck Perkins and friends from France and New Orleans
6. Toubador music from France
7. Grevel reads at the Backyard Ballroom
8. Nineteen year old Amanda Shaw at the Rock and Bowl
9. Dos Jeffes guitars
10. Grevel at Dos Jeffes
11. Chickie-Wa-Wa and the Radiators
12. Church service at the Zion Hill Church in the Treme
13. Old and Nu Fellas Second Line
14. More
15. More
16. The Wild Magnolias
17 Big Chief Bo Dollis and Bo Dollis Jr.
18. In the Quarter

The visit was returned by New Orleans poet Chuck Perkins who visited Grevel in his hometown of Manchester, UK.

Here we put the two cultures together: Manchester electronic dance music (heavily influenced by the Southern US via Detroit and Chicago) and New Orleans sights.

Footage from pre and post-Katrina New Orleans over the soundtrack of the techno classic “Voodoo Ray” by Gerald Simpson (also knowns as A Guy Called Gerald)

The relationship between New Orleans and Manchester goes way back.

Ever wonder where the cotton from New Orleans went?

To Liverpool and then on to Manchester, where textile mill workers – including children as young as the age of 5 – faced conditions every bit as inhuman as slavery in the Delta. (Liverpool was also the financial and logistics capital of the Atlantic slave trade.)

In spite of their own misery – or perhaps because of it – Manchester cotton mill workers stood in solidarity with enslaved Africans and called for Abolition.

Every beat in popular music – jazz, R & B, rock and roll, funk – originated on a drum kit in New Orleans.

Chicago and Detroit, the birthplace of House and Techno respectively, was populated by black artists whose ancestors came from the Delta.

You can learn more about poet Grevel Lindop’s book here

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