Don Vappie grew up in New Orleans with a yen for music he just couldn’t explain.
“My earliest memory, it must have been second grade, I always wanted to be a musician,” Vappie says. “I have no idea why, but that’s what I wanted to do.”
Martha Redbone and her Roots Project Band return to the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival this year to perform songs from her internationally acclaimed new CD, The Garden of Love — Songs of William Blake.
The CD is a switch for Redbone, as the indie-soul diva returns to the music of her childhood, growing up in the hills of Kentucky.
Martha Redbone performs Sunday, April 28 at the Sheraton New Orleans Fais Do Do stage at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival at 1:30 p.m.
Great New Orleans jazz singer Germaine Bazzle’s formal music education began at the Xavier Junior School of Music under the tutelage of the accomplished and very demanding Sister Mary Latitia.
“She is the one, when you hear that little sound that I make, she is the one that demonstrated that to the orchestra when we were playing as she wanted something done,” Bazzle explained. “She wanted to show the trumpets or trombones, the brass people, how to do a certain thing. And when I started doing gigs I found myself doing that.”
Great New Orleans trumpeter and vocalist Gregg Stafford spent much of his childhood in the Central City neighborhood. He saw lots of parades, often sang in church, and developed a real love of music.
When it came time for high school, Stafford had the chance to join the school band — if his mother approved. So he told her, “I don’t have an elective at the moment, so the band instructor asked me, would I be interested in music? ‘Oh no, no, no, no; I don’t have no money to pay for no horn, so you can just scratch that,’” she told him.
As film production work pours into Louisiana, a nonprofit media arts group is helping locals access jobs and cultivating a more robust local film community.
The Hornets have played their last game under that team name. Next season they become the Pelicans. The change is meant to tie the team more closely to New Orleans, but it also means the team has a whole new brand, and a new feel to it.
WWNO’s Eve Troeh sat down with two animal experts to take a literal approach to the change from Hornets to Pelicans. Carolyn Atherton is assistant curator of birds at Audubon Zoo. Zach Lemann directs programs at the Audubon Butterfly Garden and Insectarium.
Saxophonist Joshua Redman grew up in Berkeley, California, a very high achiever academically who turned to music for fun.
“I loved music, and I loved listening to it and I loved playing it, but I wasn’t serious about it. Music was kind of an escape, it was kind of a relief for me from the more rigorous aspects, the more studious aspects, of academics,” Redman says. “That was kind of how I let myself go and have fun.”
George Cables is a superb pianist, an outstanding composer with a real gift for melody. He was born in Brooklyn, grew up in Queens. He started piano in grade school, and liked taking traditional lessons and studying classical music right away.
“I did like the piano. I had a crush on my piano teacher,” he said.
Cables studied classical piano at the Manhattan High School for the Performing Arts, and found a way to incorporate jazz into his afternoon commute home.
