Bourbon Street

The pianist is finishing his solo - I can tell only because its getting faster, and my limited experience of jazz tells me that most solos finish with a flourish. As the flourish comes the crowd clap - enthusiastically, but not wildly, because, as we are about to find out, its the trumpeter they have come to see.

Right on cue, as the claps for the pianist fade the trumpet starts. The double bass and the drum never stopped, but they get no credit here. Again, the music starts gently and builds. A flourish here and a crescendo there, each met with far increasing applause by the crowd. Even with my limited experience and poor ear I can tell the trumpeter is very good. By now his fingers are moving so fast they are no more than a blur, but the music is controlled, rhythmic, and never misses a note.

We have some friends with us who are musically inclined, and undoubtedly better judges than me - and they too are enraptured. Like the rest of the crowd, Jono and Jacinta are mesmerized, tapping along almost subconsciously and joining the spontaneous applause that breaks out sporadically. I have to admit that I take my cue for these outbreaks from the rest of the crowd - I can't predict when the mid-song applause becomes appropriate. It must be something that comes with a sense of rhythm and tone.

We are in a jazz club on Bourbon Street, in New Orleans famed French Quarter. The club is exactly as I had imagined clubs on New Orleans' most famous street to be: a small bar, live jazz on stage in front of a couple of rows of wooden chairs and tables, in an aging French colonial style building - good enough to let me forget the offense of paying $7 for a Bud Light. Well, its almost what I expected - apart from the brilliant trumpeter the rest of the band is middle aged and white, which I have to admit it slightly different to my mental picture.

While the bar, Maison Bourbon, is just right, it is in truth an exception rather than the rule on Bourbon Street. A quick glance at the audience reveals that most of them are in their thirties or older, clearly enjoying the refuge that the jazz club provides from the hustle and bustle of an entertainment district that more closely resembles Khao San road in Bangkok than any quarter in France that I ever been to. There are still parts of New Orleans to visit for its rich history and live music scene, but Bourbon Street is not one of them. I'm told that it hasn't been for quite some time. While there are still plenty of bands playing on the street, the music venues are outnumbered by t-shirt stalls, strip clubs and beer barns, and the revelers are more likely to be celebrating a bachelor, or bachelorette, party than soaking up Louis Armstrong.

It comes as a surprise to me, but apparently New Orleans has long been a rival to Las Vegas as a drinking and partying venue for college kids, frat and sorority houses and anyone else from the big cities looking to cut loose for a weekend. I didn't realize it was a legendary party town before I came, but when the facts change… Well, it was time to get involved.

A unique feature of Bourbon Street is the presence of take away cocktail vendors. Each of the famous t-shirt stores also sells the local favorite, a Hand Grenade, in souvenir, grenade shaped cups. Once they are empty, you can take the cups into any bar and they will refill them for you (for an exorbitant fee, of course). If the Hand Grenades are not your choice of poison - and in truth, after you've had one of these sickly sweet, vile green concoctions, they probably won't be - bars will happily let you take any drink you buy with you. There is usually someone stationed at the door to pour your drink into a plastic cup for the road.

The fact that you can take your drink with you has an interesting effect on the street, in that most of the partying happens on the outdoors, rather than in the bars. That's convenient, because the building facades and the architecture are the other great attraction of the French Quarter, so you can enjoy both the history and the party at the same time.

The buildings on Bourbon Street are all in the same style - old wooden buildings, two stories, and a balcony on the second story. The balconies are full of people throwing necklaces of plastic beads to the people below. Originally a Mardi Gras tradition, and still only worn that day by the locals, the beads are considered part of the New Orleans experience by the tourists now and are a feature year round. The people on the balconies enjoy the scene they create by throwing them down, while the recipients, who I suspect never realized they wanted beads, suddenly see an indispensable, and free, souvenir, and crowd around shouting for more. In many ways the beads seem like a reflection of New Orleans as a whole - once a meaningful tradition, now somewhat corrupted by the demands of the tourist industry, but enjoyed by all.

On leaving the the jazz club we join the throng on the street, buy some take away Hand Grenades and watch Kate and Jacinta eagerly amass a large collection of beads. The take-away culture makes a pub crawl here not only easy, but essential. A shot of jaegermeister at a bar with a mechanical bull tempts us inside, but the line for the bull looks long, probably because the bull seems to rock so gently that, even with the help of copious amounts of alcohol, everyone manages to ride out most of the bull's time.

Eventually we reach a bar with dueling pianos, where Kate wants to try out the two step she was taught in Texas. She tries to show me how its done, but suddenly its not as simple as it was in Texas - there is no answer to the age old question of whether the instructor or the student is to blame, but our two step seems to contain many steps, few of them in time with each other. At the pianos a woman, comfortably in her fifties, has become enamored with, alternately, the piano players and a group of young guys wearing matching t-shirts. Even in New Orleans, a fifty year old woman jumping on stage and beginning to remove her singlet top causes a stir. The crowd watches with the voyeuristic fascination usually reserved for a car crash, torn between wanting the woman to stop and save some dignity or take it all off and give everyone a funny story to take home (or blog about). She stops at the last possible moment and disappears into the crowd, only to return later having swapped tops with one of the matching t-shirt brigade. She looks at him expectantly, apparently ready to ignore the thirty year age difference. He looks uncomfortable, both from wearing a woman's tank top and as a result of the situation that seems to be developing around him.

It's past 2 am when we decide to call it quits, but the street shows no sign of abating. We are far enough from our hotel to justify a taxi, but can't resist walking all the way back down Bourbon Street one more time (and picking up a hot-dog from a street vendor on the way). The hand grenades are still pouring freely, the beads still flying from balconies, and, as it is finally cooling down to a bearable temperature, the party will continue all night.