Butch's Blog

This weekend I'm playing (deep breath) The Original "Blind" Boone Ragtime and Early Jazz Festival  in Columbia, Missouri.  This event celebrates the African-American piano virtuoso John William "Blind" Boone.  This is a great festival, where some of Boone's music is indeed played, but not exclusively.  Among other delights, my friends Morten Gunnar Larsen (a great pianist from Oslo) and Vernel Bagneris (New Orleans-born actor, writer, dancer) will perform their hit off-Broadway show "Jelly Roll: the Music and the Man."  Stay tuned.  

Eubie Blake and Alberta Hunter, sometime between 1978 and 1983, performing one of Eubie's best known numbers. These veterans were in their 80s when this was broadcast.  Eubie was at least eight years older than Ms. Hunter, but the point here isn't age, but experience.  Both were being feted by the national media as true originals, and that is what they were.  

The show is called Jazz Originals.  We produce it here, where it's streamed (sorry, no archive) every Sunday at 6 pm CST and repeated every Thursday at 8 pm CST. 

This is a roundup of shots from our two weeks in the Land of Dreams last month.  These images don't need much explication, but here's what I think: New Orleans is putting up a very good front for the tourists, but Katrina -- or rather the man-made disaster triggered by that storm -- hasn't gone away, and it never will.