Contributed by - Posted: April 29, 2007 9:12:35 PM I guess you could say I'm an existential Christian in that I believe that if we all followed Jesus' admonitions to love our neighbors as we love ourselves, turn the other cheek and do unto others as we would have them do unto us, the world would be a much better place. The Beatitudes are also inspiring, as is the notion that God is love.
But as far as my spiritual life goes, I am an unabashed idolater and my idols have names like Coltrane and Schatmo, Hank, Marley and Tosh, Ludwig and Amadeus, Lucinda and Brother Ray, Bird, Duke, Miles, Monk and Dizzy and many, many more.
As many, if not more, in fact, as there are Catholic saints and Hindu gods combined.
So for me, and tens of thousands of people like me across the country and even around the world, this is the holiest week of the year. And like Muslims to Mecca, Jews and Christians to Jerusalem and Hindus to the Ganges, we'll all be headed in one direction this week: toward New Orleans, the birthplace of American music.
For me this is my 32nd consecutive pilgrimage to the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival and my second visit since Hurricane Katrina struck on Aug. 25, 2005. The storm delivered a horrific blow that still threatens the viability of the Crescent City, dubbed for the broad bend in the Mississippi River on which it was founded.
But I don't think these 10 days of music, food and fellowship with old friends from all over the country will be as poignant as last year, when many of the Katrina wounds were still bleeding.
Since the Fairgrounds horse race track where the official festival is held for two consecutive weekends is at one of the lowest points in the city, even if you were staying in the relatively unscathed French Quarter or Uptown districts, there was no way to get to the delights of the 10 music stages and scores of food booths without passing through scenes of heart-breaking devastation.
There were whole blocks where there was no electricity, there was debris everywhere and trees still holding twisted metal high in their branches.
Visible watermarks could be seen 10-feet high on many buildings and there were many carports where Federal Emergency Management Agency trailers had been parked. In them lived the families driven from their adjacent unlivable homes.
And all that was and is nothing, of course, compared to the Lower Ninth Ward and precincts east that still are in a state of total ruin and really nothing more than ghost ghettos and ghost suburbs.
I've been back a couple of times since the last festival. While a lot has been done to clean up and services, even including parts of the street car lines, have been restored to a modest extent, New Orleans is still a crippled, deeply wounded city.
Fewer than half as many people live in the city as before the storm and much of the social infrastructure -- the health system, the education system, the legal system and law enforcement -- still teeters on the brink of collapse.
Some very sober-minded experts are not even certain that the city will survive in the long run, especially if another Katrina-sized storm hits the Big Easy in the near future.
Which makes continued pilgrimages to the Jazz Festival not just for pleasure anymore -- they are now a moral imperative to help save what is in my mind the most important and certainly the most unique city there is.
New Orleans is nothing less than America's soul.
In antebellum times, Congo Square, now in Louis (Satchmo) Armstrong Park, was one of the few places in the country where the slaves were allowed to gather regularly on a communal basis to make music and it was from there that the blues and jazz, arguably American's only unique art form, was born.
In short, it is in this holy city that my religion was also born. Yes, I know what it means to miss New Orleans.
If the city were to somehow die of neglect, bureaucratic incompetence and through the forces of natures, the whole world will be the lesser for it.
Returning to spend my money, help keep the Jazz Festival viable and lend moral support has become as much a crusade as a pilgrimage. It will remain a spiritual one, touched as always, I'm sure, with moments of transcendent musical ecstasy.
And I hope that when Pharaoh Sanders closed down the Jazz Tent yesterday, he played his epic "The Creator Has a Master Plan for his full allotted hour and 15 minutes and that The Creator, does indeed, have a master plan for a resurrected New Orleans.
Reach Tommy Stevenson at tommy.stevenson@tuscaloosanews.
com or 205-722-0194.
UPDATE, 4/29, 8:15 p.m.
: No Pharoah Sanders did not play The Creator Has a Master Plan, but he was great, anyway, startring with a bow to his mentor, John Coltrane, with My Favorite Things and soaring off into space from there.
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