by Rod Amis

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a cathedral of words

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New Orleans, LA, USA - Everybody asks about Bourbon Street, the legendary theme park for adults, when they ask you about New Orleans. It's the center of the Mardi Gras celebrations for drunken revelers and people who believe they're getting a real taste of The Big Easy.

But among the cognoscenti of this storied town, the 21st Century hipsters, the place to be right now is a bit further down river. It's Frenchmen Street. Frenchmen Street has become so BIG and EASY in the last twelve months that the bridge crowd (people coming across the famed Causeway from the 'burbs) and tourists from France, Germany and the midwestern United States think of it as their private treasure

They've figured out where the locals go for good live music seven nights a week and they're becoming addicted.

The jewel in the crown of Frenchmen Street, by many people's lights, is a club called The Spotted Cat.

New Orleans JazzFest is mentioned by print journals like Details as one of the must-do events for globetrotting party types. Two of the local bands that made the JazzFest cut, The Jazz Vipers and Hot Club, play every week at "The Cat" (as habitues call it) on Mondays and Thursdays respectively.

Trish Cone and her partner Ed Parrish had been in the bar business in New Orleans for years, but she had this dream of owning her own place that offered quality live music in an intimate setting. Kind of like sitting in your family parlor and having Miles Davis show up and jam. Nice dream.

She kept working and dreaming until she ran into David Berman, a friend, who suggested that she might want to look at a place on Frenchmen Street, in the Faubourg Marigny, hard on the French Quarter. It was a neighborhood that some folks back in the '90s felt had a lot of potential. Prices in the Quarter itself were going up. But the street was moribund. There were a couple of bars there, like the Tin Roof, that had gone through various incarnations, the Apple Barrel, Snug Harbor. But these places were known more for the food in or near them, not music. The street was not even zoned for music.

But Trish wanted to own her own bar. She named it for her pet African cervil, Ninja -- a spotted cat.

The Spotted Cat opened at 623 Frenchmen Street in New Orleans in December, 2000. Then there was the problem of having live music. Talking with an assistant to Mayor Morial, Cone was told, "You want to do music? Do music. There's no such thing as Entertainment Police in New Orleans."

That proved to be good advice. When the Cat first started offering live music in April, 2001, only three of the eight clubs on Frenchmen offered live music at all, and that intermittently. Today, all the clubs on Frenchmen, anchored by the restaurants Belle Forché and Marigny Brasserie, offer live music. The taxis come in and out of Frenchmen Street all night long with young, stylish people, looking for the night life. During the afternoon, when the Cat offers "Happy Hour" prices from 2 until 6, southern gentleman reading Kipling and Wallace Stevens, local computer consultants and the neighborhood crowd lounge and trade gibes with each other and the bartenders.

Besides the intimate music atmosphere (we'll talk about that below) there are the bartenders themselves that make the place and its ambience. ALL of the bartenders at The Spotted Cat are artists: three painters, a photographer and a singer. The fact that they're not only bartenders raises the level of both the humor at the place but also the discourse. Curtis, one of my favorite bartenders, jokes that it's "a bar full of right-brain people". That's one of the charms of the Cat.

One rainy day, a group of jazz trumpeters took refuge in the Cat decided to jam. They were playing for themselves. There were only three or four customers in the Cat. The jam became a musicians' party. Curtis, the bartender, calls this "A New Orleans Moment" and says that's why he loves this town as Your Commentator has not. One of the patrons graced with that Moment commented, "This is what 52nd Street in Manhattan used to be all about."

There are a lot of jaded bartenders in New Orleans. They have worked fourteen-hour shifts during Mardi Gras and learned to get an ATTITUDE toward visitors. The nice thing about the Cat is that if you're a guest in The Big Easy, you DON'T get treated like dirt. You get treated just fine.

Music, with no cover charge, at the Cat started an infectious trend on Frenchmen Street. When This Writer moved to New Orleans in July, 2001, it was still a little-known adjunct to the gutter-punk bars it connected to at the low end of Decatur Street. Today Checkpoint Charlies and even the trendy Matador -- where Vince Vaughn acts as Guest Bartender when he is in town -- say they are at "Esplanade off Frenchmen". Last year they said "Esplanade and Decatur." You might get my drift.

BACK TO THE CAT: Last Monday, while the Jazz Vipers (next week's G21 INTERVIEW subjects) were playing at the Cat, Charmaine Neville and Kermit Ruffins came in and just joined the set. Musicians love this place. It's like being at home. There's a sofa in front of the bandstand where patrons sit with their friends lounging in "safari" wicker chairs. The bartenders bring in their favorite CDs to fill the time during the breaks of the bands.

The Secret of Success for the Cat is the music. Well, the musicians and the magic they make in this little room. It's almost impossible to walk past The Spotted Cat when the music is playing. Visitors to New Orleans, after seeing Bourbon Street, who start to actually explore New Orleans, find themselves on Frenchmen at the Cat on a lazy afternoon, fleeing the sweltering heat, and say, "I wish I'd known about this place when I got here." Now they do. So do you, but don't ruin it for the rest of us if you come here. Keep it the intimate, cordial space you found when you arrived. Thank you.

Things go slow in New Orleans. What do you do when the Heat Index tells you that it feels like 110 degrees Fahrenheit, even if the thermometer says it's only 96? You'd mosey, I suspect. You'd amble and take things a little easy. Except here in New Orleans folks take things a Big Easy. That means that things don't quite happen when they were planned to. You spend your time in a saloon with nice air conditioning and the next thing you know the music is more intoxicating than the booze and you find yourself talking to someone you never met before about things that matter. Lots of things. It's easy.

The Spotted Cat is a reincarnated bar from the earlier years, fifty years ago, when the fisherman on the Mississippi River would come back into town. That long ago bar was supplanted by an oyster processing plant and, briefly, a dress shop. Frenchmen Street, as recently as six years ago, was a place to avoid, as was much of the Marigny. There were whores and drug dealers and crime like Baltimore East. By the 90s New Orleans was ready to clean itself up. That process is still going on. Frenchman Street is an example of what can happen when you get it right and reclaim your town. Trish and Ed were lucky enough to come here at the right time.

There are jokes going around you in a place like Nawlins. A lot of them have to do with the endless summer and the hot-hot-hot nature of things. How many liters of sweat, how hot it is in the shade, when you have 4-6 months of summer the weather man should be talking about how soon it will be summer again, as my pal Matt says. It's analogous to living with a sun shining down on you at midnight or a full moon that never ever goes away. That's why this subterranean, above ground crypts feel of New Orleans makes everything about the life a dreamy thing. A dreamy thing. That might explain all the ghost stories, the way you imagine waifs moving just along your peripheral vision. There. Not there. That's why a place like The Spotted Cat can be like a long, sweet draught of lemonade when you most need it.

DRAMATIS PERSONNAE JAK has been around since the beginning. He left for a while, but now he's back. Grizzled and wiry, the guy has more off-beat charm than any single mortal deserves. I'm still trying to figure out why he wants to call me "Don". JULIE is another long-timer at this venue. She's a handsome blonde with the kind of mature, cosmopolitan grace that makes it easy to be around. DANIEL is tall and jovial with a smile that reminds you of a playground friend. He moves fast and talks almost so. You can imagine him as a forward guard. LINNZI is the new kid on the block. She sings with the Jazz Vipers and oozes wholesome. Picture Pipi Longstocking with blonde hair. Is t right that this woman should be dealing with drunks? CURTIS and Mayor Ray Nagin were separated at birth. I have this on the authority of their personal barber. We all know that we should enjoy His Awesomeness's company as long as we can. One day he and his wife will build that house in Belize and we'll never see him again.

The Nouvelle New Orleans that is being offered to a new generation of visitors is still bohemian; this town couldn't stop being Boho if it wanted to, and it's still The South, for better or worse. What's different about the vibe (pardon my hippie-speak) is that it's not like a frat party or a theme park, it's authentic in the unadulterated way you'd expect at, say, at St. Nick's in Harlem or San Francisco's old Mabuhay Gardens. You don't get those types of moments enough in this life.

LISTEN: The Wurlitzer piano at the Cat was built in 1953. Its serial number is 459161. Until it was bought by Trish Cone and her partner Ed in 1992, it had never moved far from Bourbon Street and it had been played by a series of great New Orleans jazz pianists. [See Powerssound over the last month for a good idea about extant New Orleans jazz players. -- Ed.]

Like our Second Lines down here, those celebratory jazz funeral marches that had a wonderful representation in the Lana Turner film "Imitation of Life", the artifacts of life are carried to the Afterworld on a river of music.

The original owner of the piano at The Spotted Cat was Steve Pistorius. He primed the instrument for a series of jazz players over the next fifty years. John Royan, Steve and Lars Edegran, Topsy Chapman, Marva Wright, Thais Clark, James Booker, Chris Burke, Barry Martyn, Ron Simpson, Wendall Eugene, trumpeter Doc Cheatham brought his piano man to a party for Trish and Ed to play, Jeff Hamilton, Bob Brockman, et alia, played the lovely ivories in succession,

Brockman played that piano only a week ago, another quiet Sunday afternoon spiced with the soothing chime that only a piano's percussive and fluid flow can create.

When the piano was moved from Toulouse to Frenchmen Street, David Roe, a pianist played rollicking riffs on the back of the moving truck all the way through the French Quarter. He hit his crescendo on the doorstep of The Spotted Cat.

CURTIS

One of the bartenders at the Cat exemplifies the spirit of the place, in my view. He's a painter and he has tended or managed bars for twenty-two years. He's my favorite bartender in New Orleans for more reasons than need to be explained in this article.

Curtis came to the Cat after another bartender decided to move back to the East Coast. By that time, His Awesomeness had worked multiple Mardi Gras on Bourbon Street and its environs, from Decatur to Toulouse. Working Mardi Gras in this town is a way of earning your stripes. You get props. Bartenders are like rock stars in New Orleans. They are the juice that makes the Easy flow.

A good bartender always has a following and that makes club owners salivate.

I asked Curtis about his following one evening, both of us drinking water because of the heat . His wife had dropped him to the Quarter to retrieve his bicycle. What he said surprised me.

"Working at The Spotted Cat has been one of those times in my life when I look forward to going to work. The owners love jazz and they know they have professionals working for them, so they let us be.

"My following? Well, I find them hard to characterize. Old, young, locals and tourists who've gotten down to New Orleans over the years and keep coming back; it's just a wide range. I have this one customer from Wisconsin. The guy and I just talk about college football. He follows Wisconsin and I follow Nebraska. He and his wife come down every year and we just hang-out and talk about sports.

"What it comes down to for me is that even after 22 years of doing this work, I still genuinely like people. That's rare in this business. That and it's not only about the money for me, it's about making sure that people have a nice time. I'm not above sending somebody to some other club if I think they'll have a better time there that day. Most club owners wouldn't go along with that idea, but I believe my guests should get what they're looking for, in terms of joy, that night. I think that's what brings them back and becomes what you want to call 'my following'. They appreciate that and that's why they come back.

"What I get back, because I love this town, is what I think of as New Orleans Moments. Like that trumpet jam I told you about. Or the Brazilian band that plays here on Fridays. Musicians love playing this room because it's not a big place, it's intimate and cozy. One of the players told me that, though they don't make as much money here as other places, he likes it because its like playing a Brazilian house party.

"As an artist, working at a bar where people can have that kind of trust in you makes working easy. They enjoy the service you provide and you enjoy watching them have a good time. Having 'work' like that allows me to do my real work, my art."

THE MUSIC

The Jazz Vipers are the kind of band where the likes of Harry Dean Stanton will feel comfortable getting up and doing a song for the assembled guests at The Spotted Cat. They are serious and professional and just fun to hear. They were booked for this year's JazzFest but had to bow out and let their pals Hot Club fill the slot because of other commitments.

Nobody comes away from hearing the Vipers without a smile. They are part of what makes the Cat happen for locals and visitors alike. You have to be a hot draw to make people come out on a Monday night.

Next time in Nouvelle New Orleans we'll talk with the Hot Club, a featured band in this year's New Orleans JazzFest and explore their special magic.