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Stealing the Show

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Andrews's departure was the first of many. The other guys in the band had gigs in Europe, and then Mardi Gras season and Jazz Fest rolled around. For a time, you never knew which New Birth would show up at the Volcano on any given Wednesday. On one fateful night, the band's horn section showed up but the rhythm section couldn't make it, so an electric bassist and a kit drummer took their place. Mitchell says the neighbors complained that night for the first of many times. "They were putting up with it before that, but that was just so electronically loud that it just blew it over the top, and after that it was just any noise, they'd jump the gun."

The Volcano is on Bissonnet and in a primarily residential area, and is not normally a music venue. Mitchell had figured on some flak from his neighbors, so he always ended the shows early. That plan backfired. "The New Orleans people want that shit to start late," Mitchell says. "Even knowing my shows would start early, they wouldn't show up until ten o'clock and they would see the last 30 minutes. For them, ten was early. And even the Houstonians didn't show up until late, for whatever reason. I was just sort of flabbergasted -- I was like, man, it's a fuckin' Wednesday. Don't people have to work?"

Mitchell also believes that the local media missed out on a great story, to some degree. "The public radio stations helped, the Press did an article and Channel 26 came out, but that was it," he says. "I really thought it would get more attention than it did. I'm happy with the attention that it did get, but I guess I was thinking there might be some more people getting into it. Like maybe Majic 102 or something, but I guess those things are just so driven by advertisers and formats now..."

But by this time, the only New Orleans story the local media was interested in was crime. There was a spate of Katrina-related shootings in Houston over Thanksgiving weekend, and in late December, the Houston Police Department released figures showing that the murder rate for 2005 was 23 percent higher than that of 2004.

Houstonians felt they had done the city of New Orleans a historic favor, and many had, either through volunteering their time or donating money or clothes, and this largesse was to be repaid with senseless gang violence on our streets?

For their part, New Orleanians felt stereotyped, condescended to and less than enchanted with Houston. New Orleans is a relatively compact city of tight-knit neighborhoods where many families have lived for decades or even centuries. They didn't like our food, hated our ramshackle public transport system and the sprawl it fails to serve. (The New Birth's members were living everywhere from Pasadena to New Caney, whereas in New Orleans, they all lived a few blocks from each other.) And perhaps most of all, they were sick of being reminded of how grateful they should be.

On his return to town for the Orange Show gala, Hingle was sporting a Rockets hat and a freshly printed New Birth T-shirt that showed a map of both Louisiana and Texas as their base of operations. But if you ask him about fond memories of life in Houston, he's hard-pressed to come up with an answer, save for sincere appreciation of the people he met here, such as Mitchell, John Zotos of St. Pete's Dancing Marlin, Susanne Theis of the Orange Show Foundation and Bob Edwards of Dan Electro's. Houston as a hometown did not appeal to him.

New Orleans musicians also could not understand our relatively puritanical laws. As is well known to anybody who has traveled to Bourbon Street, in New Orleans you can carry booze from club to club in to-go cups and there is no mandatory closing time. Here, you have to consume all you order on the club premises and all alcohol sales cease promptly at 2 a.m. Here, Mardi Gras is a marketing concept. There, it's a way of life. And New Orleans police were believed to take a more laissez-faire approach to casual pot-smoking than their counterparts in Houston.

The honeymoon was over, and the marriage had truly begun. Whether this marriage will be a happy one or something that should be on Dr. Phil remains to be seen.

The Soul Rebels are perhaps the most adventurous of all the New Orleans brass bands. While there are others -- the Rebirth and Hot 8 come to mind -- that throw hip-hop and reggae in the mix, few do it as often or as well as the Soul Rebels, who have been infuriating purists with their update on brass band music ever since their inception in 1991.

The Soul Rebels still play every Thursday night at a bar called Le Bon Temps Roulé; on Magazine Street in New Orleans's Garden District, but today, three of the six members of the band live here in Houston and say they have no plans to move back home.

Bandleader Lumar LeBlanc was raised in the Tremé/Sixth Ward section of New Orleans, where, he says, "jazz is grown like flowers." He is among the more prosperous of the evacuees -- he had been a high school teacher, his band makes good money, his wife is a medical professional and he was living in the middle-class area of the Big Easy called New Orleans East, a world away from the tough corners of the Ninth Ward. "We had good neighbors, a good neighborhood, a four-bedroom home," he says. "And then all of a sudden Katrina hit. The whole world as we know it changed."

LeBlanc arrived in Houston with his family, a couple of changes of clothes and nothing else, or at least nothing physically tangible. "When we saw the horrible catastrophe in New Orleans on TV, we started to realize that probably everything was destroyed except for the inner city and the CBD [central business district]," he says. "The music was really the only thing that I had to keep me going financially and to keep my spirits up, and my wife and family."

Right now LeBlanc is viewing Houston more as a base of operations than a true hometown. "I plan to stay here to just commute to wherever I have to do my music," he says. "I've been playing music professionally since 1990, so my life has always been where I have to travel -- Europe and Brazil and all different countries. The traveling's really not a big roadblock."

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