Do You Know What It Means, to Miss New Orleans? ... or Jazz Is Like Gumbo

ENZINGER Katharina.   

Jazz is a stew. Just put in whatever you have got at your disposal, be spontaneous and creative, be daring. Improvise, experiment. You will be excited about the uncertain outcome of your making which, in the end, will always be surprisingly new, different and never the same. You haven't thought of buying okra? Use a nice dark roux for your Gumbo. The piano player didn't show? Let the Sax play. Do you feel like your simmering brew could use a fruity note? Challenge decades of sacred culinary tradition and bravely add some tomato paste. Ray Charles and his band ran out of pieces to play towards the end of a concert and made up a world hit from scratch, right on the spot. You just discovered some leftover bacon in your fridge? Chop it up and put it into the pot.
Just like in cooking also in playing music the quality of the single components of a creation are crucial for how it is going to turn out. An instrument that is out of tune will ruin your gig like rotten celery will spoil your Gumbo. A percussionist with a cricked wrist is like a missing Hot Sauce.
Jazz is like Gumbo. They are spicy, they are warm, from time to time they are an utter challenge to the ear or the palate, they fill you up, leave you with a feeling of comfort and deep satisfaction - and they are as close as you will ever get to catching an idea of the New Orleans soul.

Nailing down the terms "Jazz" and "Gumbo" might eventually be as tricky as defining "Creole". There surely are as many explanations as there are disciples of Jazz, as many recipes as there are mamas in the South. In any case, coming up with final, commonly accepted definitions of these artistic, cultural and culinary phenomenons does not appear to be possible - or have they simply not been found, yet? Might this promising, enchanting vagueness about those names be the essence of their very beings, the secret of their fascination and powerful attraction?

Certainly, as has just been established, not everybody's conception of Jazz is quite the same. In this respect it is obvious that one or the other heated discussion cannot be avoided among passionate Jazz-aficionados. Also a harmless exchanging of handed-down recipes among cooks professional or not can lead to dogmatic debates about whether filé should be added to the stew by the cook while preparing it or rather be served separately for everyone to use for seasoning their gumbo according to their tastes.
When it comes down to New Orleans' music of its heart and to its Daily Bread, controversies between "Conservatives" and "Libertarians" are bound to arise. Electrical instruments have no place in Jazz, they belong to cheap pop-music. Okra is not used together with filé-powder, that's how it's always been. Modern Jazz is noise pollution. You cannot use eight different greens for Gumbo z'herbes, it is either seven or nine and nothing else.

Naturally, individual preferences cannot only be traced back to a general conservative or progressive attitude. Some like to stick to good old "elevator music", some are open to mostly rewarding experiences with innovative musical experiments such as stunningly beautiful arrangements of piano, glass balls on strings, saxophone, bass and whale songs originally recorded for scientific purposes. People's affiliation to okra gumbo with shrimp and oysters or pleasantly unexciting chicken and sausage gumbo has mainly got to do with what they have grown used to.

Its music and its food are essential to the New Orleans experience. They are vital to the self-understanding of the individual locals and their community; they are the major attractions for curious out-of-towners. Jazz and Gumbo share a common birthplace in the Crescent City; not by chance, but by implicit necessity.

Jazz and Gumbo could probably only have come into existence around New Orleans in the Mississippi Delta. Where else can one find such a variety of cultural influences from three continents? Native Americans were forced to make room for the European conquerors who brought African slaves overseas before new immigrants from France, Southern Italy, Germany and other European countries settled in the area. Different customs from all these cultures merged into various distinct traditions of their own. Creoles are primarily defined as Louisianans of French or generally European origin, sometimes though descendents of Native Americans and black slaves are included in the tricky concept (Roahen: Gumbo Tales. p. 161ff). The least common and therefore very fuzzy denominator in the debate is probably the idea of Creoles as genuine Louisianans - whatever that is supposed to mean exactly.

The francophone inhabitants of Louisiana whose ancestors were forced to emigrate from the Canadian province Acadia in the 18th century are called Cajuns. Creole and Cajun traditional cuisines are often supposed to be quite similar, the Cajun variety being less pretentious and simpler than the Creole one, mainly because of their lower rank in society and their proximity to Native Americans on the badly accessible country side. Not only were the Cajun taste and their way of cooking influenced by Indian habits, also a new type of music. Zydeco, itself a component of early and more recent styles in Jazz, arose from this fertile encounter of cultures.

Native Africans from the Ivory Coast or the Caribbeans took with them obscure rhythms unheard by the European ear that gradually found their ways into Southern music and established themselves in African-American cultural traditions, which built the foundation Jazz was going to spring from. Via the routes of slave trade not only African music was brought to the Americas. Okra, an unimpressive little vegetable and originally the main ingredient of gumbo, basically an African dish, made it there as well.

Today gumbo, just like diverse forms of Jazz, is an all-time-favorite both among blacks and whites, both rich and poor. As romantic as this may sound, it nonetheless appears to be true even at a closer look. But can we speak about enchanting tunes of a certain type of music unifying the - up to this day - quasi-segregated Crescent City? Can a simple dish tear down the vast socio-economic rifts in the New Orleans reality of pseudo-Apartheid? Probably an African-American will merely wait on a white someone enjoying an evening of good old-fashioned Jazz at the Columns Hotel, but the next evening they might jam together in a dingy club in the Quarter. A nice bowl of steaming Gumbo or the prospect of hot beats might just be what keeps you going in the relentless face of sickening central air-conditioning and a sweltering afternoon in August, what gets you to leave the house for the first time after a hurricane, what makes you take the risk of being robbed at a red traffic light in an empty street. They will not let the god-forsaken city or its water get you down on your knees - no matter your skin color, your education, your income. Gumbo and Jazz are comfort-food - equally for the body and the soul. Frisky dancing to swinging rhythms will undo the undesired consequences of excessive gumbo-binging some hours ago, the other way round a rich and spicy seafood gumbo will give you all the energy you need for a night on the town. Jazz music and Gumbo are essential to the good-ole´ "laissez les bons temps roulez", they have formed a striking symbiosis, nurtured every day by practical experience, some well-earned indulgence, nostalgic sentiment, and - sometimes more, sometimes less - innocuous sensuality. At the end of the day, they will be what you miss most about New Orleans.

References:
BERENDT Joachim-Ernst (Hg.): Die Story des Jazz. Vom New Orleans zum Rock Jazz. Stuttgart, 1975.
ROAHEN Sara: Gumbo Tales. Finding My Place at the New Orleans Table. New York, 2008.

Musical example:
Wolfgang Puschnigg, Ulrich Scherer, Jamaaladeen Tacuma: Orca Jazz Fusion. Voices from the Inside Passage. Klagenfurt, 2008.