The truth about the New Orleans music scene today....

I get a lot of questions about what's going on with the local music industry following Hurricane Katrina. The truth is not pretty:

Prior to Katrina, this was a great place to be a working musician. If you had the skills, you could make a handsome living playing. Before I retired from actual performance (for reasons of health), I certainly did. It was not at all unusual for me to play six days a week, sometimes three gigs on each of those days. Lots of full time (no day job) players I knew were buying nice homes and sending their children to good schools strictly off the proceeds of the music business. Those days are gone, and probably gone for good.

The secret of all of this high paying work was the convention and tourist business, and that has pretty much vanished. New Orleans used to be one of the top tourist destinations in the world, and it was not unusual at all to have a couple of 20,000+ attendee conventions going on simultaniously in town. Ordinary tourists flocked here from all over the world. No more. Why, you ask? Two reasons: crime and insurance.

You're taking your life into your hands if you come to New Orleans and don't know which areas (and there are a lot of them) to avoid. We're the number one (with a bullet...) murder per capita city in the United States. Mugging tourists is a big industry in certain communities. It's dangerous here. You should stay away until the situation is resolved. I'd like to point out that we have about half the pre-Katrina population base, and about the same number of police officers we had BEFORE Katrina. We also have 300 armed National Guardsmen and 80 State Troopers patrolling the streets. Feel safer? You shouldn't. They haven't been able to stop the murders and robberies. The city government is too interested in being PC to take the action that is necessary. Sure, they hold lots of news conferences talking about improvements, and they run nice ads in various television markets saying you should come on down. Before you book your flight, take a look at the crime statistics. The numbers don't lie....

Another big problem, as if the high chances of getting murdered was not enough, is that it's become very, very difficult for conventions to buy "event cancellation" insurance. Let's say you're the convention planner for the American Association of Solid Waste Engineers. You plan to bring 20,000 people to New Orleans for your annual meeting. You have to buy a policy that guarantees that the caterer gets paid (and everybody else) if you cancel your event, for whatever reason. Given the weather we often have here, not to mention the high potential for civil unrest, insurers have pretty much stopped writing such policies. No insurance = no convention.

This has resulted in most of the successful, full time players leaving town. They're gone. You can't make money like you could pre-Katrina, and life is too hard here (that's another entirely different topic) to endure on a reduced income. I don't blame them in the least.

There have been numerous efforts to keep musicians here. Most are scams. Take the Musician's Village, for example: it was a great idea as originally put forth by Harry Connick, Jr. You build houses for musicians, give them mortgages, and set up a performance center with rehearsal halls etc. Harry was right on the money with this plan. Unfortunately, it got hijacked at city hall by the PC housing advocates, who insisted that the money raised for musicians housing should be used for others as well. Now, musicians are a very small minority of the inhabitants of the so called Musicians Village. There's something wrong with this picture....

The problem in New Oreans is that there is not enough work here to make a living. The demand for musician's services has decreased dramatically, and until it returns, the players won't be back.