Creole Intentions

The story so far: Stacey has found a couple of trad jazz albums by George Lewis and Louis Armstrong, which I'm supposed to plan a menu around.

I was a bit apprehensive in the face of Stacey's enthusiasm for a jazz player I'd never even heard of. I'm not a real expert, but I've been around jazz and jazz musicians for twenty years, so I'm familiar with most of the names that come up in casual conversation.

George Lewis, clarinettist of this parish, was not one of those names. So I decided to listen to the album, in order to be inspired by it. Within thirty seconds into George Lewis New Orleans Dixieland Band's cover of King Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton's Doctor Jazz, it's obvious just how much fun is being had by the band. You can't help but smile.  It's a riot of sound as melody and counter-melody clamber over each other. Dixieland was arguably the first genre of pop music to be recorded and sold en masse, and it's only with a bit of perspective that this becomes poignant.

This was recorded thirty years after Doctor Jazz was written, and that year, George Lewis was 26. He was a middle aged man by the time this record was cut, and he and his band-mates were looking back to their youth. But this is also, it's important to note, no self-indulgent nostalgia kick. 

Jazz evolved faster than generations could grow up. Dixieland begat Swing, and Swing begat Bebop, and Bebop begat Cool jazz in the space of less than thirty years. It's similar to the difference between Buddy Holly and Nirvana, in about the same timespan. But to the musicians who played it, Dixieland was more than an art form. It wasn't a mere intellectual exercise, or an object lesson in vanity. It was almost more like a team sport than it was like music: it was something to get together around after work and enjoy. 

George Lewis, you see, had a day job. He was a docker, a stevedore. He was nearly crushed to death by a falling crate during a dock accident in 1944. Jazz was what he did when he knocked off work, and Dixieland was what he played, with his friends, in his town, which had given Jazz to the world; New Orleans.

Lewis was one of the principal architects of the resurgence of Dixieland in 1950's Britain, of all places, known as the Trad Jazz Revival, which spawned the careers of Kenny Ball, Acker Bilk and Humphrey Lyttleton- who I had the bittersweet pleasure of seeing play a couple of years before he died. Basically, old Americans inspired young Brits. But they weren't playing the disciplined, academic, classically trained jazz of the 1950s- they were playing the raucous music of their youth. They were preserving that relic of that place, and those years, because it was precious to them.

The album notes say that he and his fellows did not have "the capacity for greater musical sophistication" but also go on to say he didn't need it: "What he and the other men he played with had was a vitally direct emotional identification with their music...[which] was so unique to their city...that it added to their sense of identity. They were not just musicians; they were New Orleans musicians."

On the second track, Burgundy Street Blues,  vocalist Monette Moore explains the birth of the blues and her vocals, are, as the notes put it 'actually a reading,' about the streets of the old French quarter. She's rapping about the 'hood, thirty years before anyone came straight outta Compton. Check it out on the left.

This music is joyful. Urban. Working class. African-American.

So, having done a bit of looking, listening and reading, I think that the music is driving me in a definite culinary direction. Before I can explain why, precisely, I need to lay a bit of groundwork, otherwise you won't know what I'm talking about.

New Orleans was a multicultural city for a hundred and fifty years before anyone would use the word "multicultural" in print. As a kid, I was taught to think about concepts as being simultaneously good, bad, and interesting. The melting pot of New Orleans was good because it's a rare treasure; a meeting of elements in a unique crucible. It's bad because it only ever arose out of slavery and the displacement of people from their homes; the dark side is strong here. The interesting aspect is what that fusion comprised, and what it produced.

It produced two words which you're probably familiar with: Cajun and Creole. There's a lot of overlap; shared ingredients and flavours and so on, but the differences are more interesting than the commonalities. Paul Prudhomme, in his 1970s classic Louisiana Kitchen, said that in restaurant kitchens, there was no difference. Well, I feel that if I was a Cajun chef writing about Louisianan food, I might be tempted to co-opt Creole food as well, but it wouldn't be right to. There are differences- maybe not so much in terms of what goes into the pan, but definitely in terms of why and how they get there.

Cajun food is country food. It's got French colonial roots. It includes a lot of poultry and game. It uses French-influenced charcuterie like andouille sausage and tasso ham. It's from Eastern Louisiana.  It's the food of the rural poor. It's been bounced off half a dozen different ethnicities on its journey from the eighteenth to the twenty first century.

Creole food is urban food. It's got African roots. It uses a lot of seafood. It's incredibly complex. It developed from the big houses and restaurants and eateries and lunch counters of New Orleans, where the cooks were predominantly black, and whose repertoire consisted of the dishes they already knew and the dishes that the people they were cooking for. It's the food of rich and poor alike. It's also been bounced off half a dozen different ethnicities on its journey from the eighteenth to the twenty first century.

So, by lumping Creole in with Cajun food, Prudhomme lays claim to iconic Creole dishes like jambalaya, shrimp Creole, and red beans and rice as a generic Louisiana cuisine, and for me this does a disservice to the complex backgrounds of both cuisines. We're not going to make that mistake in planning our menu; the difference between Creole and Cajun turns out to be important. 

The food inpired by this music absolutely has to be Creole.  More than that, it needs, like the music, to have African-American roots, and to reflect an urban, working-class milieu. As my dad said, if it's working class food, it need to be the equivalent of a Gregg's pasty.

I've been researching po' boy sandwiches. More about that later. It's going to be awesome.

Challenge Accepted!

It's been a while since I've been in the blogosphere. Is the blogosphere still a thing? Or did that word go the way of cyberspace and virtual? Meh.

Anyway, I'm feeling out of touch with the written word. A crucial element of staying proficient in anything is to keep your tools sharp. Practice your art. If you want to be good at writing, write. So here I am.

Stacey's Peach Melba- famed in
song and saga.

One of the ways Stace and I amuse ourselves is to challenge each other to cook dinner.  We used to spend ages trawling through recipes, putting together menus which would push the other out of their culinary comfort zone, get dolled up in our finest, er, finery, and eat ourselves sick. This was fun for a while, and resulted in Stacey making her first loaves of bread and her perfecting the peach Melba. It led to me spending a solid month resurrecting Frank, the legendary sourdough starter, in order to provide bread bowls for clam chowder. And while it was fun for a while, it was missing something. A good night in is about more than good food and good company.

The missing ingredient is, of course, music. Actually, music was never missing- it was just never an ingredient. There was music in the background, always, as we cooked, served, ate and played darts. But its role was on the sidelines, until we decided otherwise.

A while back, we were at a loose end on a Saturday, when we decided to go to the cafe at Harmony for lunch. As we waited to order eggplant, salad, polenta and Italian mineral water, the sound of Benny Goodman's clarinet filled the small room which, decorated as it was with bare wood and chrome, seemed to soak up the sound as naturally as if the 1950s had yet to come.

"I think we should buy a record player." Said Stacey, voicing the thought occupying both our minds. So we did, and started collecting vinyl records. It's probably the most hipster thing we've ever done since I started shaving with actual razorblades.

One of the most objectionable people I've ever known was also the first person I knew who owned an actual vinyl record. I met him at Durham, a city where the eccentric are generally tolerated as part of the cornucopia of University life. For example, in my time there, there was the fellow who mad a point of walking everywhere at the speed that 18th-Century Light Infantry regiments would march, which looked particularly alarming as he was quite a short man with little legs. And the bloke who nobody knew personally, but who looked like Mario would look if he stopped running everywhere, started listening to the Grateful Dead and eating pizza for every meal, who was rumoured to either be a kung-fu expert or a former member of the SAS.

But the person I remember with the deepest sense of loathing lived on my corridor, and came within an ace of driving his affable and intelligent room-mate to a murder no jury would ever have convicted him of. He stood out as brash, loud, pretentious and self-obsessed, even in a crowd of first-year students, and he loved his vinyl. He would wax lyrical on the superiority of sound quality, and fidelity, and blah blah blah blah blah. I rebelled by playing Blur's Charmless Man every time he came into the room. On MP3. So the idea of buying records, and being lumped into the same proto-hipster demographic as this particularly charmless man was not attractive.

Nevertheless, we started buying records, and playing them, and enjoying the experience of shopping that way. It's interesting for those of us who grew up shopping on Amazon. For instance, if you want a track, you have to buy all the other tracks. And another thing- you can only take home what the shop has in stock. This is not how I have grown up buying music. It was only a matter of time before food got involved. Now, we challenge the other person by buying them a record or two, with the idea that the music should inspire date night- the menu and the rest. 

Last weekend Stacey threw down the gauntlet, buying George Lewis and Louis Armstrong. Everyone knows Satchmo, but in years of listening to jazz I'd never heard of Lewis, who turns out to be a hardcore Dixieland specialist. He treated jazz as the gift given to the world by his home town, New Orleans.

So, what conclusions am I going to draw? Louisiana, obviously. Gumbo? Maybe. Bananananana daquiris? Possibly. Home made andouille sausage! Why not? Maybe some Tasso? That sounds like fun. I'll keep you up to date.