The Louisiana Weekly & "Jazz Lived Here"

For the past couple of years I’ve been the editor-at-large for The Louisiana Weekly, an African-American paper dating back to 1925. My role is essentially to develop stories for the paper with a stable of freelancers to whom I assign stories on the environment, education, social justice, civil rights and community profiles. It also affords me the chance to be an occasional talking head on television.

While my own goals for the Weekly are to help broaden its readership and take some ground away from New Orleans’ sleepy alternative weekly, the largest project I’ve undertaken at the paper so far is “Jazz Lived Here.” This is a 50-part series chronicling New Orleans’ most significant jazz historical landmarks in essays and contemporary and archival photos.

I started work on the project in October 2003, when I convened a panel of New Orleans’ most prominent jazz historians and jazz musicians to select the 50 properties we would cover in the series, the foremost criterion being that the properties were still standing so that the series could have an advocacy component for historic preservation. After the lengthy selection process was completed, I began the series in April 2004 with a team of very able writers and my co-editor on the project, Lili LeGardeur.

We published a commemorative edition of the first 14 essays for the Satchmo SummerFest in August 2004, and we are currently planning on bringing out the entire series as a book after it finishes its run in the paper in March 2005.

If you are interested in subscribing to The Louisiana Weekly, click here.

If you are interested in purchasing a copy of the commemorative “Jazz Lived Here” publication from the Satchmo SummerFest 2004, click here.

If you would like information of the African-American Historic Preservation Council of the Preservation Resource Center in New Orleans, which helps to put up plaques on jazz historical landmarks (a program we heartily support), click here.