Congratulations to this year’s OffBeat Best of The Beat award winners, and especially to the recipients of the Lifetime Achievement Awards. As Mrs. Antoinette K-Doe says: “It’s better to get your flowers before the funeral.”

So Mr. Earl King–our Lifetime Achievement Award winner in music–here are some flowers for you, bro, you deserve ’em! That’s what Best of The Beat is all about. It’s really hard for us to choose the winners; there are so many musical heroes here. Maybe we should do one each month!

The Best of The Beat has always been designed as an awards celebration for our music community. So many of our local musicians and music behind-the-scene folks don’t get the chance to get together as a group, and that’s what the Best of The Beat is all about. It’s OffBeat’s thank-you party for our musicians and the businesses that support them, a chance for them to have a great time, thanks to our major sponsors: The House of Blues, Abita Beer, the many great restaurants who provide food for the event, Cox Interactive Media, Louisiana Jukebox, BMI and our friends at WWOZ. In the past, Best of The Beat has been a invitation-only event for the local music community.

But since we’ve opened up the voting to the public, we’re also providing a limited number of tickets to the public for the event on January 3. This year, you can buy tickets to Best of The Beat for only $35, which gets you into the House of Blues for the awards, free food, free Abita Beer and a night of great music featuring Bleu Orleans, Supagroup, Coffee featuring Ernest Scott, BeauSoleil (in a rare local appearance), John Mooney & Bluesiana, and also Lil’ Band o’ Gold & the St. Martin Horns. I can’t wait! Tickets are very limited, so call Ticketmaster or House of Blues at 529-BLUE to purchase them now.

We’ll also honor local music businesses at the Best of The Beat Music Business Awards to take place at Loyola University’s Danna Center. Lifetime Achievement Award this years goes to the great Floyd Soileau (see story in this issue). Thanks are extended to Dr. Scott Fredrickson and Reid Wick and the Loyola Music Business Studies Program for helping this event take place. That event is on January 4, but is closed to the public.

This is the first time we’ve bestowed a Best of The Beat Lifetime Achievement Award on a Music Educator. Edward “Kidd” Jordan is our first recipient. He has had a phenomenal influence on so many musicians’ lives in this city, and continues to do so with his work at Southern University and through the Jazz & Heritage Foundation’s Heritage School of Music. Kidd, we salute you and thank you!

Annoying Political Antics

We announced in the November issue of OffBeat that Baton Rouge’s music businessman Johnny Palazzotto had been appointed to the Louisiana Music Commission. According to his certificate and letter from the Governor, Palazzotto was appointed as of July 25, 2001. Palazzotto told OffBeat that he asked for information on meetings and called both Executive Director Bernie Cyrus and Chairman Ellis Marsalis; his phone calls were not returned. Without having even been acknowledged by the LMC’s directors or the commission chairman, on December 1, Palazzotto received a letter from the Governor’s Chief of Staff, Stephen Perry, advising him that “in the interest if securing a cohesive commission with the ability to work in all areas relating to the music industry, we have decided to make changes.” Palazzotto was told he had been replaced on the commission by Baton Rouge musician and educator Alvin Batiste.

In a statement to OffBeat Palazzotto said “I assume it was because I questioned the Executive Director [Cyrus] and his assistant’s [Steve Picou] operating procedures.” In an email to OffBeat on this subject, Steve Picou’s answer to the question about why Palazzotto, a seasoned music business professional, was replaced on the commission was “I understand that you’ve been contacting commissioners and needling them over Johnny P. Here is the official statement from here: All commissioners are appointed by the Governor. All appointees serve ‘at the pleasure of the Governor.’ The Governor does not have any specific criteria or laws directing his appointments to the LMC. Thus he (or she) can appoint and remove anyone at anytime.” Okay, ’nuff said. The reader should make their own conclusions.

It should be noted that the Louisiana Music Commission recently announced involvement with a plan to entice the Grammy Music Hall of Fame (an idea conceived over a decade ago by local businessman and music activist Shea Dixon) to New Orleans on a site between the Hilton Hotel and Harrah’s Casino. This is projected to be a $55-million project, which would entail the construction of a world-class hall of fame in the area now occupied by the Hilton’s parking facility. Here’s another idea: why don’t we see what happens with the beleaguered Harrah’s, and use that magnificent building on Canal Street for a Grammy Hall of Fame?

American Routes (Finally) Hits Local Airwaves

Good news: Nick Spitzer’s American Routes has finally been picked up by local community station WWNO (89.9FM) and will be heard every Sunday night from 9 p.m. to 11 p.m.

Beginning January 7, the public radio program American Routes will bring local

listeners a weekly blend of jazz and blues, roots rock and soul, gospel, and country, Cajun and zydeco, Latin and American classical music and more–all from a New Orleans perspective. American Routes is a syndicated program produced in the French Quarter. It airs via Public Radio International (PRI) in New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, Boston Washington and over 175 places nationwide, but is just now receiving a slot in the New Orleans marketplace (it aired originally on WWOZ, but was dropped). Produced in collaboration with the University of New Orleans College of Urban & Public Affairs, American Routes includes “stories” and interviews with Louisiana-connected artists including Ellis Marsalis, Dr. John, Irma Thomas, Marcia Ball, Allen Toussaint, Randy Newman, Terence Blanchard, the Dirty Dozen, Aaron Neville, Nicholas Payton, Ernie K-Doe, Jerry Lee Lewis, Michael Doucet and many others.

American Routes host/producer Nick Spitzer, the former Louisiana state folklorist and Smithsonian cultural specialist, is professor of folklore and cultural conservation at UNO. Spitzer says, “It will be great to be heard in New Orleans by WWNO’s public radio listeners who appreciate the wide array of musical expressions, ranging from fine-tuned classical forms to improvisatory, down-home, and well-traveled genres. We take New Orleans and the Gulf South as our point of departure in the quest for great American music in many styles–showing how they are related and what distinguishes them.”

American Routes programs are often topical or tied to events such as Mardi Gras or Jazz Fest. Some have tracked the musical legacy of the Beat Generation, the impact of Louis Prima’s Bourbon Street sounds, music from Highway 61 and Route 66, and songs associated with Labor Day and other holidays. Most episodes make use of ambient sound like church bells, freight trains, street music, boat horns, and regional conversation from New Orleans and across the nation. Artists from beyond Louisiana who’ve appeared on American Routes include B.B. King, Olu Dara, John Fogerty, Willie Nelson, Pharoah Sanders, Rufus Thomas, Gladys Knight, Emmy Lou Harris, Tito Puente, Merle Haggard, Little Milton, R.L. Burnside, Wilco, Mose Allison, and many others.

Upcoming programs will present music related to food traditions, music as a healing force (in collaboration with the new Orleans Musicians’ Clinic), the musical heritage of Martin Luther King, the life of Ellington, singer and movie cowboy Herb Jeffries, and the legacy of Jelly Roll Morton. Guests will include Eddie Bo, McCoy Tyner, Hannibal Lokumbe, Herb Jeffries, Michael White, and jazz historian Dan Morganstern as well as cooks Leah Chase, Tee Eva, and Jamie Shannon.

Information on the program is available at www.americanroutes.org.

Rosy’s Resurfaces

Anyone into music in this town (who’s old enough to remember), can tell you about Rosy’s, the legendary club at the corner of Tchoupitoulas and Valence Streets. It was one of the hippest spots to see nationally-known (and local) musicians in an intimate setting that we’ve haven’t experienced since it closed in the late ’70s. Rosy’s reopened in the early ’90s, but failed to make a comeback. It’s happening again with a collaboration of three local investors and an up-and-coming music production company, SpyBoy Productions, which is handling the music booking and events.

“Rosy’s Jazz Hall” is presenting a special event for New Year’s Eve with renowned Funk Master, Big John Patton. Patton will play his Hammond B-3 organ that night with New Orleans’own Herlin Riley on drums, Tim Green (of Cosmic Krewe) on sax and Brian Seeger (Quintology) on guitar. There will be an hors d’ouervres buffet, Abita Beer and champagne for a $40 per person tab. For more information, call 896-ROSY or log on to ticketweb.com.

News and Upcoming Concerts To Die For

The Nashville Songwriters Association International Regional Workshop will meet Monday, January 15 in Room 230 in Loyola University’s Music Building. The workshop is free, and all are invited to bring one song with 10 copies of lyrics for critiques. The workshop meets on the third Monday of each month, same place and time. For more info, contact Jim McCormick, NSAI Regional Coordinator, at (504) 488-7435 or [email protected].

Shirley Horne is scheduled for an appearance with the LPO in New Orleans on February 10….my vote for the probable concert of the year, which will take place in conjunction with the Satchmo Summerfest and a Louis Armstrong Colloquium on Louis Armstrong, is a collaboration of all the Marsalis family, yes all: Ellis, Branford, Wynton, Delfeayo and Jason Marsalis, plus Harry Connick, Jr.and more. The concert is a fundraiser for the chair of the Jazz Studies program at UNO and will take place on the evening of August 4, 2001. But then, maybe we’ll see the original Meters during Jazz Fest? Music in 2001….I can’t wait!