To start on a joyful note, this year was better than last. Crawling out from the economic hole Katrina created in the New Orleans economy has been daunting for OffBeat; after all, we depend on advertising to have the ability to promote New Orleans and Louisiana music. Many small businesses in New Orleans are still hurting financially. Tower Records and the Virgin MegaStore have both gone away from this market (that’s right, there are no more big music retailers in the French Quarter anymore. Thank goodness for the Louisiana Music Factory). But slowly, surely, we’re coming back. Mid-City, Broadmoor, Lakeview, Gentilly, St. Bernard and Chalmette residents are slowly returning and businesses are reopening.

Through very hard work, the support of our “constituents”—the music community—and investments by local and national advertisers in our circulation, concept and quality of our editorial content, OffBeat has stayed steady for two decades.

We’re actually celebrating our 20th anniversary this fall. I’m sometimes amazed by the fact that we’ve been able to do our good work for so long, and what really astounds me is that all of us at OffBeat are still slogging away, burning many hours of midnight oil to continue our mission of supporting and promoting Louisiana music and musicians. Thank you to our current staff members—Joseph Irrera, Alex Rawls, Craig Guillot, Megan Harris, Eric Broad and Chris Brady—our hard-working interns; our dedicated writers and photographers (too many to mention!), Elena Reeves-Walker, our talented graphic designer; our hard-working distribution folk; to our loyal readers and advertisers; and of course, to the music, entertainment and cultural community that is the focus of this magazine.

We’ve expanded OffBeat’s print presence to the web (we had the first magazine Web site in Louisiana); to email (the Weekly Beat has almost become a separate publication; see for yourself when you sign up at offbeat.com). Our listings are so respected that we provide them to LouisianaTravel.com, FrenchQuarter.com, the Arts Council of New Orleans’ new FunGuide and to visitors throughout the city at local hotels and motels. We’re expanding our reach now into mobile information access with the introduction of OffBeatNOLA.mobi, an opt-in guide to not only the Jazz Fest but to all music throughout the city on an ongoing basis. See page 161 for instructions on getting music info on your mobile device.

We’ve also been working very hard on the next edition of the Louisiana Music Directory, to be produced in its final print format within the next few months. We already have a website for LouisianaMusicDirectory.com, whose final format will also be launched soon as a resource for musicians, music businesses and people wanting to locate them throughout the state of Louisiana.

Our Best of the Beat Awards are reaching legendary status. This year’s event at the House of Blues was the best-ever, with a panoply of New Orleans and Louisiana musical stars: Fats Domino, Art Neville, Irma Thomas, Dr. John. Allen Toussaint, Jon Cleary, Kenny Bill Stinson, David Egan and so many, many more. We’ve already started planning next year’s awards benefit show (our Lifetime Award Winner is still a secret) that will be held on January 12, 2008 at the House of Blues New Orleans. Keep an eye out on the Weekly Beat for more information as we get closer.

On a more somber note: we’ve lost so many great musicians since this time last year. I think that Katrina has had a much more devastating effect on people whose health was fragile: Timothea Beckerman, Dinerral Shavers, Freddie “Shep” Sheppard; Harold Cavallero, Charlie Brent, Marshall Sehorn, Vernell “Joe Gunn” Joseph and so many more. Life is very fragile and precious, and the survival of our musical culture (and our culture in general) may be slipping away.

The City of New Orleans and most of its residents still don’t support live music—did you know that a lot of the live music you hear in local venues is being presented illegally? There is a cadre of French Quarter residents who are preventing the return of live music on Rampart Street, right across from Congo Square. Amazing—and sad—isn’t it? The music community and local people who love music should be fighting to make sure that we continue our musical legacy of music “bubbling up from the streets.” We need zoning changes that will allow music-making to become legal in New Orleans!

On another sad note, one the authors who truly influenced my psyche and outlook on life (and many others of my generation) passed away a few days ago: Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. His novels profoundly affected me, and his self-written epitaph could be my own: “If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:

THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC.”

Amen, Mr. Vonnegut…and so it goes.