If everyone in Hollywood is a screenwriter, then everyone in New Orleans is a musician.

Amzie Adams is no exception. Always floating through the city carrying a pad of sketching paper, Adams is one of those people who inevitably seems to be somewhere nearby, if you just look around. An artist, a painter, and a singer, Adams is a true French Quarter character, right down to the oversized black top hat that always sits atop his mountain of white wavy hair. But in all his eclecticism, he’s probably the last person you’d expect to have a slew of CDs for sale on the Web.

It’s true. Amzie Adams, a man perhaps best known as the nameless, white cotton-candy bearded man who walks the streets wearing a top hat and a poet’s blouse, is in a band. It’s called Zardox.

In their most recent CD, Zardox Live, Adams goes a step beyond your run-of-the-mill “put some money in the hat” street music. The songs, brimming with innocence and vulgarity almost simultaneously, is as enigmatic as the man himself. Hinging on the twang and strums of old-school blues guitar, Adams sings of things like ghosts and dreams and loneliness while grounding his songs on the rhythm and movement of the streets themselves. But while Adams seems to always be lurking the streets of the old Quarter, you’d be hard pressed to find him strumming his low and spiritual tunes anywhere around here. For the most part, he keeps his music low-profile, selling his dozens of songs via the Internet.

Zardox Live simmers with a subtle but funky series of guitar solos bound by a melodic whisper of bells and strings which flutter in the background like echoes. At times, beautiful, at times, simply absurd, Zardox is a surprising dimension to add to that nameless bearded man in the crowd.

Now you know him.