Frenchmen Notes: The Making of a Music Scene
Tour Description
Created by Hannah Kreiger-Benson and Laura DeFazio, founders of the Frenchmen Notes project, this tour tells the story of Frenchmen Street through the voices of those who helped to develop its sounds and scene.
Locations for Tour
The Vacant Lot
The lot may not have looked like much, but this non-space took on a life of its own, growing slowly and organically into an unconventional hub for neighborhood creatives, a beloved local institution owned by no one and shared by all.
Alan…
The Rooftop of Café Brasil
Café Brasil, as you might gather from its name, was a major hub for the Latin scene that once flourished on Frenchmen Street. But it was host to a whole smorgasbord of musical weeklies as well.
“Monday night they had a jazz band; Tuesday night,…
The Bench
One of the things that makes Frenchmen Street such a unique cultural corridor—one that boasts a notably outsized impact for its two-and-a-half block length—is the sheer density of venues packed into the tiny strip.
In the late ‘90s, Frenchmen Street…
Bicycle Michael’s
We wandered into Bicycle Michael’s one day in 2019 to ask Ferrand and longtime bike mechanic/philosopher Tim Eskew if they had any particularly memorable stories they wanted to share from their tenure on Frenchmen Street. To which Tim responded, “Do…
The Christopher Inn
The second-line parade is a quintessentially Black New Orleans tradition rooted in historic jazz funerals, although not all second-lines today are funeral second-lines. The name refers to the “second line” of everyday revelers who follow in the wake…
Maison
The Maison has one of the most varied music lineups on Frenchmen St, hosting rock, funk, brass bands, jazz, fusion and more. Singer and bandleader Sierra Green has been a regular part of the calendar on many memorable nights over the last decade. But…
The Spotted Cat
The Spotted Cat, open since 2001, hosts a variety of modern and traditional jazz, brass bands and brass/funk fusion. When Jeremy was a teenager he had his own brass band, and although they were too young to get into the Cat, they’d always stand…
30/90, Cafe Negril, Spotted Cat
Curtis Casados, a longtime bartender who’s worked at various Frenchmen locations over the years (read his Spotted Cat storm story here), has always been struck by the camaraderie he’s felt on the street. “Frenchmen itself was just a big large…
d.b.a.
When world-famous musicians come to perform in New Orleans, sometimes they then go sit in on local gigs, and lucky audience members occasionally catch the magic moment.
As Margie Perez remembers: “It was the first anniversary of Katrina, in August…