Big Easy music makes its mark on Big Apple

ACCORDING to the US Federal Emergency Management Agency, 4,186 Hurricane Katrina refugees from New Orleans are currently shored up in New York. Going by the amount of benefit shows happening in Big Apple clubs and venues virtually every night of the week, a sizeable proportion of that number would seem to be displaced musicians.

There's a whole bunch of them, for instance, holding court most nights in the basement of Niagra, Jesse Malin's bar on Tompkins Square. The likes of Sufjan Stevens have also came out with caps in hand to raise cash for various causes in the Deep South.

Then, of course, there are the legends from the Crescent City coming through town to remind everyone that they're still hale and hearty despite what nature has thrown at them. Allen Touissant and Dr John headlined a bill in Central Park which showed everyone that not only had they survived, but their sound was still thriving.

Many US cities brandish their musical roots as a badge of honour, but it went much deeper than a mere tourism prop in New Orleans. There, the jazz and the soul, the zydeco and the funk were embedded in the streets, weaving a spell on all comers which few, especially musicians and music fans, could resist.

One of the most evocative passages in Bob Dylan's Chronicles, for example, covers his time in the Big Easy recording Oh Mercy. Dylan, then in the middle of a long-running creative slump, was looking for something to shake him out of a rut which had reduced him to touring with Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers. He found just what he was looking for when he hung out in the shadows with the ghosts in New Orleans.

Oh Mercy producer Daniel Lanois knew what he was doing when he set Dylan up in a big, crumbling house in the Garden District. The Canadian had already been deeply smitten by New Orleans and knew where the magic lay. Lanois was to spend a good few years in the city. He set up Kingsway Studios, where he recorded such timeless albums as Yellow Moon (for The Neville Brothers) and Wrecking Ball (his stunning collaboration with Emmylou Harris).

The producer has moved on since, but he hasn't forgotten about New Orleans. His current tour, with Chicago post-rock outfit Tortoise acting as his backing band, reached New York last weekend. From the get-go, Lanois urged the audience not to forget about the plight of people living in the mud down South.

Musically, Lanois has gone much further south in recent years. His current album, Belladonna, was recorded on the Baja Peninsula in Mexico. It's a dark, moody and dramatic series of pedal-steel guitar soundscapes, evocative big sky music - as if Ry Cooder and Brian Eno had combined to redo the Paris, Texas soundtrack. Lanois, it seems, is a musician who can always read the runes in a location.

His hook-up with Tortoise is an intriguing one. Most in the crowd tonight want to hear Lanois sing songs from his Arcadie album or hope against hope that his pal Bono (in town for U2's run at Madison Square Gardens) will turn up for a duet.

Lanois scats through a handful of his best-known songs like a scalded cat, doing them almost as a contractual obligation. For him, tonight is about embellishing and exploring the atmospherics which come from matching the compulsive, driving rhythms of the Chicago outfit with his own soulful playing.

There's something quite daring about what Lanois is doing. It would have been so easy for him to do what everyone expects him to do (like, say, his production clients U2, who have largely abandoned any sort of musical innovation in recent years), but Lanois has an adventurous ear which just won't allow him to do that. Tonight's a reminder that the best music comes when musicians venture far beyond their comfort zones and take inspiration from wherever they find themselves. As Lanois shows, the best ones always land on their feet.