Hot 8 on NPR
December 9, 2007 by nonotes
Some members of the Hot 8 were recently interviewed on the NPR show, The Bryant Park Project. Here’s a link to the audio. It’s all fairly basic stuff, but a decent introduction to the band and in its place in the contemporary New Orleans scene, both before and after Katrina.
The piece refers to the Finding Our Folk tour, which I had never heard of. I found its web site, and it’s not totally clear to me if it is active now. The site says:
During the Finding Our Folk tour, high school and college students supported by community elders and grassroots organizations toured America and visited cities where Hurricane Katrina survivors were displaced. The tour partnered with local and national community based organizations and learning institutions, to identify evacuees and the cities where they were, to develop curriculum and provide training for high school and college students to facilitate workshops and support the overall documentation of the tour.
In each city, we convened survivors and local community residents to share their stories, and to participate in the different tour activities. In selected cities, the day of learning and healing culminated in a large-scale celebration of the people and culture of the Gulf Coast region. These events allowed evacuees to share their journey through art and culture and featured performances by national and local performers, musicians, poets and visual artists, intertwined with speeches by veterans of the civil rights and current resistance movements.
A couple of years ago I did some research into the song "St. James Infirmary," wrote up what I found, emailed that essay to friends and posted it on my web site (as part of a series of "Letters From New Orleans," as I was living in that city at the time). Based on the feedback, I wrote a second version of the essay, and asked for more feedback. Based on that, I wrote a 
