Posted in New Orleans, The Hot 8 on December 9, 2007 | No Comments »
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 [...]
Posted in New Orleans, The Hot 8 on July 5, 2007 | No Comments »
I’m a bit slow in acknowledging this, but I had missed the initial news until E pointed it out to me. The T-P reports that the charges against the young man accused of murdering Hot 8 drummer Dinerral Shavers have been dropped. (Earlier posts on Shavers here and here.) A 15-year-old girl described as a [...]
Posted in The Hot 8 on March 5, 2007 | Comments Off
So, there’s another blog at Arts Journal that is concerned with New Orleans & music. It’s called Listen Good. I only came upon it this morning, by way of the current top post that happens to be partly about the Hot 8 (and mentions a performance of “SJI.” 
The writer apparently lives in Brooklyn, but [...]
Posted in New Orleans, The Hot 8 on January 27, 2007 | Comments Off
The WWOZ Street Talk blog has a nice audio piece about Hot 8 snare drummer Dinerral Shavers, whose tragic death was noted here recently. Producer/correspondent Matt Sakakeeny interviews some of the students Shavers worked with at L.E. Rabouin High School, where he got a music program going, and to others who knew his work. One [...]
AnimaMundi passes along this YouTube video of the Hot 8. I know I’ve seen this, and I hope I haven’t actually posted it before, but in any case it’s worth checking out. Although the title is “Hot 8 Brass Band on tour in France,” it’s actually footage of a street parade in New Orleans. If [...]
Posted in New Orleans, The Hot 8 on January 8, 2007 | Comments Off
Just yesterday I belatedly learned — after E came across something about it online — that 25-year-old Dinerral Shavers, snare drummer and original member of the Hot 8, was killed in New Orleans in late December. He was, according to this news story, shot in the back of the head, while in his car. [...]
Posted in Other Music +, The Hot 8 on May 29, 2006 | Comments Off
It’s a big day here at no notes HQ: The power and influence of the world’s leading “St. James Infirmary”-themed blog marches forward by way of some kind words on my favorite Podcast, The Sounds In My Head. Sure this is partly the result of my harassing host Daniel after he did a New [...]
Posted in Musical context, New Orleans, The Hot 8 on May 26, 2006 | Comments Off
Picking up, then, on The Hot 8, a topic I started on the other day:
One of the things that interested me about The Hot 8 that time we saw them back in 1998, is that at no point in the evening were there eight people in the band. I think there were five musicians when [...]
Posted in "St. James Infirmary", Musical context, New Orleans, The Hot 8 on May 19, 2006 | Comments Off
If you happen to have read the essay that this site spun off from, you may recall that my interest in “St. James Infirmary” can be traced to the time I heard The Hot 8 perform it, in 1998. We saw the group by chance, because we were visiting New Orleans and had ended up [...]
[Or: The Point of this Site]
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 third version.
And now, this site: A place to collect some of the links, leads, thoughts, and suggestions relating to the song that readers (from Finland, The Netherlands, Australia, Spain, England, Sweden, Canada, and all over the U.S.) have sent me. This may lead to a fourth and significantly expanded version of the essay, some day. Also on this site: Plenty of tangents.
Never heard "St. James Infirmary"? Start here.
The most recent version of my "St. James Infirmary" essay is now a few years old. But it's still a fairly decent overview of what I know about the song, and why I'm interested in it. You can read it either in the book Letters from New Orleans (see below), or in the archives of The Gambit, the New Orleans weekly that published the piece as a book excerpt when LfNO came out.
This site is a partial spinoff of the book Letters from New Orleans, published by the unstoppable Garrett County Press. My interest in "St. James Infirmary" is the subject of one essay in the book. All author proceeds from the book still go to post-Katrina relief efforts, so I think it's okay for me to say: You ought to buy it.
