New Orleans Social Club

Sing Me Back Home

Rhythm & Groove Club

Groove Approved

By Hank Bordowitz

Six months after Katrina’s ill wind, folk coming back from Mardi Gras in New Orleans say the place is still in shambles, with debris in the side streets of the French Quarter and entire sections of town still looking like the wrath of God and the government.  So with thousands of Louisianans still refugees in their own country and the beautiful Crescent City still a shadow of its ribald self, maybe one small good thing has can come out of it all.  See, New Orleans thrives on contradiction – like partying among the ruins up to just midnight on Ash Wednesday and then falling right into Lent. So, while the city continues to crawl from the wreckage, people started paying attention to the quintessential treasure of New Orleans funk featured on these two albums.

Take the chorus of Richard Tee’s unspeakably soulful “First Taste of Hurt” on the political-by-context Sing Me Back Home – “I think we’re ready/I know we’re ready/To go back home,” or Marcia Ball and Irma Thomas’s heavenly blues on “Look Up,”  tangled up in joyful depression, couched in the sweetest funk.  Or Henry Butler putting not even implicit blues into the West Side Story chestnut “Somewhere” and Dr. John’s reading of “Walking To New Orleans” (‘cause it’s the only way to get there?).  For those who need something more obvious, there’s the two generations of Neville double feature kicking off the album, the elder insisting “This is My Country,” the younger countering he ain’t no “Fortunate Son.” 

Only marginally less an all-star affair, the Rhythm and Groove Club (hey guys, why not “Krewe”?) plays their theme straighter, mostly a salute to the living legend at the controls and on the keyboards of the project, Allan Toussaint, such a great songwriter sometimes he needs to remind us of his brilliance on the piano, as he does on Mose Allison’s “Days Like This.” With a band featuring Toussaint, Tinsley Ellis, and Nick Payton, it doesn’t matter that Jeff Cook is a middling singer.  A frog would sound good with this band playing tunes like Toussaint’s Albert King arrangement of “Born Under A Bad Sign” and Toussaint’s own “Don’t Set Me Back.”  And come to think of it, maybe it has that sense irony after all.