Brei Olivier
Moroccan New Orleanian Mahmoud Chouki at the Columns Hotel & Bar on St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans.
“I’m a New Orleanian,” the Moroccan guitarist and oud player Mahmoud Chouki declares, to his audiences and to his interviewers. He’s now been here for five years, following a lifetime of appearances on international stages in over thirty countries. But New Orleans, and the music made here, is where he has made his home.
It’s a tale as old as jazz itself. Our region has long enticed musicians from far away places—drawn as though by magnets to our vibrant indigenous music scenes, fostering genres steeped in history and local legacy, but bursting with vitality, always transforming and evolving as musicians of new generations and new locales step in to reverently offer their own interpretations.
For this year’s Music Issue, we look at the ways the places we’ve come from and the places we’ve been shape us—as people, and as artists. In our features besides Chouki’s odyssey, we turn to the young women picking up accordions and fiddles as torches of Cajun music and adding their own flare; and to Baton Rouge bluesman Kenny Neal as he continues in the path of greats like Buddy Guy. We hold our ear to our subjects’ pasts, and listen closely for the sounds that come from their own ancestors, or from across the world.
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