Stealing the Show

For their part, New Orleanians felt stereotyped, condescended to and less than enchanted with Houston. New Orleans is a relatively compact city of tight-knit neighborhoods where many families have lived for decades or even centuries. They didn't like our food, hated our ramshackle public transport system and the sprawl it fails to serve. (The New Birth's members were living everywhere from Pasadena to New Caney, whereas in New Orleans, they all lived a few blocks from each other.) And perhaps most of all, they were sick of being reminded of how grateful they should be.

On his return to town for the Orange Show gala, Hingle was sporting a Rockets hat and a freshly printed New Birth T-shirt that showed a map of both Louisiana and Texas as their base of operations. But if you ask him about fond memories of life in Houston, he's hard-pressed to come up with an answer, save for sincere appreciation of the people he met here, such as Mitchell, John Zotos of St. Pete's Dancing Marlin, Susanne Theis of the Orange Show Foundation and Bob Edwards of Dan Electro's. Houston as a hometown did not appeal to him.

New Orleans musicians also could not understand our relatively puritanical laws. As is well known to anybody who has traveled to Bourbon Street, in New Orleans you can carry booze from club to club in to-go cups and there is no mandatory closing time. Here, you have to consume all you order on the club premises and all alcohol sales cease promptly at 2 a.m. Here, Mardi Gras is a marketing concept. There, it's a way of life. And New Orleans police were believed to take a more laissez-faire approach to casual pot-smoking than their counterparts in Houston.

The honeymoon was over, and the marriage had truly begun. Whether this marriage will be a happy one or something that should be on Dr. Phil remains to be seen.

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The Soul Rebels are perhaps the most adventurous of all the New Orleans brass bands. While there are others -- the Rebirth and Hot 8 come to mind -- that throw hip-hop and reggae in the mix, few do it as often or as well as the Soul Rebels, who have been infuriating purists with their update on brass band music ever since their inception in 1991.

The Soul Rebels still play every Thursday night at a bar called Le Bon Temps Roulé; on Magazine Street in New Orleans's Garden District, but today, three of the six members of the band live here in Houston and say they have no plans to move back home.

Bandleader Lumar LeBlanc was raised in the Tremé/Sixth Ward section of New Orleans, where, he says, "jazz is grown like flowers." He is among the more prosperous of the evacuees -- he had been a high school teacher, his band makes good money, his wife is a medical professional and he was living in the middle-class area of the Big Easy called New Orleans East, a world away from the tough corners of the Ninth Ward. "We had good neighbors, a good neighborhood, a four-bedroom home," he says. "And then all of a sudden Katrina hit. The whole world as we know it changed."

LeBlanc arrived in Houston with his family, a couple of changes of clothes and nothing else, or at least nothing physically tangible. "When we saw the horrible catastrophe in New Orleans on TV, we started to realize that probably everything was destroyed except for the inner city and the CBD [central business district]," he says. "The music was really the only thing that I had to keep me going financially and to keep my spirits up, and my wife and family."

Right now LeBlanc is viewing Houston more as a base of operations than a true hometown. "I plan to stay here to just commute to wherever I have to do my music," he says. "I've been playing music professionally since 1990, so my life has always been where I have to travel -- Europe and Brazil and all different countries. The traveling's really not a big roadblock."

LeBlanc's youngest son is with the family and attending school at Mount Carmel High School, but his oldest son returned to New Orleans to live with his mother's family and finish high school. Next fall LeBlanc hopes his oldest will enroll at his own alma mater -- Texas Southern University, where he served as a drum major in that school's Ocean of Soul Marching Band while he was studying to obtain a degree in social work. "When I had to evacuate, Houston was an easy choice for me because I was used to the city," he says.