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“At one point, early on, some public figures even asked whether it 'made sense' to rebuild New Orleans. Would you let your own mother die because it didn't make financial sense to spend the money to treat her, or because you were too busy to spend the time to heal her sick spirit?”
― Tom Piazza, Why New Orleans Matters

“Mac Rebennack, better known as Dr. John, once told me that when a brass band plays at a small club back up in one of the neighborhoods, it's as if the audience--dancing, singing to the refrains, laughing--is part of the band. They are two parts of the same thing. The dancers interpret, or it might be better to say literally embody, the sounds of the band, answering the instruments. Since everyone is listening to different parts of the music--she to the trumpet melody, he to the bass drum, she to the trombone--the audience is a working model in three dimensions of the music, a synesthesic transformation of materials. And of course the band is also watching the dancers, and getting ideas from the dancers' gestures. The relationship between band and audience is in that sense like the relationship between two lovers making love, where cause and effect becomes very hard to see, even impossible to call by its right name; one is literally getting down, as in particle physics, to some root stratum where one is freed from the lockstop of time itself, where time might even run backward, or sideways, and something eternal and transcendent is accessed.”
― Tom Piazza, Why New Orleans Matters

“In New Orleans the funerals remind us that Life is bigger than any individual life, and it will roll on, and for the short time that your individual life joins the big stream of Life, cut some decent steps, for God’s sake.”
― Tom Piazza, Why New Orleans Matters

“Go with what is. Use what happens.”
― Tom Piazza, Why New Orleans Matters

“The question is not racial solidarity or class solidarity but a distinction between people who have a soul left and people who have mortgaged their souls for a short-sighted self-gratification—whether”
― Tom Piazza, Why New Orleans Matters

“New Orleans will be the new Las Vegas or, more like it, Atlantic City: a big gaudy façade for all the high-rollers, controlled by mobsters and businessmen who live far, far away and destroy everything they touch,”
― Tom Piazza, Why New Orleans Matters

“Mac Rebennack, better known as Dr. John, once told me that when a brass band plays at a small club back up in one of the neighborhoods, it’s as if the audience—dancing, singing to the refrains, laughing—is part of the band.”
― Tom Piazza, Why New Orleans Matters

“New Orleans music lovers, black, white, young and old, are much more likely to be found in places where they can dance to the music they love, holler encouragement, sing along and, if at all possible, eat and drink at the same time.”
― Tom Piazza, Why New Orleans Matters

“Rarely is the best New Orleans music found in a concert hall where the audience sits separated from the performers by a proscenium,”
― Tom Piazza, Why New Orleans Matters

“I didn’t know it consciously at that point, but I had stepped into one of the most important lessons that New Orleans offers: Go with what is. Use what happens.”
― Tom Piazza, Why New Orleans Matters

“After New York City, where I lived and which I also loved, with its sharp right angles and hard surfaces and fast tempo and endless pavement and soaring vertical walls, a giant video game of the mind at the expense of the body,”
― Tom Piazza, Why New Orleans Matters

“Today I travel a lot, and when I tell people that I live in New Orleans their expression changes slightly; something in their facial muscles relaxes, something brightens in their eyes, and they smile.”
― Tom Piazza, Why New Orleans Matters

“The past in New Orleans cohabits with the present to an extent not even approximated in any other North American city.”
― Tom Piazza, Why New Orleans Matters

“New Orleans has a mythology, a personality, a soul, that is large, and that has touched people around the world. It has its own music (many of its own musics), its own cuisine, its own way of talking, its own architecture, its own smell, its own look and feel.”
― Tom Piazza, Why New Orleans Matters

“So which is real, the grief or the celebration? Both, simultaneously, and that is why it is profound.”
― Tom Piazza, Why New Orleans Matters

“Go into debt.'

It was the best advice anyone had ever given me. As time went on, I learned that this is a very New Orleans attitude, for good and ill.”
― Tom Piazza, Why New Orleans Matters

“Everyone who loves New Orleans learns to love it with its flaws.”
― Tom Piazza, Why New Orleans Matters

“New Orleans has a mythology, a personality, a soul, that is large, and that has touched people around the world.”
― Tom Piazza, Why New Orleans Matters

“Anger is famous for being, often, a mask for profound grief.”
― Tom Piazza, Why New Orleans Matters

“Nagin is a decent man,”
― Tom Piazza, Why New Orleans Matters

“be a certain percentage of citizens who will try to strip-mine and suck dry everything they can,”
― Tom Piazza, Why New Orleans Matters

“people of New Orleans spun a culture out of their lives—a music, a cuisine, a sense of life—that has been recognized around the world as a transforming spiritual force.”
― Tom Piazza, Why New Orleans Matters

“People born in New Orleans always go back,”
― Tom Piazza, Why New Orleans Matters

“She had arrived in dirty rags and had cooked up a striking outfit for herself, out of relief donations,”
― Tom Piazza, Why New Orleans Matters

“Chief Bo as the center, dressed, in 2005, in bright red feathers, with beadwork that should be in a museum and probably will be someday,”
― Tom Piazza, Why New Orleans Matters

“The H&R has always been the home base of the Wild Magnolias and their Big Chief, Bo Dollis.”
― Tom Piazza, Why New Orleans Matters

“It is a lesson that one has to learn continually in New Orleans. Things are always more complex than they seem.”
― Tom Piazza, Why New Orleans Matters

“Nothing in New Orleans starts on time, and this practice was no exception.”
― Tom Piazza, Why New Orleans Matters

“trombone—the audience is a working model in three dimensions of the music, a synesthesic transformation of materials. And of course the band is also watching the dancers, and getting ideas from the dancersâ€� gestures. The relationship between band and audience is in that sense like the relationship between two lovers making love, where cause and effect becomes very hard to see, even impossible to call by its right name; one is literally getting down,”
― Tom Piazza, Why New Orleans Matters

“Music was my entry point into the world of the spirit that New Orleans embodies.”
― Tom Piazza, Why New Orleans Matters