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In the months after Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans, my friend Chuck, a slammer, there, wrote a moving tribute to the musicians in the city paralyzed and how they are vital to the reconstruction of the place.

"We will empty the house, if you play your sax," I remember him in his booming baritone to a crisp late night spoken word performances. "And we'll rotate the hammer if you swing your AX / We will work with haste, just as you play your drum."

It is true that in these tragic days and difficult months following arrival of Katrina - Four years ago this week - without guys like Kermit Ruffins, John Boutte, TheSoul Rebels and The Rebirth Brass Band playing, the city j I called the house could not have persevered.

I was one of the lucky ones, and not lose my house to the storm. So when I returned to New Orleans - After the evacuation, which led me to Texas, then New Jersey - I was able to get into a good job. I helped set up a Project Katrina oral history, recording and collecting stories of people storm.I emptied the house with a group of anarchists who lived in a flooded-out church in the Ninth Ward. I cleaned up the debris and the grass mowed on the median with a bunch of soccer moms who called themselves the Katrina Krewe.

And I entered the weird shit. As the week I drove with shotgun and blogged about a guy who was driving across the country in a golf cart, the promotion of "Ried" for New Orleans.

One Sunday two people from my neighborhood in the French Quarter and Treme Lower gathered in the courtyard of the Church of St. Augustine. Founded by freed slaves in 1841, St. --August is the oldest African American church in the Catholic country. It also sits at the heart of a neighborhood that has produced dozens of jazz musicians, where it is common to see children sitting barefoot on the edge or practicing trumpet to hear a few bars of "Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans? " From inside the houses battered shotgun that the streets of his broken line....

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