New Orleans Notebook: Marcia Ball and Henry Butler headline WWOZ’s Piano Night

WWOZ PIANO NIGHT AT HOUSE OF BLUES: This is an annual fundraiser for NOLA’s community radio station. It’s a celebration of New Orleans piano styles.

Got here a little late because I’d been celebrating some New Orleans cooking styles, but I did catch Palladium favorite, Joe Krown, and visited with Krown outside. One of the stars of our Boogie Woogie Stomp in 2011 and a Hammond B3 show that same summer with his R&B trio, Joe has just released a solo piano CD and he carried a box-full under his arm.

Some fans outside were asking if he gave piano lessons. He smiled, then leaned to me:

“Hurry back inside,” he said. “Marcia is just going on.”

I angle my way through the crowd to a good spot near the stage as Marcia Ball and her band crank-up. She’s one of my favorites. I met her backstage at Jazz Fest in the early ‘90s. She had just come off the Ray Ban stage and we were both waiting for Van Morrison to play. I think we talked about the first time I saw her at an outdoor show she had done for WMNF in Largo. But I mostly remember how nice she was to a stranger backstage.

Twenty years on, she’s still long and lean – sitting far back from the keys to give her always- bare arms some room to move. The only nod to the passing of time is a V of gray – Bonnie Raitt style – at the front of her black tresses.

Playing with her full band, she pounded through a powerhouse set that included her “Red Beans Cooking” and the classic “Play With Your Poodle.”

Closing the show was Henry Butler, blind since birth, and one of NOLA’s best piano men. He’s a virtuoso, who moves easily from boogie, to improvisational jazz to classical samplings. His jazz excursions fall somewhere between Errol Garner and Sun Ra but he keeps it all rooted in New Orleans R& B.

I hope to get Butler to the Palladium sometime for our Boogie Woogie Stomp or with his trio. He’d appeal to both the blues and the jazz audience.

Filing out past the vivid collection of primitive artwork – the signature of the House of Blues – I ran into more Tampa Bay folks. Jazz Fest in April and May is a little like North Carolina mountains in  July and August – everywhere you turn you run into somebody from home.