New Orleans

This was an epic tour ending!

New Orleans Jazz Festival is King. I can’t remember the last time we were all so happy to be out in the field amidst the rabble. Now, it might have been the lure of the food that first drew us to the festival on our day off before we played. But we came back everyday, because it felt really, really good to be there. This was not an indie rock festival with one social demographic making garbage fires and pissing on fences. This was families, people from everywhere. HUGE good vibes. Bands playing their asses off. The Haitian Pavilion, an oasis of shade, drummers from RAM and amazing art. Oh and the food. Legendary. I believe that between everybody, everything was eaten at least once. I can really only speak for the African jama jama, spicy sauteed spinach alongside heavenly caramelized plantains. Best food. Not exaggerating. (I literally ate this 4 days in a row.) And the icing on the cake was that upon the last bite, when your mouth is on fire, Blam- the iced coffee stand. Them’s good times….

A word about our show. Well, two words. Cyndi Lauper. She visited our stage and belted it out with us on Girls Just Wanna Have Fun and Sprawl II. So ridiculously fun. I felt my seven year old self, clutching the vinyl of She’s So Unusual, giving my now self the biggest high five. 

And Cyndi aside, it was truly one of the best shows I can remember having. There was an overwhelming sense of love and togetherness coming from those people. It was a show that made my cheeks hurt from smiling. 

And I got to have the reverse experience the following day, finding myself surrounded by friends in the middle of the crowd during Lauryn Hill, dancing our brains out to That Thing while the sun went down. WHAT?!

What also happened during Jazz Fest weekend was a yoga workshop I co-hosted at Swan River Yoga with my dear friend Ryan Leier, who travels as much as I do but with a yoga mat, a pile of rare yogic philosophy texts and a big smiling beard. He gives great workshops and is a fantastic teacher. I had the honour and the pleasure of co-opting this one with some me-ness, and it fell together like good music. 

It actually felt really remarkable to be able to do something like that on tour. This past few years I’ve been working away at my yoga practice while on tour, mostly solo, and coming home and teaching classes in Montreal on breaks. A dual life. And these things that have felt far away from each other have been gradually coming together. And I found myself in a beautiful room in an old colonial library building in New Orleans surrounded by music loving yogis, exploring. There was this moment while the group was doing back bends and I was playing violin. I was so in what was happening around me, creating this music as a part of everyone’s experience, that I forgot everything I thought I knew for a second, and felt totally free.  It was one of those “ladder” moments that Stephen Cope talks about.

So there was the festival, the yoga, and then the crazy pulse of the city, it’s streets dripping with the lushness of greenery and late night revelry. Real blues busting out of every hole in the wall you could stumble by. Men in white suits and gold shoes. Marching bands playing Micheal Jackson. Alligators lying in the cool marshes.  And there was this sense that the struggle that people had gone through together in the last few years had filled the city with pride. I don’t know the half of it, but that feeling was there. New Orleans has a glow.

And now back to Canada I go and instead of tour depletion, I feel more full and delighted than ever. 

The pace of places will slow for sure in the next month, as so probably will my ramblings. But stay tuned for random updates.

xo Sarah.