The Big Easy is America’s great city of music, a true independent that dances to its own tunes. ‘Music moves through this place like power through an electrical grid,’ says Chicago-born O’Grady, who was first drawn to its artful excess 30 years ago. ‘Here is unrelenting visual delight where even the houses wear jewellery. Life is not a grind, or even a cabaret. It’s more a masked ball.’ He meets the characters who provide New Orleans’ backbeat, and hears how the city is still being redefined by Hurricane Katrina.
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