Paul Sanchez

We asked one of our favorite musicians and songwriters, Paul Sanchez, to offer some thoughts on the events that happened this very week in 2005. He came up with a moving and heartfelt piece that says a lot about the difficult process of healing and the resilience of this city. Everyone who loves New Orleans is invited to join us in some reflections and a toast. Enjoy…

It has been eight years since Katrina, when the levees broke and New Orleans flooded. I’m not comfortable using the word anniversary with the flood– anniversary seems like it’s something we should celebrate, and no one I know wants to celebrate Katrina.

A professional musician for most of his adult life, Paul Sanchez typically spends his summers on tour. This summer, under normal circumstances, he would have also closely monitored the progress of "Nine Lives," the New Orleans-set musical he co-created, as it is developed for the Broadway stage.

But this summer was anything but normal for Sanchez. In April, his wife of 20 years, Shelly, was diagnosed with breast cancer. She underwent a double mastectomy.

With Shelly facing a long and difficult recovery, he couldn't stand the thought of leaving her to go on the road. So he swallowed his pride and called up an old friend who owns an office supply company.

Nine Lives is already well on its way to becoming a historic watermark in musical theater; there are few better indicators of the ongoing revival in the city’s music scene.

On Saturday night, Paul Sanchez stood at the back of the Ellis Marsalis Center for Music, watching “Nine Lives” come to life. Over the past two years, Sanchez, his collaborators and benefactors have raised and spent more than $150,000 to transform “Nine Lives,” New Yorker staff writer Dan Baum’s best-selling 2009 chronicle of nine New Orleanians between hurricanes Betsy and Katrina, into a “concept cast album” and, maybe, a musical.

Next Monday, June 20th, Sixth and I will showcase Nine Lives, The Musical Adaptation, a concert which follows the stories depicted in the novel Nine Lives by Dan Baum. Nine Lives tells the stories of nine individuals in New Orleans during the time period between Hurricanes Betsy and Katrina in 1965 and 2005, respectively.

Singer/Songwriter Paul Sanchez wrote music for the concert along with Colman DeKay, and Sanchez  is joined by author Dan Baum and all-stars Tony Award-winning actorMichael Cerveris (Sweeney Todd, Assassins), and musicianArsene Delay to bring these stories to life next week. The Vinyl District was lucky enough to catch an interview with Paul Sanchez in anticipation of the show.

Read the interview, then enter for a chance to join us as we take a journey through the...

They started as fans unusually proactive fans from all over the world who met online through their shared love for New Orleans music. They wound up starting an unusual record label serving many of the city's best musicians.

“I’m going to Bing it up,” Harry Shearer says. He’s in a vocal booth at Piety Street Recording as his voice drops into a fruity, Crosby-esque baritone:

Here comes old Cedric.
He’s had a fabulous year.
A hush fills the room as his
young wife draws near.

He pimps her out freely to
advance his career
and you’re their king at Mardi Gras.

He’s portraying Rex member George Montgomery, and he’s singing over Tom McDermott’s harpsichord to Kevin Griffin’s Billy Grace, Grace having become the Rex captain and King of Carnival in 2002. The litany of dirty little secrets is so new that producer Paul Sanchez didn’t get a chance to send Shearer a demo. Instead, he’s behind the mixing board singing him a guide vocal so Shearer can cut his part a line at a time....

There's a bit of the performer in most politicians -- some more than others.

Harry Connick Sr., the city's former district attorney, has frequently moonlighted as a nightclub crooner, albeit to smaller crowds than his much more famous son. Former City Councilman Oliver Thomas is currently starring in a play. And there's Frank Minyard, the trumpet-playing coroner.

Mayor Mitch Landrieu, who took singing lessons and contemplated a stage career as a young man, is the latest elected official to take to the spotlight, appearing on a CD compilation of original songs by Paul Sanchez and Colman deKay titled "Nine Lives: A Musical Adaptation."

Mystery Street 2011

Paul Sanchez producer

Wes Fontenot, Mark Bingham engineers Nine Lives

New Orleans' musical renaissance, so well documented in the HBO series Treme, has reached its apotheosis with this expansive project. Paul Sanchez, a versatile singer-songwriter who performs in dozens of different contexts around New Orleans with many of his cohorts, joined forces with lyricist Colman deKay and several local musician buddies to write forty songs based on Dan Baum's best selling novel, Nine Lives. Sanchez then enlisted over 100 musicians to realize this dream, and they took this three-ring circus into Piety Street Studios, where Sanchez - abetted by engineer Wes Fontenot and resident master of mixology Mark Bingham - proved an able ringmaster.

Baum's novel is tough to...

Lots of authors dream of their books scoring glowing praise from theNew York Review of Books, topping the bestseller lists, getting optioned for a Hollywood movie. But getting turned into a musical? How often does that happen?

That could be the fate for Nine Lives, a nonfiction account of New Orleans penned by Boulder-based writer Dan Baum. A group of New Orleans musicians recently scored $50,000 from the Pepsi Refresh Project, a contest funding revitalization projects around the Gulf to make an album based on the characters and stories in Baum's book -- the first step towards a full Broadway musical.

Just like Baum's best-selling book weaves together the strands of different New Orleans residents from Hurricane Betsy in 1965 up to Katrina , the Threadhead Records Foundation plans...

Award-winning singer-songwriter Paul Sanchez of New Orleans was ready to bring a celebratory spirit to

his debut performance at the Provincetown Jazz Festival. 

It’s been five years since Hurricane Katrina ravaged his city, “and things were starting to come along nicely,”

Sanchez says.  “You could see neighborhood kids playing on the street.”

But then the gulf oil spill happened.

Now his performance can’t help but be “tinged with sadness….A much bigger battle is being waged.  It’s such

a kick in the guts.”

Post-Kartrina “was a tragic time, but we bounced back,” Sanchez continues.  The gulf spill “is not something

people can rebuild from.  It will kill the wildlife and put thousands of people out of work.  It will last. 

Generations of fisherman and shrimpers have...

Shamarr Allen is a born front man, the kind of artist who embraces a showy star turn. Throughout his career performing and recording with brass bands, jazz ensembles, and his recent funk-rock projects, listening to Allen perform has meant hearing his sensibilities and his powerful trumpet drive a band’s rhythms and shape its sound. On Bridging the Gap, his collaboration with veteran New Orleans singer-songwriter Paul Sanchez, Allen’s charismatic musical presence is uncharacteristically subdued.

In its style, arrangements and rhythms, Bridging the Gap is primarily governed by Sanchez’s whimsical roots-rock. It doesn’t feature many star turns at all. The CD’s 10 tracks highlight the duo’s mutual influence and the fun Allen and Sanchez obviously have making music together. The ideas they...