THERE'S MORE TO THE MUSIC OF NEW ORLEANS THAN JAZZ
The out-of-the-way musical venues of New Orleans -what might be described as Off Bourbon Street and Off Off Bourbon Street - are smaller, simpler, and perceptibly less glamorous than the clubs typically preferred by tourists. But they are also the locales of a kind of musical activity indigenously their own -either more challenging or more intimate, more unabashedly experimental or more mindful of grassroots tradition than their more fashionable neighbors.
''New Orleans Now,'' a four-part series beginning its run on Arts and Entertainment Friday night at 11, explores the vital musical diversity of this port city whose French, Caribbean, Spanish, Cajun and African heritage has filtered through its native jazz and blues traditions to form a profusion of musical styles and techniques.In weekly hour long installments, the series pokes into many of the atmospheric clubs that ornament the city's varied neighborhoods. It examines musical continuities between generations.
The rock bands The Cold, the Backbeats and Lenny Zenith & Pop Combo were recorded on the Riverboat President, a five-story paddlewheeler that serves as one of the city's floating concert halls, while the Radiators, a six-piece band taped at the 1984 World's Fair, melds Caribbean rhythms to its dual-guitar rock and roll.
This concern for comprehensibility and context is characteristic of Mr. Gabor's work on the project, which resembles that of an ardent musical anthropologist. ''New Orleans Now'' is culled from some 56 hourlong programs - drawing on approximately 400 hours of raw footage - that Mr. Gabor has produced since early 1983, shown by Cox Cable as an ongoing series entitled ''Music City.'' ''This music has always been one of my loves,'' he said, ''and we wanted to document all of the things that were happening here before all of the modernizing influences came and took them away.''.