American musician Jon Batiste
Credit: © Ron Adar, Shutterstock

We don’t need an excuse to celebrate American jazz musician, bandleader, and composer Jon Batiste, but April is also jazz appreciation month! Batiste is known for his original compositions, combining New Orleans jazz with funk, pop, and R&B music. He has won a number of Grammy Awards for his music. This month, Batiste was recognized at the 64th Grammy Awards. Batiste’s album We Are was released in March 2021. In 2022, Batiste won five Grammy Awards including album of the year, best American roots performance, best American roots song, best score soundtrack for visual media, and best music video. He took home the most awards from the ceremony, hopefully making room on his shelves to display the trophies.

Jonathan Michael Batiste was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, on Nov. 11, 1986. He grew up in a musical family in suburban Kenner. Batiste began playing the conga drums as a child with his family band, the Batiste Brothers Band. Batiste began playing piano at the age of 11. He was accepted to the Juilliard School in New York City at the age of 17. Batiste formed multiple bands while in college, including the Jon Batiste Trio and Stay Human. While he was studying at Julliard, Batiste released two albums: Times in New Orleans (2005) and Live in New York (2006). Batiste earned a bachelor’s degree in classical piano in 2008 and a master’s degree in jazz studies in 2011. He recorded albums throughout his studies, including the EPs In the Night (2008) and The Amazing Jon Batiste! (2009), and the album My N.Y. (2011). EP stands for extended play and is a type of musical recording that includes several songs but is not considered a full-length album.

In 2011 and 2012, Batiste portrayed himself in Treme, a fictionalized television show based on his extended family’s experience in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Batiste also appeared in the American director Spike Lee’s movie Red Hook Summer (2012). In the movie, Batiste played a musician and cab driver named T. K. Hazelton.

Starting in 2008, Batiste worked as associate artistic director and music curator for the National Jazz Museum in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood. Batiste released the album Social Music with Stay Human in 2013. In 2015, he joined “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” as the bandleader and musical director with Stay Human. Batiste’s music is featured on the album The Process (2013) with various artists. He released Christmas with Jon Batiste in 2016. In 2017, Batiste began serving as the musical director for The Atlantic magazine. Batiste released his first solo album, Hollywood Africans, in 2018. In 2019, he released the live albums Anatomy of Angels: Live at the Village Vanguard (2019) and Chronology of a Dream: Live at the Village Vanguard (2019).

Batiste co-composed the soundtrack for the Disney and Pixar Studios animated motion picture Soul (2020). He won an Academy Award for best original score. He became the second Black composer to win an Academy Award for composing music, behind the American jazz musician Herbie Hancock.

May 8, 2018

Yesterday, May 7, marked the 300th anniversary of the 1718 founding of New Orleans, one of the world’s busiest ports and the largest city in Louisiana. The city is also a business, cultural, and industrial center of the southern United States. True to the character of New Orleans, the city famous for Mardi Gras is celebrating its birthday in grand style. Tricentennial events began late in 2017 and will continue throughout 2018.

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New Orleans Tricentennial Logo. Credit: © New Orleans Tricentennial

The city’s famous St. Louis Cathedral is hosting a celebration of 300 years of Roman Catholicism in the United States. The women of New Orleans, from nuns and chefs to jazz singers and civil rights activists, are being honored in a city-wide and year-long event called “Builders and Rebuilders.” The city’s early French history is detailed in an exhibition called “New Orleans, the Founding Era” at the Historic New Orleans Collection, a museum and research center in the storied French Quarter. The era of Spanish rule (1762-1800) is recalled in a series of portraits at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art.

St. Louis Cathedral faces Jackson Square in the heart of the French Quarter in New Orleans, Louisiana. Credit: Sara Dreyfuss

Numerous concerts and festivals are celebrating the city’s famous jazz music scene and its delicious and renowned Cajun cuisine. Notable projects for the tricentennial include the renovation of the city’s historic Gallier Hall, an expansion of Louis Armstrong International Airport, and improvements to famed Bourbon Street and to parks along the riverfront.

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Louisiana. Credit: WORLD BOOK map

New Orleans lies along the Mississippi River, about 100 miles (160 kilometers) north of where the river flows into the Gulf of Mexico. It is the South’s oldest major city. New Orleans was founded in 1718 by Jean Baptiste le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville. Bienville was governor of the French colony of Louisiana. He named the city La Nouvelle-Orléans (French for New Orleans) after Philippe, Duke of Orléans, who ruled France for King Louis XV, then a youth. The city became part of the United States with the 1803 Louisiana Purchase.

August 28, 2015

A street intersection lies flooded near downtown New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina struck the city in August 2005. Ten years later, some aspects of the city have yet to recover. (© Chris Graythen, Getty Images)

Residents of New Orleans and other areas along the U.S. coast of the Gulf of Mexico made plans to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the landfall of Hurricane Katrina on Saturday, August 29. Legions of news reporters have descended upon the Crescent City (a nickname for New Orleans, as is Big Easy).  Once there, reporters file anniversary reports, drawing comparisons between the pre- and post-storm city. They have found miles of new and reinforced levees and clear signs of rebirth and stagnation, joy and despair.

President Barack Obama spoke on Thursday, August 27, in New Orleans, where he met with Mayor Mitch Landrieu and a number of residents from the city, who had revived their lives and neighborhoods after the storm. Speaking at the Andrew P. Sanchez Community Center in the Lower Ninth Ward, the president recalled the pain and loss in a city where four-fifths of the land was once covered by floodwater. He praised the wherewithal of Gulf Coast residents and the progress they have made with more than $100 billion in federal government spending, much of which has gone to tear down and rebuild homes and public facilities, re-engineer and construct vast lengths of flood barriers, and restore wetlands that cushion the region from future storm surges (huge waves of water driven inland by wind).

 “As hard as rebuilding levees is, as hard as rebuilding housing is, real change—real lasting structural change—that’s even harder,” Obama said, acknowledging progress and addressing continuing challenges. “And it takes courage to experiment with new ideas and change the old ways of doing things. That’s hard. Getting it right and making sure that everybody is included and everybody has a fair shot at success—that takes time.”

On August 29, 2005, Katrina’s wind gusts reached up to 125 miles (200 kilometers) per hour as the storm smacked several Gulf Coast communities. Katrina pushed a storm surge  that reached up to 34 feet (10.4 meters) high. The surge reached hundreds of feet inland. In New Orleans, the storm surge moved rapidly up man-made channels, breaching levees and flooding low-lying neighborhoods. One thousand eight hundred people died, most of them in New Orleans. Hundreds of thousands were left homeless, and tens of thousands fled their hometown. Many of them would never return.

Much of New Orleans lies below sea level and is protected by a system of flood barriers called levees. The red lines on this map show the city’s major levees. Areas below sea level suffered the greatest damage from Hurricane Katrina in 2005. (World Book map)

Ten years on, evaluation of the region’s progress falls largely along class and income lines, with poor blacks in the city and poor whites from the bordering parishes most likely to say that the area’s much reported-upon recovery has been overblown. Wealthier citizens, many of whom lived in the French Quarter and other neighborhoods on higher ground, suffered less and tend to have a sunnier picture of the region’s recovery.

In such neighborhoods as the Lower Ninth Ward, residents take note of freshly painted, rehabbed homes with tidy lawns and gardens competing with adjacent overgrown lots and empty houses, which shelter breeding snakes and rats, drug dealing, and other illicit activities. In St. Bernard Parish, southeast of the city, just about every home—some 25,000 structures—was damaged or destroyed by either the storm surge or by steeping for weeks in stinking oil-polluted floodwater. Today, roughly two-thirds of the homes in the parish have been rebuilt, with a population that has rebounded to about two-thirds of its pre-storm total. Most of the parish’s homes lie within the region’s bolstered levee system, though some areas remain unprotected and are at severe risk of flooding from future storms and rising sea levels caused by global warming.

As much as some boosters would paint the city as being back to normal, the face of New Orleans has changed. Most of its public schools were shut down and later reopened as charter schools operated under a private-public partnership. And as neighborhoods rebound, gentrifying outsiders have altered the character of the place. (Gentrification is a process whereby wealthier people move into poor urban neighborhoods, changing the balance of the neighborhood.) Prior to Katrina’s landfall, more than two-thirds of the city claimed African American heritage. Tens of thousands of blacks fled the city during pre- and post-storm evacuations, however, and many settled permanently in other locales. Today, the city remains majority black, though whites and Hispanics represent increasing shares of the city’s ethnic mix. Tremé (treh MAY), one of the city’s oldest traditionally African American neighborhoods, now has twice as many white residents as in 2005.

The physical and demographic changes brought on by Katrina have been jarring to those who have long called New Orleans home. Nothing—not even billions in federal spending—can begin to replace the lost lives or the interesting character of the city before the storm. But New Orleans, as much as anywhere in America, is accustomed to change. Flags of France, Spain, the Confederate States, and the United States have flown over the South’s oldest major city, and its resilient residents are unlikely ever to raise a white banner above their beloved and troubled home.

Other World Book articles

• The Second Battle of New Orleans (a Special report)
• Weather (2005-a Back in time article)

March 4, 2014

Today is Mardi Gras, a day to let the good times roll as the merrymaking and feasting of Carnival come to a close. Also known as Shrove Tuesday, today is the last day that boisterous crowds of costumed spectators in New Orleans; Mobile, Alabama; Biloxi, Mississippi; Rio de Janeiro; Cologne, Germany; and many other cities will enjoy parades of lavishly decorated floats and attend balls and parties. Tomorrow is Ash Wednesday and the start of Lent, a religious season observed in the spring by most Christians. Lent serves as a time of fasting, prayer, and self-sacrifice in preparation for Easter.

Mardi Gras–French for Fat Tuesday–marks the end of the long Carnival season, which starts on January 6, or Twelfth Night. In Western Christian churches, Twelfth Night commemorates the coming of the wise men to the Christ child. Among Eastern Christians, the holiday celebrates the baptism of Jesus.

People come from around the world to celebrate Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Societies called krewes organize and pay for the parades. Colorfully dressed riders on the floats throw necklaces, toys, and coins called doubloons to the onlookers. The krewes also give balls and parties. Rio de Janeiro sponsors the world’s largest Mardi Gras. There, the floats are built by samba clubs, usually made up of neighborhood associations.

Costumed riders on a elaborate decorated float toss beads and other trinkets to crowds during a Mardi Gras parade. Colorful Mardi Gras parades are a highlight of the Carnival season in New Orleans. (© Alamy Images)

Mardi Gras goes back thousands of years to ancient festivals welcoming spring. In Germany Mardi Gras is called Fastnacht. In England it is called Pancake Day or Pancake Tuesday. The first recorded Mardi Gras in New Orleans took place in 1827. But some historians date the city’s first celebration to 1699, when French explorers Jean Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, and Pierre Le Moyne, Sieur d’Iberville, landed in Louisiana. Mobile, Alabama, boasts of celebrating the first organized Mardi Gras, in 1703.

August 29, 2012

Hurricane Isaac barreled into the northern coast of the Gulf of Mexico on Tuesday, bringing storm surges, heavy rains, stiff winds, flooding, and threats of tornadoes. The Category 1 hurricane, which struck parts of Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi, was expected to reach New Orleans late this evening, seven years to the day that Hurricane Katrina slammed into the city. One of the most destructive storms in United States history, Katrina killed about 1,800 people and caused about $100 billion in damage. About 80 percent of New Orleans was flooded as parts of the city’s system of levees (flood barriers) failed. Most of the approximately 1,500 Louisianians who died because of the storm were from New Orleans.

Isaac made its first landfall at about 7:45 p.m. (EDT), about 95 miles (153 kilometers) south of New Orleans in Plaquemines Parish. The storm then wobbled westward and back into the gulf but returned for a second landfall at 3 a.m. (EDT) on Wednesday, near Port Fourchon, about 60 miles (97 kilometers) south of New Orleans. Heavy rainfall and storm surges along the Gulf Coast in Louisiana and Mississippi caused flooding as deep as 14 feet (4 meters) in some areas, sending residents who chose not to evacuate to the rooftops of their houses. Local residents and members of the National Guard mounted rescue operations in Plaquemines Parish, where a 12-foot (3.6-meter) storm surge overtopped (flowed over) an 18-mile (5.4-meter) section of levee.

By midday Tuesday, the slow-moving storm had essentially stalled, leading forecasters to predict that heavy rains would pound the area for several days. New Orleans could receive up to 20 inches (51 centimeters), said an official with the National Weather Service. Residents and officials in New Orleans were keeping a close eye on the city’s levees and pumps, which had undergone a $14-billion federal upgrade after the flood protection system had failed catastrophically during the much-stronger Hurricane Katrina.

A street intersection lies flooded near downtown New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina struck the city in August 2005. The hurricane caused many deaths and widespread damage. A combination of storm surge (a rapid rise in water levels produced when winds drive ocean waters ashore), heavy rainfall, and broken levees (walls to prevent flooding) caused water to cover most of the city. (© Chris Graythen, Getty Images)

Ahead of Isaac’s arrival, the governors of Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi ordered mandatory evacuations in some counties. The next day, U.S. President Barack Obama declared a state of emergency in Louisiana. troops were placed on stand-by alert to help communities affected by the storm. New Orleans officials also declared a state of emergency and provided buses for people to wished to leave their homes voluntarily.

Before hitting the Gulf Coast, Isaac–then a tropical storm–had lashed central and southern Florida with heavy rains and strong winds. The storm also caused the deaths of 24 people in Haiti and widespread damage along that country’s southern coast. The storm left 5 people dead in neighboring Dominican Republic.

Additional World Book articles:

• Corps of Engineers
• Federal Emergency Management Agency
• The Second Battle of New Orleans (a Special Report)
• City (2005) (a Back in Time article)
• Safety (2005) (a Back in Time article)
  

March 15, 2012

The area covered by trees in many United States cities is declining, reports the U.S. Forest Service, and that loss of trees–as many as 4 million annually–translates into an astronomical loss in energy efficiency. According to the Forest Service, urban trees greatly decrease heating and cooling costs, by as much as $2,500 over the lifespan of a mature tree; improve air and water quality; and help control water drainage and erosion. The Forest Service calculates that the financial loss of an urban tree is, thus, three times greater that the cost of maintaining it.

Forest Service researchers David Nowak and Eric Greenfield arrived at their conclusion by comparing aerial photographs of 20 urban areas from the years 2002 to 2010 and evaluating the differences in the canopy coverage. They found that the tree cover in 17 out of the 20 cities had declined. New Orleans, Louisiana, had the largest decrease. (The research suggests that much of the tree loss there was a result of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.) Only one of the 20 cities–Syracuse, New York–showed an increase in the amount of tree cover.

Many urban trees are lost to the artifically made objects in a designed landscape. This is known as “impervious cover,” which includes rooftops and pavement–streets, sidewalks, and parking lots.

Trees across North America are under attack by a number of different diseases and pests. Urban trees are especially threatened by the emerald ash borer, the Japanese beetle, and a number of fungal diseases, including the Dutch elm disease.

Ginkgo trees are popular for city plantings because they are largely resistant to air pollution as well as various tree diseases. (Atoz)

Tree-planting programs in many cities have helped to slow tree loss but have not been able to reverse the larger trend. In an effort to make city planning more tree-conscious, the Forest Service is providing cities with a free software program entitled i-Tree Canopy. The program lets users analyze changes in an area’s tree coverage by pairing aerial photographs from different time periods. U.S. Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell hopes the tool will help communities plant and maintain trees more effectively.

Additional World Book articles:

• Conservation
• Green building
• Ecology
• Trees Under Threat (a special report)