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It's important to address young people in the reopening of New Orleans. In rebuilding, let's revisit the potential of American democracy and American glory.
And if citizens of New Orleans who are really contemplating coming back heard that we're really intent upon making the place secure again - regardless of whether the levees held or not - then I think a rebuilding process would really take shape.
It can get pretty hectic in New Orleans whenever I go shopping. So I'll fly to Houston, buy my groceries, and then come back - nobody cares there because I'm not J.J. Watt.
I just want to spearhead and lead a new style of New Orleans music.
I'm sure that there are reasonable people that had some reasonable projections about the future of New Orleans, but none of those could include not trying to rebuild the city and make it better than it was before.
I'm always honored to see my music and New Orleans Bounce make its way into mainstream culture.
It's one of the greatest festivals in the world. New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Fest is the best all-around... It's an honor to be closing it.
I've always wanted to sing and to be an entertainer. After high school, I moved from New Orleans to Los Angeles and started songwriting. But I didn't really get serious until then.
You will never see Lil Wayne in New Orleans. You will never see those type of guys in New Orleans because the hate and the jealousy is that real and it's that overwhelming.
The blues. It runs through all American music. Somebody bending the note. The other is the two-beat groove. It's in New Orleans music, it's in jazz, it's in country music, it's in gospel.
Invite the best and brightest to compete for a grand prize to come up with designs, including new zoning, building codes and so forth, for New Orleans that could make it safe from water, and let the state and city pick the plan that works best for Louisiana.
I don't know what America would be without New Orleans and the music.
We have been working with Habitat for Humanity and we have built eighty homes, 80% of which are being lived in by New Orleans' musicians. It is called the Musicians' Village and at the center is the Ellis Marsalis Center for Music.
I'm a bounce artist, straight born and raised from New Orleans, Louisiana, and I love what I do.
We used to play football on the levee, with no shirts on in the summer - August in New Orleans - and my skin would turn red. They'd call me Redskin, Red Apache, then it turned around to Apache Red.
New Orleans is just so full of culture in the music content - blues, folk. I was introduced to a lot of things. My mother didn't keep me away from other music. She only kept me away from rap. The closest I got to rap was D'Angelo.
It's just the vibe I got when I landed in New Orleans. The culture is absolutely different. It's so dangerous, I tell you, I fly in and I fly out of town. That's how scared I am. And this is where I came from.
I grew up in the South, in New Orleans, where guys torture you all the time. So I didn't really grow up on the self-esteem campaign. When you were lousy at something, they told you you were lousy, and they told you how to fix it.
I think The Meters are like The Beatles to us in New Orleans, you know.
I've been all over the world. I love New York, I love Paris, San Francisco, so many places. But there's no place like New Orleans. It's got the best food. It's got the best music. It's got the best people. It's got the most fun stuff to do.
Being gay and coming up in New Orleans was not easy. At first I was very terrified and very timid.
My brother Art was a doo-wopper. He had a group that sat out on a park bench in New Orleans and sang harmonies at night, and they'd go around and win all the talent shows and get all the girls, you know.
At the end of the day, I'm a New Orleans musician. Whatever that means.
For a long time a lot of people thought New Orleans wasn't a safe place and that it was very ratchet.
Man, I was scared. I didn't know what to think. All of a sudden, I got a record climbing the charts, and I'm out in the streets. You know, workin' on the docks. And the first week, it sold something like 40,000 in New Orleans.
Since I'm born here, my music will always have some New Orleans elements.
I started travelling doing shows everywhere to make people feel like a sense of New Orleans wherever they may be.
The only thing we try and do is just be a part of the gumbo that New Orleans is.
I'm steady trying to make this bounce stuff mainstream and do some wonderful and great things for the culture of New Orleans.
In New Orleans, we like to interact with the crowd. We don't like people sitting down.
Housing vouchers are a vital lifeline for many people I know in New Orleans and around the country, including struggling artists.
New Orleans is like a big musical gumbo. The sound I have is from being in the city my whole life.
Everybody in the world now wants to twerk. We don't twerk here in New Orleans, we bounce, we wiggle, we wobble, we shake, we bust it open, bend it over, we do it all.
We're not really trying to do anything besides represent where we come from, and that's New Orleans.
There's no such thing as 'sissy bounce.' We don't separate it here in New Orleans at all. It's just bounce music. Just because I'm a gay artist, they don't have to put it in a category or label it.
In New Orleans, we celebrate everything. It's probably the only place you'll see people dancing in a funeral home.
Everything changed after Katrina. It's a new New Orleans now and I think it's better. It was a wake-up call and it rebuilt and cleaned up the city. It all happened for a reason. I'm now grateful for Katrina.
From the food to the Mardi Gras Indians to the brass bands and the second liners parading through the street, Jazz Fest presents New Orleans in one place.
I've grown in tremendous ways with enhancing my music, my ability to perform on stage and travel all around to spread bounce music. I've come so far from being that little black boy growing up in New Orleans to now.
Music in New Orleans has always been the heartbeat that drives the city. It was that even before Katrina, and that's what we had to rely on after the storm.
Twerking - and it's a lot more than twerking - comes from a long history of music and dance in New Orleans. Twerkin' happen around the world for a long time now, so I'm very excited that it's coming into the public eye, as long as it's respected.
I listen to Nine Inch Nails, Green Day, U2, and it becomes part of me, comes out in my music. Wherever it goes, there will always be the fabric of New Orleans in it.
We come from New Orleans, so everything is emotional - for, once the music takes over, and we start blowing, we go into a different zone that takes over our whole body.
When I'm creating a song, I'm thinking of a hip-hop beat playing on a live drum set - kinda like the Roots would do. I will put New Orleans music on top of that with some other rhythms.
New Orleans is like my blood; it's not going anywhere. And then I just take different things that I've learned over the years and add them to what I'm doing with the natural New Orleans sound.
No matter what setting I play in, I will always be New Orleans. It's one of the only cities where you can hang out with the Marsalis family, the Neville brothers, whoever it might be, and we all play together.
If I have to be considered any type of jazz artist, it would be New Orleans jazz because New Orleans jazz never forgot that jazz is dance music and jazz is fun. I'm more influenced by that style of jazz than anything else.
Everywhere I go around the world, we have fans of New Orleans. Sometimes we go places, and people don't really know who we are, but they know New Orleans, and once we say we are from New Orleans, we have a lot of supporters.
It doesn't matter where we are. We can be marching down the streets of New Orleans, or we can be onstage in front of 15,000 people. As long as I know that I'm about to put my horn to my mouth and play some notes, that's what I most look forward to.
Sometimes it's very hard for other New Orleans musicians to break out. It starts with the musician. They have to be willing to take a risk. Playing in the city, you can get comfortable. You think things are going well, but you're always in the city.