Preservation Hall Jazz Band – Made In New Orleans: The Hurricane Sessions / Various Artists – City Of Dreams: A Collection Of New Orleans Music

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, much of the concern centered around the flood’s impact on the local music heritage. But little of the discussion was prepared to acknowledge that the scene was mostly just that: heritage. Sure, New Orleans was still home to countless fine singers and musicians, some of whom were once huge stars. But their accomplishments were pretty much in the past. With few exceptions, New Orleans has had little influence on contemporary music since the 1970s.

And yet that’s not necessarily a bad thing, either, because some New Orleans musicians continued to hone, shake up and evolve their regional sound. Despite the lack of a large audience for what they were doing, you couldn’t say they’d been standing still. These are the kinds of issues that have dogged New Orleans music for generations, and here are two box sets that once again raise such questions: At what point does a living tradition become nostalgia? At what point does music for young people become music for old people? Are these changes inevitable, or is there a way around them without betraying roots?

With the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, the answer’s a no-brainer. The PHJB was put together in 1961 to play traditional New Orleans jazz for French Quarter tourists. The group thus started out as nostalgia, or at least as music for old people. Yet early bands featured superb musicians who’d been playing this stuff all their lives, and it showed. The leaders were Billie and DeDe Pierce; she was a bluesy pianist and resonant singer, he blew a raunchy trumpet, and the Made In New Orleans tracks featuring them are still fun, if dated.

More recent versions of the band are likewise made up of skilled players, but they often sound like they’re just picking up a paycheck. And nothing on the compilation can hold a candle to the 1959 track “Lord I Don’t Want To Be Buried” by Sister Gertrude Morgan, who was never a PHJB member. She was a street evangelist and folk artist whose work sold through the gallery that became Preservation Hall, and her whanging guitar and straining voice are untamed and exhilarating in ways that reduce the PHJB of any era to a museum piece.

This CD is packaged with a DVD of mostly historical footage and Preservation memorabilia such as contracts and Mardi Gras doubloons, and no two boxes are alike. Priced at $150 for the autographed, limited-edition (504 copies) box containing original memorabilia, and $65 for the deluxe box containing reproductions, it’s the sort of item that’s hard to shell out for unless one of the musicians is a relative.

The four CDs that make up the Rounder box are often — but not always — a different story. The label began recording extensively in New Orleans in 1981; the glory days were over but many of the R&B greats were still around, often getting a second wind thanks to the ever-growing Jazz Fest (founded in 1970). Rounder was able to ride that wave as well as to stay abreast of such new developments as the hip, contemporary brass band scene.

Those bands, along with the Mardi Gras Indians, dominate the second (“Street Beat”) disc. Though young second-line specialists such as the Rebirth Brass Band will still sound dated to some, they shouldn’t. A jam such as “Feel Like Funkin’ It Up”, with its chanting vocals and riffing horns, overhauls and breathes new life into the traditional brass band sound; it’s also downright irresistible. And Monk Boudreaux & the Golden Eagles’ “Sew, Sew, Sew” catches the Indian sound as it’s heard in parades — with nothing but percussion backing the chants. (Most tribes record with a band, as the Eagles do here on “Golden Crown”.) Much of the time, this is my favorite of the four discs.

The first disc (“Big Easy Blues”) is more problematic. For one thing, it includes early-’60s tracks (Al Johnson’s “Carnival Time”, Joe Jones’ national hit “You Talk Too Much”) from the Rounder-owned Ric and Ron labels that might sound great on their own but come off as archaic next to the more modern R&B of, say, Marcia Ball (“Big Shot”), whose combination of songcraft, NOLA pianistics and rhythmic drive makes her a standout among “progressive traditionalists.”

Disc Three (“Funky New Orleans”) definitely has its moments; it’s always a large charge to hear Walter “Wolfman” Washington’s fiery blues guitar exploding out of his hard-funk rhythm section, as on “You Can Stay But The Noise Must Go” and “Funkyard”. But this disc is too often a reminder of just how unique the Meters — who started the whole NOLA funk thang while enjoying some of the last national hits to come out of the city — really were.

Pianists mostly play solo on the final disc (“Ivory Emperors”), but that’s the way it should be. And yes, there are a couple tracks from Professor Longhair (“Every Day, Every Night”, “Go To The Mardi Gras”). But the real find may be the seldom-recorded Tuts Washington (“Tee Nah, Nah”, “Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans”), a barrelhouser who influenced Fess and all the others, and whose singular combination of blues, boogie and pop held up surprisingly well long after its era had passed.

Finally, there’s the notorious eccentric James Booker. He seems to have about eight hands on “Classified”, and four of them are providing the wall of bass that serves as “fills” at the end of a line; he gets more mileage out of his left hand than anyone this side of Otis Spann. Booker represented a line of tradition-rooted explorers that had dried up even before Katrina, and it’s hard not to wonder now if that line can ever be picked up and extended again.