From Basin to Bourbon Street

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 794, 8 October 1954, Page 15

From Basin to Bourbon Street

T’S a sad fact that Mrs. Dorothea Joblin reports to jazz-men everywhere. It seems that Basin Street, New Orleans, is no longer the seat of the mighty in jazz. Of course, the alto sax still wails out into the blue, blue night there, the trumpets lick up and down the twelve-tone scale and the bull-fiddle boop-a-doops as of yore, but the real, hot stuff has packed up its traps and moved to Bourbon Street. It sounds suspiciously as though jazz has become respectable. However, in many respects New Orleans is still as it always waswith Canal Street the dividing line between Creole and modern American civilisations, the fascinating architecture with its lingering aura of old Spanish gallantry, the Bohemian foregatherings of artists in their untidy studios, the hot, steamy climate — and the. streetcar named Desire. Her visit to New Orleans, though, is just a part of Mrs. Joblin’s trip, which may be described as not simply round-the-world, but tacking-here-and-there. In her series of talks I Stayed There, to be heard in ZB Women’s Hour and from 1XH starting October 8, Mrs. Joblin tells of the charming simplicity of living in Tokyo which was accompanied by a highly-conventionalised code of manners. Then she will take listeners to Zanzibar, describe for them life in ah African household, in Agra and in the Solomon Islands.