Jazz Condition -- UPI Arts & Entertainment

Even on a bleak Monday night in mid-winter the New Orleans jazz scene is a cornucopia of eccentric styles. When the sun goes down the musicians come out, filling every corner with joyful and mournful sounds.

On Decatur Street, just downriver from the French Quarter, the Spotted Cat gets first jump on the night with the doubleheader of Davis Rogan on piano and Chris Davis on drums followed by one of the city's popular new bands, the Jazz Vipers, a group of young traditionalists playing pre-swing New Orleans jazz.

The Spotted Cat is a jazz mecca for young hipsters, attracting a post-college crowd of artists and musicians who carry on lively conversation along the bar and on the overstuffed spotted chairs and sofas surrounding the stage that give the room its living room-like ambiance. Behind the band hangs a huge, unframed oil portrait of James Dean, one corner curled over the edge in an appropriately sullen gesture.

Rogan, a brilliant pianist, conceptualist and bandleader who leads one of the city's most innovative brass bands, All That, excels in this more stripped down setting, singing without a microphone in a strong, clear tenor that resonates through the well-apportioned room and blasting long, sinuous barrelhouse piano lines. Davis reaches back through history to the post-ragtime innovations of New Orleans piano trailblazer Jelly Roll Morton, while Davis accompanies him on brushes with the wonderful march time "second line" cadences of the New Orleans street parades.

Davis calls low to the crowd "Whoooaaaaohh," then gestures with his right hand and they echo the response. He stops, sings it an octave higher, using even more hand gestures to get the audience to answer. David hangs fire, violently stomps his foot four times and launches into the New Orleans classic "Oop Oop A Doo" and proceeds to string out a medley of Big Easy staples -- "Don't You Just Know It," "High Blood Pressure," and "I'm Gonna Be A Wheel Someday." Rogan goes on to play a beautiful version of "On the Sunny Side of the Street" and an elegiac "Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans."

On break somebody starts arguing about the difference between jazz and funk.

"Jazz is played ahead of the beat and funk is behind the beat," asserts the wag.

"You can't place jazz under a strict metrical definition," counters someone across the bar. "A jazz player can play funk or reggae, but not necessarily the other way around."

"Look what you've done," Davis chides Rogan. "This used to be an easygoing room. Now you play here and everybody's fighting."

If the Spotted Cat is the room so hip the customers won't admit they're listening to jazz, over in the French Quarter Donna's is a jazz club where the musicians have to play pop songs to satisfy the tourists. Drummer Bob French leads a capable quintet featuring the excellent trumpeter Wendell Brunious through what can only be described in musical terms as a bizarre set that included "Deep In the Heart of Texas," "The Shadow of Your Smile," "Darktown Strutters' Ball" (!), "Happy Birthday" and "Mustang Sally."

In the middle of this carnage French announces "this is a dance song," and the band launches into Herbie Hancock's "Cantaloupe Island." Suddenly the band is alive with jazz, playing with real feeling instead of the shuck-and-jive and Brunious takes an electrifying solo into "Watermelon Man." In a touching moment, the fine woman vocalist Ellen Smith gets up to sing "Fever" and notes: "This may be the last time I'm around to do this for awhile. I'm about to be called up." Smith is in the National Guard.

The band finishes its set with "Bourbon Street Parade," the tourists wave paper napkins over their heads and dance around in a strange parody of a second line parade, and everybody leaves happy.

Down on Bourbon Street at Fritzel's European Bar there are no tourists, but a crack quartet of New Orleans traditionalists is firing away on the authentic material. Tailgating trombones, virtuoso clarinet breaks, banjo player slamming away with all his might, and a piano player hammering away on the keys, we hear "Muskrat Ramble" and "Basin Street Blues" played with the fire with which those songs were cast.

Bartender Lisa Lynn, a tall, sultry redhead with a low-cut leopard skin dress, striped stockings and thigh boots, finishes pouring an Abita and steps out from behind the bar to take the microphone and sing "Am I Blue" and "Paper Moon." Lynn smiles, returns to the bar and the band finishes with "Way Down Yonder In New Orleans."

Fritzel's is about to close and Lynn asks us to join her at Lafitte's, where there's a piano and the bar never closes. Another night in New Orleans is well under way.