Armstrong Park (OUTDOORS)
The "future site of the New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park," Louis Armstrong Park is located in the Fauberg Tremé, right outside the French Quarter on North Rampart Street. Armstrong Park was created to honor New Orleans' favorite son, the great Louis Armstrong, and to preserve the site of Congo Square.
Upcoming Shows
On Thursday, September 24, we'll be doing a live broadcast of Jazz in the Park with Russell Batiste & Friends and Free Agents Brass Band.
Russell Batiste is a well-known percussionist in New Orleans who regularly performs with The Funky Meters, Charmaine Neville, and The Joe Krown Trio. Batiste has also shared the stage with Champion Jack Dupree, Harry Connick, Jr., and Maceo Parker, among many others. Raised in a musical family in New Orleans, Russell Batiste started playing drums at the age of four. He also learned to play keyboards, saxophone, guitar and bass, and started to play in the family band when he was seven.
When Hurricanes Katrina & Rita came ashore and displaced its musicians throughout the world, a group of natives became the “Free Agents Brass Band.” Many New Orleanians had relocated to Atlanta, Georgia where they would soon become desperate to hear jazz music accompanied by a traditional second line that was an ingredient of the culture they loved in pre-Katrina New Orleans. Founded by bass drummer Ellis Joseph, the Free Agents Brass Band professed to fill that yearning void. “I consider myself a free agent, so that’s where the name came from,” says Joseph. More than half a dozen other "free agent" musicians united to create the new brass band. They've been performing together since 2006.
