Foot don't fail me now

To stomp or not to stomp?

Foot stomping. Yes, the vigorous pumping of the pederal extremity. It’s good. I like it. I can’t help it. I don’t even know I’m doing it, when I’m doing it - at least I’m usually completely unaware that I’m doing it. But it’s impossible to play the piano, well, funky piano, without doing it, for me, anyway Or, is it? Today, we shall find out. In a few hours, I’ll be over at the stage, the one I can see in the distance from my ninth-floor hotel balcony, conducting a foot-stomping experiment.

I have the window open and can hear a band from over across the harbour, above the myriad parked yachts and boats. The vocals are blended with the relentless squawking of seagulls lod in the mix. And is it the volume from the stacks of faraway speakers that is filling the sails of those quick-paced and tiny boats speeding around the marina beyond the California palms, or is it the Pacific Ocean breeze?

We’re here to perform, to play a show today in San Diego. We set off from New Orleans yesterday. Stormy weather delayed our initial flight, so we wound up taking off late and missed our connection in Atlanta. A four-hour delay before a four-hour flight, after a two-hour flight and a long wait is the stuff of long-distance Minstrelsy. We travel all the time, and such news is met with a shrug of indifference and a weary smile by your average New Orleans touring musician. For the temporarily one-legged musician, full of pain killers and hobbling with a stick, the shrug and smile are wrapped in a somewhat less indifferent and moderately wearier frown of resignation.

Concert-goers and festival revellers are perhaps unaware that our allotted 90 minutes on the stage requires three days away from home. Our day started early yesterday, and we finally made it to our rooms after midnight, 2 am, this morning, Louisiana time. Now today, having slept through lunch, I’m sitting on a high balcony nursing a broken foot which has turned a rotten banana yellow and royal purple overnight. I’m twenty miles north of the Mexican border, and just to my south, the same sun is shining on Tijuana.

An announcer’s voice from the distance wafts over and up towards me in room 920 and thanks the band that just finished and we learn enthusiastically that the Mardi Gras second-line parade is about to start. Without delay, a Dixieland band strikes up to vie with the noisy traffic of North-Harbor drive and the adjacent airport. Trumpets, clarinets, and snare drums proclaim that, like a tree that’s standing by the water, ‘we shall not be moved’.

New Orleans has come to town. Me and my band are here along with Dumpstaphunk, Chubby Carrier, and Geno Delafose, amongst others, to lighten up an already bright afternoon with that particular species of rhythmic grooviness that you only usually get over on the other side of the continent. We’re fresh from the marathon of Jazz Fest, and today’s assigned task of tearing it up for the Wild-Westerners will be a doddle. By the time we hit the stage, everyone will be half-sozzled (at least they will if they’re properly observing the cultural etiquette required of a Louisiana festival) and full of the crawfish that I’m told have been driven in all the way from Opelousas, La. It’s ‘Gator by the Bay’ Fest.

Yes, yes, this is all well and good, I hear you say. But what about the foot? Er, which one? The normal-sized one or the swollen, yellow and black and purple and now a bit grey one? The one I usually can’t help stomping with? The one that got stomped? That one? Oh, it’s alright. Doesn’t hurt, unless I put pressure on it by walking (or, stomping). The foot has two jobs: one operating the sustain pedal, and another which involves hearty and spirited stompage; a counterweight, a balance in opposition to what the hands need to do when the going gets getting funky. How efficiently it does that job remains to be seen. It may be that the first involuntary stomp is accompanied by a howl of pain - in which case, apologies!