If you want to understand New Orleans music — not the postcard version, but the real version, the one that’s been quietly running this city’s soul for half a century — you go to the Maple Leaf Bar on Oak Street on a Monday night.
The Maple Leaf has been open since 1974. Seven nights a week of live music, every week, for over fifty years. The very first night, a local jazz band played there and kept playing every Saturday for seven years straight — and that kind of loyalty, between a room and the people who play in it, has basically defined the place ever since. Over the decades it’s hosted an extraordinary lineup of New Orleans legends, and the building has become something like an incubator — a place where young musicians from the local universities cut their teeth alongside the icons they grew up idolizing.
And on Monday nights, that icon is George Porter Jr.
If the name doesn’t immediately register, his bass lines almost certainly will — he was the bassist and a founding member of The Meters, the band that essentially wrote the blueprint for New Orleans funk. His groove-heavy bass work became synonymous with the genre itself, and decades later he’s still active, still touring, still recording.
I went on a Monday. Porter brings his trio to the Maple Leaf most Monday nights for two shows, joined by soulful keys and powerhouse drums, and from the first note it was obvious why this residency has lasted as long as it has. This wasn’t a man performing his greatest hits for tourists. This was a master, in his element, in his room, doing the thing he’s done longer than most of the people in the audience have been alive — and clearly still loving every second of it. The pocket they locked into was so deep I genuinely lost track of time. I don’t know how long I stood there. Long enough that my legs were sore the next day and I didn’t care even a little.
Standing in that room, in a bar that’s been doing exactly this since I was a young child, watching a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award winner play like it was the most natural thing in the world – that’s when New Orleans music stopped being something I was experiencing and started being something I understood.