Word: gumbo
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...murdered as a teenager whose corpse resurfaces, and a Civil War officer sometimes accompanied by battered but unbowed troops. Throw in the Mafia, visiting Hollywood moviemakers, a serial killer and such fillips as Robicheaux's adopted Salvadoran daughter and pet three-legged raccoon, named Tripod, and one has a gumbo to clog any narrative. It doesn't, because Burke writes prose as moody and memory-laden as his region...
...kind of rich rhythm section that can be both goad and guide. When a musical phrase or lyric passage threatens to send Lanois off into deep space, Johnson and Jones can pull him back; when he's revising tradition, as on Indian Red, a kind of New Orleans gumbo classic, they help him explore musical byways that can bring him home again along a brand new route. If Highway 61 ran past Cape Canaveral, Lanois would be singing at the crossroads...
There have been three jazz trumpet players who could be called, with no second thought, great: Louis Armstrong, Dizzy and Miles Davis. Satch played a sweet, raucous sound that kept its roots strong in the gumbo of hometown New Orleans. Dizzy knew how to nurse a tune too, but his armor-piercing solos tore those roots right up and replanted them farther north, in the new welter of urban angst. But his music, always intrepid, remained fleet. It was spontaneous reinvention in rhythm, a kind of fun that tweaked the far edges but never crossed them...
...pointed up the odd-couple nature of the Duffy-Goodgame relationship. Duffy likes to write early and, when circumstances permit, quit early for a gourmet dinner like take-out pizza. In contrast, Goodgame does his best writing late at night, often after downing several bowls of his homemade seafood gumbo...
...some enormous female singer with a voice like a howitzer. There have been exceptions that accorded blacks roles of dignity and depth (the richest emotionally, Dreamgirls, ironically was crafted by whites). But the norm is jumping and jiving, as in the new Five Guys Named Moe and the amiable gumbo of jubilant New Orleans sounds The High Rollers...