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New Orleans after Katrina

The impact of Katrina looks extraordinary from this side of the Atlantic. Global warming of the Gulf of Mexico looks to guarantee a regular supply of category 4 or 5 hurricanes to a coastal area where the emergency plans only go to a 3 even if they were implemented. See Wikipedia for current state of warming debate. Some houses on stilts with anchor cables, big windows that can be opened to let the hurricanes through and some new free way escape routes to higher ground look like the order of the day and this is just the beginning for coastal areas all around the globe.

My visit to New Orleans some 15 years ago marks the start of my serious involvement with computerized music when I bought a volume of piano transcriptions of Jelly Roll Morton's music from a shop in a street the French Quarter where he had played piano in a bordello. After transcribing three or four by hand in to MIDI format I began to search the web for existing MIDI transcriptions and the rest as they say is history.

So the potential loss of that wonderful city with it's extraordinary cultural history and diversity feels really personal even at this distance.

I hope that this brings the seriousness of the global warming risks to the forefront of political priorities in the US because the rest of the world can't fix it without you.

Sometimes world events just put our struggle to establish a nice little music business into a different perspective.

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