Fat Tuesday – Bourbon Street Parade
Today’s the day folk in England Shrove Tuesday, when one is supposed to get “shriven” by doing a penance before Lent. Another name for the occasion – favoured in Ireland – is Pancake Day, although I’m not sure what sort of penance it is to be forced to eat pancakes. Further afield the name for this day is a bit more glamorous. Mardi Gras, which I translated for the title of this post as Fat Tuesday using my schoolboy French, doesn’t make me think of pancakes but of carnivals. And being brought up in a house surrounded by Jazz, it makes me think of New Orleans and the wonderful marching bands that played not just during the Mardi Gras parades but at just about every occasion for which they could find an excuse, including funerals.
The Mardi Gras parades gave rise to many of the great tunes of New Orleans Jazz, many of them named after the streets through which the parade would travel, mainly in the famous French Quarter. Basin Street, South Rampart Street, and Bourbon Street are among the names redolent with history for Jazz fans and musicians around the world. The New Orleans Mardi Gras has on recent occasions sometimes got a bit out of hand, and you probably wouldn’t want to take kids into the French Quarter for fear they would see things they shouldn’t. Personally, though, I’d love the chance to savour the atmosphere and watch the parades.
Anyway, the clip I’ve chosen to mark the occasion of Fat Tuesday is Bourbon Street Parade. The one and only time I went to New Orleans I felt a real thrill walking along this Bourbon Street, just because I’ve heard the tune so many times on old records. I didn’t go in Mardi Gras time, however, but in the middle of summer. The heat was sweltering and the humidity almost unbearable, but the air was filled with music as well as moisture. It was impossible to sleep in the heat, so I stayed up moving from bar to bar, drinking and listening to music until I was completely exhausted.
The tune was written by the late Paul Barbarin, who died in 1969 during a street parade in New Orleans. What a way to go! He also plays on the clip I included here. I picked this particular version because it features a much underrated British musician, Sammy Rimington. My Dad once played with Sammy Rimmngton and I remember the unqualified admiration with which he (my Dad) spoke of his (Sammy’s) playing.
P.S. This year Pancake Day coincides with both the Lunar New Year and the start of Ramadan. Best wishes to all who celebrate any of these!
In the Dark 
February 17, 2026 at 9:41 pm
During my one visit to New Orleans, in the summer of 1990 after a physics conference, I stayed in a hotel in the French Quarter called the Cornstalk, formerly the house where Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote the anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The Cornstalk has been massively done up since, but in those days it was cheaper than the characterless businessman’s hotels downtown, and it had the one thing that mattered: air conditioning. New Orleans is the only place I’ve been where the combination of heat and humidity rivalled Singapore, which is surrounded by sea and one degree off the equator. Like you I binged on the (trad) jazz clubs.