LimmudFest New Orleans 2016

Author of the Gorilla Man and the Empress of Steak: A New Orleans Family Memoir, Fertel will reflect on his family’s taking root on Rampart Street just as jazz was being born. He will explore the role of Rampart St. Jews in the birth of jazz, from Louis Armstrong saying he learned how to sing from the heart by listening to Tilly Karnofsky’s Russian lullabies, to the principle of bricolage — making value out of the valueless — that, while an African vestige, Armstrong could also have learned on the Karnofsky rag and bone cart. The principle of bricolage offers a window into what jazz is all about.