US: Denis Staunton returns to New Orleans where 70,000 now live in a city that housed 450,000 before Hurricane Katrina
You could hear it halfway down Frenchmen Street, the trumpet answering the tuba and the clarinet picking up the melody, with a fiddle and a guitar feeding complex harmonies into a great, swinging stew of classic New Orleans jazz.
Inside The Spotted Cat, a couple of dozen people were listening to the Jazz Vipers, half of them dancing around a tall, skinny man in a battered black hat and a tailcoat who stared at his feet as they moved in tiny, swift, intricate steps.
Four months after Katrina, the music has come back to the Marigny, a bohemian district just beyond the French Quarter that is home to the city's liveliest jazz clubs.
Juan Santa Marina has come to The Spotted Cat most nights since he returned to New Orleans last month, hoping to recapture the spirit of the city before the hurricane.
"Everything is the same in a way. But something is missing - the soul, I think," he said.
Juan is one of about 70,000 New Orleanians who now live in a city that housed 450,000 before Katrina and with an apartment and a job to come back to, he feels fortunate.
We last met when I gave him a lift out of the city in early September, after he had spent almost a week outside the Convention Center waiting for buses that never came or which were too full to take him. Juan stayed with a friend in Albuquerque, New Mexico for two months before his employers, Tower Records, told him there was work in Henderson, Nevada, a little town near Las Vegas.
In late November, Tower Records reopened in New Orleans and Juan came home to join a skeleton staff that keeps the shop open six hours a day from Thursday to Sunday.
"I wish we could be open until midnight like before but there used to be 22 of us and now there's only six. All the stores are the same," he said.
The little things remain difficult in New Orleans - posting a letter, buying groceries, visiting a doctor. With 80 per cent of the population still evacuated, severe labour shortages mean that rubbish is collected irregularly, most schools remain closed and the shops and restaurants that are open offer a restricted service.
Built on the highest ground in the city, the French Quarter avoided flooding after Katrina, although the storm ripped up trees and smashed roofs and windows. Many businesses have reopened but the quarter remains quiet and a curfew enforced by mounted police officers obliges the bars along Bourbon Street to close at 2am.
"We're trying to push it, staying open until three or four but it's crazy. This is New Orleans. We don't start going out until 10 o'clock and the bars should be open all night," one bartender told me as he looked out on his empty premises on Bourbon Street.
The federal government announced last week that it would pay for the levees around New Orleans to be strengthened in time for next year's hurricane season. The city hopes the news will encourage more businesses to reopen and reassure investors that New Orleans' future is secure.
But to understand the scale of the problem facing New Orleans, you have to leave the French Quarter for the Ninth Ward, one of the city's poorest districts and one that suffered most during Katrina.
Almost every house is damaged and many are in ruins, with furniture, clothes and shoes strewn everywhere. Cars lie upside down, rusting where they landed after the flood lifted them up and tossed them on the ground.
Here and there, small groups of people pick through the rubble, trying to salvage a few keepsakes from what was once their family home.
A few men stand near Fats Domino's house, where someone has spray-painted "Fats Domino RIP". In fact, the musician, who stayed in New Orleans throughout the storm, is alive - if not so well - and living in a hotel in the centre of the city.
Eight five per cent of the people of New Orleans were born in the city and many residents of the Ninth Ward had never been anywhere else before Katrina came.
Now they are everywhere - in Texas, Mississippi, Georgia, Tennessee, even in Utah and Minnesota - and nobody knows when they will be able to return. The city has made the French Quarter and the Central Business District its priorities, figuring that if the most profitable parts of the city are restored, the rest will follow.
Some in the Ninth Ward fear that they will be forgotten as a new city is designed and many suspect that the business community would be happier if the poor - most of whom are black - never return to New Orleans.
Rick Fisher, a trainee teacher who evacuated to Memphis, Oklahoma City and Dallas, is sceptical about conspiracy theories but believes that New Orleans' municipal government has to change before the city can renew itself.
"If we get rid of those politicians and have to lose some diversity, I'd accept the trade-off," he said. Rick took me to see his girlfriend's house in Lakeview, on the banks of Lake Pontchartrain, which he said was badly damaged by the storm. When we turned into her street, he discovered that the house had already been razed to the ground.
He walked through where the house was, pointing out where the kitchen stood, where the bedrooms were and where he spent most evenings with his girlfriend.
"When her kids went to bed, I used to go out and get pizza, and come back and we'd watch David Letterman. We used to sit right here. It's all gone," he said.
Rick's own house survived Katrina but as he struggles to find a job and frets about the future, he's no longer sure if he had a lucky escape.
"A lot of people feel this and I feel it too. I sometimes wish I'd lost everything because then I wouldn't have to decide. I'd just have to go somewhere else and start again, maybe try living in New York - I've always wanted to. I've decided I'm staying here but I don't know - about myself, the city, about anything," he said.
The White House said it had agreed to spending of about $3.1 billion to strengthen the New Orleans levee system, a critical move in reviving the city.
"The levee system will be better and stronger than it ever has been in the history of New Orleans," said Donald Powell, the Bush administration's point person for the reconstruction of the Gulf Coast area.
Mayor Ray Nagin, struggling to persuade displaced residents to return to the shattered city, said at a White House briefing, "This action says: 'Come home to New Orleans'." - (Additional reporting by Reuters)