NEW ORLEANS: The vibrant sounds of brass bands and buskers echo through the streets of New Orleans ten years after the birthplace of jazz was devastated by Hurricane Katrina.
But while tourists may find themselves overwhelmed by choice, locals fear some of the Big Easy´s spirit of creativity and improvisation may have been lost to the floodwaters.
"There had been a long line of older musicians passing a culture on to younger musicians," guitarist Jonathan Frelich told AFP.
"That got uprooted, and the way the city decided to invest in culture didn´t have much to do with the way that it had existed before."
The loss of neighborhood clubs and an increased emphasis on tourism has shaped the opportunities for musicians and the types of music they play, he said.
"It became the mode of desperation, and the only game in town," Frelich said.
More than 1,800 people were killed across the US Gulf Coast -- the vast majority in New Orleans -- and over a million people were displaced when the Category 5 hurricane struck on August 29, 2005. The financial toll topped $150 billion.
Katrina flooded 80 percent of New Orleans with water that rose as high as 20 feet (six meters) after the coastal city´s poorly built levee system burst from the pressure of a massive storm surge.
The city descended into chaos as increasingly desperate people with little food or clean water waited days for help to arrive. It was months before the Big Easy was habitable again and over 100,000 people still have not returned to their homes.
When the waters receded, the future looked bleak. City leaders embraced the efforts of the tourism industry to package local culture as a catalyst of the recovery.
It worked. The economy is booming, a whopping nine million tourists visited last year, and there are scores of new festivals and venues offering work to local musicians.
But the cost of living has risen sharply as the city still works to rebuild its
decimated housing stock. Many musicians find themselves struggling to get by with the cost of renting or owning a home up 30 to 45 percent from pre-storm levels.