We go live in concert and conversation with two New Orleans artists each of whom bring their family heritage forward into contemporary music. Singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Leyla McCalla has called New Orleans home for many years, but her family ties are to Haiti. She draws on French Creole roots for inspiration, as well as from the poetry of Langston Hughes. Then, jazz saxophonist Big Chief Donald Harrison, whose musical journey includes time in New York with drummer Art Blakey’s band, talks about “Afro-New Orleans culture” and demonstrates how to bring soul, funk, and Black carnival traditions into modern jazz.

We’re digging into the Piedmont blues, a rich style that mixes ragtime, old-time country music, jazz, gospel, hollers, and historic popular songs. A conversation and music with two younger players in the tradition: guitarist/singer Jontavious Willis from rural Greenville, GA and harmonica player Andrew Alli from Richmond, VA. Plus music by Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee, Elizabeth Cotten, Cannonball Adderly and Bob Wills. Then it’s the Stooges Brass Band from New Orleans in a live studio session.

From New Orleans to southern France, Trinidad to Brazil, we celebrate Mardi Gras masquerading and dancing to the beat of Carnival music. We’ll visit with Mardi Gras Indian Chief Monk Boudreaux as he suits up in handmade, feathered regalia and struts through the streets with his gang. Then, we travel to southern France for the Carnival parade and music of Nice, and costumed revelry a few hours east in the wine country town of Limoux. Back home in French Louisiana, it’s the Cajun Courir de Mardi Gras where beggar clowns dance for a chicken to put in a communal gumbo feast. Plus calypso, New Orleans brass bands, and rhythm & blues classics to keep the krewe mamboing through the end of Fat Tuesday.

This week on American Routes, we give voice to the saxophone – an instrument revered by everyone from free jazzmen like Charles Lloyd to soul rocker Charles Neville, of the Neville Brothers. The late New Orleanian Charles Neville tells us how music carried him through his family, his neighborhood and a segregated South. Charles Lloyd, a real California dreamer, traces the roots of his modern, free style and musical collaborations back to the blues of Memphis. From the archives, we hear words and music of saxophone honker Sam Butera (Louis Prima), bebopper Sonny Rollins and modernist Yusef Lateef; plus recordings from Sidney Bechet, Lester Young, Louis Jordan, John Coltrane, and King Curtis.