La Rochelle Sister City Initiative

Painting by Barrie Hill - La Rochelle 'New Orlens' Jazz Festival 2010

La Rochelle sits on the west coast of France, an ocean away from its sister city New Rochelle. Face-to-face communication between residents of the two cities is rare at best. However, the cities are connected through music, jazz specifically. Through the Sister City Initiative, New Rochelle sent 24-year-old musician Zachary Lipton to La Rochelle to both play jazz and to be an ambassador to represent the Queen City of the Sound.

1 - With René Bigot, my host and director of the La Rochelle New Orleans Jazz Festival
2 - With Jérôme Nicolas at the La Rochelle casino
3 - Les Deux Tours de La Rochelle
4 - Backstage before concert with Vitamine
5 - La Rochelle City Hall

1) At educational event in La Rochelle
2) Zachary with Bernard Godon
3) With Malo Mazurié Practicing at 7am
4) Jérôme Nicolas pre-concert
5) Zachary With Philippe
6) With Didier, Jerome, and Robert in street performance.

April 30th, 2010. Zachary with Mayor Maxime Bono on the opening day of the festival.

1 - Replica (under construction) of a frigate used by Marquis de Lafayette to travel to America
2 - Centuries old drydock in the old port of La Rochelle
3 - Laurent Rieu, talented trumpeter and professor
4 - My great-great-grandfather when he was in the Navy
5 - Philippe Guignier, great banjoist and guitarist

Video coming soon. Wifi dans la maison is too slow to handle the transfer. In the meantime, here's a few moments from the tour from the perspective of mon ami l'ordinateur (Professor Macbook).

1 - Robert Mendoche et Alain Rattier
2 - Jérôme Nicolas and Philippe Guignier
3 - Backstage in La Rochelle waking up, wiped after two hours passed in a van.

Photo by Michael Lardeux

1 - Gare de La Rochelle
2 - Backstage with Didier Court preparing set list (Photo by Michael Lardeux)
3 - Schedule for Festival

Zachary Lipton - Tenor Saxophone, Didier Court - Guitar, Philippe Guignier - Guitar, Aurélien Guyot - Violin, Jérôme Nicolas - Clarinet, Robert Mendoche - Bass

[excusez-moi! - the following post was written last night but could not be published for lack of wifi access]

Hello world! I wanted to blog sooner but my schedule has exploded. After arriving yesterday afternoon in La Rochelle, I settled for a moment in my host’s lovely home before running off to dinner at a restaurant with several fellow musicians. Today, after waking up at 9:00am, I quickly tore through a lovely breakfast before warming up and running to participate in a New Orleans style street performance. Immediately after, we departed for a sound check prior to a concert in La Rochelle’s suburbs. Though I write, I must wake up in four hours to begin a new day of learning tunes, making friends and performing.

René Bigot, the festival director, and my gracious host while in La Rochelle has a wonderful house, complete with a pool and beautiful garden. The welcome from the people of La Rochelle has been warm and I have made several friends along the way. Special shout outs (did I actually just write ‘shout outs’? – there has to be a better word but I can’t summon it) go to Robert Mendoche, a trumpeter and bassist with a sharp wit; Michael Lardeux, a web designer, graphic artist and photographer who has generously donated his time to create a beautiful website (http://larochelledixiejazz.fr); Aurélien Guyot, a violiniste skilled both in traditional and modern jazz; Phillppe Guignier, a guitarist in the mold of Django Reinhardt; Jérôme Nicolas, a clarinetist whose gorgeous sound makes me want to start playing clarinet again, and Didier Court, a talented guitarist, banjoist, bandleader and sometimes singer.

For now, maybe I can compensate for my lack of cogent writing with some video from the road. Enjoy the thoughtful commentary on American politics from a like-minded French woman with whom I road the train from Paris.

Some photo documentation of last night's quixotic quest to recover my saxophone.

1st photo - Martin, the man who volunteered his evening to save my horn.
2nd photo - Yan, the RATP worker who kept my horn safe until I got there.
3rd photo - 4am in the Latin Quarter, eating cheese and writing my story.
4th photo - Back home with my horn and good luck trinket

Opening thoughts: There exists about me a painful legend of undeniable veracity that exposes some bugs in my programming. Most versions of the tale start with me boarding a train with a saxophone and some baggage; they end with me exiting the train with … some baggage. A second thought: I normally despise proselytizing tales of ‘real-life miracles’, blasted through the Internet, in an effort to prove the validity of some system of belief. So take the following harrowing and uplifting tale of midnight madness however you choose.

I awoke this morning early by New Yorkers’ standards, late by Parisians’. I walked off the jetlagged malaise on a stroll through Montparnasse, feating on a salade du saumon and pounding an espresso before attending to some logistical matters, sauntering in and out of a few stores.

Today was a great day in the storied history of yours truly moving places. Unlike some past trips marred by logistial SNAFUs - the cognitively impaired flat tire road trip to the Cleveland Clinic, the broken fuel gauge on the flight to San Francisco - Today's voyage rose from behind the smoldering ash plume of Eyjafjallajökull to deliver my most pleasant travel experience in memory.

My friends at the La Rochelle Sister City Initiative have wisely suggested that I use this website to blog the voyage to our jumelage.

While this site normally serves less as a diary and more as a platform for broadcasting original music and airing opinions on art, medicine and technology, this seems the right opportunity to embrace a less formal rapport with my legions of adoring cyberfans (ahem, Grandma Jean and my parents...).

If Ashton Kutcher can do it, so can I! I'll try to refrain from abbreviating words that are only three characters long to begin with, and will welcome a pie in the face if I stumble so far as to communicate emotions through emoticons.

Until Mid-May, farewell dear New Yorkers. Take care of my rainy, grimy and irritable, but always beautiful ancestral home.

Again, thanks to Peter Korn, Domenic Guastaferro, Sheila Sarkar, David Patterson and Brian Carter of he La Rochelle Sister City Initiative for organizing this trip and selecting me.

Time to watch Shrek V and whatever Ben Affleck bomb American Airlines scooped up in the bargain bin.