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It's getting close to 4 years since the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina put the plight of New Orleans on the front page of the news. And inevitably, it has been pushed further and further down the list of daily news stories. But things in New Orleans are not yet "back to normal" - even granting that "normal" in the Crescent City might have meant something different than anywhere else. The city's population has not returned to pre-Katrina levels, and even as new construction or reconstruction goes on, a number of affordable housing projects have come down.

Those are facts - numbers and articles and documentation are easy to find. After that you get into the far more difficult area of opinion and impressions: one that struck me in one of Larry Blumenfeld's articles is the quote from the director of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Foundation; he said that New Orleans' musicians "are the working poor, making an average of $21,000 a year." Nothing about this claim strikes me as being wrong. But I do wonder whether things were any different prior to Katrina.

I wish I could say I were more familiar with New Orleans and had visited there more often, but I've only been there once, in the 90s. But it was true that music seemed to be everywhere. In bars, at a crawfish boil, on a street corner, in the park. And this wasn't even at Mardi Gras or Jazzfest, when apparently everything is ratcheted up to 11. I remember wondering, how does this city support so many musicians? I figured the answer must be that many of them had other jobs, and that music was just such a part of the culture that people did it as readily as watching TV or gossiping with friends.

What I did not get during that one trip during the offseason was the sheer weight of the tourism industry on the New Orleans economy. And tourism, apparently, has not returned at the levels needed to sustain that remarkable New Orleans musical hothouse in which so much great music has flowered over the past two centuries. Jazzfest opens this Friday in NOLA; last year, the festival reported almost 400,000 visitors - to a city that currently claims to have about 450,000 residents. Is that enough? And what does the city do if it isn't? There is still much work to be done, and basic services needed for the people who either never left or have returned. Balancing the needs of the tourists and the needs of the city's poorest residents is a delicate piece of business, and advocates for the latter claim that New Orleans is both literally and figuratively steamrolling over parts of historic poor neighborhoods to make more glitzy attractions for tourists.

But if that statement about the musicians of NOLA being the working poor is right, they need those tourists to survive. The whole thing is a vexing issue. How much of it becomes apparent to the hordes of Jazzfest listeners starting later this week remains to be seen.

Tell us: How do we save New Orleans and its unique musical culture? And keep it healthy over the longterm?
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