Top 10 New Orleans

Excellent compiled with the best musicians of style, lot of swing, jazz and much blues.

Toots Thielemans virtually introduced the chromatic harmonica as a jazz instrument. In fact, beginning in the mid-'50s, he never had a close competitor. Thielemans simply played the harmonica with the dexterity of a saxophonist and even successfully traded off with the likes of Oscar Peterson.

Sister Swing is a fresh, exciting trio of singers which has captured the Big Band Swing era and brought it to the 21st century. Heavily influenced by groups like the Andrews Sisters, the Boswell Sisters, and Manhattan Transfer, Sister Swing brings a new sound to an old style. The three ladies, Leigh Hannah, Valerie Marston and Paula Chafey-Merrill, genuinely have a good time on stage and that transcends to their audience. An evening with Sister Swing will take you back in time to an era of glamour, romance and innocence.

Jazz is a music genre that originated from African American communities of New Orleans in the United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It emerged in the form of independent traditional and popular musical styles, all linked by the common bonds of African American and European American musical parentage with a performance orientation. Jazz spans a period of over a hundred years, encompassing a very wide range of music, making it difficult to define. Jazz makes heavy use of improvisation, polyrhythms, syncopation and the swing note, as well as aspects of European harmony, American popular music, the brass band tradition, and African musical elements such as blue notes and African-American styles such as ragtime. Although the foundation of jazz is deeply rooted within the black experience of the United States, different cultures have contributed their own experience and styles to the art form as well. Intellectuals around the world have hailed jazz as "one of America's original art forms".