A Waltz In New Orleans

“The story I have to tell you is about how something beautiful, something excellent, was created in spite of unfairness and vexation”

A Waltz in New Orleans is the yarn of the greatest jazz musician you’ve never heard of… Narrated by the braggadocious, somewhat unreliable, and entirely fictitious Henri ‘Second Line’ DuBois, get ready for a tall story with ‘hot’ music that will immerse you in New Orleans’ Storyville and the colourful life of the drummer here to convince you that he invented jazz.

Inspired by the boasts of ragtime pianist Jelly Roll Morton, A Waltz in New Orleans began life as a radio play written and aired during the lockdown of 2020 before being adapted for the stage in 2021 with the support of The Arts Council’s Developing Your Creative Practice fund.

Delighting audiences and selling out theatres it has played at Woolwich Works, The Cockpit Theatre and Cambridge International Jazz Festival.

Featuring original compositions by trumpet player Claude Deppa & the play’s writer Lucas Keen, alongside well known and lesser known standards, the show’s mix of jazz, opera and West African music evokes the cosmopolitanism of New Orleans that ultimately gave birth to jazz and much popular music.