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New Orleans is Louis Armstrong, his cheeks swelling up as he plays, his horn tilting toward heaven, the instrument a seemingly inexhaustible source of melody and percussion and swing. Armstrong carried the joyful sound of jazz--a music born of the crazy-quilt, shotgun marriage of races and heritages that make up his native city--around the world, and the world fell in love with it. And to fall in love with jazz or its bastard child, rock 'n' roll, is to fall in love with New Orleans.

"Hard Times in the Big Easy," Time: Hurricane Katrina - The Storm That Changed America, December 2005, page 29.