The New Orleans Jazz Museum presents Paul Sanchez! Join us as we celebrate the artists that make New Orleans a world destination for music.
This program takes place inside our third floor Performance Center, listening room. Admission is free and open to the public, seating is limited and offered first come, first serve.
Enjoy Jazz Music from home with the New Orleans Jazz Museum! Join the Jazz Museum online for our daily Live-Stream Concert Series, in which dynamic musicians perform live from the Jazz Museum! Tune in at 2pm on facebook.com/nolajazzmuseum/live to watch for free.
Paul Sanchez
Paul Sanchez was born in New Orleans at Sara Mayo Hospital on Jackson Avenue and Thcoupitoulas across the street from the Mississppi River and his life sounds like the history of Louisiana itself.
His mother's father, George Payne, was an Irish cop in the in the Irish Channel neighborhood of New Orleans which is where Paul was born and raised. Grandpa Payne lost his legs to diabetes and his mother, Sylvia, dropped out of school in the 8th grade to get a job so she could take care of her father, mother and younger siblings until, at the age of 18, she met his father.
Joe "Black" Sanchez. Born in White Castle, Louisiana, his father was Islenos and had come over to America from the Canary Islands like thousands of his countryman. When Paul's grandmother died in the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1917, his grandfather gave his father to an Islenos family he knew in the Delacroix Islands in Louisiana. Paul's father dropped out of school in the third grade to work as an indentured employee on the family's shrimp boat, he slept on the floor of the boat, he ate what he could catch in the Gulf of Mexico from the age of 9 to the age of 16 when he ran away to New Orleans and got a job as a waiter at the Fairmount Hotel.
Paul grew up in the 60's with five brothers and five sisters.He listened to the music they tuned into on WTIX AM which still played singles by local artists like Art Neville's All These Things or Ernie K-Doe's Mother-In -Law. The older siblings would see artists Irma Thomas or Deacon John at sock hops around town, buuujngbtheyr tevurds and those 45s played in the house on First Street. They were a poor family and music was in the air, on the radio, coming out of windows, "it was the only thing we could get free that gave us joy", Paul has said in looking back.
Paul started playing music in New Orleans at the age of fifteen in bars around the French Quarter.
He lived in New York in the 80's and learned the craft of songwriting as part of the Anti Folk scene in the East Village.
Paul spent the 90’s and early 2000's making 11 albums and touring the U.S.A. and Europe with New Orleans rockers, Cowboy Mouth but after losing his home and possessions in the aftermath of Katrina and the flooding of New Orlean, he left the band he had helped form in 1992 and went home to New Orleans to rebuild his life. He was the only member of the band who lost everything and said at the time, "it wasn't as much fun to be in a tour bus anymore when my friends and family were looking for places to live back home in New Orleans".
“I’m New Orleans born, New Orleans bred and when I die I’ll be New Orleans Dead”
Stew Called New Orleans
Paul Sanchez, John Boutte'