The musicians who made up New Orleans' unique musical culture are scattered to the four winds, with no place to live and no place to play. Lovers of Nawlins music wonder if they'll ever make it home -- and what will happen if they don't.

Some excerpts from the BBC story:

The musicians of New Orleans have been blown to the wind and the big question is whether they will ever return.

The thing about musicians is that they play to make a living so they go where the work is - and that place now is New York or Houston or even London or Lyon in France.

The venerable Preservation Hall in the French Quarter is locked up and silent while its band, four of whose members are homeless, plays the Pizza Express on Dean Street in Soho in London.

Ben Jaffe, the bass player with the Preservation Hall band said: "I was there during the hurricane and I saw first hand that we were unable to get our brothers and sisters out of New Orleans and now I see that we're going to have just as much trouble getting them back to New Orleans."

Jazz funerals

The point about New Orleans was that it was a genuine culture and not a tourist confection.

Musicians lived in clusters in the city and left and returned as the work came and went.

Now, the work has gone. And so have some of their homes. ...

The thing about New Orleans is that it was not just a tourist destination.

Kids really would pick up a trumpet in poor areas and learn it - and without those kids a culture dies.

One danger many foresee is that of a "Disneyfication" of New Orleans where the money gets spent on the tourist French Quarter - which wasn't damaged anyway - while the residential, poorer parts get ignored.

That, most say, would be a disaster, the killing or rather the acceptance of the death of one of the great cultures of the US and the world.

There needs to be grit in the new New Orleans too.

As Wynton Marsalis, the world's greatest trumpeter - classical or jazz - puts it: "You need to bring the wildness back too. We're wild - and we're elegant. If you get rid of our wildness, it's not New Orleans."

From my one trip to New Orleans in 1992, I would say it's overstating the case a bit to say the city wasn't touristy before, but it also has some real grit and some great music venues.

I made it to both Tipitina's (saw Chicago blues legend Buddy Guy!), Preservation Hall and saw the Neville Brothers' less famous sister Charmaine (who was actually terrific in her own right).

I keep telling myself I'll make it down for the New Orlean's Jazz and Heritage Music Festival one of these years.

A rueful related anecdote: I was in New York City in 1996, looking south from the Empire State Building's observation deck towards the World Trade Center towers.

I decided against visiting them. "They'll be there next time," I remember thinking to myself at the time.