Did you ever wish to visit Bourbon Street? Not for the drink, but for the music? Did you ever walk into the music building at a university and stop and listen to the cacophony coming from practice rooms and see the students conducting to tunes in their heads in the lobby and breathe and say, “feels like home?”

The other night, about half an hour before sunset, she took a hike. Right there on Paul Wilbert Memorial Trail, a saxophone bleat caught her attention. She stopped dead in her tracks to listen. Clearly, from 300 feet below in the neighborhood, came squawking sounds of reed music. Someone was practicing outside. She was delighted. Memory took her back to childhood sessions lolling in a hammock with trumpet pressed to her lips. Was it a student? And then, reed properly wetted and adjusted, the musician eased into 60s jazz, bending a few tones, undulating, something familiar. This was no beginner. This was a gift to the neighbors. Mark it on your schedule, 7:00 pm every night.

She has pinpointed, in various forays around the neighborhood, a kit drum house, two guitar houses, the saxophone house and a banjo house. It’s a quaint Victorian neighborhood, four blocks from downtown old town, half degenerating and half up-town restoration. But, musicians live here. Artists thrive. Rich cultures mix. People walk their dogs – and their children – and themselves, every morning and evening. Skateboards trundle by, bicyclists call to one another and stop and chat. The weather is so fine, she opens her door each evening at 5:00 and plays through a piano repertoire for an hour. Folk songs, sixties, seventies, a nod to the eighties and nineties, something fresh; a river set, an Elvis Presley sampling. Good grief, she’s been playing for over 60 years. That’s a lot of music.

Last night as she launched into Danny Boy a particularly loud conversation caught her ear because it stopped right outside the window for the dog to do its business. Business complete, the human came right on up the porch, chattering on a phone all the while, and peered in the screen door. “I am talking to my friend in Buenos Aires,” she explained with thick accent, “She wants to know, do you know your music is heard in Argentina?”

“Hola!” the pianist called, waving to the screen. She continued to play with pride and an increased sense of excellence and performance. After all, she is going international. Her music is heard ‘round the world.