Bourbon Street life desaturates; near Royal, a monochromatic transformation bleaches tourist sights. Mark’s orange wall is now slate gray. Charcoaled facial shadows sweep into rounded shirted shoulders.  His skin is a musician’s mask casting back the New Orleans sun, revealing tired eyes that beat in private tempos. His worn tuba, a stark white life preserver, buoys him in the music that is his life, exhaling his brother’s inspiration, a shared breath by which the old cat taught the new one to play. When Mark blows, his breath re-colors the Quarter.

 

His music scales the color that reflects from a street puddle, the architectural yellows and browns, with a hint of blue, that arc over cobbled stones towards my camera lens. His music rips the colors that reflect from a window’s warped glass, the wooden shutter greens transposed against pointed railings radiating like compass points from a balcony’s heart. His music peels the colors that reflect from a street cleaner’s frothy wash where pink shorts and sneakered feet march in bent-kneed fashion. His music tears the red brick reflections streaking into a royal blue of a curb’s pool. His music stokes the colors that reflect in a storefront window, enlivening the eyes of a jester mask, whose bright red lips mouth Mark’s melodies. His airs traverse the Quarter along a one-way street transformed by the word love, a sticker’s single plea. In Mark’s eyes, a soul bleeds back into the heart of another. Marley.

“One Love! What about the one heart?”

 

 

 

 

 

See more of Chris Whitney’s work here