During March 2014, Irish Jazz singer Tara O’Grady found herself, as one does, on an Irish Channel parade float, throwing cabbages and potatoes to crowds on Magazine Street while singing Danny Boy.

“I was completely unaware that there was an Irish community in New Orleans,” remembered O’Grady. “But watching all those New Orleanians catching Irish stew vegetables was my introduction to a tradition that I was completely oblivious to, but am now completely enthralled by.”

O’Grady was so enthralled that, on the way back home to New York City,  she began writing songs for her fourth album  - aptly named Irish Bayou – which mixes American jazz and blues with Celtic story-telling, and a playful sense of shared history.

The first Irish Bayou CD launch party will take place at the Metropolitan Room, 32 W. 22nd St, New York City on March 26, 2015; the second will take place here in New Orleans at Treo, 3835 Tulane Ave, on May 14, 2015.

Last year, O’Grady performed in New Orleans as part of the 2014 International Famine Commemoration.

“That was my father’s first visited to New Orleans,” said O’Grady. “He is first generation Irish, and the first live street performer he encountered in New Orleans was a fiddle-player performing traditional Irish tunes. So, in New Orleans, we found a home away from home.”

Born just a few blocks away from Louis Armstrong’s house in New York City, O’Grady   grew up surrounded by Irish traditional music, but it was jazz and swing - including the music of New Orleans’ greats like Louis Armstrong and Louis Prima - that stole her heart.

“Louis Armstrong wrote about New Orleans’ Irish Channel in his memoirs,” said O’Grady. “It was a rough and tough town back in the day. During his childhood, he wrote he never entered the Irish Channel because the Irish who lived there were tough - which is saying something because Louis grew up in an area nicknamed “The Battlefield.”

“So, the Irish are part of the gumbo that makes New Orleans a unique American city,” said O’Grady.  “In New Orleans, just like in New York, Boston and Philadelphia, Irish flags can be seen on front porches throughout the city.”

According to O’Grady, the intertwined history of New Orleans’ myriad musical traditions, and the common threads that tie its diverse cultures together, were the inspiration for Irish Bayou, her latest album.

“The history of the Irish in New Orleans, from the thousands who died digging the New Basin Canal (Dem Dry Bones) to New Orleanians like Kate Chopin, author of The Awakening (A Rude Awakening –Kate O’Flaherty’s Blues) all inspired ideas for songs about the Irish in New Orleans,” explained O’Grady. 

“New Orleans has a multi-cultural atmosphere, so writing Irish Bayou came naturally, with no agenda. And it draws from a number of multitude of genres – jazz, folk, blues, zydeco and rockabilly – all woven together by the theme of the Irish in New Orleans.”

“But,” she laughed. “It was a WWOZ DJ, after hearing one of my tracks, who told his audience to ‘get yourself a heaping helping of Tara O’Grady. And that became a song about muffalatas, beignets, and chocolate pecan pies – A Heaping Helping of My Love!”

Tara O’Grady will be performing, with love, at Treo, 3835 Tulane Ave, on May 14, 2015 at 8 pm.

More information can be found at: http://treonola.com/treo-events/tara-ogradys-irish-bayou-cd-launch-concert/