At Lil Weezyana Fest, the August 2015 revue that lovingly showcased old-school New Orleans bounce stars ranging from 5th Ward Weebie to first-gen Cash Money signee Ms. Tee, R&B singer-songwriter PJ Morton spent some time hanging out backstage with Lil Wayne. The two men watched their childhood idols—some of whom had become their collaborators—and waxed romantic about the sounds of NOLA, which both had moved away from as their careers advanced.
“I could tell he was like, ‘I miss this,’ and I was too,” Morton said later. “You go around the world, and it takes a while, but you start to see there’s really no place like this.”
Morton’s father is the prominent New Orleans pastor and Grammy-nominated gospel star Bishop Paul S. Morton. Now 35, the younger Morton started out playing piano in the jazz band at St. Augustine High School, home to one of New Orleans’ most celebrated marching ensembles. Before even graduating, Morton had snagged his first professional gig, putting his training in praise music to work as part of the House of Blues’ gospel brunch ensemble. But like a lot of ambitious young musicians in New Orleans—whose music scene has always run high on quality and influence but low on infrastructure—Morton felt like he had to leave to kickstart a career. It worked, too. While still at Atlanta’s Morehouse College, he co-wrote and produced a bonus track for India.Arie’s Grammy-winning 2002 album Voyage to India. He got a job in Erykah Badu’s touring band and a few years later, in 2010, as Maroon 5’s keyboardist. All told, he spent about 14 years living away from New Orleans.
“I didn’t really have intentions on coming back,” Morton explained. “I used to come home for my mom’s cooking, but [in business] I didn’t have examples here. I felt boxed in.”
Of course, when Morton was growing up, there was a certain amount of grassroots infrastructure in New Orleans—namely, Cash Money and Master P’s No Limit Records, whose releases soundtracked his teenage life as much as that of his dad’s church. Morton also went to high school with Young Money Entertainment president Mack Maine; Young Money put out Morton’s 2013 solo album, a smooth and soulful pop/R&B hybrid titled New Orleans. Lil Wayne, who’s about the same age as Morton, appeared on it, guesting on the bonus track “Lover.” In hindsight, it was a harbinger of things to come.
Catching nostalgia for the music of your youth seems a little premature when you’re not yet 40. But for the last half-decade or so, bounce music and vintage New Orleans rap have been the subjects of both a renaissance at home and a new wave of interest around the world, due to multiple factors. One, there’s the rise of Big Freedia, who honed her skills in the street-level scene contemporaneous to the rise of Cash Money and No Limit, and, current legal troubles aside, broke through to national acclaim more recently as a recording artist, reality-TV star, and now, Beyoncé collaborator. In Freedia's wake as well came artists like Nicky da B, whose career was buoyed by the social media and online-listening technology that wasn’t around a decade earlier, when indie artists like Freedia were starting out—and whose premature death in 2014, at age 24, cut short a career that Rolling Stone heralded as promising for its blend of traditional roots and global dance influences.
Of course, there’s also the great NOLA delineator—Hurricane Katrina—to consider. For decades to come, probably, New Orleans history will be defined by its before and after. As I wrote in the New Orleans Times-Picayune over the storm’s tenth-anniversary weekend, its devastation created a sense of cultural emergency for a city whose identity is tied to culture. The need to protect it demanded that it be defined, and over the past ten years and change, an increase in serious documentation, diversity of audiences and inclusion in tradition-driven institutions like community radio and major local festivals all indicate that New Orleans bounce and hip-hop are edging their way into canon, and underneath the umbrella of heritage.
As of late last year, Morton is back in New Orleans, and with a plan: He’s starting his own independent label, Morton Records, based out of a studio he plans to build in the once heavily Katrina-flooded New Orleans East area, where he grew up. “I started to see the value at home,” he said, “and I thought, if there’s no infrastructure, maybe I can bring that.” His wife is also from New Orleans; since the couple has been home, Morton has played several local shows and hosted free songwriting workshops for kids through the Jazz and Heritage Foundation.
His first release on Morton is his own laid-back, playful new mixtape Bounce & Soul Vol. 1, released March 25 and employing some of his early heroes: Juvenile and Mannie Fresh are both featured, working with Morton for the first time. Lil Wayne, Weebie (of the viral hit “Let Me Find Out”), Trombone Shorty, and inspirational rapper Dee-1 also appear. The prominent local DJ and producer Raj Smoove serves as host.
To get started on Bounce & Soul, Morton called Smoove to get copies of the foundational instrumental samples behind vintage bounce highlights, like the 1986 Showboys track “Drag Rap” and Cameron Paul’s “Brown Beats.” “I chopped it up and started having fun with it,” he said. “It’s the music I grew up with, and I wanted to have fun.”
Bounce & Soul, which fuses Morton’s pop-R&B style with old-school bounce production (he remixes his Stevie Wonder collab, “Only One,” with a bounce beat), could be considered a small diary of Morton’s thoughts on the NOLA sounds he grew up with. During spoken interludes, Mack Maine reminisces about the origins of Young Money and talks lovingly about the 17th Ward Hollygrove neighborhood, where he and Lil Wayne grew up. Wayne is sampled quoting Big Freedia’s earliest local street hit, “Gin In My System.” Q93.3 FM DJ Wild Wayne, New Orleans’ best-known hip-hop radio DJ, does a quick spoken interview laced with deep references (“I was listening to that song… on my way out to Thibodaux this weekend, the Krewe of Ghana had their ball out there”). It’s a collage of deep New Orleans insider talk that feels, to an outside fan, as if they stumbled on a little secret.
The New Orleans-based indie coffee chain PJ’s, which sells copies of Bounce & Soul in its shops, hosted a listening party for the project on a recent evening, in a warehouse and roasting facility that sends big waves of aromatic coffee scent out on Mississippi river breezes, into the French Quarter and Faubourg Marigny. Reid Nolte, a slightly gawky white guy about Morton’s age who serves as the marketing director for PJ’s Coffee, welcomed guests from a stage set up in between industrial-sized sacks of beans, with a short speech remembering his own adolescence listening to bounce music. “I almost threw out my back,” he said, “dancing to DJ Jubilee.”