That’s one of the battle cries of the new post-K New Orleans, seen on T-shirts and bumper stickers in a town that still seems traumatized nine months later. “The Big Empty” I heard one DJ call it and downtown at night it can seem that way: what happened to the people? Oh, yeah, right. Except for the tens of thousands at the fairgrounds for JazzFest the streets are most deserted.

The sense of tramua and recovery is still in the air and in a lot of the music. At a benefit for the New Orleans Musicians’ Clinic at the Old Point Bar in Algiers Friday night, local singers including Shannon McNally and Arlee Leonard sang songs and read poetry about wading in the water and surviving for another day. “A Change Is Gonna Come” was the theme and the song itself was covered by the amazing sacred-steel band, the Campbell Brothers. That’s gospel funk played on steel guitars, in this case by a quartet of African-American guys from Rochester, NY.

The musical gumbo you find here can’t be diluted, no matter how much water you add. We dashed from Algiers back to to the Maple Leaf to catch local heroes Papa Grows Funk and found the fellow doing the fabulous chikcen-scratch rhythm guitar and Santana like leads was from Japan, while one of the best local blues players, Anders Osbourne, was from Norway. They all found a home in NO: they came, they played, they stayed and ain’t no hurricane going to drive them away.

At Domilise’s Cafe on Saturday, having inhaled a few seafood po’ boys, my friend Jeffrey stopped to say hi to the proprietess, Dot Domilise, 80 something and still going strong. They share a mutual friend in the music business who once, in payback for all the great food he enjoyed when he was living there, wrangled a few connections to get Dot a gold-record that had once belonged to her musical hero, Englebert Humperdinck. (She doesn’t hang it in the cafe anymore, afraid that someone might steal it.) Though she really knew neither of us, Dot was solicitous and happy to learn we had come to town to hear music. “Y’all got a place to stay?” she asked and I’m sure if we had said no she would have found a place in her little house adjacent to cafe, right below the solid gold record.