The Faubourg Marigny — usually just called "the Marigny" — lies immediately downriver from the French Quarter and is New Orleans's liveliest music district outside of Bourbon Street. Frenchmen Street is the centre of it: a two-block stretch that on any night from Thursday to Sunday is lined with jazz clubs, brass band venues, and open-air stages, all of them playing live music and most of them free or nearly free to enter. It is where musicians go after their formal gigs; it is where locals actually go to hear jazz.
The neighbourhood itself is a colourful mix of Creole cottages painted in Caribbean shades — turquoise, coral, chartreuse — with shotgun houses and corner bars mixed in. The Art Market on Frenchmen Street operates on weekends, adding local painters and jewellers to the musical atmosphere. The Marigny has been gentrifying steadily but still feels like a real neighbourhood, with a bohemian energy that Bourbon Street abandoned decades ago.