City Park has 1,300 acres to get lost in, and most visitors don’t find the Singing Oak on purpose. It sits on the south side of the park east of Big Lake, a short walk from the New Orleans Museum of Art, looking like any other massive live oak from a distance.
Get close enough, and you start to hear it before you can quite make sense of what you’re hearing.
Local artist Jim Hart hung the tree with seven aluminum alloy wind chimes, all painted black to disappear into the shadows of the branches.
The largest reaches 14 feet long. Every chime is tuned in relation to the others on the pentatonic scale, the same scale that runs through West African gospel hymns and early New Orleans jazz, which means the tree doesn’t produce random noise when the wind moves through it.
It produces something that sounds intentional and ancient and faintly familiar in a way that’s hard to place. Hart described his thinking plainly: early jazz was improvisational, and what could be more improvisational than the wind?
The oak itself is roughly 125 years old, which puts its roots in the ground around the time jazz was being invented a few miles away in the Treme.
A plaque at the base reads: “Let the wind bring you a melody, a smile, and a sense of peace and nature.” It’s the kind of sentence that would feel corny anywhere else and lands just right here, under a canopy of Spanish moss with the chimes moving in the Gulf breeze and the rest of the city temporarily irrelevant.
The experience shifts depending on the day.
A light afternoon wind produces something gentle and almost conversational between the different-sized tubes. A stronger breeze pushes the chimes into a lower, fuller register that carries further across the park.
On a very still day, you get silence, which has its own quality in a city that almost never stops making noise. The shade alone is worth the walk in summer, when New Orleans heat sits on everything like a second atmosphere, and a 125-year-old oak is one of the better solutions available.
The Singing Oak is free to visit and open year-round during City Park hours.
Find it on the south side of the park, east of Big Lake, near the New Orleans Museum of Art. The Canal Streetcar stops near the park entrance if you’d rather not drive.
