Sonali Fernando

I enjoy life. Cultural Engineer for Ace Hotel, former restaurant owner in New Orleans, sing on occasion, and make a mean cocktail. Reformed whiskey and Chartreuse devotee. I am also quite deft at picking out samples and borrowed/similar chord progressions in music.

[inmytemple]

Joy of Booking

Ben Sisto’s series of interviews on tell stories about events and the people who make them happen. Click Here.

[inmytemple]

A Cultural Engineer’s Guide to the New Orleans Music Scene

Photo by Adrienne Battistella

Sonali Fernando is the cultural engineer at Ace Hotel New Orleans, where she oversees the hotel’s dedicated music venue, Three Keys—home to the annual music and culture festival Six of Saturns. Held during the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival each spring, Six of Saturns hosts a diverse lineup of up-and-coming performers alongside beloved icons.

Originally from Garland, Texas and a first-generation Sri Lankan-American, Fernando first came to New Orleans 17 years ago for the Music Industry Studies program at Loyola University. After Katrina, she felt driven to stay in the city, working as a bartender, musician, cultural arts educator, artist manager, party promoter, restaurant owner, and even bike delivery girl before landing the cultural engineer role at the Ace Hotel.

“The New Orleans music scene is unique and special because our music is a living, driving force of the city,” says Fernando. “The inheritors of this legacy have always continued to push the needle forward—from Cash Money and No Limit to the very artists we’ve booked for Six of Saturns like DJ Soul Sister, Pell, Chase N. Cashe, and many others.”

In other words, to experience music in New Orleans is to experience something that is inextricably tied to its culture. Below, Fernando shares her favorite places to see live music in the Crescent City.

Six of Saturns hosts a variety of performers over the course of ten days each spring.

Guests can listen, drink, and dance to musical acts spanning genres from hip hop to jazz.

Sonali Fernando, the Ace Hotel's cultural engineer.

More here.

[inmytemple]

Sonali Fernando (SF): “The venue is named after the James Booker song, so we were thinking of all the great piano people of New Orleans and wanted to honor Isidore ‘Tuts’ Washington, who is lesser-known because he refused to record, but he influenced everyone—from Fats Domino to Professor Longhair to James Booker. He was born in 1907 and started playing at the age of 10. He was known for boogie-woogie and blues, but also for pop music and for reading a crowd. Since we’d named our venue after a piano man, we wanted to take it a step further with this cocktail.”

King Tuts

1/2-ounce Korbel brandy 1/2-ounce La Favorite Rhum Blanc 1/2-ounce Tempus Fugit Crème de Banane liqueur 1/2-ounce Pierre Ferrand Dry Curaçao liqueur 3/4–ounce fresh lemon juice 1/4-ounce ginger syrup (made with equal parts simple syrup and fresh ginger juice) 2 dashes Bittermens Hellfire Habanero Shrub Palo Santo (optional)

Shake liquids with ice, and strain over fresh crushed ice. Burn some Palo Santo, if desired.

[inmytemple]

1. At some point during the two-hour layover at O’Hare International Airport on my trip from Pittsburgh to New Orleans last weekend, a supernatural force compelled me to glance up from my laptop and scan the gate around me. There was a shift in the space-time continuum that the universe was attempting to alert me to and my spirit felt it.

“The homie Sonali Fernando—whose title at the Ace Hotel is “cultural engineer,” which apparently is Swahili for “the tiny person who runs shit” — brought me and Panama to New Orleans as part of the Ace’s programming for Essence.“ - I could not be more flattered. From fan to friend.

[inmytemple]

“Big Head”

[inmytemple]

“I talked about the adversity that people of color who work in the service industry face. We must understand where the roots of that adversity stem from, from colonialism and slavery and imperialism, and that is the framework for the industry today.”

—Post-Gazette

[inmytemple]

Tackling the Tough Issues in Pittsburgh's Restaurant Industry

86 Conference, organized by Good Peoples Group and Collected Pgh, will touch on topics such as gentrification and appropriation, company culture and conflict resolution.

Delivered Keynote.

[inmytemple]

A seat at the table

[inmytemple]

via NPR

“The Ace’s July Fourth weekend of shows and parties is a rebuke, intentional or not, of #closedforessence, offering the kind of piggybacking welcome and extra fun that is how most upscale hospitality businesses in town respond to a perceived market during events that aren’t anywhere near Essence’s size. For New Orleans tourists in general, who arguably come to the city expecting to experience a particular version of the city’s African and Caribbean heritage — traditional jazz, Creole cuisine — it’s a fresh perspective, and one that seems to speak to Essence’s next generation, which festival bookers (FPI, the original producers of Essence and still the producers of Jazz Fest, ceased booking Essence in 2008; another New Orleans-based company, Solomon Group, has been running the show since 2013) seem to be deliberately working to cultivate.”

—Alison Fensterstock, NPR, Essence Fest: A Festival Evolving

[inmytemple]

via Financial Times UK

“I am a transplant,’ admits Fernando, 'I don’t represent native voices. But I am very concerned about hearing and making sure those voices are heard.”

—by Joshua Stein, Financial Times UK

[inmytemple]

[inmytemple]

via The Advocate

“Other events, helmed by Ace “cultural engineer” and former Oxalis co-owner Sonali Fernando, focus on programming that’s not necessarily performance driven, as well as charitable and social justice work.”

—Allison Fensterstock in her article in The New Orleans Advocate

[inmytemple]

FEELZ.

[inmytemple]

Found paradise.

[inmytemple]

Happy Halloween!

Excited to be moving on to Ace Hotel.  As I look forward, I thought I might glance back to my second Halloween in New Orleans in 2003, where I was in a band on Frenchman Street at the legendary Cafe Brasil.  Its been a long time, and it feels good to still be in New Orleans.

[inmytemple]

Oxalis co-owner Sonali Fernando departs for new Ace hotel

Sonali Fernando of Oxalis

“Fernando, who was a co-owner of Oxalis, has left the gastropub and will deploy her impeccable tuned-in taste as the "cultural engineer" for New Orleans' new Ace hotel”

[inmytemple]

Circa 2003 #tbt to my days behind the bar at Cafe Brasil with these two ladies. All three of us went on to owning restaurants: Yuki, at Yuki Izakaya, Margaret, at The French Press in Lafayette, and I at Oxalis.