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The profile · researched 13 September 2026
Thirty-two years of Saturday nights, still played entirely off vinyl
Melissa A. Weber has hosted Soul Power on WWOZ since 1994 and built a New Orleans dance-floor calendar around rare groove played only from records; in 2026 she finished a Tulane master's on go-go and holds three dates on sale, opening with NOLAxNOLA.
A Saturday-night slot, taken in 1994
Melissa A. Weber grew up in New Orleans and went to Cabrini High School, an all-girls Catholic school. The route into the music was two-sided: her parents' records, Lionel Richie and Teddy Pendergrass among them, and the hip-hop she heard as a teenager, whose samples pointed backwards towards the originals. She trained at Loyola University New Orleans' college radio station and volunteered at community station WWOZ 90.7 FM.
In 1994 she was given the Saturday-night slot and launched Soul Power. It has run almost every Saturday since, now from 8pm to 10pm, and is billed as the longest-running rare groove radio show in the United States. The slot was originally at midnight before being moved forward. Episodes she recorded for Worldwide FM remain archived online.
Playing to a room came later. In the late 1990s a bartender friend talked her into spinning at a birthday party; the technical grounding was a ten-minute lesson on the basics from a friend's boyfriend. The bookings followed from there.
The Hustle, and a rule about records
She founded the Hustle, first at Leo's, a dive bar in Bywater, before settling its long residency at Mimi's in the Marigny around the middle of the 2000s. It ran weekly for roughly fifteen years, and shifted to a periodic night in 2017 when she enrolled in graduate study at Tulane and could no longer hold down a weekly.
The rule across all of it has not moved: everything is played from vinyl she owns, a collection of around 15,000 records. The range is 1970s to mid-1980s R&B, funk, soul, underground disco, jazz fusion, Brazilian and soulful jazz sides, and early hip-hop, with soulfulness as the only entry requirement. Her collection was documented in the book Dust and Grooves: Adventures in Record Collecting.
The billing has carried further than the city. She was the first DJ on the main stage at the Essence Music Festival, and has played the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, Voodoo Music Experience, BUKU, Electric Forest and Boiler Room. She has opened for Parliament-Funkadelic, The Roots and Bootsy Collins, and George Clinton asked her to DJ his 71st birthday party. She was the first DJ to take the Big Easy Entertainment Award for Best DJ, and has also won OffBeat magazine's Best of the Beat award in the same category.
Two nights that anchor the year
The Birthday Jam at Tipitina's has run each September for nearly two decades, each edition built around a theme rather than a straight DJ booking. The tenth, in 2016, was a tribute to Washington D.C. go-go. The nineteenth, on 20 September 2025, was a Gap Band tribute with The Nth Power and a guest list that included Eric Gales, Tony Hall, Ivan Neville, Skerik, Alex Wasily, Aurelien Barnes and Dominique Xavier, with an 8pm start.
The New Year's Eve Soul Train at the Civic Theatre is the other fixture, running annually since the early 2000s; the fifteenth edition sold out on 31 December 2017 and the nineteenth ran on 31 December 2021. The 2025 edition gives the current shape of the night: doors at 9pm, music from 10pm to 1am, over-21s only, 35 dollars in advance and 39.50 on the door, with 150 premium tickets at 135 dollars carrying a balcony bar, reserved seating, a separate entry line and a midnight champagne toast.
A third recurring night has settled in alongside them. Purple Takeover, a Prince celebration, ran at Tipitina's on 7 June 2025 and again on 6 June 2026, both starting at 9pm.
Curator, lecturer, and a thesis on go-go
On 24 September 2019 Tulane named her curator of the Hogan Jazz Archive, the research centre for New Orleans jazz held in the Special Collections division of the Howard-Tilton Memorial Library. She came to it from nearly a decade as programme manager in the Newcomb-Tulane College Office of Academic Programs, where she handled undergraduate research funding and produced the annual Lagniappe Series concert. The curatorial job covers acquisitions, teaching students to work with primary sources, and exhibitions.
In the autumn of 2020 she joined the faculty of Loyola University New Orleans' School of Music Industry to teach History of Urban Music, a new course inside the undergraduate degree in Urban and Electronic Music Production.
The graduate work finished in 2026, when she took an MA in musicology from Tulane. The thesis subject was go-go, the Washington D.C. form she first heard properly when Chuck Brown played the 2003 Essence Festival, and which she followed up with trips to D.C. to hear Rare Essence and others in their own rooms. She has presented papers at the International Association for the Study of Popular Music US conference, the Museum of Pop Culture's Pop Conference, and the National Council for Black Studies.
Where things stand, autumn 2026
Three dates are currently on sale, all of them in New Orleans. On 24 September she opens for The Rumble Plays P-Funk at Tipitina's, alongside Jamison Ross and Ian Neville, with doors at 7pm and the show at 8pm. That booking sits on the opening night of NOLAxNOLA, which runs from 24 September to 4 October 2026 with more than 300 performances across 50 venues, and which has distributed over 1.05 million dollars to local venues, musicians and cultural workers since it started in 2021.
On 4 October she plays Gasa Gasa, the second of a two-day Mothership Month pairing of P-Funk deep-dives on 3 and 4 October. On 31 December the Soul Train returns to the Civic Theatre, 10pm to 1am.
Between the ticketed dates the diary stays local and small-room, which is how most of the year actually runs: a Decadent Disco Brunch at Junebug on 6 September, a Groove for Good benefit at the Jazz and Blues Market on 12 September, an 80s party at Tipitina's on 17 October, a Mothership Selection at Junebug on 30 October, and a set at Fernando Lopez's photo exhibit at CANOA on 15 November.
The show, now
A set runs on records only, mixed and blended from her own crates, with nothing on a laptop; the material sits roughly between the early 1970s and the mid-1980s, funk into disco into Brazilian sides and soulful jazz, and the show is structured around keeping a floor moving rather than around a fixed track list. Room length varies by format. The club dates run about three hours, as at the New Year's Eve Soul Train at the Civic Theatre, doors 9pm and music 10pm to 1am, over-21s only, which adds vintage Soul Train projections and her own Groove Express dancers to the booth. The autumn 2026 dates are shorter and more varied: an 8pm opening slot ahead of The Rumble Plays P-Funk at Tipitina's on 24 September with Jamison Ross and Ian Neville, a three-hour late set at Junebug on 30 October, a two-hour brunch set, and P-Funk deep-dives on 3 and 4 October that pair listening and discussion with the records. Tickets for the Civic Theatre night ran 35 dollars in advance in 2025, with 150 premium passes at 135 dollars covering a balcony bar and a midnight toast, and the New Year's Eve edition has sold out in past years. The September Birthday Jam at Tipitina's is the outlier: a full live band show built on a theme, most recently a Gap Band tribute on 20 September 2025 with The Nth Power and guests including Eric Gales, Ivan Neville, Tony Hall and Skerik, with her DJing around the band.
Researched from djsoulsister.com · daily.redbullmusicacademy.com · news.tulane.edu · loyno.edu · jambase.com · ticketweb.com · civicnola.com · ticketweb.com