By David Lee Simmons

For the AJC

In New Orleans, David Ellington was an in-demand jazz piano player. He started his own group that produced a CD and performed often at Jazz Fest. In a city flush with talented piano professors, he was known.

In Atlanta, where Ellington landed after Hurricane Katrina, it’s not so easy.

“I’ve hooked up with all these wonderful musicians here,” said Ellington, 48, who leads a quartet at Twain’s on the first Tuesday of the month. “But it’s not like in New Orleans, where in six months you’re established and everyone knows you. People haven’t heard of you because it’s so spread out here.”

Yet Ellington says he’s happy here for now. His parents live here, he’s met a woman, and he’s avoided some of the bad habits that held him back in New Orleans.

Ellington’s like a lot of the creative types who moved to Atlanta first out of necessity but, four years on, decided to stay by choice. They know the food, the music, the life rhythms and sense of community aren’t quite the same here. They’re making their peace with that.

They appreciate Atlanta’s upside — the sense of professionalism, the possibilities.

“It’s a good place to make money,” said Jeremy Townsend, a caricature artist who worked at a kiosk in New Orleans and now gets steady corporate work in Atlanta. He also showed his work at Eyedrum. “There’s more opportunity here, especially in the arts.”

And while they haven’t exactly turned Atlanta into New Orleans North, Atlanta’s New Orleans transplants have carved out a nice little cultural niche of their own.

Jason Toups found his creative outlet more by necessity than inspiration. He evacuated to Atlanta with several members of New Orleans’ most popular gay theatrical troupe, Running With Scissors. He’s the only member who remained.

Through a connection, the 31-year-old scored a fun, challenging job as a game tester for Turner Broadcasting’s Game-Tap, but consecutive layoffs in 2008 and 2009 (after the company’s sale) forced him to find other work. Toups possessed little more than a stellar music collection housed on several iPods, so he found a mixing deck and started DJ’ing at Friends on Ponce as “Tootsie Collins.”

The owners of Mary’s, the gay dance club in East Atlanta, took notice and recruited him to start mixing songs there last November. This past spring Toups debuted in a campy movie series in which he screens underground classics such as “Coffy” and “Grey Gardens” on Saturdays.

He’s back working for Turner as a freelance game tester for Adult Swim and hopes to become a full-time game producer. Until then he’s thrilled to find peers who are as into gaming as he is, showing that there is a more versatile gay community than the one he knew back home.

But what really drives Toups is the opportunity to reinvent himself professionally in Atlanta, with a creative twist.

“I wanted to throw my hands up the first time I got laid off and just run home,” he said, “but if I’d gone home, then I’d have no career. It would have been very difficult to transfer my experience here to New Orleans. Staying in Atlanta, it helped me focus my career on producing video games.”

Kenneth Woodfin killed two birds with one stone by running a snowball stand called Orleagians out of a kiosk in Virginia Highland. In honoring the iconic and syrupy New Orleans treat, Woodfin was able to exploit his entrepreneurial impulses and at the same time remain connected to his hometown.

“I’d always wanted to open a snowball stand,” said Woodfin, an African-American who graduated from the University of New Orleans right before the flood. “My shop automatically connects me to New Orleans, and people with a New Orleans affiliation come to connect with something familiar with their past. It’s the small things that create traditions and memories.”

Although he misses the easy connections that come with living in a smaller city such as New Orleans, Woodfin says he appreciates what Atlanta can do for seemingly everyone with ambition.

“It seems as though no one discounts you here,” he said. “A 29-year-old black guy in trendy jeans could be a millionaire just as well as a 50-year-old white guy in a suit. The more interesting thing is, the black guy probably isn’t a rapper or athlete.”

Brandt Blocker had already enjoyed professional success in New Orleans — before Katrina. He was one of the city’s most successful, and honored, musical-theater producers until the flood washed away some of his performers and a chunk of his audience. He came to Atlanta when the artistic director position opened up at Atlanta Lyric Theater in May of 2007.

Blocker jumped at the chance — with some reservations. He’d just gotten married and his wife was pregnant. And Atlanta was definitely not New Orleans.

“I was assuming a theater company that was sorely in need of reorganization and re-development,” he said, but “the biggest adjustment has been acclimating myself to a city that isn’t necessarily known as a supporter of musical theater as an entertaining art form.”

There’s been improvement, thanks to Blocker’s passion for Broadway, and a timely move last year into Marietta’s renovated Earl Smith Strand Theatre. His production and direction of “Little Shop of Stories” earned nine Suzi Bass Awards from the 2007-’08 season.

But money’s been tight since the recession kicked in; losses forced Blocker to opt for recorded music for a recent production of “Cabaret.” He’s brought back the band for last weekend’s 2009-10 season opener, “The Will Rogers Follies.”

Despite the artistic success, Blocker keeps struggling to make musicals work in Atlanta.

“I just think New Orleans is more of an organic entertainment town, and it really values musicals,” he notes. “That being said, living in a city that can boast a venue like the Woodruff Arts Center is a real treasure.”

Like all those interviewed, Blocker concedes he’s homesick for New Orleans. Like the others, he misses the food and that ingrained love of music. But he also remains committed to a city that’s given him a second professional chance.

“I miss New Orleans a lot, and I hope to return there some day,” Blocker said. “But, I’ve got more work to do here in Atlanta, to develop a greater appreciation for musical theater as a viable and valuable art form.

“For now, Atlanta is home.”