At the bar I found Mr. Ruffins himself, an auspicious development — he was a good person to ask about something that had been on my mind.

Travel can be fraught with questions about appreciation versus appropriation — heedless tourists can treat cultures as instruments for their own enrichment, and risk trampling them in the process. It seemed to me that if you approach places with humility, respect and an open heart, it didn’t matter how you discovered them. But I saw how facile it could seem, checking off a list of things you saw on TV.

I posed some version of this to Mr. Ruffins, who acknowledged that many people who come to his bar do so because they saw it or him on “Treme,” rather than because they are devoted jazz fans.

“But we turn them into jazz fans once they hear the band play,” he said. “We can convert people real fast.”

If he’s untroubled by it, who am I to wring my hands?

The show was about to start so I took a chair in front of the stage. Mr. Ruffins sat down, too, and the band kicked in. As I watched him blow a bright solo in his version of “Sunny Side of the Street,” I stopped worrying about authenticity, or anything else. After five days, 1,200 miles and God knows how many nuclear calories, my back was sore, my heart was homesick and my guts sizzled in misery. But in a nice inversion of TV’s old brain-rotting reputation, my head felt pleasantly empty.