New Orleans Brass Bands S/D

Alvin- Curran-"Oh Brass On The Grass Alas" (2006), for 300-500 brass band musicians. Duration 40 min. First performance Donaueschingen festival, October 2006.

It's not New Orleans style, but apparently avante musician/composer Alvin Curran is doing his piece for 300 plus brass musicians again. I saw a reference to a NY Times article, but the article is accessible only to NY Times Select (paid subscribers) members.

That's a big band. Seems almost like a Flaming Lips style experiment.

jordan your mix is awesome btw

Seems almost like a Flaming Lips style experiment.

An insult to Alvin Curran.

test

In another apparent inequity in the fee schedule, the department charged two vastly different fees to police two high-profile jazz funerals, those of Hot 8 Brass Band drummer Dinerral Shavers and filmmaker Helen Hill, whose murders in part launched January's march against crime on City Hall. The NOPD charged $3,610 for Shavers' Jan. 6 funeral march but just $1,175 for Hill's Feb. 24 jazz funeral.

(apparently I can't use tags now, whatever)

Thx Deej, glad you're feelin it.

I read an article elsewhere on that fees for parade issue (maybe in Offbeat). Ridiculous how the New Orleans government (and the Police Department especially) keeps doing things that hurt their own residents. But I guess it's no big shock that the New Orleans Police are not doing things logically. Despite the media attention it will take the ACLU winning in court for things to change. I guess Katrina did not end up bringing any positive personnel changes to the NOPD.


RS:

I wan't trying to insult Curran, I was just giving a more pop-culture type comparison that I guess may not have been necessary (or just showed my lack of familiarity with Curran or such types of musical experiments).

wan't trying to insult Curran

It's okay, I wasn't being that serious. I just don't like the Flaming Lips (on admitedly limited exposure), but I'm sure Alvin Curran has been doing his thing longer than they have. I vaguely remember him having some sort of river boat fog horn type thing at the New Music America festival in 1987, for instance. (Actually I'm not much more familiar with Alvin Curran than with the Flaming Lips.)

i know it's not really brass band stuff, but i've been listening to (NOLA funk/soul drummer) Smokey Johnson's It Aint My Fault a lot lately, particularly the track "Did You Heard What I Saw" which is one of the best party songs i've ever heard.

i guess what i meant to say is does anyone have any recommendations for other good nola songs with good jive talkin and unrelenting beats in them? i'm sure there are plenty of brass band songs that do as much.

[/[Removed Illegal Link]

Kermit Ruffins is gonna get married onstage at the French Quarter Fest next weekend.

Oh shit, Hot 8 is playing in Chicago today through Sunday, apparently.

I guess you'll be seeing them Jul 15 2007 3:00P at La Fete de Marquette Madison. They just keep on keepin' on. They haven't been in DC since they played the Smithsonian Folklife Fest last summer or was it the summer before...

I'm not heading down to New Orleans for the FQ Fest or Jazzfest or the Ponderosa Stomp this year. Wait till next year I guess.

Wouldn't miss it. I think we're playing that show too.

I'll be down May 4th - 7th.

Any recommendations on which Jazzfest weekend is best this year? At quick first glance, first looks to edge out second by a hair...

First weekend has Rebirth, New Birth, Hot 8, Leroy Jones, & Ludacris, second weekend has Stooges, TBC (guess they get a stage instead of playing down the street?), Soul Rebels, and Harry Connick. I guess first weekend looks better, I'm going second anyway. I'm sure there will be some hot shit not at the grounds.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/artsentertainment/2003674612_popcon1.html?syndication=rss Paul de Barros from the Seattle Times re: a New Orleans panel at the EMP Pop Conference

This afternoon's "Resurrecting New Orleans" panel could not be accused, like other moments in the conference, of lacking passion. Ned Sublette, Larry Blumenfeld, Alex Rawls and Don McLeese sounded united in their anger and outrage, yet also in their belief and hope -- to borrow their own words -- about post-Katrina music in the Crescent City. Sublette took us through a ghastly litany of offenses in slavery days and Rawls, a local, noted, with some sadness, that "people are slowly coming around to the realization that the city will never be the way it was."

Though uninspiring as a speaker, McLeese offered the best talk, an inventory (with welcome musical examples) of tracks made after the hurricane by Allen Toussaint, Irma Thomas (well, almost after), Chris Thomas King, Donald Harrison and the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, with penetrating comments appended to each.

Blumenfeld gave an update on the lawsuit against the city brought by the Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs -- the groups that organize the "second line" neighborhood parades that are the soul of New Orleans music -- because of last year's near-tripling of parade fees. (What can the city be thinking?) On a more hopeful note, he quoted New Orleans clarinetist Michael White, who told Blumenfeld, "This is all going to continue."

"Do you know what it Means to Miss New Orleans..." I'm not there. Colin, Jordan, and American Routes folks can you post something about Jazzfest sometime (or when you get back). This first weekend includes:

Irma Thomas, Ludacris, Jerry Lee Lewis,Rebirth Brass Band, Percy Sledge, Kermit Ruffins, Troy "Trombone Shorty" Andrews, Terence Blanchard, George Porter, Jr., Marva Wright, Zachary Richard avec Francis Cabrel, Bobby Charles, Irvin Mayfield, Lucky Peterson, Eddie Bo, Henry Butler, Kirk Joseph's Backyard Groove, Geno Delafose, Pine Leaf Boys, Astral Project, Bob French & the Original Tuxedo Jazz Band, , Charmaine Neville Band, Steve Riley, Ray Abshire, Burnside Exploration, Mem Shannon, New Orleans Klezmer Allstars, C.J. Chenier, and as mentioned above New Birth and Hot 8...

The Ponderosa Stomp coming up in a few days has its usual spectacular bill...

[url][Removed Illegal Link] Not Wash Away
The fight for New Orleans' culture continues, one parade at a time
by Larry Blumenfeld
April 24th, 2007 Village Voice

an excerpt regarding today's court case involving the ACLU vs. the city of New Orleans regarding parade security fees:

[i]Just three days before members of the Nine Times Social Aid & Pleasure Club dance their way through the Jazz & Heritage Festival Fair Grounds—second-lining with the Mahogany Brass Band—they'll be represented in federal court, fighting to protect the century-old tradition from threats to its future.

On April 25, a federal judge will hear arguments on behalf of a consortium of Social Aid & Pleasure clubs, aided by the ACLU, in a lawsuit protesting the city's hiking of police security fees—in some cases, triple or more from pre-Katrina rates—for second-line parades, the regular Sunday events, held September through May, at which members snake through neighborhoods, dancing to brass bands. The suit invokes the First Amendment right to freedom of speech and expression, claiming that parade permit schemes "effectively tax" such expression. "Should the law not be enjoined," reads the complaint filed in Social Aid & Pleasure Club Task Force v. City of New Orleans, "there is very little doubt that plaintiff's cultural tradition will cease to exist."

"It's a solid, core ACLU issue," says staff attorney Katie Schwartzmann. "We handle freedom of speech cases all the time. But this one is different in that the speech at issue signifies this city and an entire cultural tradition. At some point, I mean, the power to tax is the power to eliminate, right? At some point, if the government can put enough fees and enough obstacles in the way of somebody exercising their First Amendment right, then they're ultimately going to eliminate it."

Second-line parades derive from funeral rituals, transforming mourners into celebrants; the term "second-line" refers not just to up-tempo rhythms signifying spiritual rebirth, but also to the tight-knit communities who follow the musicians, dancing and clapping along. Yet now the very tradition itself appears endangered. For all the ink spilled about post-Katrina New Orleans, surprisingly little has been written about the cultural costs of this ongoing tragedy—what it means for centuries-old rituals and for jazz tradition in general, and what it says about how Americans value our homegrown arts, if we value them at all.

Erosion of our coastal wetlands may have paved the way for the natural disaster that hammered this city. But the least- mentioned aspect of the resulting devastation—the erosion of what ethnographer Michael P. Smith once called "America's cultural wetlands"—is of tantamount concern. The resilient African-American cultural traditions of New Orleans, famously seminal to everything from jazz to rock to funk to Southern rap, also contain seeds of protest and solidarity that guard against storm surges of a man-made variety. Erasure of these wetlands exposes many to the types of ill winds that shatter souls.

The brass band–led second-line tradition is particularly and somewhat curiously caught in the crosshairs of violence and controversy now fixed on New Orleans. The wave of homicides that swept through New Orleans in late December and early January claimed among its victims Dinerral Shavers, the 25-year-old snare drummer of the Hot 8 Brass Band and a teacher who had established Rabouin High School's first-ever marching band. Hundreds gathered at the gate to Louis Armstrong Park earlier this year for an all-star second-line, yet not a note was played nor a step danced for two miles. The silence—unthinkable throughout the hundred-plus- year history of this raucous tradition—was a carefully thought-through statement. It addressed the violence afflicting the city, the desperately slow process of post-Katrina recovery, and the enabling power of jazz culture for disenfranchised (in many cases, still displaced) communities. Two miles into that procession, not far from where M.L. King Boulevard meets South Liberty Street—the statement having been made—the men of the Nine Times club (in lime-green suits and royal-blue fedoras) and the Prince of Wales club (in red suits and mustard-colored hats and gloves) started jumping and sliding to the irrepressible sounds of the Hot 8 and Rebirth Brass Bands. Such scenes underscore what's now at stake, both in and out of court.[i]

Jazzfest starts today. I wonder how the federal court hearing on parade fees went yesterday?

Actually I think Jazzfest starts Friday.

Hundreds gathered at the gate to Louis Armstrong Park earlier this year for an all-star second-line, yet not a note was played nor a step danced for two miles.

Wow, I didn't hear about that.

Nor had I. A pretty stunning statement.

Awwww man, missing New Birth and Hot 8 (and more) down at Jazzfest today or this weekend. I think they're are various folks blogging the fest--I'll look 'em up later.

I'll be down next weekend.

http://www.artsjournal.com/listengood/2007/04/secondline_frontlines_the_sequ.html#more

Writer Larry Blumenfeld on his nice Listen Good blog detailing the settlement reached on parade fees, outside Federal Court in New Orleans yesterday.

http://www.jazzfestblog.com/

A jazz-fest blog posting by Alicia Ault. You have to skim down a bit to get to the bits about the fest.

http://www.alanat.com/women/new-orleans-jazz-fest-honors-ed-bradley-2/

Published April 27, 2007 by Editor-in-Chief

NEW ORLEANS - CBS newsman Ed Bradley was a big fan of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. On Friday, the Jazz Fest honored his memory and his two decades of support with an opening-day jazz funeral procession, complete with two brass bands.

Bradley, who died in November, had wanted to be remembered at the festival with a second line parade, so-called because watchers often fall in to form a second line of paraders.

He put it in his will. He wanted a second line and a New Orleans brass band and Quint Davis to put it all together, said his widow, Patricia Blanchet.

Julie Melrose, guest blogger at the following website is seeking help in buying sousaphones for New Orleans musicians

[url][Removed Illegal Link]

[i]Donations are now being sought for the third and fourth group sousaphone purchases, since two suitable fixer-uppers will be available only a couple of days from now. With donated shipping and professional instrument restoration already in place, acquiring the actual instruments (at an anticipated cost of under $700) is the only missing link in giving two NOLA musicians the tools they need to return to employment.

Please contact me at girlbanjoistsrule at yahoo.com if you are interested in making a modest contribution toward an upcoming sousaphone purchase, or would like more information about the musical instrument recycling program of the Tipitina’s Music Co-op. All financial and used instrument donations are fully tax deductible, with a “thank you” letter on Tipitina’s Foundation letterhead documenting your donation.

The shipping address for donations of used musical instruments in reparable condition is:
Mark Fowler
Tipitina’s Music Co-op
501 Napoleon Avenue
New Orleans, LA 70115

Co-op manager Mark Fowler can be reached by email at mfow✧✧✧@tipiti✧✧✧.c✧✧, or by phone at (504) 891-0580. As this year’s New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival miraculously kicks off two weekends of festivities, I thank you in advance for helping to restore the unique musical culture of New Orleans.[/i}

Jon Pareles of the NY Times is down there reporting from the fest:

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/04/29/jazzfest-thank-god-i-made-it/#more-19

The Mahogany Brass Band played a slow version of “Just a Closer Walk With Thee,” used at jazz funerals, and then its trumpeter dedicated the song to New Orleans and spoke about how it had felt “to have the world pulled from under your feet.” But he also saw some progress: “Last night,” he said, “me and my wife slept in our own bed in our own
home for the first time.”

Keith Spera from the Times-Picayune:

http://blog.nola.com/keithspera/2007/04/stage_shuffling.html

Troy "Trombone Shorty" Andrews survived a near-disastrous leap off the Congo Square Stage, landing awkwardly on a riser in the photo pit. But the show must go on: He straightened out his sunglasses and white suit and finished the set.

At Congo Square, sousaphonist Kirk Joseph's Backyard Groove was a mini-orchestra: Four percussionists, four singers, drums, two guitars, sax and trombone. Guest vocalist Theryl "Houseman" DeClouet made only his second hometown appearance since Hurricane Katrina exiled him to Chicago.

http://www.bloggingneworleans.com/2007/04/29/jazz-fest-hot-8-brass-band/

Somebody named Kelly Leahy blogging about Hot 8 at Jazzfest

The show was upbeat, dedicating one song to a newly married member and celebrating his one-day-old marriage. Things got a little emotional when later a song was dedicated to Dinerral Shavers who was murdered last winter. Shavers' son, DJ, was introduced (he couldn't be more than eight or nine years old) and placed behind a couple of snare drums where he played along with the band for their final number.

In case you missed them today, the Hot 8 Brass Band will be playing tonight at The Parkway Tavern from 7-10 pm. Get on your dancing shoes and go!

We need someone who is down there to post here. Jordan's heading down in a few days I guess.

I'll post next week. Rebirth put out a dvd btw, and apparently TBC has a live record now.

Well he's not quite a brassbander but he may as well be mentioned here:

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/pop/1403AP_Obit_Batiste.html

New Orleans clarinetist Batiste dies
By MARY FOSTER
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER



NEW ORLEANS -- Clarinetist Alvin Batiste, who toured with Ray Charles, recorded with Branford Marsalis and taught pianist Henry Butler, died Sunday of an apparent heart attack. He was in his 70s.

Batiste died only hours before he was to perform with Harry Connick Jr. and Marsalis at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, festival officials said.

Marsalis' record label released Batiste's latest CD, "Marsalis Music Honors Alvin Batiste," just a few weeks ago. Marsalis also played on the album.

Batiste, a jazz clarinetist, was considered one of the founders of the modern jazz scene in New Orleans. While his exact age was not immediately known, festival officials said he was born in New Orleans in 1932.

Batiste also wrote for and toured with Billy Cobham and Cannonball Adderley.

A longtime teacher at Southern University in Baton Rouge, he created the Batiste Jazz Institute - one of the first programs of its kind in the nation - and taught jazz at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts.

His students included Marsalis, Donald Harrison, Kent Jordan, Michael Ward, Herlin Riley, Charlie Singleton, Woodie Douglas and others.

"He was not only a teacher, he was my father away from home," Butler said. "He taught us about music, the history of music and the business of music. The ones who had the benefit of learning from him are better musicians and better people today."

Batiste toured with Charles in 1958, but remained largely unknown to the general population until he recorded with Clarinet Summit in the 1980s. The quartet also included John Carter, David Murray, and Jimmy Hamilton.

Batiste recorded an album, "Bayou Magic" in 1988, and made the 1993 album "Late." "Songs, Words and Messages, Connections" appeared in 1999.

The show at the jazz tent of the festival - "Marsalis Music honors Alvin Batiste & Bob French" - went on as planned. "The show will go on," festival spokesman Matthew Goldman said.

Hey Jordan, just saw some photos on a jazzfest blog of lots of rain and water everywhere at the 2nd weekend of Jazzfest. How was it?

Saw your answers on the Ponderosa Stomp thread. So I don't remember Da Truth Brass Band from last year, but their myspace site suggests they've been around a few years (although they are only recently out of high shcool I think it said). Maybe I just missed them last year the weekend I was there.

They're young kids, but really good. A bunch of them played with us on Friday night. They were busking outside the festival a block away from TBC (playing a lot of the same tunes, Night Shift, Just My Imagination, etc.) and opened for the Rebels at Cafe Brasil on Saturday. These bands coming up now are not fucking around, esp. Free Agents (who are older than TBC and da Truth, incl. some of the Stooges guys).

New shit:

I highly recommend getting the Rebirth dvd that's at Louisiana Music Factory while it's still available (says "limited festival release" for whatever that's worth). I wish it was a full concert film instead of a documentary, but it's still great. It goes through all their records in order w/interviews with the dudes and the producers, and it's got some good show and second-line footage stuck in (which is frustrating, because you know the full recordings are out there somewhere).

Also Hot 8 <a href="http://www.jazzfestlive.com">Live @ Jazzfest '07</a> is fire.