New Orleans Brass Bands S/D

Very nice. Lomax, who has posted here a time or two, also reviewed the Dirty Dozen's new cd take on Marvin Gaye's What's Going On in the Village Voice.

Offbeat Magazine just posted this, although the information is from back in September...Keller, see below, was known for his expertise with analog studio equipment.

SAYING GOODBYE

Producer/engineer Keith Keller died [of a heart attack]September
6. At Chez Flames, his studio on Annunciation
Street, he produced a variety of musicians, from
Alex Chilton to G. Love and Special
Sauce to Rebirth Brass Band to King
Sonny Ade and Charlie Musselwhite. A jazz
funeral has been arranged to escort Keller’s ashes
to the Mississippi River, where some will be
scattered on the waters. The jazz funeral with the
Treme Brass Band starts Saturday at 1 p.m. at
the Backstreet Cultural Museum (1116 St. Claude
Ave.) and proceeds on St. Claude to St. Phillip, St.
Phillip to Rampart, Rampart to Conti, Conti to
Decatur, Decatur to Iberville and Iberville to
Woldenberg Park and the Mississippi. All are welcome
to help say goodbye to Keller.

I went to Keith Keller's funeral Saturday - the Treme played it very traditional, starting w/the dirge "What a Friend We Have in Jesus" and then some uptempo tunes on the march to the French Quarter. When they got to Borboun Street, they stopped and repeated the process, playing a dirge and then some fast marches (!). This funeral was an interesting contrast to one earlier that day, for Little Joe Glasper (son of Big Joe, who ran Joe's Cozy Corner bar that used to feature Kermit & Rebirth on Sunday nights before Joe was jailed). That funeral featured an all-star version of the Lil Rascals, w/Corey Henry & Winston from the Soul Rebels on tb, James Andrews and Shorty on trumpet, Hot 8's bass drummer, and many more. The highlight was the tuba section w/Jeffrey Hills AND Ben Jaffee... huge sound. The band was so hot that Kermit was following them around taking pictures. They skipped the dirges and played funky tunes like "Hoo Na Nae". When they got to Joe's Cozy Corner the crowd was chanting "here comes the sidewlk" (a call to the Sidewalk Steppers marching club who usually start their parade there?) and 2 guys jumped up on the roof and started dancing. All in all an exciting few hours, and while the Treme parade was good to see, if I had too pick one...

Man, I would have loved to have seen that band.

What happened to Joe's son?

From the Offbeat weekly e-mail:

Neeta Ragoowansi of SoundExchange has money for
Louisiana artists. The company has royalties for
many local artists, and they need to be disbursed by
December 15 or the artists will lose
them.

The following artists or their
representatives or their estates need to get in
touch with Ragoowansi as soon as possible: Clifton
Chenier (pictured), the Dixie Cups, Clarence
“Frogman” Henry, Lazy Lester, Kenny Peal, Chris
Ardoin and Double Clutchin’, Ernie K-Doe, Dirty
Dozen Brass Band, Queen Ida, Angelica Maria, Chris
Thomas King, Beau Jocque, Big Tymers, Jean Knight,
Sidney Bechet, New Orleans Classic Jazz Orchestra,
Joe Jones, Barbara George, Danny Barker, Bruce
Daigrepont, Huey “Piano” Smith & the Clowns, Smiley
Lewis, George Lewis, James Booker, Storyville, Bunk
Johnson, Roosevelt Sykes, New Orleans Blue
Serenaders, Snooks Eaglin, Johnny Wiggs, Mannie
Fresh, Chris Tyle’s New Orleans Rover Boys, Sweet
Emma Barrett, Earl King, New Orleans Ragtime
Orchestra, Eddie Bo, Paul Barbarin, Jimmie Noone,
The N’Orleans Statesmen, Papa Don’s New Orleans Jazz
Band, Earl Scheelar’s Funky New Orleans, Lonnie
Johnson, George Girard, Connee Boswell, Edmond Hall,
Kid Howard, Tangle Eye, Capt. John Handy’s New
Orleans Jazz, Soilent Green, Deadeye Dick, Choppa,
Sing Miller, Armand Hug, Nicholas Payton, Exhorder,
Percy Humphrey, Original Dixieland Jazz Band, Sam
Butera, Blue Lu Barker, Mia X, Albert Burbank, Lisa
Angelle, New Orleans Blue Serenaders and New Orleans
Ragtime Orchestra. Ragoowansi can be contacted by
calling 212-713-1677 or emailing
neeta@soundexchange.com.

I just found out that Terrence Andrews, who I had seen playing at Little Joe's funeral on Saturday and a parade with the Hot 8 on Sunday, lost his wife just days before. I'm not sure how she died. She must have been very young. The funeral is at St. Jude's today and Benny from the Hot 8 tells me they're going to play after the mass.

The bad news down there just keeps coming.

from Offbeat(Uncle Lionel and Kirk Joseph.):

The Quarter will be open Sunday for “Down By the
Riverside: A Concert of Thanksgiving” at
Woldenberg Park. The free show presented by the
New
Orleans Jazz and Heritage Foundation runs from 1-5
p.m. and features Craig Klein and the Arabi
Wrecking Krewe All-Stars—Stanton Moore, Dr. Michael
White, Deacon John, Marlon Jordan, Matt Perrine,
Rick Trolsen, Leroy Jones, Mark Breaux, Freddie
Lonzo, Topsy Chapman, Bob French, Bruce “Sunpie”
Barnes, Benny Jones, “Uncle” Lionel Batiste, Kirk
Joseph and more. All have put in their time with
the Arabi Wrecking Krewe helping to gut musicians’
houses, and Sunday they play together for the first
time.

And more:

STOP THE VIOLENCE

Friday at 1 p.m. the Anirtak Theater—formerly the
State Palace—plays host to the Stop the
Violence Hip-Hop Town Hall Meeting. The
recent
violence that has erupted in New Orleans and
particularly in Central City has brought local
hip-hop artists BG, Mia X, Joe
Blakk, Head-Roc,
DJ Jubilee, Sess 4-5, Fifth Ward
Weedie, and L.O.G. together to address
the problem. This town hall meeting is sponsored by
the Hip-Hop Caucus Institute with the goal of
creating a youth coalition to oppose violence and
help bring about social justice.

I think that'd be Fifth Ward Weebie. Don't ask me how these trivial bits stick in my mind, but after 20 some trips to the Crescent City, they just do. Man, that Woldenberg Park show looks beautiful.

I love Weebie.

How'd I miss that Offbeat typo. Sorry folks.

Dammit, I've been sort of expecting the Lionel Ferbos obit for a while now. I made it a priority to see him at Jazzfest the last few years I've been down there. Had to pay respect to the oldest working musician in New Orleans. RIP Lionel.

Sorry, that was Lionel's son, Lionel Jr. who passed.

They arrested the kid who shot Dinerral (snare drummer for the Hot 8 Brass Band) and the story behind it makes it even more sad and pointless.

http://www.nola.com/search/index.ssf?/base/news-6/1167461915258450.xml?NZNENO&coll=1

I don't think there's ever been a band that's had worse luck then the H8.

Dinerral's funeral yesterday was beautiful. There were at least 25 musicians waiting when they brought Dinerral out of the church - the Hot 8 plus New Brith plus Glen David and James Andrews, Erion and Edward from Soul Rebels, and many more - 5 tubas alone! Then Rebirth was holding up the back of the second line. I haven't seen a two band funeral in a while.

I wound up doing a story about Dinerral on NPR. You can check it out here:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6735417

Jordan, I heard you came down - call me anytime.

Matt.

Maybe that march on City Hall will help. All these murders (Dinneral, Helen Hill and others) are heartbreaking (not that this hasn't been a problem there for years)

The Ponderosa Stomp and the Essence Festival are returning to New Orleans this year. In May and July 2007 respectively.

Marching against violence is stupid. Who the fuck are they demonstrating to? The pro-murder crowd? What will stop the violence in this city is poverty reduction and the provision of alternatives to Katrina-scarred victims of New Orleans public "education." The working class here, just like everywhere else in America, is fucked--no unions, no job security, no training, nothing. I don't see people marching against the low-wage service-based economy that is crippling the economic development of New Orleans and her citizens. Fix that and people will stop mindlessly and needlessly killing each other.

On a lighter note, has the Ponderosa Stomp lineup been announced? I might actually be able to afford to go this year--unless Kathleen fucking Blanco's moronic smoking ban means I can't smoke at Rock n Bowl.

Not to mention the idiocy of bringing Lee Brown or whoever in as a consultant. Didn't he institute the "zero-tolerance" broken-windows thing in New York? And now New York sucks? And New Orleans is anything but a zero-tolerance kind of town? ARGH THERE ARE SO MANY THINGS WRONG AND SO MANY STUPID FUCKING PEOPLE DOING EVEN MORE WRONG THINGS.

The march was supposed to wake up the mayor and the police chief, but I see that the Police Chief responded with moronic blame game comments instead. And yea you're right about poverty reduction and the working class...

Roky Erikson's gonna be at the Ponderosa Stomp, with only one night announced so far--at the House of Blues (for some reason)
http://www.knights-maumau.com/news.php?PHPSESSID=b7857518bfe1836beecad5e05f4cf21f

"At the Ponderosa Stomp, Roky Erickson will be surrounded by legendary performers, including master arranger Wardell Quezergue and the New Orleans Rhythm & Blues Revue, soul songwriter supreme Dan Penn, rockabilly wild man Dale Hawkins, R&B soprano Little Jimmy Scott, Texas Tornado co-founder Augie Meyers, Stax sessions guitarist Skip Pitts, Gulf Coast guitar empress Barbara Lynn, Mardi Gras king Al "Carnival Time" Johnson, Excello harp master Lazy Lester, keyboardist extraordinaire Willie Tee, President of soul Rockie Charles, hillbilly bopper Jay Chevalier, tough Texas shouter Roy Head, and rockabilly wailer Joe Clay, with more to come."

Next weekend, Mama Digdown's Brass Band @ Donna's (Feb. 2nd) and Krewe du Vieux parade (Feb. 3rd)

Sounds like fun. There's a nice poster of Rebirth for this year's fest (and one of Jerry Lee Lewis also)

http://www.nojazzfest.com/

That Phil F. poster is pretty sweet.

Looks like all the cool brass bands are on the first weekend.

Thanks Curmudgeon, that's a, erm, curmudgeonly way to sum up the JF schedule. For the most part I concur, although post-Katrina just the fact that "some good local artists" (actually a ton of 'em) are still alive and well and showing up from wherever they're dispersed makes me very happy. Yeah you rite, Rod Stewart and Counting Crows didn't exactly raise my eyebrows, although Steely Dan and ZZ Top did, a little, and Jerry Lee Lewis, Pharoah Sanders... okay, I have to spend some time with this!

Yea you rite. There are lots and lots of good locals there, I just want perfection! And while everyone else is watching ZZ Top, that means it will be that much easier for New Orleans afficionados to see the locals. The second weekend does have Irma Thomas' Tribute to Mahalia Jackson which sounds wonderful (although most of the young brass bands are the 1st weekend).

Jordan, do you know anything about Smitty Dee's Brass Band who are there on the second weekend? A google seach tells me Dimitri Smith of the band used to be in the Olympia Brass Band, so that makes them more traditional, right?

I don't think Aaron Neville is gonna be there again (last year he said his breathing problems get compounded in post-Katrina New Orleans) and I just read that his wife died of cancer. He's living in Nashville now. http://www.tennessean.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070106/OBITS/701060330/1090/NEWS

Nope, I don't know any of the musicians but they definitely look more trad.

Over the holidays I saw Aaron on the Trinity Broadcasting Network, which is headquartered in the Nashville 'burbs, doing a very Lawrence Welk-ish Christmas special. Surreal....

http://ilx.thehold.net/thread.php?msgid=34078#unread

Maybe you can't link to ILX sandbox threads even if you follow the proper procedure for placing a hyperlink.

NYTimes
February 20, 2007
In New Orleans, Bands Struggle to Regain Footing By JON PARELES

NEW ORLEANS, Feb. 19 — When the first Mardi Gras after Hurricane Katrina took place last year, New Orleanians felt something vital was missing:
the strutting steps and triumphal horns of the city’s proud, immensely competitive high school bands marching between the floats.


The reason was obvious: Nearly all the city’s schools were still shut, and most of the students had been evacuated. This year fewer than a third of the public schools in New Orleans have reopened — many more are due this fall — and much of the city’s old population remains dispersed.
But some of the top high school bands are back: a rare, heartening sign not only for the parades but also for the long-term vitality of New Orleans culture. “Music is New Orleans, and marching bands are part of every phase of our city’s life,” said Allen T. Woods, the principal of Frederick A.
Douglass High School in the hard-hit Ninth Ward. His school’s band was booked for two parades in this Mardi Gras season, which began on Feb.
10. The members are wearing matching warm-up suits, since band uniforms are still on order. But they are marching.


New Orleans has always been a city of parades, from Mardi Gras to jazz funerals. When jazz began, it commandeered the trumpets and drums of military bands, and the swagger and swing of brass bands have been among the city’s great musical resources ever since.


The high school bands have long been the incubator for New Orleans music, and the training ground for generations of musicians. In this city’s wonderfully insular culture, band instruments like trombone and sousaphone are as ubiquitous as guitars and synthesizers elsewhere.
Before Katrina, it wasn’t unusual to hear young brass players jamming on New Orleans street corners, and those musicians’ first instruments might well have come from high school stockpiles. Through the years, school music programs have put horns, clarinets and drums into the hands of students who would never have played them otherwise, and high school connections have jumpstarted important New Orleans groups like the Rebirth Brass Band.


Brass bands repay the help. Dinerral Shavers, the snare drummer of the Hot 8 Brass Band, was hired to organize a marching band at L. E. Rabouin High School, and his fellow Hot 8 members dropped in to help teach. But Mr. Shavers was shot dead on Dec. 28 in one of a series of murders that led to a large anticrime rally at City Hall on Jan. 11. The Rabouin High School Band marched in this year’s Mardi Gras parades.

“These bands play as important a role in the perpetuation of New Orleans music culture as anything,” said Bill Taylor, executive director of the Tipitina’s Foundation, which has turned the long-running uptown club Tipitina’s into a nonprofit organization that provides instruments and other help for musicians. Since New Orleans schools had long since cut back on music education, the foundation started donating instruments to them in 2002. In 2006 it gave away $500,000 worth of instruments. “This is about keeping New Orleans New Orleans,” Mr. Taylor said.

And in New Orleans, unlike many other places, band membership means prestige in high school. “High school bands in New Orleans are as important as football is in Texas,” said Virgil Tiller, the band director at St. Augustine High School, whose Purple Knights, better known as the Marching 100, have been the city’s most celebrated high school band.


St. Augustine is a historically black school, and its band integrated 20th-century Mardi Gras parades when they were invited in 1967 to appear with the Rex Organization, the top Mardi Gras krewe. Spectators spat on them and threw bricks and urine-filled condoms, Edward Hampton, the band’s founding director, recalled, but the students refused to brawl and just kept marching. Since then, bands from black high schools have become mainstays of Mardi Gras. Band programs are paid about $1,500 a parade.


Montreal A. Givens, 17, a trombonist who is a drum major in the Marching 100, lives alone in a trailer provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency so that he can finish out his senior year with the band. He’s also an honors student. His father, Lumar LeBlanc, leads a brass band, the Soul Rebels, that was formed by New Orleans high school bandmates; Mr. LeBlanc still resides in Houston.


“I came back here for the music,” Mr. Givens said in the school’s band room as the Marching 100 assembled for a parade. “I took a hard hit, but I couldn’t stop my life because of the hurricane.”


Before Katrina, the Marching 100 actually had 150 to 170 members, including baton twirlers and a color guard. Now it has about 90. The flood completely destroyed what had been a newly built band room and all the school’s instruments and uniforms. At last year’s Mardi Gras parade, some members of St. Augustine’s Marching 100 were part of a small but determined high school band, the MAX band, that merged the returned students from three private schools: St. Augustine, St. Mary’s Academy and Xavier University Preparatory School.


“We proved we could do something positive in such devastated surroundings,” said Lester Wilson of Xavier, who led the MAX band.


This year, as St. Augustine marched in the Krewe d’Etat parade, there were shouts and applause as its purple and gold uniforms came into view.
“This band is the city’s band,” Mr. Tiller said. “When we march, it’s amazing to me how many people say: ‘Thank you for coming back. If St.
Aug’s is back, the city is coming back.’ ”


Educators say that band membership, like other extracurricular activities, helps to keep students from dropping out. Practicing an instrument, particularly for the chance at the status of leading a section in a beloved high school band, builds discipline. So do regular rehearsals — the St. Augustine band works five days a week, summers included — and memorizing the formations and instrument-swinging choreography used by New Orleans high school bands.


But music has not been a priority for New Orleans schools struggling to reconstruct buildings and entire academic programs. Paul Batiste, the band director of the Sophie B. Wright Charter School, had his band practicing on what he could afford from his own pocket — just the mouthpieces for trumpets and clarinets — until instruments were provided by private groups, including the Tipitina’s Foundation and Mr. Holland’s Opus. FEMA has also supplied instruments to some schools, among them Douglass High School in the Ninth Ward.

Like other New Orleans institutions....
“It doesn’t sound like it did before,” said Shantell Franklin, 17, who plays baritone horn in the band from Sarah T. Reed High School in New Orleans East. Instruments to replace those ruined by rust and mold arrived at her school only a month ago. “We’ve got a lot of beginners in the band,” Ms. Franklin said. “They’re dedicated and they want to play, but they just can’t get the notes out right.”


Yet even at less than full strength, New Orleans high school bands are still producing musicians to continue the city’s musical legacy. Joshua Phipps, who plays F horn in the marching band of McDonogh 35 High School and saxophone in the concert band, was a beginner two years ago. His English teacher suggested he join the band at Walter L. Cohen High School, now closed; after Katrina, he enrolled in McDonogh 35, whose band has a citywide reputation.

Mr. Phipps had been thinking about basketball, but the band changed his life, he said. “At my first band practice, I just fell in love with the sound,” he said. “I practiced a whole lot, every day, and it was like a hidden talent I didn’t know I had.”

Like many a high school band member before him, he also has gigs of his own. Mr. Phipps is in a brass band called the Truth, which plays for parties and processions, along with a weekly downtown club date. He plans to study music in college.

“I want to be a band teacher,” he said. Then he picked up his horn and joined McDonogh 35’s ranks for a Mardi Gras parade.

Scott S. mentioned this on the American Routes thread--a thread about that Nick Spitzer hosted syndicated public radio show(and on XM). The American Routes website lists radio stations and websites where you can hear the program :

February 28 - March 6, 2007
Routes March On: Brass Bands & Cajun Youths
Visit with two groups of musicians taking Louisiana roots music forward into the 21st century. The Hot 8 Brass Band can be found everywhere in the streets and clubs of the Crescent City, mixing rap and funk with older traditional numbers. While over in Cajun country, the Pine Leaf Boys swap accordions and fiddles for guitars moving back and forth between Cajun and zydeco tunes and new originals.

So that's going to air on March 6th? I'd like to hear it.

I've played with some of those dudes from the Truth, haven't heard their full band though.

It will aire on some stations sooner than March 6th I think.

Let me know what you think of that American Routes story - I wound up getting interviews w/Tuba Phil, Benny Pete, and Lumar and Marcus from Soul Rebels. It was murder choosing little snippets of all of their songs to represent them. Later this week you should be able to stream the segment from their website.

I also want to to hear the below. But I'd have to make it to Seattle on April 20th at the Experience Music Project emplive.com pop conference to hear it. Some more details on each presentation are at the EMP website.

>> Resurrecting New Orleans
Venue: Level 3
Featuring:
Ned Sublette, “Rock the City With Their Congo Dances: The African Layers Of Colonial New Orleans”

Reginald Jackson, ““My eyes were not believin’, what I seen there but I could not turn away”: Siting the Voyeur in Sonny Landreth’s “Congo Square””

Alex Rawls, “The Silhouette of a Trumpet Player”

Larry Blumenfeld, “Will the Second Line Survive? Jazz and the Struggle for Survival by Social Aid & Pleasure Clubs, Mardi Gras Indian tribes, and Brass-Band Communities”

This looks great out there also:

>> Made It Funky: New Orleans, James Brown, and the Foundations and Futures of U.S. Pop Music
This multi-media conversation between Jeff Chang, author of the award winning Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation and Total Chaos: The Art And Aesthetics of Hip-hop, and Gaye T. Johnson, faculty in the Black Studies Department at UC Santa Barbara, centers New Orleans' shaping influence on pop music's past, present, and future through a revelatory discussion of music, history, and memory in the wake of Katrina. Johnson draws upon her research project, "The Mexican Genius of Borderlands Jazz," awarded the 2006 prize for best writing on Comparative Ethnic Studies from the American Studies Association to set the ground for Chang's historical exploration of the connection between breakbeat, the clave, the blues 4/4, James Brown, and what has come to be known as the New Orleans meter. Facilitators: Michelle Habell-Pallan, Associate Professor of American Ethnic Studies and Women Studies and Music adjunct at the University of Washington. Judy Tsou, Head Music Librarian, School of Music, University of Washington. Note: A reception at 7:30 will be followed by the conversation from 8 to 9

There are a couple more New Orleans related presentations. Here's one of them:

Katherine Doss

Before joining the Curriculum in Folklore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Katherine Doss worked at The Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Panel(s):
Trickster Treks and the Southern Vernacular
Saturday, April 21, 2007, 9:00 - 10:45
Abstract:

"Lord I Want To Be In That Number: The Influence of Music on the Culture of New Orleans after the Flood"
It is broadly accepted that culture shapes music and nowhere is this more apparent than in New Orleans, with its particular sound. New Orleans remains anchored in the rhythms and lyrics of that sound while serving as a muse, a protagonist, and a playground for emerging music. The city itself has been the centerpiece and shaper of music that continually develops from amalgamated traditions. With the momentary absence of an abiding community after Hurricane Katrina, the question presents itself as to what extent music can turn around and influence the culture. The answer seems to point to music as a critical element, perhaps the most pervasive, in re-forming the culture of New Orleans.
.... ....
Some musical traditions are so intricately wed to New Orleans-founded rituals that they cannot fulfill their purposes outside of the city. The brass band tradition, especially its inimitable community role in parades and processions, rises to this standard. As a New Orleans native and an ethnographer, I will explore the symbiotic relationship between culture and music in New Orleans, emphasizing my work with the Treme Brass Band and in particular its founder, Benny Jones, Sr."

Sorry to be late with this--my Katrina documentaries roundup:

http://citypages.com/databank/28/1367/article15139.asp

Also, from the New York Times:

February 23, 2007

In New Orleans, Progress at Last in the Lower Ninth Ward

By ADAM NOSSITER

NEW ORLEANS, Feb. 22 — The first new houses built in the Lower Ninth Ward since Hurricane Katrina were turned over to their owners on Thursday, creating a small island of hope in a sea of ruin.

Side by side, sparkling and bright on Delery Street at the neighborhood’s eastern edge, the two houses unveiled at a ceremony on Thursday stand out in a landscape grimly frozen since the storm. The twin pastel variants on traditional New Orleans architecture sit incongruously whole amid block after block of ruined shells with doors swinging open and windows gaping wide.

Empty during the day and dark at night, this area is a long way from being a neighborhood again, even though it has been the focus of intensive volunteer efforts and organizing since the storm. The destruction of the Lower Ninth Ward, which was working-class and black before the hurricane, and its subsequent failure to begin recovering, have become symbols for what some see as inequities in this city’s halting revival.

That symbolism was much in evidence at the ceremony, a gathering of the homeowners and the varied volunteer forces that built the $125,000 solid pine houses, which officials said are elevated five feet and designed to resist hurricane-force winds. It was an occasion to look past the catastrophe that sent a wall of water rushing into the Lower Ninth Ward 18 months ago, at least for the moment. If the levees fail again and a similar volume of water comes through, the new houses will take only two feet of water, the contractor said.

There were promises on Thursday to bring the neighborhood back, particularly from Acorn, the nonprofit neighborhood group that organized the construction and helped finance the two houses. There was cheering, there were plaques for the volunteers, and there were speeches by politicians and preachers.

And there were the two sturdy women who had been next-door neighbors for 25 years until Hurricane Katrina blew their houses away, the owners Gwendolyn Guice and Josephine Butler, who received the keys to the new houses on Thursday.

Acorn and the volunteers built the houses on the same spot as the women’s original ones, and both women seemed overcome at being back.

“I’m all over hoops,” Ms. Guice said, switching between tears and smiles as she happily showed off her trim little green house, a subtle modification of the classic New Orleans front-to-back-hall style.

Looking out the back at a nearby school building with a collapsed roof and a muddy vacant lot where there was once a house, Ms. Guice was adamant that Thursday represented a hopeful beginning on a street that once sheltered many solid homeowners.

“A lot of people are just sitting back, waiting and seeing,” Ms. Guice said.

Her re-installment and Ms. Butler’s, she insisted, would help draw people back. And given the privations of her long exile, much of it spent in Houston, she would not be fazed by living in the ward’s darkness and isolation, she suggested.

She showed no regrets about the fate of her old house.

“I never did find the den,” Ms. Guice said. “It just shoved straight off. It might be floating in the gulf.”

Still, the complications of the demonstration project on Delery Street raise questions about its usefulness as a prototype. The two houses were financed by Acorn and a California bank, and the two women are planning to repay their loans using their insurance proceeds and money they hope will be forthcoming from Louisiana’s Road Home housing aid program. Louisiana State University’s School of Architecture helped design the houses, students from the school helped build them, young people from Covenant House did odd jobs, a church provided landscaping, and even the novelist Richard Ford, who recently moved back to the city, pitched in.

How often this process could be replicated is unclear, though Acorn has money for more loans. Some believe that a neighborhood as destitute as this one cannot come back without large-scale intervention.

“I think we have a problem of quantity, and anything that can’t be delivered in quantity is not a suitable prototype, regardless of the fantastic intentions,” said Andrés Duany, the Miami architect and planner who has played a leading role in this city’s efforts at rebuilding. “The verification is not aesthetics, not the degree of good will; it’s quantity.”

But under Thursday’s bright sun, the focus was not on the hurdles.

“If you try not to focus on how bad everything is, you can focus on what is good,” Allan Jones, an electrician who worked on the two houses, said as he surveyed the bleak landscape. “There is potential.”

Mr. Ford spoke at the ceremony of the “valiant and hopeful house-raising,” and those words captured the spirit of an enterprise that seemed as much a challenge to the future as a foundation for something new.

When Ms. Butler moved to the area nearly 60 years ago, it was still a semi-wilderness, recalled Tanya Harris, her granddaughter and an Acorn official.

“This was a shot in the dark,” Ms. Harris said. “This was a leap of faith.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/23/us/23ninth.html

Oh, and I taped the American Experience doc but haven't watched it yet.

President Bush is in New Orleans today. I doubt he will hear any brass bands (but who knows).

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED