New Orleans Brass Bands S/D

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

I gotta find time to track down and listen to that American Routes episode online...

American Routes Archives

Listened last night to the 19 minutes or so brass band segment on the 2-28 to 3-6 episode. There's also an 11 minute or so segment on the Pine Leaf Boys. I also started a separate thread called "Cajun and Zydeco Music is not just for old people"

Hey Jordan how can i get a copy of that mix you've passed around?

Deej e-mail me, jordan1 at gmail

Any of you New Orleans folk-my band (The Mighty Sound of Maryland) was recently in New Orleans, helping out building Musician's Village and playing in some parades and such. Did anyone see them? The band is trying to collect quotes and such about the project and if anyone wanted to email me that'd be awesome.

On a non-self aggrandizing note,
Is there a brass band tradition in Chicago? The last time I was there I saw a great brass band playing on the street and I heard tales of numerous others. Anyone have suggestions on how to track down some Chicago brass music?

There's a band called Hypnotic who are cool but not really New Orleans-influenced at all, they're probably who you saw on the street. I don't think they improvise.

My band plays at the Green M1ll a few times year.

Yeah, it was Hypnotic. I'm actually going to be in Chicago from March 20th-25th or so, will you guys be in town?

Unfortunately not, we just played there a few weeks ago so the next time may not be until Fall.

That American Routes piece was pretty good, esp. the parts where Benny Pete is talking about the backline (poignant) and where the Rebels dudes are going on about the band kids being the most popular ones in school (lol). Nice track selection.

"Atlanta based writer David Fulmer authored three acclaimed historical mysteries involving the Creole of Color detective Valentin St. Cyr set in New Orleans at the beginning of the 20th Century, and among the characters were such legendary jazz pioneers as Buddy Bolden and
Jelly Roll Morton. Fulmer’s writing was atmospheric as well as thrilling as he skillfully weaved together the actual mystery against a background of Storyville and its musicians, madams,
streetwalkers and associated characters." http://inabluemood.blogspot.com/index.html

Has anybody read these books that I saw highlight ed on this blues blog?

More reading--

I had donated money to the New Orleans Musicians' Clinic (NOMC) and their latest newsletter has Armand Sheik Richardson, a trumpet player with the Gentille Brass Band and a photographer telling about all the red ink and struggles he went through to have eye surgery to restore his vision (cataracts) after Katrina. He's also a participant in the Arabi Wrecking Krewe who help New Orleans musicians patch their roofs and fix up their homes.

The newsletter also reports that the majority of older musicians who used to go to the NOMC before Katrina have not returned to New orleans after Katrina.

New OrleansMusiciansClinic.org


"For 2007, we are once again expanding and refocusing our mission to sustain our beloved New Orleans musicians. In response to the death of Dinerral Shavers, we are quickly moving to establish our Musicians Mentorship Initiative, a program designed to allow musicians to serve as mentors in the public schools. Dinerral was one of the first jazz musicians slated to work in the program and he was dedicated to rebuild and revitalize New Orleans by passing our culture to young people. The NOMC has set up a Fund to help sustain his family and his band during this very sad time. "

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.