February 28, 2006
Mardi Gras Dawns With Some Traditions in Jeopardy
By JON PARELES
NEW ORLEANS, Feb. 27 — Surrounded by bags of feathers and beads in the bedroom of a temporary apartment, Monk Boudreaux had plans for the long Carnival weekend before Mardi Gras. Amid the parades, costume balls and general excess here, the 64-year-old Mr. Boudreaux would be doing what he has done for decades: sewing his suit for Mardi Gras on Tuesday.
That suit, created anew each year, is a larger-than-life assemblage of glitter, sequins, extremely fine hand beadwork on leather patches and giant ostrich plumes, each feather securely sewn in to withstand a lot of dancing. He was also finishing five other suits for his grandchildren. Mr. Boudreaux is the chief of the Golden Eagles tribe of Mardi Gras Indians, a New Orleans African-American parade tradition that dates back more than a century.
For longtime New Orleanians, Mardi Gras isn't a frivolous diversion from deep problems; it's a symbol of continuity and identity. "It's not that we're going to celebrate and party and forget our rough times," said Irvin Mayfield, a jazz trumpeter whose father drowned during the flooding after Hurricane Katrina. "We're going to celebrate and party and make that about our rough times."
Through the weekend of Carnival, parade floats for organizations like the Krewe d'Etat and costumes at parties like the annual Mom's Ball made pointed references to the storm and its aftermath. Krewe d'Etat's theme was a post-Katrina Olympics, with events like Breach Volleyball and Looter Shooting. At Mom's Ball, along with the glitter, revelers made costumes from hard hats, hazmat coveralls and the blue tarpaulins used for temporary roof repairs.
After Katrina, the lingering question is whether the New Orleans cultural traditions that had sprung up spontaneously in African-American neighborhoods would survive.
The people in neighborhoods like the Lower Ninth Ward, some of whom had lived there for generations, have been scattered by the evacuation. But New Orleans musicians, almost unanimously, insist that their traditions will prevail.
"You only come to New Orleans for the culture; there's no reason to come down to these swamps otherwise," said Bruce (Sunpie) Barnes, a zydeco musician who is also part of a Mardi Gras tradition called Skull and Bones: skeleton-costumed dancers who pop out at Mardi Gras parades as a reminder of mortality. They plan to appear this year.
Bands whose members have been scattered to various states have driven and flown in to play New Orleans dates. Mardi Gras Indian practice sessions have been held as far away as Texas. Coolbone, a brass band that played a jazz-funeral tribute to Clarence (Gatemouth) Brown on Saturday afternoon, now has members in Texas and Alabama; a saxophonist for the Rebirth Brass Band now lives in New York City. But the groups are staying together.
Musicians who are synonymous with New Orleans, like the trumpeter Kermit Ruffins, have moved back and reclaimed their regular local dates. "I couldn't wait to get back," said Mr. Ruffins, who established himself so quickly in Houston after the storm that he's lending his name to a barbecue restaurant there. "All my life I grew up in the little nightclubs, and I couldn't wait to go back to just the old hole-in-the-walls."
For musicians, as for hundreds of thousands of other displaced New Orleanians, housing is the main problem. Real estate prices have skyrocketed because so much of the city is uninhabitable. Mr. Ruffins said that musicians who could make comfortable livings as New Orleans expatriates would still be eager to return. "If they had thousands of homes for people to stay in, I know that every musician who left would be right back," he said.
No upheaval would make Mr. Boudreaux change his Mardi Gras ritual. "You gotta do this," he said. "If that spirit is in you, it has to come out."
The Mardi Gras Indians represent one of New Orleans's endangered neighborhood traditions. So do the brass bands that play for jazz funerals and other neighborhood parades. Parades in New Orleans aren't complete without a "second line" of strutting, dancing, clapping spectators turned paraders — a street-level, neighborhood celebration. Now, in places like the Lower Ninth Ward, there are no neighbors.
On Mardi Gras morning the Indians appear: shaking tambourines, dancing down the streets and singing bellicose chants like "Iko Iko" (the basis of the old Dixie Cups hit) and "Meet the Boys on the Battlefront." The syncopated beat of those chants, a beat shared with old brass-band struts, pervades New Orleans music from traditional jazz to funk; it's also called the second line. Once the Indians were like gangs battling for turf with shotguns as well as songs. Nowadays, they are more cooperative, and the competition is for who can be the flashiest and the "prettiest."
The Indians traditionally have done everything on their own — most of them never tote up how much they spend on materials for their suits — but this year, some of them had help. A foundation associated with the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival (which starts April 28) bought and distributed 900 strings of marabou feathers and 175 pounds of custom-dyed large African ostrich plumes — two pounds per Indian, with 75 to 100 feathers per pound. The festival has also been paying the cost of police permits for second-line neighborhood parades — which was raised, in January, to $3,605 — and fees for the brass bands. "This is all that is left of this jazz culture in the world," said Quint Davis, the director of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival.
Tipitina's, a club devoted to New Orleans music, is now a nonprofit foundation. It has been distributing instruments, including a shiny new brass sousaphone for the leader of the Rebirth Brass Band, which had New Orleans gigs all through the weekend. It also turned its upstairs offices into a community center for musicians, where they can use computers, get free legal help and meet one another: a kind of substitute for neighborhood hangouts that are now gone. And in November 2005, it began holding Mardi Gras Indian practices, which used to take place in neighborhood bars. The practice sessions doubled in size each time until they outgrew the club.
Long-term questions remain about what will happen to New Orleans traditions. High school bands in African-American neighborhoods were a vital training ground and source of instruments for young New Orleans musicians; with far fewer students in the city, many schools are closed down or consolidated, and music instruction is unlikely to be the most pressing priority for those that reopen. But on Carnival weekend, the clubs were full of familiar New Orleans names and sounds: brass bands like the Hot 8 and the Soul Rebels, funk bands like Galactic and the Radiators, the bluesman Walter Wolfman Washington and jazz musicians like the New Orleans Vipers and Trombone Shorty.
In the aftermath of the storm, there has been a huge surge of interest in New Orleans music. "Since Katrina, the culture in this city is being recognized more," said Bo Dollis, chief of the Wild Magnolias, another parading tribe. "And without the music, I don't know how this city will survive."
Then, flanked by tribe members in feathers and beads, he took to the stage of the Rock 'n' Bowl in the Mid-City neighborhood — much of it still dark and deserted — to sing the old Indian songs once again.
photo: Big Chief Donald Harrison with his 2006 costume
No comments:
Post a Comment