New Orleans Bands Struggle to Regain Footing

New York Times
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 resurrected since Katrina, the high school bands are stretched thin. They have fewer members than they did before the storm, often operating at half their old numbers. They also use more fledgling instrumentalists to fill the ranks.

“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.