on man, this is disgusting. And if you have ever been around a lot of brass players, you know that wherever they play, they slow condensation and saliva onto the floor via their spit valves. Keep that in mind when you read this:
NPR
Think Music Heals? Trombone Player Begs To Differ
by Diane Orson
September 8, 2010 from WNPR
Each day, thousands of music students head to band practice with their trumpets, trombones and saxophones. But they may want to pay a bit more attention to the way they clean out their instruments when rehearsal is over. One musician in Connecticut learned the hard way about the dangers of not cleaning his horn — after he developed a condition that's being called "trombone players' lung."
Scott Bean spends hours each day performing, practicing and teaching the trombone. But for years, Bean struggled with health problems that made it hard to play his instrument.
"I coughed. I had a horrible deep barking cough — especially when I played trombone. I had a sore throat, lost 60 pounds at a time, had a low-grade fever," he says. "It was a huge hindrance."
The Stuff Inside
Doctors thought Bean had asthma, but none of the usual therapies worked. After 15 years, Bean went on vacation for the first time without his trombone — and felt better. He began to wonder if the instrument could be making him sick.
A doctor at the University of Connecticut took a culture from inside his horn.
"Then he calls me up and says, 'Scott, we know what's in your trombone,'" Bean says.
It was a mold called fusarium, says Mark Metersky, a professor at the University of Connecticut Medical School's division of pulmonary and critical care.
"He also grew a type of bacteria called a mycobacterium, sort of a cousin of tuberculosis," Metersky says.
This stuff inside the trombone was causing an allergic reaction, which led to hypersensitivity pneumonitis, a severe inflammation of the lungs. Microscopic organisms were breaking off and getting into Bean's lungs each time he inhaled.
Bean admits brass players are often lax about cleaning their horns.
"You talk about cleaning out your instrument, and they laugh and make some funny remark about it," he says. "I never cleaned out my trombone — maybe once every other year. We never clean it out."
Not Alone
Mold and bacteria could grow in any brass instrument. And for most players, it wouldn't matter much, except maybe aesthetically. But for a subset of people who react to these organisms, it's no joke. Metersky set out to see how common a problem it was. He asked several professional musicians if he could culture the insides of their trombones and trumpets for a pilot study.
"Things plopped out," Metersky says. "It was disgusting. Imagine the worst thing you've found in your refrigerator in food that you've left for a few months, and that was coming out of these instruments."
Metersky stopped testing after 10 instruments, because they all were contaminated....
.....
Doctors have known about this disease for a while, but Cecile Rose, a hypersensitivity pneumonitis expert at National Jewish Health in Colorado, says no one has ever thought to connect it to musical instruments.....
Read and hear the entire story HERE.
Showing posts with label brass. Show all posts
Showing posts with label brass. Show all posts
Thursday, September 09, 2010
Monday, December 29, 2008
Freddie Hubbard (1938-2008)
Jazz great Freddie Hubbard dead at 70
By JOHN ROGERS, Associated Press Writer John Rogers, Associated Press Writer Mon Dec 29, 5:49 pm ET
LOS ANGELES – Freddie Hubbard, the Grammy-winning jazz musician whose style influenced a generation of trumpet players and who collaborated with such greats as Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins, died Monday, a month after suffering a heart attack. He was 70.
Hubbard died at Sherman Oaks Hospital, said his manager, fellow trumpeter David Weiss of the New Jazz Composers Octet. He had been hospitalized since suffering the heart attack a day before Thanksgiving.
A towering figure in jazz circles, Hubbard played on hundreds of recordings in a career dating to 1958, the year he arrived in New York from his hometown Indianapolis, where he had studied at the Arthur Jordan Conservatory of Music and with the Indianapolis Symphony.
Soon he had hooked up with such jazz legends as Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Cannonball Adderley and Coltrane.
"I met Trane at a jam session at Count Basie's in Harlem in 1958," he told the jazz magazine Down Beat in 1995. "He said, `Why don't you come over and let's try and practice a little bit together.' I almost went crazy. I mean, here is a 20-year-old kid practicing with John Coltrane. He helped me out a lot, and we worked several jobs together."
In his earliest recordings, which included "Open Sesame" and "Goin' Up" for Blue Note in 1960, the influence of Davis and others on Hubbard is obvious, Weiss said. But within a couple years he would develop a style all his own, one that would influence generations of musicians, including Wynton Marsalis.
"He influenced all the trumpet players that came after him," Marsalis told The Associated Press earlier this year. "Certainly I listened to him a lot. ... We all listened to him. He has a big sound and a great sense of rhythm and time and really the hallmark of his playing is an exuberance. His playing is exuberant."
Hubbard played on more than 300 recordings, including his own albums and those of scores of other artists. He won his Grammy in 1972 for best jazz performance by a group for the album "First Light."
As a young musician, Hubbard became revered among his peers for a fiery, blazing style that allowed him to hit notes higher and faster than just about anyone else with a horn. As age and infirmity began to slow that style, he switched to a softer, melodic style and played a flugelhorn. His fellow musicians were still impressed.
"The sound he gets on just one note. I know he does all the flashy stuff and the high stuff and it's all great but ... he'd play `Body and Soul' on the flugelhorn and it was just that much better again than everyone around him," trumpeter Chris Botti said in an interview earlier this year.
___
Associated Press Writer Charles J. Gans in New York contributed to this story.
From downbeat:
Freddie Hubbard Dies
Daily News Headlines
Posted 12/29/2008
Trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, who from the mid '60s to the late '80s was arguably the most powerful and prolific trumpeter in jazz, died Monday morning in Sherman Oaks Hospital in Sherman Oaks, Calif., of complications from a heart attack he had in late November. He was 70.
Blessed with a sound that combined Clifford Brown's technique, Lee Morgan's bravura and Miles Davis' sensitivity, Hubbard was prominent for much of his career both a leader and a sideman. Born in Indianapolis on April 7, 1938, Hubbard's earliest professional gigs were with guitarist Wes Montgomery and his brothers before he moved to New York in 1958, working with Eric Dolphy, Sonny Rollins, Quincy Jones and many others. He recorded with John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman and on Oliver Nelson's Blues And The Abstract Truth album.
In 1961, he joined Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers for three years and recorded as a leader for Blue Note. His albums for the label include Breaking Point, Goin' Up and Hub-Tones, and he appeared as a sideman on a number of important Blue Note dates, including Herbie Hancock's Maiden Voyage and Empyrean Isles. After stints with Atlantic and Impulse! records, Hubbard worked with producer Creed Taylor in 1970 and recorded a number of accessible and noteworthy jazz-fusion classics including Red Clay, Straight Life, Sky Dive and First Light. In the mid '70s, Hubbard signed with Columbia and recorded and toured with VSOP: a Miles Davis reunion combo featuring Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, Wayne Shorter and Tony Williams.
Hubbard also collaborated with vocalists Chaka Khan and Elton John and recorded Double Take with trumpeter Woody Shaw. His recorded on the Atlantic, Pablo ad EMI throughout the '80s. After a series of lip problems had sidelined him for almost a decade, Hubbard re-emerged in the past few years with David Weiss’s New Jazz Composers Octet. He released On The Real Side (Times Square) last year to celebrate his 70th birthday.
By JOHN ROGERS, Associated Press Writer John Rogers, Associated Press Writer Mon Dec 29, 5:49 pm ET
LOS ANGELES – Freddie Hubbard, the Grammy-winning jazz musician whose style influenced a generation of trumpet players and who collaborated with such greats as Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins, died Monday, a month after suffering a heart attack. He was 70.
Hubbard died at Sherman Oaks Hospital, said his manager, fellow trumpeter David Weiss of the New Jazz Composers Octet. He had been hospitalized since suffering the heart attack a day before Thanksgiving.
A towering figure in jazz circles, Hubbard played on hundreds of recordings in a career dating to 1958, the year he arrived in New York from his hometown Indianapolis, where he had studied at the Arthur Jordan Conservatory of Music and with the Indianapolis Symphony.
Soon he had hooked up with such jazz legends as Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Cannonball Adderley and Coltrane.
"I met Trane at a jam session at Count Basie's in Harlem in 1958," he told the jazz magazine Down Beat in 1995. "He said, `Why don't you come over and let's try and practice a little bit together.' I almost went crazy. I mean, here is a 20-year-old kid practicing with John Coltrane. He helped me out a lot, and we worked several jobs together."
In his earliest recordings, which included "Open Sesame" and "Goin' Up" for Blue Note in 1960, the influence of Davis and others on Hubbard is obvious, Weiss said. But within a couple years he would develop a style all his own, one that would influence generations of musicians, including Wynton Marsalis.
"He influenced all the trumpet players that came after him," Marsalis told The Associated Press earlier this year. "Certainly I listened to him a lot. ... We all listened to him. He has a big sound and a great sense of rhythm and time and really the hallmark of his playing is an exuberance. His playing is exuberant."
Hubbard played on more than 300 recordings, including his own albums and those of scores of other artists. He won his Grammy in 1972 for best jazz performance by a group for the album "First Light."
As a young musician, Hubbard became revered among his peers for a fiery, blazing style that allowed him to hit notes higher and faster than just about anyone else with a horn. As age and infirmity began to slow that style, he switched to a softer, melodic style and played a flugelhorn. His fellow musicians were still impressed.
"The sound he gets on just one note. I know he does all the flashy stuff and the high stuff and it's all great but ... he'd play `Body and Soul' on the flugelhorn and it was just that much better again than everyone around him," trumpeter Chris Botti said in an interview earlier this year.
___
Associated Press Writer Charles J. Gans in New York contributed to this story.
From downbeat:
Freddie Hubbard Dies
Daily News Headlines
Posted 12/29/2008
Trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, who from the mid '60s to the late '80s was arguably the most powerful and prolific trumpeter in jazz, died Monday morning in Sherman Oaks Hospital in Sherman Oaks, Calif., of complications from a heart attack he had in late November. He was 70.
Blessed with a sound that combined Clifford Brown's technique, Lee Morgan's bravura and Miles Davis' sensitivity, Hubbard was prominent for much of his career both a leader and a sideman. Born in Indianapolis on April 7, 1938, Hubbard's earliest professional gigs were with guitarist Wes Montgomery and his brothers before he moved to New York in 1958, working with Eric Dolphy, Sonny Rollins, Quincy Jones and many others. He recorded with John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman and on Oliver Nelson's Blues And The Abstract Truth album.
In 1961, he joined Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers for three years and recorded as a leader for Blue Note. His albums for the label include Breaking Point, Goin' Up and Hub-Tones, and he appeared as a sideman on a number of important Blue Note dates, including Herbie Hancock's Maiden Voyage and Empyrean Isles. After stints with Atlantic and Impulse! records, Hubbard worked with producer Creed Taylor in 1970 and recorded a number of accessible and noteworthy jazz-fusion classics including Red Clay, Straight Life, Sky Dive and First Light. In the mid '70s, Hubbard signed with Columbia and recorded and toured with VSOP: a Miles Davis reunion combo featuring Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, Wayne Shorter and Tony Williams.
Hubbard also collaborated with vocalists Chaka Khan and Elton John and recorded Double Take with trumpeter Woody Shaw. His recorded on the Atlantic, Pablo ad EMI throughout the '80s. After a series of lip problems had sidelined him for almost a decade, Hubbard re-emerged in the past few years with David Weiss’s New Jazz Composers Octet. He released On The Real Side (Times Square) last year to celebrate his 70th birthday.
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
The French Horn, That Wild Card of the Orchestra
NYT
August 13, 2008
The French Horn, That Wild Card of the Orchestra
By ALLAN KOZINN
Orchestral instruments don’t come more treacherous than the French horn, either for the musicians who play it, or, when the going gets rough, for the listeners who find themselves within earshot. Sometimes you wonder how the instrument found its way from the hunting lodge to the orchestra.
At the Mostly Mozart Festival in recent weeks, the intractable early version of the horn has made its way into the Rose Theater as a series of period-instrument bands from Germany, England and Italy performed music ranging from Italian Baroque choral works to Mozart opera. When these groups were at their best, a listener whose fondness for period instruments dates to the 1960s could reflect on how far the performance standard has risen since.
In those days period ensembles that sounded vigorous on disc often proved anemic in concert, and the instruments’ antique technology was regularly blamed for mediocre performances. Nowadays, the performances are more typically extroverted and expressive, and although period instruments, by definition, have not been modernized to make them easier to play, listeners are no longer asked to consider their difficulty when a performance goes awry.
Except, that is, when the horn notes crack and slither. The horn remains the wild card in period-instrument orchestras, and in modern ones too. And if you find yourself cringing when horn players falter badly — as I did on Aug. 5, when Concerto Italiano played three Vivaldi concertos with prominent horn parts — caveats about the instrument’s intransigence come quickly to mind.
It’s worth understanding the challenges hornists face. In its 17th- and 18th-century form, the horn is basically just a long, flared pipe wound into two or three coils, with a mouthpiece on the end. What it lacks, compared with today’s horn, is the valve mechanism: the complex tubing and finger keys at the center of a modern horn that let hornists play chromatically and in different keys.
Without recourse to valves, hornists are most at home in the relatively few notes in the overtone series that come naturally to a bit of coiled metal: mainly, the notes you hear in hunting and military calls. As the music grows more complex, the technical demands escalate. One resource hornists have is hand-stopping: by putting a hand inside the instrument’s bell, they can flatten the pitch to produce chromatic notes.
When everything goes right, hornists can work miracles. You need only have heard James Sommerville, the Boston Symphony’s principal hornist, play Elliott Carter’s Horn Concerto at Tanglewood a few weeks ago to know how chromatic (and lyrical) a horn line can be. But you can see the potential for pitch problems. And a bit of condensation from a player’s breath adhering to the inside of a coil can lead to cracked notes, or “clams.”
As is often the case, when Concerto Italiano’s hornists were good, they were great. Their sound had a fascinatingly gritty texture, much closer to the horn’s hunting-party origins than to the mellow, warm sound of a modern instrument. But when they were off — oh, dear, what a mess!
Strangely, some believe that period horn playing is meant to sound thus. When I was in music school, I had a job in a record store and would sometimes stay after hours to listen to new releases. One was a period-instrument recording of Handel’s “Water Music” on which the horns were consistently flat. When I crinkled my nose, the store’s manager said, dismissively:
“Oh, you don’t understand. It’s only because of showoffs like Don Smithers” — a brilliant Baroque trumpeter who was also my music history teacher at the time — “that people think these instruments can be played in tune. But they aren’t meant to be.”
I didn’t buy that argument then, and having heard many superb Baroque hornists, I find it less tenable now.
For some reason — maybe it’s a little-documented, mouth-drying effect of global warming — the last season was particularly rough for hornists. In a concert of Brahms and Schumann works at the 92nd Street Y in December, the usually reliable David Jolley became ensnared in every tangle a hornist can encounter (or create), including serious balance issues in ensemble pieces. And visiting orchestras seemed more prone than usual to horn flaws.
But surely the most catastrophic horn performance of the season — of many seasons, for that matter — was at the New York Philharmonic in March, when Alan Gilbert, conducting his first concert with the orchestra since having been appointed its next music director, opened his program with Haydn’s Symphony No. 48, a work with two prominent and perilous horn parts.
The Philharmonic has long been action central for horn troubles; its principal player, Philip Myers, is wildly inconsistent, and the rest of the section is also accident-prone. Much of the time Mr. Myers’s playing is squarely on pitch, shapely and warm, and when it is, it’s everything you want in a French horn line. But he cracks, misses or slides into pitches often enough that when the Philharmonic plays a work with a prominent horn line, you brace yourself and wonder if he’ll make it.
The Haydn symphony was a real clambake.
Mentioning hornists’ failings in reviews invariably brings plenty of e-mail messages, often from people who did not hear the performances but feel moved to defend a player’s reputation. Perhaps not surprisingly, most of these correspondents have variations on the word horn (“corno” or “horncall,” for example) in their e-mail addresses, and they usually identify themselves as hornists, as if their addresses didn’t make that clear.
In the case of the Haydn, some offered amazing conspiracy theories. The most interesting was that Mr. Gilbert had programmed the work knowing that it would be botched, so that he would later have reason to replace Mr. Myers. (Mr. Gilbert doesn’t seem that Machiavellian.) Another blamed the orchestra’s management for allowing Mr. Gilbert to program it.
Still others offered technical excuses: that the work requires a variety of horn that Mr. Myers doesn’t play, for instance. (That an orchestra’s programming is announced months in advance — ample time to deal with such technical problems or lobby to have the work replaced — seems not to have troubled anyone.)
Of about a dozen e-mail messages, all but one correspondent found someone other than the players to blame for the performance. A few blamed me: I am supposedly a raging cornophobe with some deep-seated resentment of horns and hornists.
To the contrary. I played the horn briefly as a teenager, somewhere between the violin and the trombone (which had a nicer bite), and I gave up brass instruments only when I realized that continuing would mean spending weekends marching around at football games in a dopey band uniform. It was the late 1960s; that kind of thing just wasn’t done.
Nearly a decade later, as a composition student, I revisited the instrument and what it could (ideally) do when I wrote an unaccompanied horn piece and a quartet for horn, violin, bassoon and percussion (what was I thinking?) for a hornist friend.
I like the horn, honest. And I know how difficult it is to get a good, centered, well-tuned sound out of it.
But here’s the thing about musical performance: It’s all difficult. It’s meant to be. Composers write, and have always written, music that pushes the limits of technique. And if you’re onstage in a professional capacity, you’re expected to be able to negotiate it. That’s the least audiences expect, and it’s a precondition for what they buy tickets for: to be moved by an interpretation; to savor its nuances and to hear something revelatory, whether the work is new or familiar.
If, instead, they end up wincing at mistuned notes and reminding themselves how tough the instruments are, they’ve been pushed out of the zone. And at that point, no amount of rationalization will make the performance anything but a sow’s ear.
August 13, 2008
The French Horn, That Wild Card of the Orchestra
By ALLAN KOZINN
Orchestral instruments don’t come more treacherous than the French horn, either for the musicians who play it, or, when the going gets rough, for the listeners who find themselves within earshot. Sometimes you wonder how the instrument found its way from the hunting lodge to the orchestra.
At the Mostly Mozart Festival in recent weeks, the intractable early version of the horn has made its way into the Rose Theater as a series of period-instrument bands from Germany, England and Italy performed music ranging from Italian Baroque choral works to Mozart opera. When these groups were at their best, a listener whose fondness for period instruments dates to the 1960s could reflect on how far the performance standard has risen since.
In those days period ensembles that sounded vigorous on disc often proved anemic in concert, and the instruments’ antique technology was regularly blamed for mediocre performances. Nowadays, the performances are more typically extroverted and expressive, and although period instruments, by definition, have not been modernized to make them easier to play, listeners are no longer asked to consider their difficulty when a performance goes awry.
Except, that is, when the horn notes crack and slither. The horn remains the wild card in period-instrument orchestras, and in modern ones too. And if you find yourself cringing when horn players falter badly — as I did on Aug. 5, when Concerto Italiano played three Vivaldi concertos with prominent horn parts — caveats about the instrument’s intransigence come quickly to mind.
It’s worth understanding the challenges hornists face. In its 17th- and 18th-century form, the horn is basically just a long, flared pipe wound into two or three coils, with a mouthpiece on the end. What it lacks, compared with today’s horn, is the valve mechanism: the complex tubing and finger keys at the center of a modern horn that let hornists play chromatically and in different keys.
Without recourse to valves, hornists are most at home in the relatively few notes in the overtone series that come naturally to a bit of coiled metal: mainly, the notes you hear in hunting and military calls. As the music grows more complex, the technical demands escalate. One resource hornists have is hand-stopping: by putting a hand inside the instrument’s bell, they can flatten the pitch to produce chromatic notes.
When everything goes right, hornists can work miracles. You need only have heard James Sommerville, the Boston Symphony’s principal hornist, play Elliott Carter’s Horn Concerto at Tanglewood a few weeks ago to know how chromatic (and lyrical) a horn line can be. But you can see the potential for pitch problems. And a bit of condensation from a player’s breath adhering to the inside of a coil can lead to cracked notes, or “clams.”
As is often the case, when Concerto Italiano’s hornists were good, they were great. Their sound had a fascinatingly gritty texture, much closer to the horn’s hunting-party origins than to the mellow, warm sound of a modern instrument. But when they were off — oh, dear, what a mess!
Strangely, some believe that period horn playing is meant to sound thus. When I was in music school, I had a job in a record store and would sometimes stay after hours to listen to new releases. One was a period-instrument recording of Handel’s “Water Music” on which the horns were consistently flat. When I crinkled my nose, the store’s manager said, dismissively:
“Oh, you don’t understand. It’s only because of showoffs like Don Smithers” — a brilliant Baroque trumpeter who was also my music history teacher at the time — “that people think these instruments can be played in tune. But they aren’t meant to be.”
I didn’t buy that argument then, and having heard many superb Baroque hornists, I find it less tenable now.
For some reason — maybe it’s a little-documented, mouth-drying effect of global warming — the last season was particularly rough for hornists. In a concert of Brahms and Schumann works at the 92nd Street Y in December, the usually reliable David Jolley became ensnared in every tangle a hornist can encounter (or create), including serious balance issues in ensemble pieces. And visiting orchestras seemed more prone than usual to horn flaws.
But surely the most catastrophic horn performance of the season — of many seasons, for that matter — was at the New York Philharmonic in March, when Alan Gilbert, conducting his first concert with the orchestra since having been appointed its next music director, opened his program with Haydn’s Symphony No. 48, a work with two prominent and perilous horn parts.
The Philharmonic has long been action central for horn troubles; its principal player, Philip Myers, is wildly inconsistent, and the rest of the section is also accident-prone. Much of the time Mr. Myers’s playing is squarely on pitch, shapely and warm, and when it is, it’s everything you want in a French horn line. But he cracks, misses or slides into pitches often enough that when the Philharmonic plays a work with a prominent horn line, you brace yourself and wonder if he’ll make it.
The Haydn symphony was a real clambake.
Mentioning hornists’ failings in reviews invariably brings plenty of e-mail messages, often from people who did not hear the performances but feel moved to defend a player’s reputation. Perhaps not surprisingly, most of these correspondents have variations on the word horn (“corno” or “horncall,” for example) in their e-mail addresses, and they usually identify themselves as hornists, as if their addresses didn’t make that clear.
In the case of the Haydn, some offered amazing conspiracy theories. The most interesting was that Mr. Gilbert had programmed the work knowing that it would be botched, so that he would later have reason to replace Mr. Myers. (Mr. Gilbert doesn’t seem that Machiavellian.) Another blamed the orchestra’s management for allowing Mr. Gilbert to program it.
Still others offered technical excuses: that the work requires a variety of horn that Mr. Myers doesn’t play, for instance. (That an orchestra’s programming is announced months in advance — ample time to deal with such technical problems or lobby to have the work replaced — seems not to have troubled anyone.)
Of about a dozen e-mail messages, all but one correspondent found someone other than the players to blame for the performance. A few blamed me: I am supposedly a raging cornophobe with some deep-seated resentment of horns and hornists.
To the contrary. I played the horn briefly as a teenager, somewhere between the violin and the trombone (which had a nicer bite), and I gave up brass instruments only when I realized that continuing would mean spending weekends marching around at football games in a dopey band uniform. It was the late 1960s; that kind of thing just wasn’t done.
Nearly a decade later, as a composition student, I revisited the instrument and what it could (ideally) do when I wrote an unaccompanied horn piece and a quartet for horn, violin, bassoon and percussion (what was I thinking?) for a hornist friend.
I like the horn, honest. And I know how difficult it is to get a good, centered, well-tuned sound out of it.
But here’s the thing about musical performance: It’s all difficult. It’s meant to be. Composers write, and have always written, music that pushes the limits of technique. And if you’re onstage in a professional capacity, you’re expected to be able to negotiate it. That’s the least audiences expect, and it’s a precondition for what they buy tickets for: to be moved by an interpretation; to savor its nuances and to hear something revelatory, whether the work is new or familiar.
If, instead, they end up wincing at mistuned notes and reminding themselves how tough the instruments are, they’ve been pushed out of the zone. And at that point, no amount of rationalization will make the performance anything but a sow’s ear.
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Florida A&M's Marching 100
NYT
July 23, 2008
Camp Leads a Drumbeat for a Marching Band’s Style
By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — As his extended family gathered around the table for dinner last Christmas, Ben Brock received one final present. It was a scrapbook, each page adorned with photos of him as a child and handwritten notes from his relatives. Then, on the last sheet, the names of his mother, sister, uncles and aunts appeared, with a dollar figure next to each.
Those numbers reflected the money they had pledged to send Ben, 16, almost as far from his home in Seattle as it was possible to go within the continental United States. At the end of that journey lay the dream he had nurtured since watching the movie “Drum Line” in sixth grade: to become part of the Marching 100, the renowned band at Florida A&M University.
So on a gauzy gray morning seven months later Ben and his snare drum strode onto the dewy grass of the band’s practice field on the Tallahassee campus. He had been awakened at 5 a.m. and the day’s last rehearsal would not end until 10 p.m. His feet screamed. His shoulders ached. Gnats swarmed around his face, daring him to break rhythm and lose composure.
“Snap, precision, lock in with the tempo,” called out an instructor, very much in the manner of a Marine drill sergeant. “Now step it up, get some volume.”
But this, all this, is what Ben Brock had sought, he and 450 other high school students, drawn from throughout the United States and as far as Germany. They had enrolled in the summer band camp operated by the Marching 100. For the campers, these eight days offered a kind of initiation; for the band, they offered the chance to recruit future members and to spread its ecstatic performance style literally around the world.
In the nation’s historically black colleges, marching bands have long provided far more than “The Star-Spangled Banner” for football crowds, and none, arguably, has grown more famous than Florida A&M’s.
The group’s traditional and official name, the Marching 100, is a rare bit of false modesty: the group now numbers upward of 350 musicians, drum majors and flag-carriers. The unit has built a national, even global, following with appearances at the Super Bowl, both of President Bill Clinton’s inaugural parades, the Grammy Awards and the bicentennial of the French republic.
The only reason Florida A&M was not explicitly identified as the inspiration for “Drum Line” is that the script called for the Marching 100 to finish second in a battle of the bands, and, as the group’s director, Prof. Julian E. White, put it the other day, “We don’t lose.”
The Marching 100 has created a revolution in band style, radically infusing the traditional catalog of songs and formations with the sounds and dances of black popular culture. “It slides, slithers, swivels, rotates, shakes, rocks and rolls,” the band’s founding director, Prof. William P. Foster, wrote in his memoirs. “It leaps to the sky, does triple twists, and drops to earth without a flaw, without missing either a beat or a step.”
It also attracts plenty of acolytes. When Dr. White began the summer camp 18 years ago, he expected to attract mainly African-American students from the Southeast. Not only has the enrollment soared to 450 from an initial 90, the geographical and racial range has expanded. (Tuition is $475, with many students receiving scholarships.)
Three busloads of campers came this summer from Michigan alone. Dozens of Hispanic and white teenagers have flocked to the program, including the archetypal slacker this summer who wore a T-shirt explaining, “I’m Probably Late.”
“They come here, they ignore the gnats, they ignore the heat, because of the uniqueness of what we do and the pride we feel, the dedication,” Dr. White said. “And when they leave here, their parents say they sleep for a week.”
Ralph Jean-Paul remembers those sensations well. Now the band president and a tuba instructor for the summer program, he started out eight years ago as a camper.
“I felt I had come to an empire,” Mr. Jean-Paul recalled. “To see this magnitude of musicians, all working in one place, 30 tubas alone. That first day, I told myself, ‘This is where I want to be.’ ”
Technology has enhanced and challenged the summer camp. On the one hand, teenagers anywhere in the world can find clips of the Marching 100 on YouTube or visit its MySpace page.
“I saw people doing a dance routine with their drums that I thought was completely impossible,” Mr. Brock said of his online exploration. “I said to myself, ‘I’ve got to learn how to do that.’ ”
On the other hand, the rise of hip-hop and the computerized music programs like GarageBand has depleted the pool of young instrumentalists. In addition, many public schools have reduced or eliminated music classes to provide double periods of math and reading, which are tested annually under the education law No Child Left Behind.
The camp makes no concession to any of it. Within the program’s single week, every student is expected to learn a pregame and half-time show, and to perform with a symphonic, chamber or jazz ensemble. Veterans know to bring along insect repellent and ice packs.
“They’re serious down here,” said L’Dante Brown, a 14-year-old drummer from the Virgin Islands. “When they tell you to stand still and be quiet, you can hear the mosquitoes flying.”
And when they tell Mr. Brown and the rest to move and make noise, and all the French horns and piccolos and saxophones and trombones sashay into action, the syncopated sound echoes across the hilly campus.
“I know I’m not the best player,” said Dana Dixon, 16, a clarinetist from Cedar Rapids, Iowa. “But I’ve learned notes. I’ve learned steps. I’m happy and I’m sore. I thought waking up at 5 o’clock would be terrible, but it’s nothing. It’s, like, let’s wake up and do it.”
July 23, 2008
Camp Leads a Drumbeat for a Marching Band’s Style
By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — As his extended family gathered around the table for dinner last Christmas, Ben Brock received one final present. It was a scrapbook, each page adorned with photos of him as a child and handwritten notes from his relatives. Then, on the last sheet, the names of his mother, sister, uncles and aunts appeared, with a dollar figure next to each.
Those numbers reflected the money they had pledged to send Ben, 16, almost as far from his home in Seattle as it was possible to go within the continental United States. At the end of that journey lay the dream he had nurtured since watching the movie “Drum Line” in sixth grade: to become part of the Marching 100, the renowned band at Florida A&M University.
So on a gauzy gray morning seven months later Ben and his snare drum strode onto the dewy grass of the band’s practice field on the Tallahassee campus. He had been awakened at 5 a.m. and the day’s last rehearsal would not end until 10 p.m. His feet screamed. His shoulders ached. Gnats swarmed around his face, daring him to break rhythm and lose composure.
“Snap, precision, lock in with the tempo,” called out an instructor, very much in the manner of a Marine drill sergeant. “Now step it up, get some volume.”
But this, all this, is what Ben Brock had sought, he and 450 other high school students, drawn from throughout the United States and as far as Germany. They had enrolled in the summer band camp operated by the Marching 100. For the campers, these eight days offered a kind of initiation; for the band, they offered the chance to recruit future members and to spread its ecstatic performance style literally around the world.
In the nation’s historically black colleges, marching bands have long provided far more than “The Star-Spangled Banner” for football crowds, and none, arguably, has grown more famous than Florida A&M’s.
The group’s traditional and official name, the Marching 100, is a rare bit of false modesty: the group now numbers upward of 350 musicians, drum majors and flag-carriers. The unit has built a national, even global, following with appearances at the Super Bowl, both of President Bill Clinton’s inaugural parades, the Grammy Awards and the bicentennial of the French republic.
The only reason Florida A&M was not explicitly identified as the inspiration for “Drum Line” is that the script called for the Marching 100 to finish second in a battle of the bands, and, as the group’s director, Prof. Julian E. White, put it the other day, “We don’t lose.”
The Marching 100 has created a revolution in band style, radically infusing the traditional catalog of songs and formations with the sounds and dances of black popular culture. “It slides, slithers, swivels, rotates, shakes, rocks and rolls,” the band’s founding director, Prof. William P. Foster, wrote in his memoirs. “It leaps to the sky, does triple twists, and drops to earth without a flaw, without missing either a beat or a step.”
It also attracts plenty of acolytes. When Dr. White began the summer camp 18 years ago, he expected to attract mainly African-American students from the Southeast. Not only has the enrollment soared to 450 from an initial 90, the geographical and racial range has expanded. (Tuition is $475, with many students receiving scholarships.)
Three busloads of campers came this summer from Michigan alone. Dozens of Hispanic and white teenagers have flocked to the program, including the archetypal slacker this summer who wore a T-shirt explaining, “I’m Probably Late.”
“They come here, they ignore the gnats, they ignore the heat, because of the uniqueness of what we do and the pride we feel, the dedication,” Dr. White said. “And when they leave here, their parents say they sleep for a week.”
Ralph Jean-Paul remembers those sensations well. Now the band president and a tuba instructor for the summer program, he started out eight years ago as a camper.
“I felt I had come to an empire,” Mr. Jean-Paul recalled. “To see this magnitude of musicians, all working in one place, 30 tubas alone. That first day, I told myself, ‘This is where I want to be.’ ”
Technology has enhanced and challenged the summer camp. On the one hand, teenagers anywhere in the world can find clips of the Marching 100 on YouTube or visit its MySpace page.
“I saw people doing a dance routine with their drums that I thought was completely impossible,” Mr. Brock said of his online exploration. “I said to myself, ‘I’ve got to learn how to do that.’ ”
On the other hand, the rise of hip-hop and the computerized music programs like GarageBand has depleted the pool of young instrumentalists. In addition, many public schools have reduced or eliminated music classes to provide double periods of math and reading, which are tested annually under the education law No Child Left Behind.
The camp makes no concession to any of it. Within the program’s single week, every student is expected to learn a pregame and half-time show, and to perform with a symphonic, chamber or jazz ensemble. Veterans know to bring along insect repellent and ice packs.
“They’re serious down here,” said L’Dante Brown, a 14-year-old drummer from the Virgin Islands. “When they tell you to stand still and be quiet, you can hear the mosquitoes flying.”
And when they tell Mr. Brown and the rest to move and make noise, and all the French horns and piccolos and saxophones and trombones sashay into action, the syncopated sound echoes across the hilly campus.
“I know I’m not the best player,” said Dana Dixon, 16, a clarinetist from Cedar Rapids, Iowa. “But I’ve learned notes. I’ve learned steps. I’m happy and I’m sore. I thought waking up at 5 o’clock would be terrible, but it’s nothing. It’s, like, let’s wake up and do it.”
Friday, June 13, 2008
2007 New Orleans brass band funeral for Kerwin James
Below is some YouTube footage of a New Orleans brass band funeral for musician Kerwin James, who played for the New Birth Brass Band:
"Noted tuba player Kerwin James, member of the New Birth Brass Band and younger brother to Philip and Keith Frazier of the Rebirth Brass Band, died Friday in a Houston hospital. James, 35, had been in a coma since the summer of 2006, when he suffered a stroke during a performance.
James, a native of the Treme neighborhood in New Orleans, was known for his dedication and devotion to the city after the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina. Considered by bandleader Joe Torregano as “the heir to the throne of the late, great Anthony ‘Tuba Fats’ Lacen,” James was also known for his impressive performances at local events such as the French Quarter Festival.
Yet after a show last year, James suffered a stroke that left him paralyzed and, on Friday, caused complications that led to his death. A parade in James’ honor was spontaneously held on St. Phillip Street in New Orleans when the community heard of his death, but authorities broke up the event and two musicians, snare drummer Derrick Tabb and trombonist/singer Glen David Andrews, were arrested for disturbing the peace."
Typically the early music at a jazz funeral consists of slow dirges before later switching to up-tempo jazz. Here, though, instead of a dirge there is a soulful 6/8 lilt to the band's version of the hymn "Just a Closer Walk with Thee," a staple of the jazz funeral repertoire (though often played as a dirge). The band is huge and wailing for one of their own. It's the most powerful version of this hymn I have ever heard. Near the end, they move the coffin around in time so the deceased can step with the band one last time. Beautiful. Bless him and bless New Orleans.
"Noted tuba player Kerwin James, member of the New Birth Brass Band and younger brother to Philip and Keith Frazier of the Rebirth Brass Band, died Friday in a Houston hospital. James, 35, had been in a coma since the summer of 2006, when he suffered a stroke during a performance.
James, a native of the Treme neighborhood in New Orleans, was known for his dedication and devotion to the city after the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina. Considered by bandleader Joe Torregano as “the heir to the throne of the late, great Anthony ‘Tuba Fats’ Lacen,” James was also known for his impressive performances at local events such as the French Quarter Festival.
Yet after a show last year, James suffered a stroke that left him paralyzed and, on Friday, caused complications that led to his death. A parade in James’ honor was spontaneously held on St. Phillip Street in New Orleans when the community heard of his death, but authorities broke up the event and two musicians, snare drummer Derrick Tabb and trombonist/singer Glen David Andrews, were arrested for disturbing the peace."
Typically the early music at a jazz funeral consists of slow dirges before later switching to up-tempo jazz. Here, though, instead of a dirge there is a soulful 6/8 lilt to the band's version of the hymn "Just a Closer Walk with Thee," a staple of the jazz funeral repertoire (though often played as a dirge). The band is huge and wailing for one of their own. It's the most powerful version of this hymn I have ever heard. Near the end, they move the coffin around in time so the deceased can step with the band one last time. Beautiful. Bless him and bless New Orleans.
Friday, May 30, 2008
Rebirth Brass Band celebrates 25 years
Story including photos at the New Orleans Times-Picayune/Nola.com
Rebirth Brass Band celebrates 25 years of blowing its horns
Posted by amaloney May 29, 2008 16:30PM
Video
. . . . . . .
It was a Tuesday night, and Phil and Keith Frazier were at the Maple Leaf Bar, where they have played every week for 18 years with the Rebirth Brass Band. Instead of performing, however, they were reminiscing about the past 25 years of Rebirth. It took them a while to get started, but once the stories started flowing, they didn't stop.
Their favorite touring partner?
"Ani, " Phil said.
As in Ani DiFranco, the dreadlocks-sporting, righteous babe, acoustic-guitar-playing Ani?
"That's our girl!" exclaimed Phil, as he went on to describe Rebirth's six-week tour opening for the indie-rock heroine. DiFranco's audiences, more in tune with anti-war chants than with brass band beats, "didn't know what was coming, " Keith said.
"And then we'd just hit 'em with it, " Phil said.
They played for more than 10,000 people at Red Rocks in Colorado -- "That was the show, " Phil said -- and opened for the Grateful Dead in 1989, "when Jerry Garcia was still around -- cool guy, " he said.
The Rebirth Brass Band has been playing at the Maple Leaf Bar on Oak Street just about every Tuesday night for nearly 20 years.
One summer in the 1980s, they traveled the same European festival circuit as a slew of jazz legends, and several times shared a hotel floor with Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie and Art Blakely.
At the North Sea Jazz Festival, they crashed the end of a James Brown concert. "He sang the last note, and we busted through the crowd. People were like, 'What is this?' " Keith said.
"We went to Africa for six weeks, " Phil said.
"We went to Syria -- by mistake, " Keith added.
After 20 European tours, 14 albums, four tours of Japan and gigs in 46 states, these guys have seen a lot.
Since emerging in the early 1980s with their street-infused brand of brass band music, Rebirth has become a New Orleans institution, still as welcome and active at home as they are around the world. The band is celebrating its 25th anniversary tonight and tomorrow with two shows at the Howlin' Wolf, which will feature nearly all of the band's 28 members, past and present. They released an anniversary CD, titled simply "25, " in April.
They are both global ambassadors for New Orleans and second-line favorites in New Orleans. And they show no signs of slowing down.
. . . . . . .
The band officially formed in 1983, growing out of the Joseph S. Clark Senior High School marching band, but the Fraziers say Rebirth's story really began on the streets of Treme. Along with founding member Kermit Ruffins, who left the band in 1992 to forge his own career, both the Fraziers played music from an early age. The brothers were encouraged by both their mother, Barbara Frazier, who played gospel piano, and by the vibrant musical culture of the Treme neighborhood.
Phil Frazier, leader of the Rebirth Brass Band, and his brother Keith are the only members to have been with the band for 25 years.
While Keith started out on baritone horn in the seventh grade, Phil, who had been playing trombone since the fourth grade, soon found his passion in the tuba.
"I switched to tuba in high school because it was calling me.
"I would go to bed with the tuba, " he said, laughing, then added, "I don't do that anymore."
The newly formed band cut its first album with 1984's "Here To Stay." Perhaps, at the time, only the players knew how apt that debut title would prove to be.
Professionally, the group was inspired by the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, which, at the time, had achieved the greatest crossover appeal of any New Orleans brass ensemble. But musically, they were most inspired by the second-line tradition, street beats and the funky abandon of Treme. It was that quality they sought to re-create on their albums and in shows, and it is ultimately what has made them so enduring.
"We came along and did a lot of street stuff, " Keith said. "We took the street, and brought it to the stage."
Their early agent, Allison Minor, told them they'd find bigger audiences abroad than in the United States, and sent them to Europe. The intense touring in foreign lands, catching -- and sometimes missing -- trains, "made us grow up faster, " Phil said.
"We were so young, too, " Keith said. "We didn't know what the hell we were doing."
. . . . . . .
At 8:30 p.m., the Maple Leaf courtyard was virtually empty as the brothers Frazier recounted tales from the past quarter-century. A middle-aged African-American couple, dressed for some place fancier than the Maple Leaf, wandered up to the bar next to the courtyard and looked around expectantly.
"Excuse me, " the woman said to Phil. "What's the name of the band tonight?"
"Rebirth, " he said.
"Rebirth, OK, " said the woman, nodding to her husband, who nodded back. The couple was visiting from Atlanta, they said, and had heard about the band from friends from New Orleans.
Phil turned to his brother and flashed a precocious grin. "Ohhhh, I love getting new people!" he exclaimed.
Phil directed the couple to the front bar, telling them to say that "King Phil" had sent them. They looked at him skeptically, but smiled and disappeared toward the front.
"We call them Rebirth virgins, " Keith said. "They listen, and they're like, 'Oh my God, where has this music been my whole life?' "
The couple returned a few minutes later, drinks in hand. They laughed and said to Phil, "You really are the king!" and went into the courtyard.
After fine-tuning their touring chops in Europe, Rebirth conquered the United States, too. San Francisco and New York are among their favorite cities, where their venues often sell out. Amsterdam, they said, remains their favorite locale outside of New Orleans.
"It's so like New Orleans, " Keith said.
In their recording history, which includes 14 full-length albums and countless guest appearances, they have partnered with Robbie Roberston of The Band, Soulja Slim and Harry Connick Jr. Their favorite studio collaboration? Playing "Whole Lotta Loving" with Lenny Kravitz, Troy "Trombone Shorty" Andrews, Fred Wesley, Pee Wee Ellis and Maceo Parker on the album "Going Home: A Tribute to Fats Domino."
"We just gelled like that, instantly, " Phil said. "It was funky."
. . . . . . .
Despite the band's renown, if there's one thing that has stayed with Rebirth over the past quarter-century, it is the street.
The group experienced the inevitable backlash that comes with fame after their first decade of international and domestic touring, and today many locals complain that the long-running Tuesday night gig at the Maple Leaf has become a reservoir for college students and bourgeois Uptowners. But few can deny that Rebirth is still a band of the people.
When not touring, the band plays second-lines nearly every Sunday, and the band's members have kept their roots in New Orleans. Snare drum player Derrick Tabb, who has been with Rebirth 12 years, recently started the organization Roots of Music, which conducts after-school music classes for children.
What drives the Fraziers to keep playing after so long is not money or fame, they said, but the joy of bringing music to the people.
"I love making people happy, " Phil said. "I love giving people my all. If I'm not doing anything, I'm depressed."
"We just dealt with (the criticism), " Keith said. "We told people, 'This is what happens when you go from underground to being famous. It doesn't change who you are.' "
Now, Phil, 42, is a grandfather, and Keith will hit the four-decade mark in October, though he says, "I still feel 18."
Though they say playing music makes them feel young, they have embraced the avuncular role they play with the band's younger members, such as Chadrick Honore, who is 20.
"I could be his father, " Phil said in disbelief, which turned promptly to knee-slapping laughter. "Man, that's some crazy s- - -!"
Keith continued: "I really love to tell them what to expect in life, especially as a musician. It makes you feel good to be able to pass on that stuff."
Their only rule for the band, they say, is no fighting with one another. Everything else is met with New Orleans-style laissez faire. The Fraziers advise their younger band mates on keeping track of their finances and having a good time while paying mind to their image, which is, by extension, the band's image and the city's image.
"We got New Orleans on our shoulders, " Keith said.
Their most important words of wisdom?
"Don't take anything for granted, " Keith said. "Until you leave here, you don't understand what it's like, so don't take it for granted. Just play like it's your last time every time."
Rebirth Brass Band celebrates 25 years of blowing its horns
Posted by amaloney May 29, 2008 16:30PM
Video
| Rebirth Brass Band's 25th Anniversary |
. . . . . . .
It was a Tuesday night, and Phil and Keith Frazier were at the Maple Leaf Bar, where they have played every week for 18 years with the Rebirth Brass Band. Instead of performing, however, they were reminiscing about the past 25 years of Rebirth. It took them a while to get started, but once the stories started flowing, they didn't stop.
Their favorite touring partner?
"Ani, " Phil said.
As in Ani DiFranco, the dreadlocks-sporting, righteous babe, acoustic-guitar-playing Ani?
"That's our girl!" exclaimed Phil, as he went on to describe Rebirth's six-week tour opening for the indie-rock heroine. DiFranco's audiences, more in tune with anti-war chants than with brass band beats, "didn't know what was coming, " Keith said.
"And then we'd just hit 'em with it, " Phil said.
They played for more than 10,000 people at Red Rocks in Colorado -- "That was the show, " Phil said -- and opened for the Grateful Dead in 1989, "when Jerry Garcia was still around -- cool guy, " he said.
The Rebirth Brass Band has been playing at the Maple Leaf Bar on Oak Street just about every Tuesday night for nearly 20 years.
One summer in the 1980s, they traveled the same European festival circuit as a slew of jazz legends, and several times shared a hotel floor with Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie and Art Blakely.
At the North Sea Jazz Festival, they crashed the end of a James Brown concert. "He sang the last note, and we busted through the crowd. People were like, 'What is this?' " Keith said.
"We went to Africa for six weeks, " Phil said.
"We went to Syria -- by mistake, " Keith added.
After 20 European tours, 14 albums, four tours of Japan and gigs in 46 states, these guys have seen a lot.
Since emerging in the early 1980s with their street-infused brand of brass band music, Rebirth has become a New Orleans institution, still as welcome and active at home as they are around the world. The band is celebrating its 25th anniversary tonight and tomorrow with two shows at the Howlin' Wolf, which will feature nearly all of the band's 28 members, past and present. They released an anniversary CD, titled simply "25, " in April.
They are both global ambassadors for New Orleans and second-line favorites in New Orleans. And they show no signs of slowing down.
. . . . . . .
The band officially formed in 1983, growing out of the Joseph S. Clark Senior High School marching band, but the Fraziers say Rebirth's story really began on the streets of Treme. Along with founding member Kermit Ruffins, who left the band in 1992 to forge his own career, both the Fraziers played music from an early age. The brothers were encouraged by both their mother, Barbara Frazier, who played gospel piano, and by the vibrant musical culture of the Treme neighborhood.
Phil Frazier, leader of the Rebirth Brass Band, and his brother Keith are the only members to have been with the band for 25 years.
While Keith started out on baritone horn in the seventh grade, Phil, who had been playing trombone since the fourth grade, soon found his passion in the tuba.
"I switched to tuba in high school because it was calling me.
"I would go to bed with the tuba, " he said, laughing, then added, "I don't do that anymore."
The newly formed band cut its first album with 1984's "Here To Stay." Perhaps, at the time, only the players knew how apt that debut title would prove to be.
Professionally, the group was inspired by the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, which, at the time, had achieved the greatest crossover appeal of any New Orleans brass ensemble. But musically, they were most inspired by the second-line tradition, street beats and the funky abandon of Treme. It was that quality they sought to re-create on their albums and in shows, and it is ultimately what has made them so enduring.
"We came along and did a lot of street stuff, " Keith said. "We took the street, and brought it to the stage."
Their early agent, Allison Minor, told them they'd find bigger audiences abroad than in the United States, and sent them to Europe. The intense touring in foreign lands, catching -- and sometimes missing -- trains, "made us grow up faster, " Phil said.
"We were so young, too, " Keith said. "We didn't know what the hell we were doing."
. . . . . . .
At 8:30 p.m., the Maple Leaf courtyard was virtually empty as the brothers Frazier recounted tales from the past quarter-century. A middle-aged African-American couple, dressed for some place fancier than the Maple Leaf, wandered up to the bar next to the courtyard and looked around expectantly.
"Excuse me, " the woman said to Phil. "What's the name of the band tonight?"
"Rebirth, " he said.
"Rebirth, OK, " said the woman, nodding to her husband, who nodded back. The couple was visiting from Atlanta, they said, and had heard about the band from friends from New Orleans.
Phil turned to his brother and flashed a precocious grin. "Ohhhh, I love getting new people!" he exclaimed.
Phil directed the couple to the front bar, telling them to say that "King Phil" had sent them. They looked at him skeptically, but smiled and disappeared toward the front.
"We call them Rebirth virgins, " Keith said. "They listen, and they're like, 'Oh my God, where has this music been my whole life?' "
The couple returned a few minutes later, drinks in hand. They laughed and said to Phil, "You really are the king!" and went into the courtyard.
After fine-tuning their touring chops in Europe, Rebirth conquered the United States, too. San Francisco and New York are among their favorite cities, where their venues often sell out. Amsterdam, they said, remains their favorite locale outside of New Orleans.
"It's so like New Orleans, " Keith said.
In their recording history, which includes 14 full-length albums and countless guest appearances, they have partnered with Robbie Roberston of The Band, Soulja Slim and Harry Connick Jr. Their favorite studio collaboration? Playing "Whole Lotta Loving" with Lenny Kravitz, Troy "Trombone Shorty" Andrews, Fred Wesley, Pee Wee Ellis and Maceo Parker on the album "Going Home: A Tribute to Fats Domino."
"We just gelled like that, instantly, " Phil said. "It was funky."
. . . . . . .
Despite the band's renown, if there's one thing that has stayed with Rebirth over the past quarter-century, it is the street.
The group experienced the inevitable backlash that comes with fame after their first decade of international and domestic touring, and today many locals complain that the long-running Tuesday night gig at the Maple Leaf has become a reservoir for college students and bourgeois Uptowners. But few can deny that Rebirth is still a band of the people.
When not touring, the band plays second-lines nearly every Sunday, and the band's members have kept their roots in New Orleans. Snare drum player Derrick Tabb, who has been with Rebirth 12 years, recently started the organization Roots of Music, which conducts after-school music classes for children.
What drives the Fraziers to keep playing after so long is not money or fame, they said, but the joy of bringing music to the people.
"I love making people happy, " Phil said. "I love giving people my all. If I'm not doing anything, I'm depressed."
"We just dealt with (the criticism), " Keith said. "We told people, 'This is what happens when you go from underground to being famous. It doesn't change who you are.' "
Now, Phil, 42, is a grandfather, and Keith will hit the four-decade mark in October, though he says, "I still feel 18."
Though they say playing music makes them feel young, they have embraced the avuncular role they play with the band's younger members, such as Chadrick Honore, who is 20.
"I could be his father, " Phil said in disbelief, which turned promptly to knee-slapping laughter. "Man, that's some crazy s- - -!"
Keith continued: "I really love to tell them what to expect in life, especially as a musician. It makes you feel good to be able to pass on that stuff."
Their only rule for the band, they say, is no fighting with one another. Everything else is met with New Orleans-style laissez faire. The Fraziers advise their younger band mates on keeping track of their finances and having a good time while paying mind to their image, which is, by extension, the band's image and the city's image.
"We got New Orleans on our shoulders, " Keith said.
Their most important words of wisdom?
"Don't take anything for granted, " Keith said. "Until you leave here, you don't understand what it's like, so don't take it for granted. Just play like it's your last time every time."
Friday, March 28, 2008
New Orleans Musician Glen David Andrews
Offbeat
BackTalk with Glen David Andrews
By John Swenson
The late January afternoon shadows shiver across the flagstones on Jackson Square as a crowd of about 50 tourists in winter clothes passively watches an unlikely collection of musicians—a chubby, red-faced schoolboy trumpeter, a trombone player, tuba player, trap drummer and stand-up bassist—huff through a ragtag version of “Saints.” Glen David Andrews arrives with his trombone case slung over his shoulder, sits next to the kid trumpeter and transforms this tableau into an impromptu party.
During “I Have a Friend in Jesus,” Andrews shoulders his trombone and sends a bolt of electricity through the crowd with a solo that corkscrews in intensity as he throws in four and eight bar quotes from sources including horseracing’s “Call To Post.”
Andrews signals the other trombonist to solo, then shows the trumpeter how to comp under the solo. Andrews starts singing “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It,” adding verses from “I Hear You Knockin’” and “Blueberry Hill.” Suddenly the tourists are doing that spasmodic tourist dance, the involuntary shuffle, and a handful of homeless men who’ve been watching in silence start dancing around and gesturing as if they’re part of the entertainment. Andrews encourages the kid to sing “New Orleans Street Parade” and does a scat vocal call-and-response, making the kid take another chorus. Andrews then plays the opening strains of “Georgia,” but when he starts to sing, he changes it to “Louisiana.” The crowd goes nuts, filling the tip bucket with paper money, and Andrews takes a bow.
Andrews has been playing in this exact spot since he was younger than that red-faced trumpeter, learning from the legendary Tuba Fats. His career has taken him through the Lil’ Rascals Brass Band, the New Birth Brass Band and some spectacular moments in the Andrews Family Band along with his cousins James and Troy Andrews. As part of the new breed of brass band musicians, he wrote the refrain “Gimme a dime /I only got eight,” which has become a staple of the new brass band repertoire.
Since Katrina, Andrews has been homeless—he’s currently sleeping in his uncle’s FEMA trailer—and has turned into an outspoken critic of street violence, the slow pace of the recovery and police crackdowns on second line parades. “I got a lot to play,” he says, “and a lot to say!”
What may even be more interesting about his post-Katrina persona, though, is that Andrews has moved away from his role as one of the young turks of the new brass band movement and embraced traditional brass band music. His band, Glen David Andrews and the Lazy Six, plays the old school New Orleans jazz of his ancestors in regular gigs at Preservation Hall and Mid City Lanes Rock ’n’ Bowl.
It’s interesting to see that you still play in Jackson Square.
I like to play in Jackson Square. That’s what I’m interested in doing, teaching people. Nobody’s teaching the traditional music. The only way you can really hear the traditional music is through the Treme Brass Band or at Preservation Hall.
You were recently arrested for second lining in the Treme, which brought attention to the pressure being applied by the police to the second line tradition.
You have to just do it. They shouldn’t even ask for permission. I’ve been second lining all my life and I’m going to keep on doing it. We paraded in the Treme yesterday for about three hours. Nobody bothered us.
You’ve been an effective spokesperson for a lot of post-Katrina issues. Unfortunately, if you say what’s on your mind, you’re branded as a troublemaker. Look at what happened to Cyril Neville.
He was right to say what he said. He said we didn’t leave New Orleans, New Orleans kicked us out. On one hand the city wants to use you to promote it, “Come to New Orleans to hear the great music,” but on the other hand there’s no place for you here.
It’s like the Musicians’ Village, which I have a real problem with. And not just because they turned me down for a house. They turned down most of the musicians who applied, most of the brass band members. The only people who are qualifying are people with good credit, older people with social security and folks like that. How does that help us, really? How are you supposed to have good credit when you’re wiped out, lost all your possessions and are living in somebody else’s trailer? Even if I had good credit, if I could get a loan from a bank, what do I want to live in the Ninth Ward for, anyway? I grew up in the real Musicians’ Village, Treme. I want to live in the real Musicians’ Village.
A lot of the older people have been sidelined since Katrina. You didn’t have to drown to be kept from being able to do what you were doing before. It seems like a big part of the social infrastructure that kept the traditional brass bands going is just gone.
They ran them off. I used to talk to [Olympia’s] Doc Watson all my days. I would just call him and talk to him; he ain’t here to do that anymore. There’s no Tuba Fats left in the Sixth Ward. Tuba Fats taught everybody and not just about the music. He took us to London every year to play, and he took us to Amsterdam.
I talk to Irvin Mayfield a lot. He says, “They know what you’re trying to do. They don’t like people that speak out.” You go against the grain, they stay away from you. Everything’s a clique. That’s why the city’s in the trouble it’s in.
With so many of the older keepers of the flame out of commission or out of the city, it falls on younger guys like you not only symbolize the new blood in the brass band sound, but now you’ve got to uphold the old tradition, too.
When I saw the Olympia Brass Band for the first time I was like six, seven years old. I knew I wanted to be a part of that. I knew when I saw James (Andrews) at the World’s Fair I knew I was going to be playing with him. I grew up with it in the Treme, it was all around me. Ironing Board Sam. James Black lived around the corner. I grew up with the Olympia, the Pinstripe band all my life, and I realize that’s my niche. I love to sing the old tunes. Every Sunday when I get on the stand at Preservation Hall, I get a chill.
What’s your ideal repertoire for playing there?
I always try to play some Bunk Johnson, some Punch Miller, some Red Allen.
At places like Fritzel’s they play traditional jazz like classical music, note for note reproductions.
I’ve only seen one black musician play there in the 27 years of my life and that was Gregg Stafford. The best place you’re going to get down there [on Bourbon Street] is the Maison Bourbon; Jamil Sharif is there to commemorate the traditional music. That’s the thing about the tradition. You’ve got to know “Sunny Side of the Street” before you can know “Gimme a Dime.” You’ve got to know the tradition. And that’s what’s happening with these new brass bands. It’s the same thing with these Indian chiefs. Everybody wants to be the Big Chief now. There’s like 23 chiefs now; nobody wants to start off being the Spyboy.
How did you learn the tradition?
They gave me a horn when I was like 13 and said, “Do this” and I’ve been doing this ever since. I used to come by Tuba Fats and he’d have me play the bass drum. He’d say, “Sit there and do this.” I didn’t realize it at the time, but he was training me. My brothers, James and Troy Andrews, Nicholas Payton, they were my earliest influences. They all played together in brass bands. Kerwin James, who just passed away, he was there. It all started there in the Sixth Ward. We were a close family, 15 children, me and my cousins. Eight of them are named Glen Andrews. You know the New Kids Brass Band? Well, that’s all my cousin and brother’s children. Three of them in the band are named Glen Andrews. So the three of them and me and my cousin with the Rebirth, we went to channel 4 about two months ago. Everybody is signing in as Glen Andrews. The security guard says, “I don’t know if you take security seriously or not, but this is not funny.” So we all get to pulling out our IDs.
So you see your role now, at 27 years old, as an older guy passing along the tradition?
People don’t respect the tradition. The young people don’t seem to respect much. If I’m playing at the Rock ’n’ Bowl, everybody wears suits and ties. Suits and ties. At Preservation Hall, if you don’t come out there with a coat and tie, you can go home. You could be the tuba player, somebody I need. If you don’t come with a suit and tie, you can go home. Tuba Fats told me that’s the way you run a band. You’ve got to pay them, make sure everybody’s looking good and professional and sounding good. Otherwise it’s going to fall on you.
You were also part of the brass band new wave with the Rascals and New Birth.
I did the song “Gimme a Dime, I only got 8” with New Birth. But that ain’t what I want to do. I’m through with that. The new shit dishes the old folks.
So you put that aside.
It’s violence. It’s not music. It’s one chord over the same groove over and over. No offense to the Hot 8. My brother Derek started that band. No offense to the Soul Rebels. I like all those people as people. I don’t want to listen to that. “That’s the street thing,” they say. “I’m trying to do something new.” How the hell are you going to do that if you don’t know where it came from? Do you know “Palm Court Strut?” Do you know who Danny Barker was? You need to find out about some of these things. You need to go by George Buck and get you a couple of them records.
You’ve been under a lot of psychological stress over the last couple of years…
I look at it that I am actually homeless. I’m living in my uncle’s trailer. If I didn’t have the help of my family, if I was a weak-minded person, I’d be back on drugs. I’d most likely have killed myself by now. I look out the door and there’s a woman across the street with her two babies sleeping in the outdoors. That shit breaks my heart, but I know God and I know God is merciful. I know he’ll look down on me and give me the courage and strength to keep going.
You were relocated to Texas for a while…
I was in Houston for six months but I left. I was stressed. They don’t welcome us there. They have an ad campaign right now there encouraging all the people in Houston to buy a gun to protect themselves from those people from New Orleans. Those people. They did have that bunch of assholes that went out there killing everybody, but that doesn’t represent the rest of us.
What do you think the future is for brass band music?
There’s not enough cooperation among the younger brass band players. All the white players stick together. All these so-called retro jazz bands, I don’t hear anything I like down on Frenchmen Street outside of Snug Harbor except if it’s John Boutte. It’s sad.
If you’re going to play the traditional music do it the right way. The Storyville Stompers. They’re doing traditional music the right way. Rebirth works so hard and travels up and down that road, so they’re going to survive. Them and the Dozen are all right. Not all the individuals in those bands are all right financially, but those bands are all right as far as work. But I’ve got to worry about myself.
Everybody compares me to Troy and James, but Troy and James are working. I guess I’m just as good as them; I just don’t get as much work. The last 15 years of my career, I’ve spent backing up. I backed Troy, I backed James, I backed the New Birth. The time has come for me to step out on my own. Going on this trip to Austin is a big step for me.
I’m a musician. I don’t build homes. I don’t paint. I don’t know how to paint. I don’t know nothing about changing tires. But I can sing and that’s what I want to do. If I sit in that trailer, I’ll go crazy.
BackTalk with Glen David Andrews
By John Swenson
The late January afternoon shadows shiver across the flagstones on Jackson Square as a crowd of about 50 tourists in winter clothes passively watches an unlikely collection of musicians—a chubby, red-faced schoolboy trumpeter, a trombone player, tuba player, trap drummer and stand-up bassist—huff through a ragtag version of “Saints.” Glen David Andrews arrives with his trombone case slung over his shoulder, sits next to the kid trumpeter and transforms this tableau into an impromptu party.
During “I Have a Friend in Jesus,” Andrews shoulders his trombone and sends a bolt of electricity through the crowd with a solo that corkscrews in intensity as he throws in four and eight bar quotes from sources including horseracing’s “Call To Post.”
Andrews signals the other trombonist to solo, then shows the trumpeter how to comp under the solo. Andrews starts singing “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It,” adding verses from “I Hear You Knockin’” and “Blueberry Hill.” Suddenly the tourists are doing that spasmodic tourist dance, the involuntary shuffle, and a handful of homeless men who’ve been watching in silence start dancing around and gesturing as if they’re part of the entertainment. Andrews encourages the kid to sing “New Orleans Street Parade” and does a scat vocal call-and-response, making the kid take another chorus. Andrews then plays the opening strains of “Georgia,” but when he starts to sing, he changes it to “Louisiana.” The crowd goes nuts, filling the tip bucket with paper money, and Andrews takes a bow.
Andrews has been playing in this exact spot since he was younger than that red-faced trumpeter, learning from the legendary Tuba Fats. His career has taken him through the Lil’ Rascals Brass Band, the New Birth Brass Band and some spectacular moments in the Andrews Family Band along with his cousins James and Troy Andrews. As part of the new breed of brass band musicians, he wrote the refrain “Gimme a dime /I only got eight,” which has become a staple of the new brass band repertoire.
Since Katrina, Andrews has been homeless—he’s currently sleeping in his uncle’s FEMA trailer—and has turned into an outspoken critic of street violence, the slow pace of the recovery and police crackdowns on second line parades. “I got a lot to play,” he says, “and a lot to say!”
What may even be more interesting about his post-Katrina persona, though, is that Andrews has moved away from his role as one of the young turks of the new brass band movement and embraced traditional brass band music. His band, Glen David Andrews and the Lazy Six, plays the old school New Orleans jazz of his ancestors in regular gigs at Preservation Hall and Mid City Lanes Rock ’n’ Bowl.
It’s interesting to see that you still play in Jackson Square.
I like to play in Jackson Square. That’s what I’m interested in doing, teaching people. Nobody’s teaching the traditional music. The only way you can really hear the traditional music is through the Treme Brass Band or at Preservation Hall.
You were recently arrested for second lining in the Treme, which brought attention to the pressure being applied by the police to the second line tradition.
You have to just do it. They shouldn’t even ask for permission. I’ve been second lining all my life and I’m going to keep on doing it. We paraded in the Treme yesterday for about three hours. Nobody bothered us.
You’ve been an effective spokesperson for a lot of post-Katrina issues. Unfortunately, if you say what’s on your mind, you’re branded as a troublemaker. Look at what happened to Cyril Neville.
He was right to say what he said. He said we didn’t leave New Orleans, New Orleans kicked us out. On one hand the city wants to use you to promote it, “Come to New Orleans to hear the great music,” but on the other hand there’s no place for you here.
It’s like the Musicians’ Village, which I have a real problem with. And not just because they turned me down for a house. They turned down most of the musicians who applied, most of the brass band members. The only people who are qualifying are people with good credit, older people with social security and folks like that. How does that help us, really? How are you supposed to have good credit when you’re wiped out, lost all your possessions and are living in somebody else’s trailer? Even if I had good credit, if I could get a loan from a bank, what do I want to live in the Ninth Ward for, anyway? I grew up in the real Musicians’ Village, Treme. I want to live in the real Musicians’ Village.
A lot of the older people have been sidelined since Katrina. You didn’t have to drown to be kept from being able to do what you were doing before. It seems like a big part of the social infrastructure that kept the traditional brass bands going is just gone.
They ran them off. I used to talk to [Olympia’s] Doc Watson all my days. I would just call him and talk to him; he ain’t here to do that anymore. There’s no Tuba Fats left in the Sixth Ward. Tuba Fats taught everybody and not just about the music. He took us to London every year to play, and he took us to Amsterdam.
I talk to Irvin Mayfield a lot. He says, “They know what you’re trying to do. They don’t like people that speak out.” You go against the grain, they stay away from you. Everything’s a clique. That’s why the city’s in the trouble it’s in.
With so many of the older keepers of the flame out of commission or out of the city, it falls on younger guys like you not only symbolize the new blood in the brass band sound, but now you’ve got to uphold the old tradition, too.
When I saw the Olympia Brass Band for the first time I was like six, seven years old. I knew I wanted to be a part of that. I knew when I saw James (Andrews) at the World’s Fair I knew I was going to be playing with him. I grew up with it in the Treme, it was all around me. Ironing Board Sam. James Black lived around the corner. I grew up with the Olympia, the Pinstripe band all my life, and I realize that’s my niche. I love to sing the old tunes. Every Sunday when I get on the stand at Preservation Hall, I get a chill.
What’s your ideal repertoire for playing there?
I always try to play some Bunk Johnson, some Punch Miller, some Red Allen.
At places like Fritzel’s they play traditional jazz like classical music, note for note reproductions.
I’ve only seen one black musician play there in the 27 years of my life and that was Gregg Stafford. The best place you’re going to get down there [on Bourbon Street] is the Maison Bourbon; Jamil Sharif is there to commemorate the traditional music. That’s the thing about the tradition. You’ve got to know “Sunny Side of the Street” before you can know “Gimme a Dime.” You’ve got to know the tradition. And that’s what’s happening with these new brass bands. It’s the same thing with these Indian chiefs. Everybody wants to be the Big Chief now. There’s like 23 chiefs now; nobody wants to start off being the Spyboy.
How did you learn the tradition?
They gave me a horn when I was like 13 and said, “Do this” and I’ve been doing this ever since. I used to come by Tuba Fats and he’d have me play the bass drum. He’d say, “Sit there and do this.” I didn’t realize it at the time, but he was training me. My brothers, James and Troy Andrews, Nicholas Payton, they were my earliest influences. They all played together in brass bands. Kerwin James, who just passed away, he was there. It all started there in the Sixth Ward. We were a close family, 15 children, me and my cousins. Eight of them are named Glen Andrews. You know the New Kids Brass Band? Well, that’s all my cousin and brother’s children. Three of them in the band are named Glen Andrews. So the three of them and me and my cousin with the Rebirth, we went to channel 4 about two months ago. Everybody is signing in as Glen Andrews. The security guard says, “I don’t know if you take security seriously or not, but this is not funny.” So we all get to pulling out our IDs.
So you see your role now, at 27 years old, as an older guy passing along the tradition?
People don’t respect the tradition. The young people don’t seem to respect much. If I’m playing at the Rock ’n’ Bowl, everybody wears suits and ties. Suits and ties. At Preservation Hall, if you don’t come out there with a coat and tie, you can go home. You could be the tuba player, somebody I need. If you don’t come with a suit and tie, you can go home. Tuba Fats told me that’s the way you run a band. You’ve got to pay them, make sure everybody’s looking good and professional and sounding good. Otherwise it’s going to fall on you.
You were also part of the brass band new wave with the Rascals and New Birth.
I did the song “Gimme a Dime, I only got 8” with New Birth. But that ain’t what I want to do. I’m through with that. The new shit dishes the old folks.
So you put that aside.
It’s violence. It’s not music. It’s one chord over the same groove over and over. No offense to the Hot 8. My brother Derek started that band. No offense to the Soul Rebels. I like all those people as people. I don’t want to listen to that. “That’s the street thing,” they say. “I’m trying to do something new.” How the hell are you going to do that if you don’t know where it came from? Do you know “Palm Court Strut?” Do you know who Danny Barker was? You need to find out about some of these things. You need to go by George Buck and get you a couple of them records.
You’ve been under a lot of psychological stress over the last couple of years…
I look at it that I am actually homeless. I’m living in my uncle’s trailer. If I didn’t have the help of my family, if I was a weak-minded person, I’d be back on drugs. I’d most likely have killed myself by now. I look out the door and there’s a woman across the street with her two babies sleeping in the outdoors. That shit breaks my heart, but I know God and I know God is merciful. I know he’ll look down on me and give me the courage and strength to keep going.
You were relocated to Texas for a while…
I was in Houston for six months but I left. I was stressed. They don’t welcome us there. They have an ad campaign right now there encouraging all the people in Houston to buy a gun to protect themselves from those people from New Orleans. Those people. They did have that bunch of assholes that went out there killing everybody, but that doesn’t represent the rest of us.
What do you think the future is for brass band music?
There’s not enough cooperation among the younger brass band players. All the white players stick together. All these so-called retro jazz bands, I don’t hear anything I like down on Frenchmen Street outside of Snug Harbor except if it’s John Boutte. It’s sad.
If you’re going to play the traditional music do it the right way. The Storyville Stompers. They’re doing traditional music the right way. Rebirth works so hard and travels up and down that road, so they’re going to survive. Them and the Dozen are all right. Not all the individuals in those bands are all right financially, but those bands are all right as far as work. But I’ve got to worry about myself.
Everybody compares me to Troy and James, but Troy and James are working. I guess I’m just as good as them; I just don’t get as much work. The last 15 years of my career, I’ve spent backing up. I backed Troy, I backed James, I backed the New Birth. The time has come for me to step out on my own. Going on this trip to Austin is a big step for me.
I’m a musician. I don’t build homes. I don’t paint. I don’t know how to paint. I don’t know nothing about changing tires. But I can sing and that’s what I want to do. If I sit in that trailer, I’ll go crazy.
Friday, March 21, 2008
Pep Bands: For Bands, Songs Remain the Same
NYT
March 19, 2008
For Bands, Songs Remain the Same
By JOHN BRANCH
Step inside an arena where N.C.A.A. tournament games are being played. Close the eyes during timeouts. Listen to the pep bands play their jaunty tunes. And remember what year it is.
Pep bands may provide the N.C.A.A. tournament’s greatest culture clash — giving a time-warped soundtrack to games that decide this year’s champion.
At last weekend’s Pacific-10 Conference tournament in Los Angeles, Staples Center was periodically filled with horn-tooting variations of songs by Bon Jovi (“Livin’ on a Prayer”), Boston (“More Than a Feeling”), Ozzy Osbourne (“Crazy Train”), the Police (“Message in a Bottle”) and KC and the Sunshine Band (“Get Down Tonight”).
Across the country, during the Big East tournament at Madison Square Garden, the well-worn strains of Michael Jackson (“Thriller”), Kansas (“Carry On Wayward Son”), Guns N’ Roses (“Paradise City”) and the Doobie Brothers (“Long Train Runnin’ ”) helped fill the downtime when the court was empty.
It can seem that the pep bands are forever behind the times, playing from song lists borrowed from classic-rock radio stations and wedding-reception D.J.s.
But there is a method to their madness — and to their Madness (“Our House”).
“We try to play songs that not only appeal to the blue-hairs in the crowd, but also to our students,” said Jim Hudson, director of athletic bands at Arizona State.
The brass-heavy 30-piece ensembles (the tournament allows no amplification — meaning no electric guitars — and only 30 band members for each team) are typically subsets of the university’s much larger marching band. And there are plenty of reasons why the song lists (most bands arrive ready to play 40 to 60 songs) can seem dated.
Mostly, it is because fans want it that way. Bands are looking to get toes tapping and chins wagging no matter the listener’s age.
There are other reasons. Rock anthems, with their catchy melodies and complex chord progressions, often lend themselves to arrangements better than other genres. Older songs have become part of each band’s familiar repertory and never leave. Copyright issues and costs can limit the possibilities for fresh tunes.
And, perhaps — admit it, occasional pep-band listener — the bands are sometimes too hip, playing songs so fresh that they are not recognized. Most fans pay little attention to a game’s background noise, only when a familiar tune catches the ear: Wait. No way. Is that Journey they’re playing?
“Well, we do have a lot of Journey,” the Cal student director Stephen Gamboa said.
Most college bands last weekend played plenty of songs from this decade, too, by the likes of the Black Eyed Peas, Kanye West, 50 Cent, Green Day and the Offspring.
“The kids want to play what they listen to, not what I want to listen to,” said Art Bartner, Southern California’s longtime director of bands. “I’m basically Chicago, Earth Wind & Fire, Tower of Power. They want to do a lot of the newer ones.”
U.S.C.’s standards include its well-known fight song and “Tusk,” the 1979 Fleetwood Mac song that featured the university’s marching band. It also plays cutting-edge variations from Foo Fighters and System of a Down.
Updating the songbook is an annual tug-of-war. Most bands hold year-end votes for band members. At U.C.L.A., the bottom five songs are dropped. Five new ones are added.
“ ‘Build Me Up Buttercup’ is the most controversial song we have,” said Reesa Jones, the undergraduate teaching assistant leading U.C.L.A.’s band at the Pac-10 tournament. “Some love it, some hate it. Tubas love it, because it’s their one chance for a solo. But a lot of others just hate it.”
U.C.L.A. recently added songs by the Red Hot Chili Peppers (“Can’t Stop”) and Matchbox Twenty (“How Far We’ve Come”). The band also regularly plays the theme song from the 1970s television show “The Jeffersons” (“Movin’ on Up”).
At U.S.C., band members take samples of new songs to Bartner and his assistants. They ascertain how well guitar riffs and piano solos can be transformed for trumpets, trombones and mellophones.
Most pep-band arrangements, designed for timeouts, range from 100 seconds to 2 minutes. Raps, with their repetitive hooks, are increasingly used for 30-second timeouts.
Choosing the right mix has legal complexities, too. Music is copyrighted, so bands typically cannot simply choose a song and start playing it — although many do.
In theory, bands need to get approval and pay for the rights to use songs. They often start with the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (Ascap) or Broadcast Music Inc. (BMI), which license music and distribute royalties to songwriters and composers. They deal with sheet-music publishers, such as Hal Leonard or Alfred Publishing, which combine to control the majority of the popular-music catalog.
Rights to a song can cost $50 to $350, according to Jeni Paulson, president of CopyCat Music Licensing. Her company, a type of middleman, works with many Pac-10 and Big Ten band directors. They call, usually in the summer after making a wish list for the coming school year, and say which songs they want to use. CopyCat does the research on licensing and returns with a price.
“Not all directors know that they’re supposed to ask permission,” Paulson said.
Some artists and songs are simply off limits. Van Halen’s “Jump” is a popular request, but always denied. So are the works of the composer John Williams, meaning that the familiar chords of “Jaws,” “Star Wars” or “Raiders of the Lost Ark” should not be heard blaring through arenas.
But there is still plenty to hear in the coming days. From the Kingsmen (“Louie, Louie”) to Parliament (“Give Up the Funk”), from Twisted Sister (“We’re Not Gonna Take It”) to 50 Cent (“Candy Shop”), the bands will play on, or at least until the game starts again.
And when the game ends, after a quick rendition of a fight song or alma mater — and, almost invariably, one side’s version of Kool & the Gang’s “Celebration” — the bands are shooed away and replaced by two new ones for the next game.
Listen carefully. They want to please you. And, yes, that probably was Journey.
March 19, 2008
For Bands, Songs Remain the Same
By JOHN BRANCH
Step inside an arena where N.C.A.A. tournament games are being played. Close the eyes during timeouts. Listen to the pep bands play their jaunty tunes. And remember what year it is.
Pep bands may provide the N.C.A.A. tournament’s greatest culture clash — giving a time-warped soundtrack to games that decide this year’s champion.
At last weekend’s Pacific-10 Conference tournament in Los Angeles, Staples Center was periodically filled with horn-tooting variations of songs by Bon Jovi (“Livin’ on a Prayer”), Boston (“More Than a Feeling”), Ozzy Osbourne (“Crazy Train”), the Police (“Message in a Bottle”) and KC and the Sunshine Band (“Get Down Tonight”).
Across the country, during the Big East tournament at Madison Square Garden, the well-worn strains of Michael Jackson (“Thriller”), Kansas (“Carry On Wayward Son”), Guns N’ Roses (“Paradise City”) and the Doobie Brothers (“Long Train Runnin’ ”) helped fill the downtime when the court was empty.
It can seem that the pep bands are forever behind the times, playing from song lists borrowed from classic-rock radio stations and wedding-reception D.J.s.
But there is a method to their madness — and to their Madness (“Our House”).
“We try to play songs that not only appeal to the blue-hairs in the crowd, but also to our students,” said Jim Hudson, director of athletic bands at Arizona State.
The brass-heavy 30-piece ensembles (the tournament allows no amplification — meaning no electric guitars — and only 30 band members for each team) are typically subsets of the university’s much larger marching band. And there are plenty of reasons why the song lists (most bands arrive ready to play 40 to 60 songs) can seem dated.
Mostly, it is because fans want it that way. Bands are looking to get toes tapping and chins wagging no matter the listener’s age.
There are other reasons. Rock anthems, with their catchy melodies and complex chord progressions, often lend themselves to arrangements better than other genres. Older songs have become part of each band’s familiar repertory and never leave. Copyright issues and costs can limit the possibilities for fresh tunes.
And, perhaps — admit it, occasional pep-band listener — the bands are sometimes too hip, playing songs so fresh that they are not recognized. Most fans pay little attention to a game’s background noise, only when a familiar tune catches the ear: Wait. No way. Is that Journey they’re playing?
“Well, we do have a lot of Journey,” the Cal student director Stephen Gamboa said.
Most college bands last weekend played plenty of songs from this decade, too, by the likes of the Black Eyed Peas, Kanye West, 50 Cent, Green Day and the Offspring.
“The kids want to play what they listen to, not what I want to listen to,” said Art Bartner, Southern California’s longtime director of bands. “I’m basically Chicago, Earth Wind & Fire, Tower of Power. They want to do a lot of the newer ones.”
U.S.C.’s standards include its well-known fight song and “Tusk,” the 1979 Fleetwood Mac song that featured the university’s marching band. It also plays cutting-edge variations from Foo Fighters and System of a Down.
Updating the songbook is an annual tug-of-war. Most bands hold year-end votes for band members. At U.C.L.A., the bottom five songs are dropped. Five new ones are added.
“ ‘Build Me Up Buttercup’ is the most controversial song we have,” said Reesa Jones, the undergraduate teaching assistant leading U.C.L.A.’s band at the Pac-10 tournament. “Some love it, some hate it. Tubas love it, because it’s their one chance for a solo. But a lot of others just hate it.”
U.C.L.A. recently added songs by the Red Hot Chili Peppers (“Can’t Stop”) and Matchbox Twenty (“How Far We’ve Come”). The band also regularly plays the theme song from the 1970s television show “The Jeffersons” (“Movin’ on Up”).
At U.S.C., band members take samples of new songs to Bartner and his assistants. They ascertain how well guitar riffs and piano solos can be transformed for trumpets, trombones and mellophones.
Most pep-band arrangements, designed for timeouts, range from 100 seconds to 2 minutes. Raps, with their repetitive hooks, are increasingly used for 30-second timeouts.
Choosing the right mix has legal complexities, too. Music is copyrighted, so bands typically cannot simply choose a song and start playing it — although many do.
In theory, bands need to get approval and pay for the rights to use songs. They often start with the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (Ascap) or Broadcast Music Inc. (BMI), which license music and distribute royalties to songwriters and composers. They deal with sheet-music publishers, such as Hal Leonard or Alfred Publishing, which combine to control the majority of the popular-music catalog.
Rights to a song can cost $50 to $350, according to Jeni Paulson, president of CopyCat Music Licensing. Her company, a type of middleman, works with many Pac-10 and Big Ten band directors. They call, usually in the summer after making a wish list for the coming school year, and say which songs they want to use. CopyCat does the research on licensing and returns with a price.
“Not all directors know that they’re supposed to ask permission,” Paulson said.
Some artists and songs are simply off limits. Van Halen’s “Jump” is a popular request, but always denied. So are the works of the composer John Williams, meaning that the familiar chords of “Jaws,” “Star Wars” or “Raiders of the Lost Ark” should not be heard blaring through arenas.
But there is still plenty to hear in the coming days. From the Kingsmen (“Louie, Louie”) to Parliament (“Give Up the Funk”), from Twisted Sister (“We’re Not Gonna Take It”) to 50 Cent (“Candy Shop”), the bands will play on, or at least until the game starts again.
And when the game ends, after a quick rendition of a fight song or alma mater — and, almost invariably, one side’s version of Kool & the Gang’s “Celebration” — the bands are shooed away and replaced by two new ones for the next game.
Listen carefully. They want to please you. And, yes, that probably was Journey.
Sunday, August 12, 2007
Terence Blanchard: Jazz Fanfare for a New New Orleans
NYT
August 12, 2007
Music
Jazz Fanfare for a New New Orleans
By NATE CHINEN
NEW ORLEANS
IT was hard coming back here, man,” Terence Blanchard said one recent morning in his mother’s house, in the Pontchartrain Park neighborhood here. The house was empty and uncluttered, its renovation nearly complete, a far cry from the sodden wreckage that had greeted Mr. Blanchard and his mother, Wilhelmina, when they first returned weeks after Hurricane Katrina. Back then Mr. Blanchard offered what consolation he could. “This is all stuff that can be rebuilt,” he said, in a reassuring tone.
That initial visit, and especially the staggering despair of Mrs. Blanchard, made for one of the more poignant scenes in “When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts,” the 2006 HBO documentary directed by Spike Lee. “In fact,” Mr. Lee said by telephone the day the film’s six Emmy nominations were announced, “when we shot that scene, I stayed outside. I couldn’t go inside the house.”
Of course Mr. Blanchard — the acclaimed jazz trumpeter and bandleader and the composer responsible for almost all of Mr. Lee’s film scores, including “Levees” — had no such choice. And judging by the assessment of some of his colleagues, “going inside” is in keeping with his temperament as a musician.
“He’s not afraid to reach into those dark corners that we don’t know about and illuminate them,” the pianist Herbie Hancock said. “And he does it with gusto. He means it. You can tell by the way it feels.”
Now, coming up on Katrina’s second anniversary, Mr. Blanchard, 45, is ushering in two projects that reflect both his deep commitment to New Orleans and his conviction that stuff can in fact be rebuilt. The effort has significance partly because Mr. Blanchard has spent most of his career building a name elsewhere: he has also scored dozens of films by other directors, and his international stature as a top-shelf jazz artist dovetails with a reputation for accessible innovation. In some ways disaster prompted Mr. Blanchard to bring it all back home.
The first project is “A Tale of God’s Will (A Requiem for Katrina),” his impressive new album for Blue Note, due out on Tuesday. In a purposeful convergence of his film-composer and jazz-musician identities, it interweaves Mr. Blanchard’s “Levees” music with new compositions for his band and a 40-piece string orchestra. The result is a melancholy suite that feels both intensely personal and broadly cinematic.
With heavy-hearted themes like “Funeral Dirge” and “Wading Through,” some dark corners are illuminated. The cover depicts Mr. Blanchard on his mother’s roof, in stark silhouette.
The second project involves the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz Performance, a graduate-level education program based for the last dozen years at the University of Southern California. As the program’s artistic director, Mr. Blanchard helped broker its move to Loyola University New Orleans, where a new class of students will begin its first semester next week. The relocation means that the city that gave birth to jazz (and, much later, to Mr. Blanchard) can now claim one of the art’s most progressive institutions.
During a two-day interval between out-of-town commitments, Mr. Blanchard guided a visitor around his New Orleans, to places like the Magazine Po-Boy Shop, for lunch; the Maple Leaf Bar, for a late-night set by the Rebirth Brass Band; and the Still Perkin’ cafe, where his wife and manager, Robin Burgess, kept a watchful eye as their daughters, Sidney, 10, and Jordan, 8, ducked into an adjacent bookstore.
At the restored home of his aunt Alice Douglas and her husband, the Rev. Andrew Douglas, a few blocks from the London Avenue Canal, he visited his mother. Mrs. Blanchard, a small, no-nonsense woman, owned up to a sort of celebrity since “Levees” was broadcast. Her son confirmed it: “Everywhere I go, people recognize me not because I play the trumpet. They recognize me because of her.”
Mrs. Blanchard retorted with a laugh, “It’s about time.”
Her son said, “The thing I’ve been telling everybody is that if you cry for her, you’ve got to cry for about a hundred thousand other people that went through the same thing.”
Afterward, at his mother’s house, Mr. Blanchard recalled his upbringing as an only child. His father, Joseph Oliver Blanchard, was an insurance company manager and part-time opera singer who encouraged his son’s early classical training. “This is where I had to practice the piano every day,” he said, indicating a corner of the den. “Right next to the window, while the other kids were outside playing ball.”
Before heading to the Northeast to attend Rutgers in 1980, Mr. Blanchard studied at the New Orleans Center of Creative Arts, where he met the alto saxophonist Donald Harrison Jr. Together they would later succeed their former classmates Wynton and Branford Marsalis as the front line of Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, then regarded as jazz’s premier finishing school. Mr. Blanchard and Mr. Harrison would also form their own quintet, releasing a handful of heralded albums.
“All those guys were living in my neighborhood,” Mr. Lee recalled. “They had all moved up from New Orleans to Fort Greene, Brooklyn. Wynton was there, Branford was there, Terence was there, Donald Harrison. So my father, Bill Lee, managed to give these young jazz musicians some experience working on a film score.”
The film was “Mo’ Better Blues” (1990), starring Denzel Washington as a jazz trumpeter who bears some resemblance to Mr. Blanchard. (The opening scene, set in childhood, finds him stuck at the piano while his friends head off to play ball.) Mr. Blanchard played the film’s trumpet parts and, at the director’s invitation, contributed a theme.
In the studio, Spike Lee said, “my father handed the music back to Terence and said, ‘You wrote it, you conduct it.’ Terence has been doing my scores ever since.”
Mr. Blanchard’s success as a film composer has led some musicians and critics to underestimate his seriousness in jazz. (Before he signed with Blue Note in 2003, his solo albums were issued on the Sony Classical label.) But his working band has been a crucible of talent: two former members, the guitarist Lionel Loueke and the pianist Aaron Parks, each recently landed their own Blue Note contracts. Few things seem to make Mr. Blanchard prouder than his current group with the bassist Derrick Hodge, the tenor saxophonist Brice Winston, the drummer Kendrick Scott and, now, the pianist Fabian Almazan.
“A Tale of God’s Will,” like the album “Flow” before it, includes one song apiece by each young band member. Mr. Winston, a former New Orleans resident, contributed a haunting lament, “In Time of Need.” Mr. Hodge, a budding film composer who helped with the “Levees” score, lent his anthem “Over There.” Mr. Parks, then still in the band, wrote a sonorous piece called “Ashé.” Mr. Scott brought in “Mantra,” with his own orchestration. (“You wrote it, you conduct it,” he was told.)
For his cultivation of these players, Mr. Blanchard is often likened to Art Blakey. A better analogy might be Miles Davis, whose young quintet of the mid-1960s featured compositions by all of its members and absorbed their characteristics.
Mr. Hancock, a member of that group, endorses the idea. “They’re able to take these compositions,” he said of the musicians, “and immediately translate them into the particular sound of Terence’s band, which in many ways reminds me of what used to happen with Miles.”
The comparison would end there, if not for some Davis-like nonmusical interests. Mr. Blanchard sped through the city in his jet-black Porsche Carrera, and giddily described a recent spin around a racetrack in a vintage Ferrari. And at the Freret Street Gym he stepped into the ring to train with the two-time world kickboxing champion Steven (Spyder) Hemphill.
“The thing I like about this guy, he’s technical,” Mr. Hemphill said after Mr. Blanchard had landed a volley of four-punch combinations. “He wants to know why.” (For the record: In a Davis-Blanchard fight, the smart money would probably be on Mr. Blanchard.)
The mentorship ethos that guides Mr. Blanchard’s band is also central to the Monk Institute, which established its two-year performance program in 1995. Unique in jazz education, it admits just seven students at a time, bringing them into regular contact not only with Mr. Blanchard but also legends like Mr. Hancock, the institute’s chairman. Each class works as a band and participates in an outreach with area high schools. Among the program’s success stories is Mr. Loueke.
When the institute’s contract was ending at U.S.C., a number of prestigious universities indicated their interest. Mr. Blanchard campaigned for Loyola, where he met his first trumpet teacher and gave his senior recital, partly on the basis of its existing commitment to music. Of course its location had some resonance too.
“It’s a means for us to give back to the community, and to have this continuing love affair with the city,” he said of the move, during an impromptu tour of the facilities. “But to do it in this way in particular is what I’m most proud of, because we’re not trying to create something from scratch. We’re taking something that has already worked, and bringing it here. It’s like putting a beautiful orchid in some seriously fertilized soil.”
That metaphor could apply to Mr. Blanchard. It’s been more than 25 years since he left New Orleans to pursue his career, more than a decade since he moved back to be near his two other children, Terence and Olivia, after his first marriage ended.
Now, though he keeps an apartment in Los Angeles and tours often, his roots have clearly been reinforced. He knows well the problems still facing New Orleans — a natural topic of conversation at dinner with Garland Robinette, the talk-radio host who famously broadcast through the storm — but he’s committed to its renewal.
Together with Ms. Burgess and their daughters, he awaits the renovation of their new house uptown, which will include a cavernous attic studio, soundproofed and wired, where he can work on film music. It will be a five-minute walk from the Monk Institute, where he sees at least one facet of the city’s future brimming with promise.
August 12, 2007
Music
Jazz Fanfare for a New New Orleans
By NATE CHINEN
NEW ORLEANS
IT was hard coming back here, man,” Terence Blanchard said one recent morning in his mother’s house, in the Pontchartrain Park neighborhood here. The house was empty and uncluttered, its renovation nearly complete, a far cry from the sodden wreckage that had greeted Mr. Blanchard and his mother, Wilhelmina, when they first returned weeks after Hurricane Katrina. Back then Mr. Blanchard offered what consolation he could. “This is all stuff that can be rebuilt,” he said, in a reassuring tone.
That initial visit, and especially the staggering despair of Mrs. Blanchard, made for one of the more poignant scenes in “When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts,” the 2006 HBO documentary directed by Spike Lee. “In fact,” Mr. Lee said by telephone the day the film’s six Emmy nominations were announced, “when we shot that scene, I stayed outside. I couldn’t go inside the house.”
Of course Mr. Blanchard — the acclaimed jazz trumpeter and bandleader and the composer responsible for almost all of Mr. Lee’s film scores, including “Levees” — had no such choice. And judging by the assessment of some of his colleagues, “going inside” is in keeping with his temperament as a musician.
“He’s not afraid to reach into those dark corners that we don’t know about and illuminate them,” the pianist Herbie Hancock said. “And he does it with gusto. He means it. You can tell by the way it feels.”
Now, coming up on Katrina’s second anniversary, Mr. Blanchard, 45, is ushering in two projects that reflect both his deep commitment to New Orleans and his conviction that stuff can in fact be rebuilt. The effort has significance partly because Mr. Blanchard has spent most of his career building a name elsewhere: he has also scored dozens of films by other directors, and his international stature as a top-shelf jazz artist dovetails with a reputation for accessible innovation. In some ways disaster prompted Mr. Blanchard to bring it all back home.
The first project is “A Tale of God’s Will (A Requiem for Katrina),” his impressive new album for Blue Note, due out on Tuesday. In a purposeful convergence of his film-composer and jazz-musician identities, it interweaves Mr. Blanchard’s “Levees” music with new compositions for his band and a 40-piece string orchestra. The result is a melancholy suite that feels both intensely personal and broadly cinematic.
With heavy-hearted themes like “Funeral Dirge” and “Wading Through,” some dark corners are illuminated. The cover depicts Mr. Blanchard on his mother’s roof, in stark silhouette.
The second project involves the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz Performance, a graduate-level education program based for the last dozen years at the University of Southern California. As the program’s artistic director, Mr. Blanchard helped broker its move to Loyola University New Orleans, where a new class of students will begin its first semester next week. The relocation means that the city that gave birth to jazz (and, much later, to Mr. Blanchard) can now claim one of the art’s most progressive institutions.
During a two-day interval between out-of-town commitments, Mr. Blanchard guided a visitor around his New Orleans, to places like the Magazine Po-Boy Shop, for lunch; the Maple Leaf Bar, for a late-night set by the Rebirth Brass Band; and the Still Perkin’ cafe, where his wife and manager, Robin Burgess, kept a watchful eye as their daughters, Sidney, 10, and Jordan, 8, ducked into an adjacent bookstore.
At the restored home of his aunt Alice Douglas and her husband, the Rev. Andrew Douglas, a few blocks from the London Avenue Canal, he visited his mother. Mrs. Blanchard, a small, no-nonsense woman, owned up to a sort of celebrity since “Levees” was broadcast. Her son confirmed it: “Everywhere I go, people recognize me not because I play the trumpet. They recognize me because of her.”
Mrs. Blanchard retorted with a laugh, “It’s about time.”
Her son said, “The thing I’ve been telling everybody is that if you cry for her, you’ve got to cry for about a hundred thousand other people that went through the same thing.”
Afterward, at his mother’s house, Mr. Blanchard recalled his upbringing as an only child. His father, Joseph Oliver Blanchard, was an insurance company manager and part-time opera singer who encouraged his son’s early classical training. “This is where I had to practice the piano every day,” he said, indicating a corner of the den. “Right next to the window, while the other kids were outside playing ball.”
Before heading to the Northeast to attend Rutgers in 1980, Mr. Blanchard studied at the New Orleans Center of Creative Arts, where he met the alto saxophonist Donald Harrison Jr. Together they would later succeed their former classmates Wynton and Branford Marsalis as the front line of Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, then regarded as jazz’s premier finishing school. Mr. Blanchard and Mr. Harrison would also form their own quintet, releasing a handful of heralded albums.
“All those guys were living in my neighborhood,” Mr. Lee recalled. “They had all moved up from New Orleans to Fort Greene, Brooklyn. Wynton was there, Branford was there, Terence was there, Donald Harrison. So my father, Bill Lee, managed to give these young jazz musicians some experience working on a film score.”
The film was “Mo’ Better Blues” (1990), starring Denzel Washington as a jazz trumpeter who bears some resemblance to Mr. Blanchard. (The opening scene, set in childhood, finds him stuck at the piano while his friends head off to play ball.) Mr. Blanchard played the film’s trumpet parts and, at the director’s invitation, contributed a theme.
In the studio, Spike Lee said, “my father handed the music back to Terence and said, ‘You wrote it, you conduct it.’ Terence has been doing my scores ever since.”
Mr. Blanchard’s success as a film composer has led some musicians and critics to underestimate his seriousness in jazz. (Before he signed with Blue Note in 2003, his solo albums were issued on the Sony Classical label.) But his working band has been a crucible of talent: two former members, the guitarist Lionel Loueke and the pianist Aaron Parks, each recently landed their own Blue Note contracts. Few things seem to make Mr. Blanchard prouder than his current group with the bassist Derrick Hodge, the tenor saxophonist Brice Winston, the drummer Kendrick Scott and, now, the pianist Fabian Almazan.
“A Tale of God’s Will,” like the album “Flow” before it, includes one song apiece by each young band member. Mr. Winston, a former New Orleans resident, contributed a haunting lament, “In Time of Need.” Mr. Hodge, a budding film composer who helped with the “Levees” score, lent his anthem “Over There.” Mr. Parks, then still in the band, wrote a sonorous piece called “Ashé.” Mr. Scott brought in “Mantra,” with his own orchestration. (“You wrote it, you conduct it,” he was told.)
For his cultivation of these players, Mr. Blanchard is often likened to Art Blakey. A better analogy might be Miles Davis, whose young quintet of the mid-1960s featured compositions by all of its members and absorbed their characteristics.
Mr. Hancock, a member of that group, endorses the idea. “They’re able to take these compositions,” he said of the musicians, “and immediately translate them into the particular sound of Terence’s band, which in many ways reminds me of what used to happen with Miles.”
The comparison would end there, if not for some Davis-like nonmusical interests. Mr. Blanchard sped through the city in his jet-black Porsche Carrera, and giddily described a recent spin around a racetrack in a vintage Ferrari. And at the Freret Street Gym he stepped into the ring to train with the two-time world kickboxing champion Steven (Spyder) Hemphill.
“The thing I like about this guy, he’s technical,” Mr. Hemphill said after Mr. Blanchard had landed a volley of four-punch combinations. “He wants to know why.” (For the record: In a Davis-Blanchard fight, the smart money would probably be on Mr. Blanchard.)
The mentorship ethos that guides Mr. Blanchard’s band is also central to the Monk Institute, which established its two-year performance program in 1995. Unique in jazz education, it admits just seven students at a time, bringing them into regular contact not only with Mr. Blanchard but also legends like Mr. Hancock, the institute’s chairman. Each class works as a band and participates in an outreach with area high schools. Among the program’s success stories is Mr. Loueke.
When the institute’s contract was ending at U.S.C., a number of prestigious universities indicated their interest. Mr. Blanchard campaigned for Loyola, where he met his first trumpet teacher and gave his senior recital, partly on the basis of its existing commitment to music. Of course its location had some resonance too.
“It’s a means for us to give back to the community, and to have this continuing love affair with the city,” he said of the move, during an impromptu tour of the facilities. “But to do it in this way in particular is what I’m most proud of, because we’re not trying to create something from scratch. We’re taking something that has already worked, and bringing it here. It’s like putting a beautiful orchid in some seriously fertilized soil.”
That metaphor could apply to Mr. Blanchard. It’s been more than 25 years since he left New Orleans to pursue his career, more than a decade since he moved back to be near his two other children, Terence and Olivia, after his first marriage ended.
Now, though he keeps an apartment in Los Angeles and tours often, his roots have clearly been reinforced. He knows well the problems still facing New Orleans — a natural topic of conversation at dinner with Garland Robinette, the talk-radio host who famously broadcast through the storm — but he’s committed to its renewal.
Together with Ms. Burgess and their daughters, he awaits the renovation of their new house uptown, which will include a cavernous attic studio, soundproofed and wired, where he can work on film music. It will be a five-minute walk from the Monk Institute, where he sees at least one facet of the city’s future brimming with promise.
Wednesday, August 01, 2007
Parody of Guitar Hero Game: Sousaphone Hero
Delicious parody (complete with photo, sales graph, and X-box cover) courtesy The Onion:
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
Interview with LSU Professor Helen Regis on New Orleans' Second Lines/Jazz Funerals
AFRO-POP WORLDWIDE
Interview: Helen Regis with Ned Sublette in New Orleans, 2006
Place and Date: New Orleans, LA
2006
Interviewer: Ned Sublette
Helen Regis is Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography & Anthropology at Louisiana State University. She has lived in and conducted research in France, New Orleans, Cameroon, & Mississippi. In addition to International Studies, she is affiliated with Women’s and Gender Studies, and African and African American Studies programs.
NS: Who am I talking to?
HR: I'm Helen Regis, a resident of the 7th Ward, and an associate professor of anthropology at Louisiana State University.
NS: And what do you study?
HR: African American social and pleasure clubs, and the second line parades that they sponsor. I've been looking at second line parades pretty intensively since '95, but I actually started in '88.
NS: So you've been going on second lines for almost 20 years.
HR: That's right. It's weird to say that. The people who would say that when I started doing it seemed ancient.
NS: Well, we gotta get used to that. Could explain to people who have never seen one: what is a social aid and pleasure club and what are its historical origins?
HR: Today a social aid and pleasure club is a club that's brought together by people who are friends -- many of them went to high school together -- and who have a common goal of sharing conviviality and pleasure as well as mutual aid. Most historians trace the origins to the 19th century, around [the time of] emancipation. And certainly 19th-century organizations were really focused on benevolence and mutual aid. They were insurance companies, they were health insurance societies. Basically kind of face-to-face organizations of people who would help each other. You would put in your dues and those dues would go to help aid a member who was ill, or would go to help a member pay for the funeral of a family member, or of course if a member of the club died, then the club would sponsor that funeral. They didn't just pay for the funeral, but they also organized the ritual procession, the ceremonial aspect of the funeral, and they insured that the deceased got a dignified burial, in a period when that wasn't taken for granted by any means.
NS: And this had something to do with the tradition of jazz funerals, then?
HR: Right. The jazz funeral tradition definitely originated out of those benevolent societies. Jason Berry would be a really good person to talk to about that. He's writing a book on the history of jazz funerals in New Orleans , and I think the dancing associated with it is one of his main interests. I have not done historical research on this. I've been mostly looking at the contemporary performances as contemporary history of the city. I'm really interested in how, within any one moment in time, you can go to a second line and you can find out what's happening in the city, because people are talking about it, people are singing about it. The whole interaction that happens between club members and their community, and between people and the police, is often really revealing of the mood of this city. So, for example, right now we're seeing these spontaneous lyrics that people sing behind the bands that are often improvised in the moment, are often a commentary on what's going on in the city right now, kind of like the conga chants in. So that right now, you know, there are chants about FEMA, there are chants about particular political leaders, there are chants about insurance companies. People are voicing their woes. As well as celebrating life, which is a big part of the tradition, too.
NS: How old are the oldest extant clubs in the city? Do we know?
HR: The oldest organization of which I'm aware that's involved in the street parades is the Young Men Olympian Junior Benevolent Aid Society, which recently celebrated its 120th anniversary.
NS: Wow.
HR: And that's the juniors. So you have to think that they were a division of young people whose parents or whose uncles or grandparents had the previous version of that organization. And today that organization is still structured along specific divisions. They can have up to six divisions, so that young people get incorporated into the group, but then they have their own organization. So they parade together, but they're separate and that allows people to develop their own style and their own leadership, and to have some autonomy and yet still be part of the larger corporate group.
NS: Do you have an idea how many clubs there are?
HR: Some people have estimated up to 70 clubs. I don't know if there are that many who are actually parading, but it's sometimes hard to measure, because clubs sometimes band together and share a parade permit and parade together. So for example the Young Men Olympian, they have all these divisions. When you see them on the street you think of them as one club, but they may have six divisions, so . . . There's certainly been a huge increase since the early 90s, and I think a real renaissance of brass band music. There's just been a huge infusion of interest among young people. A whole new generation of people started organizations.
When I first started going to parades in the late 80s, the season started around Labor Day and it went pretty much to the end of the year. So you had parades into December, and then there started to be a few parades in January. And then you started having parades going all the way to Mardi Gras, and they stop parading in the Mardi Gras season because the city's already overloaded with activities, and they start again during Lent. Now we have parades going all the way through June, so there's a club – the Perfect Gentlemen, which has often had a Fathers' Day parade. So there's been probably a doubling of social organizations that participate in this particular tradition.
NS: So new clubs have continued to be formed?
HR: Absolutely. We recently had on January 15th an all-star parade of organizations from throughout the city, with several groups who had never paraded before. They had been planning on parading this fall, and because of the hurricane had to delay their coming-out parade, so they paraded for the first time as part of this larger group which had assembled to state their intention to return and to demand affordable housing, among other things.
NS: I want to ask you about that particular parade in a minute. How have you seen it change in the years you've been observing?
HR: One change a lot of people talk about is that some clubs have experimented with having floats as part of the parade, which in New Orleans we think of being more part of the carnival tradition. Second lines have always been marching parades, where everybody's at ground level – musicians, clubs, followers. There's a special kind of social interaction that comes from that, from sharing the street together. But I think it's understandable that some people – and many of the clubs to have royalty, or honorary members, and they want to show respect for those folks, and while they sometimes ride in convertibles, they've recently experimented with having floats, which some traditionalists say is not appropriate for a second-line.
NS: Have you heard any change in the music?
HR: I'm sure the music has changed radically, but I'm not really a musicologist, and I don't necessarily have that vocabulary to talk about it. I think that when I first started going to second lines in the late 80s, the Dirty Dozen were already touring widely nationally and internationally, so they were no longer playing regularly in the streets, although they certainly come out of that tradition. Being on tour they were unable to make commitments to particular clubs, to say, "We'll play for you the 4th Sunday in September," and the clubs need that. So the Rebirth was already stepping into their shoes in that respect. There were a few other bands playing at the time – the Pinstripe Brass Band, the Tremé Brass Band, and the Olympia Junior Brass Band was still playing on the street in those days. And all those bands were already well into the pattern of incorporating funk and blues and r & b into the music, but Rebirth is the first band I remember bringing rap into it. With, in my opinion, mixed success. Playing riffs familiar to people from the radio stations, and having people sing along to particular lyrics -- that's something I've really seen Rebirth do more than any other band. And that was definitely happening more throughout the 90s than it had previously.
NS: I'm impressed by Rebirth's repertory of calls that the public knows how to respond to. Like, this particular flourish is the cue for everybody to yell "Hey!"
HR: And I think that's because Rebirth, unlike the Dirty Dozen, really made the commitment to keep playing on the streets. They're very loyal to the social organizations that have been hiring them for 20 years. So they have a really loyal following among club members and organizers, but also among second liners. They've had this ongoing dialogue with black communities in New Orleans all that time. So, yeah, we know their songs. And they know us.
NS: How far do the Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs extend? Do they have them in Algiers? Do they have them in Jefferson Parish?
HR: I've only seen them in Orleans Parish, but we could very well with Katrina be seeing them reorganizing –
NS: In Portland?
HR: Maybe not in Portland, 'cause I don't think there's enough critical mass, but in Houston, or Atlanta, it's very possible. Now a lot of people have been speculating about that, saying, well, you can't in a suburban context really have the dynamic interaction between crowd and musician that you can have in the densely settled streets of a central city environment. But even before the storm, we already had a suburban club that was performing in New Orleans East. They've been parading, I think at least four years – the New Orleans East Steppers. The parade I went to, they started at the Plaza, which was a shopping mall, so a real contradiction for the second line tradition. And I had my doubts, but I wanted to go experience it, and it was a beautiful parade, in spite of the fact that it was very different. The stops would be at a daiquiri shop instead of at a corner store or a neighborhood bar or the home of a friend. But of course the reason they were in the east is that they were displaced from center city apartments or public housing developments that were being torn down. In the late 90s we saw a huge change in the residential pattern of the city, because we had 10% of the population living in public housing prior to the Hope 6 initiatives and the demolition of public housing. The St. Thomas was torn down, the Desire was torn down, and large portions of the Magnolia. And those were very important places for social club members, especially the Magnolia and the St. Thomas, which were close to downtown.
NS: It certainly seemed last year like many Sundays you could find a second line somewhere. But you have to know where they are.
HR: Yeah, you have to know where they are, and you have to have a sense that this is an okay place to be. I mean, I think for newcomers to the city it can be a little bit intimidating to go into some of the neighborhoods where the second lines happen.
NS: It seems sometimes like the second line is a ghetto day pass to go into places where normally you would not be able to go.
HR: I think that's definitely the way a lot of people have experienced it. Including, by the way, middle-class African Americans who don't necessarily feel comfortable walking around in a housing development unaccompanied. So, yeah, when you're following a second line, you're accompanied. You have the band and the club saying it's okay to be here.
NS: It seemed to me there are two kinds of second lines: the kind that makes a circuit and ends up where it started, and the kind that ends up miles away. And then you have to get back to your car.
HR: Right, so there's really two ways of doing it. Either you have [a sheet outlining] the route in advance, or you know, because you already know this club quite well, basically what their route is. And so you say, well, I'm gonna catch it at such-and-such a point in the parade. I'm gonna go to Joe's Bar and wait for them to come, I'll have an elegant drink while I'm waiting, dance for a while and come back to the bar, get back to the air-conditioning, and then head for home. So that's one way to do it. Many people do that, who don't want to walk or dance for four hours.
NS: Do clubs keep pretty much the same route every year?
HR: Some clubs seem to alternate between uptown and downtown routes, but most clubs have long-term relationships to particular places. They may always go to a particular bar or stop by a club member's grandmother's house.
NS: Now, I had you describe what a social aid and pleasure club is. Now could you explain, for people who've maybe never seen one or heard one, what is a second line? What are these parades?
HR: Well, first, it's kind of misleading to call it a parade, because we often think of parades as something that you watch. A second line is not really anything to watch. You have to really jump in. Jump into the flow, move into the music, and become a part of it. So that's the first thing. The only way to really get a sense of what a second line is about is to be a part of it. And if you're standing on the sidelines while the parade is going by, people within the crowd will urge you to come in and dance. You get this kind of urgent invitation, so the main thing about a second line is walking or dancing down the street with hundreds of people or maybe thousands of people who are all moving to the same rhythm. That's the most powerful thing about it, I think, is that feeling of togetherness of people from all walks of life. People say the name ["second line"] comes from the idea that the first line is the club, or if you talk to the musicians, the first line is the band, and then the second line is those who follow the band. So anyone who feels like following a band, who likes their sound, or who's a fan of that particular social organization, is going to be a second liner. So that's what makes it what it is, I think: that massive following. If you just have a band walking down the street, it's not a second line. It's a procession, but it's not a second line, because it doesn't have that massive group of followers, or that intense interaction between people – rubbing shoulders with people, moving down the street in a way that seems kind of impossible when you first look at it. But then when you're in it, people are just amazingly gentle and polite, and someone steps on your foot and they say, oh excuse me, pardon me, so there's this real sense of sharing space and making it comfortable to be in.
NS: How long does it take? What's the rhythm of the parade?
HR: Most parades today are limited to four hours. We're talking about the Sunday afternoon anniversary parades. So they usually start at 12 noon and go to 4 p.m. Now in the past, the early part of the 20th century, these parades went all day. People talk about getting up early in the morning and starting their parade, and then stopping for a leisurely picnic in the park, and then going again. So there was a really different pace in those days, but they're limited by the police to four hours now. So depending on the club, the pace can be very fast. There can be this sense that, we really need to get to such-and-such a part of town, and there's a real sense that the club is investing its reputation in being able to finish their route. So if you're delayed, if your band members are late [laughs], or if something happens and the money doesn't come together and the parade gets delayed, there's a real question of public reputation involved. And also your reputation's involved in maintaining the pace, so you can move pretty quickly down the street and then have a leisurely stop for five, ten, fifteen minutes, and then you've gotta start again, or else you won't make your route. Now if you don't make the end of your route in four hours, the police will disband the crowd. And I think there's a real sense of what a shame that is, if you're not able to bring people all the way home.
NS: My impression was that the police do not like second lines.
HR: Yeah. I don't fully know why that is. I mean, sometimes I think that the antagonism between the police and the second liners is almost part of the tradition. Sometimes they seem to almost egg each other on. Sometimes the police use their sirens to push people up the street. Why are they doing that? I don't know, but it makes people mad, it really does. Sometimes the dancers in a second line will start gyrating against the police car in a provocative way that seems designed to make the police mad. So then the police are being challenged to keep their cool and not worry about it.
NS: In Cuba – the congas of Cuba are not second lines, but they're cousins – and there is, and possibly since the 16th century has been, a theater of ritualized confrontation with authority almost as part of the activity of a conga. The play of the crowd against the police is part of whatever the game is. I had the impression here [in New Orleans] that the police are just nervous about seeing thousands of people romping down the street together, drinking and taking over the street.
HR: Yeah, that's a really interesting thing. I think if you're a police officer and you're asked to work at the second lines, you have this experience that you're not in control. Here's this huge crowd of people dancing and to the extent that there is order, which I believe there usually is, it's the band and the club members who are really providing that order, and the second liners, who are self-policing, as I was saying, being really polite to each other, or breaking up fights or making sure they don't get into disagreements. Conflict mediation is a well-practiced art in the black communities, and certainly in New Orleans . People know what the costs are to conflict, and they're usually very, very good at preventing that. But the police are clearly not in charge. And that's bound to be hugely frustrating. But when you think about that nervousness about possibly the crowd getting out of control, it's really interesting to think about that having a history too. When the history was really rigidly segregated – legally segregated – surely having black folk march down St. Charles Avenue would never have been allowed. And there are a few clubs today who march at least one or two blocks – I think the Prince of Wales Social Club marches down St. Charles . I was told that in the 60s some clubs were marching down Canal Street, and that they were banned from doing that by some merchants who were afraid that their store windows would get broken. So I think there is this fear of disorder and violence on the part of officials and to some extent business owners. A lot of businesses close their doors when the second line goes by, even though second liners are very eager to buy water and buy drinks, especially on a hot day.
NS: As the second lines go around, part of the rhythm – on the ones I went on, anyway – there were usually six stops. And each one was a little neighborhood bar. I assume that the second lines are an important part of the bars' business.
HR: Absolutely. Not only on the day of the second line, when huge crowds of people will stop by and buy drinks, but also the clubs themselves become patrons of particular bars. Some clubs have their regular meetings in a bar, or they will have social events there, and they're bringing their friends and neighbors to those bars. And very literally, when a club publishes a route sheet, if they name a particular business on their route sheet, they're putting them on the map, they're putting them in public consciousness. So if I was starting a bar, let's say right here in the 7th Ward, I would want to have an affiliation with a social club, so that the name of my business would become known.
NS: Do the clubs have other activities than second lines? Or is producing the annual second line the sole focus of their activities?
HR: Most of the clubs function year-round as social organizations, so they're having fund-raisers four, five, six times a year. A lot of clubs have dances as fund-raisers, so they're inviting friends, family, neighbors, and other clubs.
NS: Is it fair to say that they're part of the glue that holds the town together?
HR: Most definitely.
NS: Could you talk to me about that?
HR: Although they're no longer providing health insurance for their members, they're still providing a benevolent function in a more subtle way. [If] you lose your job and you want to find another job, who are you gonna ask about where there are job openings? You're gonna ask your club members. And I think that, again in a more subtle way, they continue to organize major events in people's lives, from birthday parties to funerals. Some clubs meet once a week. So they really provide a kind of solidarity and a kind of emotional and social connection for people.
NS: How many people would be at a meeting of a social club that meets once a week?
HR: Typically, I would say, between 10 and 20 people. Most clubs don't go above 20. If they do, then they start having different divisions. That seems to be the size that people can really relate to each other on a face-to-face basis, where everyone can talk at a meeting, where you can make decisions by consensus.
NS: So 20 people handle the work of producing an event with several thousand people and run it all themselves?
HR: That's right. In most cases, nearly everybody at those parades knows one of the club members. So they're really deploying their social network, and that's why most parades, you have a beautiful peaceful event. Because people are there to support their friend who's in the club.
NS: What is the membership in terms of African Americans versus non-African Americans? Are white people part of the social club network at this point?
HR: Absolutely, although not in numbers proportional to our presence in the city. These clubs definitely come out of a black cultural tradition in New Orleans , and I think that, although there are white participants, many of us feel that we're participants in a black cultural event, or a black institution, I guess. A number of clubs have had white members. There's even one club, the Bayou Steppers, that was founded as a multiracial social organization. The founding presidents were black and white.
NS: And of course, we were both on that parade, and you remember how that parade ended. Could you describe that, since you were there?
HR: The parade you're talking about ended right near the interstate overpass on North Claiborne at a little club called the Mother-in-Law Lounge, which is run by Antoinette K-Doe, the widow of Ernie K-Doe. The parade ends at the Mother-in-Law Lounge, it was a beautiful four-hour parade, just a perfect day, and there's a wonderful feeling among second liners at the end of a parade. People are feeling great about having been dancing and walking for four hours, and you have friends that you want to talk to, now that the band is taking a rest. And the police began to use their sirens to disperse the crowd. These were not ordinary sirens, because they were parked under the interstate in order to be able to use the amplification of the cement structure of the interstate. And so their sirens, which were already loud, were being amplified by the interstate. And there were several cars that were doing this, and they were directing it at this club. We couldn't have a conversation outside on the sidewalk, or inside the club. If you lived in a home in that area, you couldn't hear yourself think, even within your home. It was extraordinarily abusive. What happened that day is really part of a larger pattern of the police intentionally disbanding the crowd after a parade. I feel positive that this is not an individual initiative on the part of a particular police officer. This is an NOPD policy coming from the top down.
NS: Which reached a climax a little later with the debacle of the Mardi Gras Indian gathering.
HR: Right. March 19, 2005, just last St. Joseph's Day, the police dispersed a crowd of Mardi Gras Indians and their supporters and followers. In the paper it was reported as being about 200 people. One of the police officers was quoted as having said: take them fucking feathers off or go to jail. That really conveys the attitude toward this tradition, that this is something that's not worthy of respect. I hate to think this, but this seems to be the attitude informing these policies, that any gathering of working-class people or of African Americans in New Orleans in public space is inherently a problem and they want to disperse that. Now it may be that gatherings of people do create higher risk that something unfortunate could happen in a crowd. But a lot of things are risk factors that we don't choose to ban, and this is such an important cultural tradition in New Orleans, that I really think that this is not a reasonable approach to policing.
NS: What is the right way? Certainly, if you talk to people in town, you will hear some of them express nervousness about second lines. A lot of people won't go anywhere near one because they're afraid there'll be a shooting. Things do sometimes happen. What do you think is a reasonable way of looking at this?
HR: Again, I think the second line really does reflect what's going on in the city, and to some extent New Orleans reflects what's happening in America more generally. We like to talk about how unique we are, but in many ways we share the same problems that all American cities share. We have too much poverty, we don't have good jobs, and we have a lot of people who end up in the informal economy in ways that are really self-destructive and hurtful to others. And there's a lot of violence associated with that. So we really do have these problems, and some people choose the second line as the place to settle scores, and to do so violently. So that does happen. And I can completely understand that that concern causes some people to decide, I'm not gonna do this anymore, I'm not gonna go. Unfortunately, we can't really solve the problem of policing second lines in an appropriate way without solving our social problems. But on the other hand, no one's really looked carefully at the pattern of violence at second lines. There have been shootings. I've been on second lines where there have been shootings. And it's a terrible thing. But there are shootings in poor neighborhoods in New Orleans every day -- before the storm, anyway. So being poor is a risk factor for violent crime. Just like being married is a risk factor for spousal abuse. There's a relationship there, but we're not gonna ban marriage. So second lines do occasionally provide a forum for people to settle scores, but I don't think it's reasonable to ban second lines, any more than you would ban marriage because marital violence is linked to marriage.
NS: There's also the tradition of the informal second line, not an annual planned parade, but something that springs up more spontaneously.
HR: I guess the Tremé neighborhood is really known for having spontaneous second lines, or second lines that are not in any way official, and sometimes I've been aware of second line parades happening during, for example, the period between the death of a relative or a friend and the funeral. For one well-known musician, there was a second line every night between the night he died and the funeral. And the Rebirth were playing there. That was James and Troy Andrews' brother, D-Boy [Donnell Andrews], who was quite young [he was 17] when he was found killed. And so, yeah, this incredible kind of wake of a second line moving through the streets, moving through the neighborhood he had lived in, with hundreds of people and no sign of a police presence. That's definitely an informal second line. And a lot of people say that the Tremé neighborhood, more than any other neighborhood in the city, are fierce defenders of this tradition. They really have not accepted the idea that you have to pay for a police permit in order to gather peaceably in the streets and perform this kind of sacred dance.
NS: It seems like the issue of who can assemble in the street is a fundamental one here.
HR: Absolutely. I think a lot of second liners – you know, they might not have law degrees, but they have a really profound understanding of public space, and the value of public space. I believe that public space is really important to a democracy, that we need to be able to gather in public and be together, whether that's discussing politics or dancing in the streets. And certainly in New Orleans it feels like a fundamental right to those who participate in this tradition.
NS: A right that's been exercised since the days of Jim Crow.
HR: Absolutely, and this is where I think funerals take on special significance. Because during slavery, black folk in many parts of the South – enslaved people – could not gather except for a funeral. That was one of the only occasions when the people in charge would allow them to gather. I think as Christians, they [the slaveowners] had to recognize that a funeral was an important event. Funerals, I believe, became especially important in the black community in part because there were so few occasions for people to gather and to enact or to talk about or to perform the values that they hold dear and to celebrate their dignity and the sacredness of life.
NS: I always felt from the first time I went on a second line that if you haven't been on one, there's something about jazz you don't know.
HR: A lot of people refer to the second line tradition as fundamental to the origins of jazz. Louis Armstrong talks about having played at second lines as a child, and certainly having admired jazz musicians. He wanted to be like them, and he saw them for the first time during jazz funerals, during anniversary parades. And you know, the social organizations in the black community that hired these bands week after week – not only for parades, but for dances and balls and other social events – really were crucial to that connection between the music and the community. And I guess – yeah, when you hear a brass band playing in the streets and you really begin to understand the kind of interaction between musicians and dancers, you can really see how fundamental that is to the kind of dialogue that's happening in jazz music. There's a wonderful quote [on p. 72 of] in Mick Burns's book – have you seen that? – Keeping the Beat on the Street: The Brass Band Renaissance, and it's an interview with Gregory “Blodie” Davis of the Dirty Dozen, who talks about how their music really grew out of the interaction between the band and the dancers, and the dancers challenging the musicians with their dance and the musicians having to come back and do one better. And the band practicing all week, thinking about what the dancers were gonna be throwing at them, and so there's that sense in which dancing is already very musical.
NS: I realize this is hard to do, but could you take a stab at describing how second line dancing works, how it moves, how it goes down the street, what the movements are?
HR: There's kind of a basic second line step, which is almost a strut that you do while you're moving quickly down the street with a brass band. But then there are people who are doing something entirely different, and they're the virtuoso performers, the virtuoso second liners, and they can be of all ages. When they start to really get into their dancing, there's often a circle that forms around them, and people start watching them and encouraging them. And then someone else will move into the circle and challenge them. It's often men dancing with men as well as men dancing with women or women dancing with women. So there's a real competitive challenge happening on the street, which then gets translated into the challenge between the dancers and the band members as well.
The feet are usually really close to the ground, but people are really light on their feet at the same time. There's also this incredibly athletic dancing, with people jumping up in the air and twisting, going down in splits, the kind of dancing that you would expect to see on stage somewhere, instead of . . .
NS: . . . on concrete.
HR: Yeah, and these people are wearing tennis shoes, because they're going to be walking for a very long time, so that has an effect on the kind of dancing that you see.
NS: It's an exhausting thing to go on a full second line parade. I always wonder how the musicians do it. Of course, they do take breaks, but even so, four hours of blasting away, making all the many feet of metal in a sousaphone vibrate by pushing air through it with your jaw muscles as you dance down the street in hot sun, dehydrated, and the tuba player's usually overweight to start with, which is why he wound up playing the tuba. It seems like a real physical ordeal.
HR: The brass bands who really have a commitment to the second lines, they're fit. And so are the club members and the regular second liners. Sometimes you'll see a band coming back to the street after having been away for a while, and you see them huffing and puffing and taking a break between songs, and at times the second liners start to become quite outspoken – "why don't they play something?" You don't get a lot of slack from the second liners if you're trying to rest.
NS: Do you have any idea how much distance is covered by a typical second line?
HR: I would say it's not unusual to cover six or seven miles, but some of them may cover even more.
NS: That's a long march.
HR: Yeah, absolutely. And when you think about dancers who are really into this – they go into this clowning mode – "clowning" is what they call it in New Orleans . They start doing things like climbing up telephone poles and dancing, or climbing onto rooftops and dancing. There's something about that. It's usually young men who do this. But think about all the miles they're climbing, as well as walking! And then they have to walk ahead of the group in order to be up there by the time the second liners pass by and see them, and then climb back down and run ahead again. The photograph that's above you is from the Circle Food Store, on St. Bernard Avenue and Claiborne, and you can see there's a dancer, dancing on the roof during a second line parade.
NS: I took a bunch of pictures of two dancers up on the overpass on Claiborne, that big overpass. It didn't look like much in the picture, actually, you couldn't really get the sense of these thousand of people watching these two guys dancing way up in the air on this concrete air. But the whole crowd was like . . .
HR: . . . stunned. One of the things about being in the second line is, you can't really see it when you're in it. You can see the people just around you, which might be 10 to 20 people, but if there's six thousand people at a parade, you're obviously not seeing most people. But if the route allows you to go over a bridge, then you're able to really look back and you can see the expanse of people. Some clubs try to design their routes to include a bridge or an overpass so that they can have that experience. There are two clubs that I know of that are doing that right now – the CTC, the Cross the Canal Steppers, they go over the Industrial Canal over into the Lower Ninth Ward, so that allows them to really have this incredible panoramic view. And they're going over this rickety old metal bridge. It's not really rickety, but it feels like it when you're on there, the whole bridge starts to move as people are dancing. And another group, the Nine Times, which is out of the Desire area, goes over the Almonaster Bridge , which is over a railroad track. When they talk about their route, they talk specifically about the importance of being on that bridge, and being able to see all the people you've brought out, and the people you've brought together, and they just take great pride in that accomplishment. And so at some point in their route, they're going to be able to look around and see all the people who have come together to support them.
NS: Let's talk now about what's happened since Katrina. Of course, Katrina happened just before Labor Day . . .
HR: Well, the Sunday before Labor Day is traditionally the second line of the Black Men of Labor, which is a social organization started in the mid-1990s. And as you can tell from their name, they were very self-conscious when they organized that they wanted to honor the dignity of black working men, and they also embrace a really traditional approach to the music, and to their clothes and their decorations. They make all their decorations themselves, and they often wear shirts and suspenders instead of expensive suits. The idea was to really honor the musicians and put more money in the music and less on their clothing. And since they're Black Men of Labor, they often wear clothes that recall a working-class heritage as well.
NS: And that of course didn't happen this year.
HR: Yeah, the Labor Day weekend was – well, just the weekend after Katrina, so of course the members of the organization had evacuated before the storm, or they were in the process of evacuating, or they were back in the city helping people, working in the city in boats and helping people get out.
NS: Would you care to speak in general terms about what has happened since the disaster?
HR: [long pause]. Well, we're talking right now in February of 2006, so it's been over five months since the storm, and the majority of the city's African American population is still living in exile, so I think for that reason alone the future of the second line tradition and the music that the second line organizations support is very much in question. The storm and the flood affected people from all walks of life, and it affected many areas of the city, and in many ways it cut across race and class in the way that it affected people, but now the floodwaters have receded. People's ability to return is very much determined by class. So many of the people who were the creators of the second line culture and the music really come out of working class families and neighborhoods, and most of the city's public housing developments remain closed. Even those that didn't flood. So it's hard not to feel that there's a major transformation happening in New Orleans and we don't know what it is yet, because it's changing all the time. But there really is a sense that this city will be dramatically different, and certainly right now it's a much whiter and a much wealthier city, and I don't think that that city can really support the second line tradition as it currently is.
NS: Now there have been some second lines since Katrina.
HR: We've had a few second line parades.
The first club to come out since the storm was the Prince of Wales. They had their anniversary parade, which would originally have been scheduled in October. They were delayed by a couple of months, but nonetheless, they came back, they came together, and they managed to put on a beautiful parade. Their route goes through uptown, and they were fortunate in that most of their route didn't flood, so they were able to go to some of the bars where they traditionally stop, and those bars were open. The Rock Bottom Lounge, which is where the club was really founded, on Tchoupitoulas Street, is on high ground, because it's basically on the natural levee. Many of the people in the Prince of Wales came out of families where the men were longshoremen, so they lived close to the river for that reason. So partly for that reason too, most of their route is still navigable, by foot anyway.
Most of the other clubs, their routes reflected where their members lived. Most of those clubs paraded through neighborhoods that were farther from the river, what people in New Orleans call Back of Town. And that means that they were downhill, you know, downslope in terms of the natural levee sloping down into what people call the Bowl. So some of the lowest areas of the city that were settled in the 20th century ended up with high concentrations of working-class folks and high concentrations of African Americans, so the majority of the social organizations that sponsored second line parades were in those Back of Town areas, and they were heavily flooded. It's not clear if that housing stock is gonna be repaired.
There was another parade that was organized since the flood. That was the All-Star Parade. And that involved numerous social organizations. I want to say, between 20 and 30 different clubs helped to organize it. They all wore basically a black T-shirt that just said, Renew New Orleans. And listed the sponsoring clubs on the back of the shirt. And this is certainly the first time that I know of in the history of second lining that clubs have paraded not so much as a club but as part of a larger whole, this All-Star second line parade. And in that way it was really a beautiful event. And because it was the first massive second line parade in the city, it also drew people from all walks of life who wanted to see a second line. People come to second lines looking for – now more than ever – looking for a sign that black culture is alive and well in New Orleans, and I think that a lot of people came, a lot of middle-class folks, white and black, came looking to see that New Orleans was coming back. Because the parade was well organized and planned in advance, people were able to get tickets to fly in from Atlanta and Houston and in some cases New York or Portland, and probably I would say at least half of the people who were in the clubs who paraded are not living in New Orleans. But they were here for that event. And sadly, after the parade, they had go back and leave the city. But at least during the parade they were announcing their intention to reclaim their city, to come back to New Orleans one way or another.
NS: It was a very large parade, as I understand, in terms of the turnout.
HR: It was huge. I counted – very approximately – eight thousand people, but I was doing that after the height of the crowd. And a lot of people leave. New people come in and join it, but a lot of people leave after a couple of hours, so the parade went until four o'clock, and I was probably counting around three o'clock.
NS: And the parade ended with a shooting.
HR: Yeah. Most of the paraders had already finished parading when the shooting started. I was not near the gunshots. I didn't even hear them. But I did feel the crowd kind of surging forward, and of course people in New Orleans do run when they hear gunshots and try to get out of the way. I think only a few intrepid reporters were trying to go toward the shots, but most people run in the other direction. So I felt the crowd surging forward and I was hoping it was a false alarm, but I found out later that there was a shooting. [It was] extremely saddening for the organizers of the event and the people who came back for it. And so far, the response of the police department has been – I think somewhat predictably – fairly severe. So they've announced that they're raising the fees for parade permits from approximately $1600 per club to $3605 dollars per club. And that's just for the permit.
NS: And that's what a lot of the clubs do all year long, is raise the money for those permits, right?
HR: For the permits, for the band, for their clothes.
NS: What's the budget of a typical second line? Any idea?
HR: You'll have to ask some club members. I have no idea. I think there's a huge range, because some people are quite proud of the fact that they'll spend ten dollars on their shoes. It's not about that for them. Whereas other clubs are quite proud of the fact that they've spent fifteen hundred dollars on their shoes. Showing that you're able to spend money is important for some of the clubs. So you'd have to say that the basic expenses for the club have to be ten thousand dollars, and for some clubs, considerably higher than that.
NS: Is there anything else that you'd like to say that I haven't asked you about? Do you have any other observations in general about this?
HR: I think I want to get back to the idea of the ghetto pass. I don't want to use that phrase, but I think there's definitely something to that. I've interviewed a lot of second liners who evidently didn't grow up with the tradition. Some of them aren't even from New Orleans , but they've come here and fell in love with this tradition. For many of them, the second line is the kind of event in New Orleans where they feel like they can be part of the whole city. It seems like, even though desegregation was forty years ago, in many aspects of our everyday lives in New Orleans we're still very separate from each other. And the second lines have created a place where people from different walks of life can share space. It's not for everyone -- there are lots of people who don't like second lining. But for many of us, it's provided an entree into the larger city. I first moved to New Orleans in the 80s to go to school, and I was told, don't go here, don't go there, don't ride the bus, ride the streetcar, don't go into the areas that are known as black neighborhoods, and it was through the second line tradition that I started to see that the city was – for one thing – much richer than I ever thought culturally, but also that I could be a citizen. That I could really live in the city. That I didn't have to be cloistered in only certain sections of the city, and that's really liberating.
We usually think of the ghetto as enclosing – obviously, in Jewish history, being a place where Jewish people had to be, or where black folk have had to live in American cities. But in a way, white New Orleanians have been very much sequestered by differences – perceived differences or actual differences – in wealth, race, class status.
NS: Ghettoization in New Orleans works very differently than any place else I've ever been, just because of the peculiar nature of the city's layout.
HR: People always talk about the checkerboard pattern that defined New Orleans historically, but when I moved to the city in the 80s that had already started to change. So what some people call Central City really became a black neighborhood, or you could call it a black ghetto. But that really was produced partly through legally segregated housing during the Jim Crow and then partly through white flight, starting in the '60s.
NS: And also in the 60s when the projects became all black. The St. Thomas [housing project] was originally for white people.
HR: Right. The projects were from the beginning racially segregated. But yeah, they went from being pretty much all white to being all black fairly quickly.
NS: Magnolia and the St. Thomas were both built in 1941. Magnolia was built as a black project, the St. Thomas was built as a white project. I talked to an older lady from the neighborhood, who told me that on St. Mary, by the St. Thomas, that's where the country-and-western bars were.
HR: Yeah, it's really interesting to think of the musical landscape having changed with the landscape of residence. And public housing had a huge impact on that. If you check out the Soul Rebels' piece "Free Yo’ Mind" there's a really amazing lyrical sequence about the projects in New Orleans , calling them out one by one as if they were cities.
NS: Do you have any observations about the relationship between the Mardi Gras Indian organizations and the second lines? I’m thinking of the Tambourine and Fan second line, which last year was a tremendous parade, and was also [the Mardi Gras Indian event] Downtown Super Sunday.
HR: The Tambourine and Fan event, which is usually the Sunday after St. Joseph's Day, so the Sunday after March 19, brings together social clubs and Mardi Gras Indians. The focus is definitely on the Mardi Gras Indians, but the clubs are there, so there's this kind of celebration of black street culture as a whole.
NS: Is Tambourine and Fan a social club?
HR: It's unusual, in that I think it's primarily educational, and [it's] modeled almost as a freedom-school concept. They put on this public event, but [the club] functions year round as a series of after-school programs, and a summer camp, and headed by Jerome Smith, who'd be a really interesting person for you to interview, who's a veteran of the civil rights movement. Something else about the Indians I wanted to say: we were talking about how strenuous the playing is for the brass band members, you know, playing and walking for four hours? But they do take breaks, there are these stops, where you go in and get some water or something else to drink. And what you see a lot of times is that the crowd is gathered outside the bar, because the overwhelming majority of the crowd can't go in the bar, wouldn't possibly be able to fit. But people often start to play the tambourine or other percussion that they have, and sing Mardi Gras Indian chants. So the Mardi Gras Indians take over when the band members take a break, during the second lines. When you start paying attention to who's walking directly behind the band, you see that the percussionists are also Mardi Gras Indians, so they're really amplifying the sound of the brass band, and contributing to it musically as well. They're often the ones who are calling out the lyrics. If the band members aren't singing, it's usually the percussionists right behind the band who are singing. So there's this real dynamic interaction between the brass band and the people walking right behind them. And those are often Mardi Gras Indians. Now they may not be men who sew elaborate suits for Mardi Gras day, but in terms of their social identity in the community, they identify as Indians. We usually think what makes you a real Indian is having callouses on your fingers showing that you're sewing, but it's also a social identity, and the music is one of the ways that people express that.
NS: Thank you, Helen.
HR: Thanks, Ned.
Interview: Helen Regis with Ned Sublette in New Orleans, 2006
Place and Date: New Orleans, LA
2006
Interviewer: Ned Sublette
Helen Regis is Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography & Anthropology at Louisiana State University. She has lived in and conducted research in France, New Orleans, Cameroon, & Mississippi. In addition to International Studies, she is affiliated with Women’s and Gender Studies, and African and African American Studies programs.
NS: Who am I talking to?
HR: I'm Helen Regis, a resident of the 7th Ward, and an associate professor of anthropology at Louisiana State University.
NS: And what do you study?
HR: African American social and pleasure clubs, and the second line parades that they sponsor. I've been looking at second line parades pretty intensively since '95, but I actually started in '88.
NS: So you've been going on second lines for almost 20 years.
HR: That's right. It's weird to say that. The people who would say that when I started doing it seemed ancient.
NS: Well, we gotta get used to that. Could explain to people who have never seen one: what is a social aid and pleasure club and what are its historical origins?
HR: Today a social aid and pleasure club is a club that's brought together by people who are friends -- many of them went to high school together -- and who have a common goal of sharing conviviality and pleasure as well as mutual aid. Most historians trace the origins to the 19th century, around [the time of] emancipation. And certainly 19th-century organizations were really focused on benevolence and mutual aid. They were insurance companies, they were health insurance societies. Basically kind of face-to-face organizations of people who would help each other. You would put in your dues and those dues would go to help aid a member who was ill, or would go to help a member pay for the funeral of a family member, or of course if a member of the club died, then the club would sponsor that funeral. They didn't just pay for the funeral, but they also organized the ritual procession, the ceremonial aspect of the funeral, and they insured that the deceased got a dignified burial, in a period when that wasn't taken for granted by any means.
NS: And this had something to do with the tradition of jazz funerals, then?
HR: Right. The jazz funeral tradition definitely originated out of those benevolent societies. Jason Berry would be a really good person to talk to about that. He's writing a book on the history of jazz funerals in New Orleans , and I think the dancing associated with it is one of his main interests. I have not done historical research on this. I've been mostly looking at the contemporary performances as contemporary history of the city. I'm really interested in how, within any one moment in time, you can go to a second line and you can find out what's happening in the city, because people are talking about it, people are singing about it. The whole interaction that happens between club members and their community, and between people and the police, is often really revealing of the mood of this city. So, for example, right now we're seeing these spontaneous lyrics that people sing behind the bands that are often improvised in the moment, are often a commentary on what's going on in the city right now, kind of like the conga chants in. So that right now, you know, there are chants about FEMA, there are chants about particular political leaders, there are chants about insurance companies. People are voicing their woes. As well as celebrating life, which is a big part of the tradition, too.
NS: How old are the oldest extant clubs in the city? Do we know?
HR: The oldest organization of which I'm aware that's involved in the street parades is the Young Men Olympian Junior Benevolent Aid Society, which recently celebrated its 120th anniversary.
NS: Wow.
HR: And that's the juniors. So you have to think that they were a division of young people whose parents or whose uncles or grandparents had the previous version of that organization. And today that organization is still structured along specific divisions. They can have up to six divisions, so that young people get incorporated into the group, but then they have their own organization. So they parade together, but they're separate and that allows people to develop their own style and their own leadership, and to have some autonomy and yet still be part of the larger corporate group.
NS: Do you have an idea how many clubs there are?
HR: Some people have estimated up to 70 clubs. I don't know if there are that many who are actually parading, but it's sometimes hard to measure, because clubs sometimes band together and share a parade permit and parade together. So for example the Young Men Olympian, they have all these divisions. When you see them on the street you think of them as one club, but they may have six divisions, so . . . There's certainly been a huge increase since the early 90s, and I think a real renaissance of brass band music. There's just been a huge infusion of interest among young people. A whole new generation of people started organizations.
When I first started going to parades in the late 80s, the season started around Labor Day and it went pretty much to the end of the year. So you had parades into December, and then there started to be a few parades in January. And then you started having parades going all the way to Mardi Gras, and they stop parading in the Mardi Gras season because the city's already overloaded with activities, and they start again during Lent. Now we have parades going all the way through June, so there's a club – the Perfect Gentlemen, which has often had a Fathers' Day parade. So there's been probably a doubling of social organizations that participate in this particular tradition.
NS: So new clubs have continued to be formed?
HR: Absolutely. We recently had on January 15th an all-star parade of organizations from throughout the city, with several groups who had never paraded before. They had been planning on parading this fall, and because of the hurricane had to delay their coming-out parade, so they paraded for the first time as part of this larger group which had assembled to state their intention to return and to demand affordable housing, among other things.
NS: I want to ask you about that particular parade in a minute. How have you seen it change in the years you've been observing?
HR: One change a lot of people talk about is that some clubs have experimented with having floats as part of the parade, which in New Orleans we think of being more part of the carnival tradition. Second lines have always been marching parades, where everybody's at ground level – musicians, clubs, followers. There's a special kind of social interaction that comes from that, from sharing the street together. But I think it's understandable that some people – and many of the clubs to have royalty, or honorary members, and they want to show respect for those folks, and while they sometimes ride in convertibles, they've recently experimented with having floats, which some traditionalists say is not appropriate for a second-line.
NS: Have you heard any change in the music?
HR: I'm sure the music has changed radically, but I'm not really a musicologist, and I don't necessarily have that vocabulary to talk about it. I think that when I first started going to second lines in the late 80s, the Dirty Dozen were already touring widely nationally and internationally, so they were no longer playing regularly in the streets, although they certainly come out of that tradition. Being on tour they were unable to make commitments to particular clubs, to say, "We'll play for you the 4th Sunday in September," and the clubs need that. So the Rebirth was already stepping into their shoes in that respect. There were a few other bands playing at the time – the Pinstripe Brass Band, the Tremé Brass Band, and the Olympia Junior Brass Band was still playing on the street in those days. And all those bands were already well into the pattern of incorporating funk and blues and r & b into the music, but Rebirth is the first band I remember bringing rap into it. With, in my opinion, mixed success. Playing riffs familiar to people from the radio stations, and having people sing along to particular lyrics -- that's something I've really seen Rebirth do more than any other band. And that was definitely happening more throughout the 90s than it had previously.
NS: I'm impressed by Rebirth's repertory of calls that the public knows how to respond to. Like, this particular flourish is the cue for everybody to yell "Hey!"
HR: And I think that's because Rebirth, unlike the Dirty Dozen, really made the commitment to keep playing on the streets. They're very loyal to the social organizations that have been hiring them for 20 years. So they have a really loyal following among club members and organizers, but also among second liners. They've had this ongoing dialogue with black communities in New Orleans all that time. So, yeah, we know their songs. And they know us.
NS: How far do the Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs extend? Do they have them in Algiers? Do they have them in Jefferson Parish?
HR: I've only seen them in Orleans Parish, but we could very well with Katrina be seeing them reorganizing –
NS: In Portland?
HR: Maybe not in Portland, 'cause I don't think there's enough critical mass, but in Houston, or Atlanta, it's very possible. Now a lot of people have been speculating about that, saying, well, you can't in a suburban context really have the dynamic interaction between crowd and musician that you can have in the densely settled streets of a central city environment. But even before the storm, we already had a suburban club that was performing in New Orleans East. They've been parading, I think at least four years – the New Orleans East Steppers. The parade I went to, they started at the Plaza, which was a shopping mall, so a real contradiction for the second line tradition. And I had my doubts, but I wanted to go experience it, and it was a beautiful parade, in spite of the fact that it was very different. The stops would be at a daiquiri shop instead of at a corner store or a neighborhood bar or the home of a friend. But of course the reason they were in the east is that they were displaced from center city apartments or public housing developments that were being torn down. In the late 90s we saw a huge change in the residential pattern of the city, because we had 10% of the population living in public housing prior to the Hope 6 initiatives and the demolition of public housing. The St. Thomas was torn down, the Desire was torn down, and large portions of the Magnolia. And those were very important places for social club members, especially the Magnolia and the St. Thomas, which were close to downtown.
NS: It certainly seemed last year like many Sundays you could find a second line somewhere. But you have to know where they are.
HR: Yeah, you have to know where they are, and you have to have a sense that this is an okay place to be. I mean, I think for newcomers to the city it can be a little bit intimidating to go into some of the neighborhoods where the second lines happen.
NS: It seems sometimes like the second line is a ghetto day pass to go into places where normally you would not be able to go.
HR: I think that's definitely the way a lot of people have experienced it. Including, by the way, middle-class African Americans who don't necessarily feel comfortable walking around in a housing development unaccompanied. So, yeah, when you're following a second line, you're accompanied. You have the band and the club saying it's okay to be here.
NS: It seemed to me there are two kinds of second lines: the kind that makes a circuit and ends up where it started, and the kind that ends up miles away. And then you have to get back to your car.
HR: Right, so there's really two ways of doing it. Either you have [a sheet outlining] the route in advance, or you know, because you already know this club quite well, basically what their route is. And so you say, well, I'm gonna catch it at such-and-such a point in the parade. I'm gonna go to Joe's Bar and wait for them to come, I'll have an elegant drink while I'm waiting, dance for a while and come back to the bar, get back to the air-conditioning, and then head for home. So that's one way to do it. Many people do that, who don't want to walk or dance for four hours.
NS: Do clubs keep pretty much the same route every year?
HR: Some clubs seem to alternate between uptown and downtown routes, but most clubs have long-term relationships to particular places. They may always go to a particular bar or stop by a club member's grandmother's house.
NS: Now, I had you describe what a social aid and pleasure club is. Now could you explain, for people who've maybe never seen one or heard one, what is a second line? What are these parades?
HR: Well, first, it's kind of misleading to call it a parade, because we often think of parades as something that you watch. A second line is not really anything to watch. You have to really jump in. Jump into the flow, move into the music, and become a part of it. So that's the first thing. The only way to really get a sense of what a second line is about is to be a part of it. And if you're standing on the sidelines while the parade is going by, people within the crowd will urge you to come in and dance. You get this kind of urgent invitation, so the main thing about a second line is walking or dancing down the street with hundreds of people or maybe thousands of people who are all moving to the same rhythm. That's the most powerful thing about it, I think, is that feeling of togetherness of people from all walks of life. People say the name ["second line"] comes from the idea that the first line is the club, or if you talk to the musicians, the first line is the band, and then the second line is those who follow the band. So anyone who feels like following a band, who likes their sound, or who's a fan of that particular social organization, is going to be a second liner. So that's what makes it what it is, I think: that massive following. If you just have a band walking down the street, it's not a second line. It's a procession, but it's not a second line, because it doesn't have that massive group of followers, or that intense interaction between people – rubbing shoulders with people, moving down the street in a way that seems kind of impossible when you first look at it. But then when you're in it, people are just amazingly gentle and polite, and someone steps on your foot and they say, oh excuse me, pardon me, so there's this real sense of sharing space and making it comfortable to be in.
NS: How long does it take? What's the rhythm of the parade?
HR: Most parades today are limited to four hours. We're talking about the Sunday afternoon anniversary parades. So they usually start at 12 noon and go to 4 p.m. Now in the past, the early part of the 20th century, these parades went all day. People talk about getting up early in the morning and starting their parade, and then stopping for a leisurely picnic in the park, and then going again. So there was a really different pace in those days, but they're limited by the police to four hours now. So depending on the club, the pace can be very fast. There can be this sense that, we really need to get to such-and-such a part of town, and there's a real sense that the club is investing its reputation in being able to finish their route. So if you're delayed, if your band members are late [laughs], or if something happens and the money doesn't come together and the parade gets delayed, there's a real question of public reputation involved. And also your reputation's involved in maintaining the pace, so you can move pretty quickly down the street and then have a leisurely stop for five, ten, fifteen minutes, and then you've gotta start again, or else you won't make your route. Now if you don't make the end of your route in four hours, the police will disband the crowd. And I think there's a real sense of what a shame that is, if you're not able to bring people all the way home.
NS: My impression was that the police do not like second lines.
HR: Yeah. I don't fully know why that is. I mean, sometimes I think that the antagonism between the police and the second liners is almost part of the tradition. Sometimes they seem to almost egg each other on. Sometimes the police use their sirens to push people up the street. Why are they doing that? I don't know, but it makes people mad, it really does. Sometimes the dancers in a second line will start gyrating against the police car in a provocative way that seems designed to make the police mad. So then the police are being challenged to keep their cool and not worry about it.
NS: In Cuba – the congas of Cuba are not second lines, but they're cousins – and there is, and possibly since the 16th century has been, a theater of ritualized confrontation with authority almost as part of the activity of a conga. The play of the crowd against the police is part of whatever the game is. I had the impression here [in New Orleans] that the police are just nervous about seeing thousands of people romping down the street together, drinking and taking over the street.
HR: Yeah, that's a really interesting thing. I think if you're a police officer and you're asked to work at the second lines, you have this experience that you're not in control. Here's this huge crowd of people dancing and to the extent that there is order, which I believe there usually is, it's the band and the club members who are really providing that order, and the second liners, who are self-policing, as I was saying, being really polite to each other, or breaking up fights or making sure they don't get into disagreements. Conflict mediation is a well-practiced art in the black communities, and certainly in New Orleans . People know what the costs are to conflict, and they're usually very, very good at preventing that. But the police are clearly not in charge. And that's bound to be hugely frustrating. But when you think about that nervousness about possibly the crowd getting out of control, it's really interesting to think about that having a history too. When the history was really rigidly segregated – legally segregated – surely having black folk march down St. Charles Avenue would never have been allowed. And there are a few clubs today who march at least one or two blocks – I think the Prince of Wales Social Club marches down St. Charles . I was told that in the 60s some clubs were marching down Canal Street, and that they were banned from doing that by some merchants who were afraid that their store windows would get broken. So I think there is this fear of disorder and violence on the part of officials and to some extent business owners. A lot of businesses close their doors when the second line goes by, even though second liners are very eager to buy water and buy drinks, especially on a hot day.
NS: As the second lines go around, part of the rhythm – on the ones I went on, anyway – there were usually six stops. And each one was a little neighborhood bar. I assume that the second lines are an important part of the bars' business.
HR: Absolutely. Not only on the day of the second line, when huge crowds of people will stop by and buy drinks, but also the clubs themselves become patrons of particular bars. Some clubs have their regular meetings in a bar, or they will have social events there, and they're bringing their friends and neighbors to those bars. And very literally, when a club publishes a route sheet, if they name a particular business on their route sheet, they're putting them on the map, they're putting them in public consciousness. So if I was starting a bar, let's say right here in the 7th Ward, I would want to have an affiliation with a social club, so that the name of my business would become known.
NS: Do the clubs have other activities than second lines? Or is producing the annual second line the sole focus of their activities?
HR: Most of the clubs function year-round as social organizations, so they're having fund-raisers four, five, six times a year. A lot of clubs have dances as fund-raisers, so they're inviting friends, family, neighbors, and other clubs.
NS: Is it fair to say that they're part of the glue that holds the town together?
HR: Most definitely.
NS: Could you talk to me about that?
HR: Although they're no longer providing health insurance for their members, they're still providing a benevolent function in a more subtle way. [If] you lose your job and you want to find another job, who are you gonna ask about where there are job openings? You're gonna ask your club members. And I think that, again in a more subtle way, they continue to organize major events in people's lives, from birthday parties to funerals. Some clubs meet once a week. So they really provide a kind of solidarity and a kind of emotional and social connection for people.
NS: How many people would be at a meeting of a social club that meets once a week?
HR: Typically, I would say, between 10 and 20 people. Most clubs don't go above 20. If they do, then they start having different divisions. That seems to be the size that people can really relate to each other on a face-to-face basis, where everyone can talk at a meeting, where you can make decisions by consensus.
NS: So 20 people handle the work of producing an event with several thousand people and run it all themselves?
HR: That's right. In most cases, nearly everybody at those parades knows one of the club members. So they're really deploying their social network, and that's why most parades, you have a beautiful peaceful event. Because people are there to support their friend who's in the club.
NS: What is the membership in terms of African Americans versus non-African Americans? Are white people part of the social club network at this point?
HR: Absolutely, although not in numbers proportional to our presence in the city. These clubs definitely come out of a black cultural tradition in New Orleans , and I think that, although there are white participants, many of us feel that we're participants in a black cultural event, or a black institution, I guess. A number of clubs have had white members. There's even one club, the Bayou Steppers, that was founded as a multiracial social organization. The founding presidents were black and white.
NS: And of course, we were both on that parade, and you remember how that parade ended. Could you describe that, since you were there?
HR: The parade you're talking about ended right near the interstate overpass on North Claiborne at a little club called the Mother-in-Law Lounge, which is run by Antoinette K-Doe, the widow of Ernie K-Doe. The parade ends at the Mother-in-Law Lounge, it was a beautiful four-hour parade, just a perfect day, and there's a wonderful feeling among second liners at the end of a parade. People are feeling great about having been dancing and walking for four hours, and you have friends that you want to talk to, now that the band is taking a rest. And the police began to use their sirens to disperse the crowd. These were not ordinary sirens, because they were parked under the interstate in order to be able to use the amplification of the cement structure of the interstate. And so their sirens, which were already loud, were being amplified by the interstate. And there were several cars that were doing this, and they were directing it at this club. We couldn't have a conversation outside on the sidewalk, or inside the club. If you lived in a home in that area, you couldn't hear yourself think, even within your home. It was extraordinarily abusive. What happened that day is really part of a larger pattern of the police intentionally disbanding the crowd after a parade. I feel positive that this is not an individual initiative on the part of a particular police officer. This is an NOPD policy coming from the top down.
NS: Which reached a climax a little later with the debacle of the Mardi Gras Indian gathering.
HR: Right. March 19, 2005, just last St. Joseph's Day, the police dispersed a crowd of Mardi Gras Indians and their supporters and followers. In the paper it was reported as being about 200 people. One of the police officers was quoted as having said: take them fucking feathers off or go to jail. That really conveys the attitude toward this tradition, that this is something that's not worthy of respect. I hate to think this, but this seems to be the attitude informing these policies, that any gathering of working-class people or of African Americans in New Orleans in public space is inherently a problem and they want to disperse that. Now it may be that gatherings of people do create higher risk that something unfortunate could happen in a crowd. But a lot of things are risk factors that we don't choose to ban, and this is such an important cultural tradition in New Orleans, that I really think that this is not a reasonable approach to policing.
NS: What is the right way? Certainly, if you talk to people in town, you will hear some of them express nervousness about second lines. A lot of people won't go anywhere near one because they're afraid there'll be a shooting. Things do sometimes happen. What do you think is a reasonable way of looking at this?
HR: Again, I think the second line really does reflect what's going on in the city, and to some extent New Orleans reflects what's happening in America more generally. We like to talk about how unique we are, but in many ways we share the same problems that all American cities share. We have too much poverty, we don't have good jobs, and we have a lot of people who end up in the informal economy in ways that are really self-destructive and hurtful to others. And there's a lot of violence associated with that. So we really do have these problems, and some people choose the second line as the place to settle scores, and to do so violently. So that does happen. And I can completely understand that that concern causes some people to decide, I'm not gonna do this anymore, I'm not gonna go. Unfortunately, we can't really solve the problem of policing second lines in an appropriate way without solving our social problems. But on the other hand, no one's really looked carefully at the pattern of violence at second lines. There have been shootings. I've been on second lines where there have been shootings. And it's a terrible thing. But there are shootings in poor neighborhoods in New Orleans every day -- before the storm, anyway. So being poor is a risk factor for violent crime. Just like being married is a risk factor for spousal abuse. There's a relationship there, but we're not gonna ban marriage. So second lines do occasionally provide a forum for people to settle scores, but I don't think it's reasonable to ban second lines, any more than you would ban marriage because marital violence is linked to marriage.
NS: There's also the tradition of the informal second line, not an annual planned parade, but something that springs up more spontaneously.
HR: I guess the Tremé neighborhood is really known for having spontaneous second lines, or second lines that are not in any way official, and sometimes I've been aware of second line parades happening during, for example, the period between the death of a relative or a friend and the funeral. For one well-known musician, there was a second line every night between the night he died and the funeral. And the Rebirth were playing there. That was James and Troy Andrews' brother, D-Boy [Donnell Andrews], who was quite young [he was 17] when he was found killed. And so, yeah, this incredible kind of wake of a second line moving through the streets, moving through the neighborhood he had lived in, with hundreds of people and no sign of a police presence. That's definitely an informal second line. And a lot of people say that the Tremé neighborhood, more than any other neighborhood in the city, are fierce defenders of this tradition. They really have not accepted the idea that you have to pay for a police permit in order to gather peaceably in the streets and perform this kind of sacred dance.
NS: It seems like the issue of who can assemble in the street is a fundamental one here.
HR: Absolutely. I think a lot of second liners – you know, they might not have law degrees, but they have a really profound understanding of public space, and the value of public space. I believe that public space is really important to a democracy, that we need to be able to gather in public and be together, whether that's discussing politics or dancing in the streets. And certainly in New Orleans it feels like a fundamental right to those who participate in this tradition.
NS: A right that's been exercised since the days of Jim Crow.
HR: Absolutely, and this is where I think funerals take on special significance. Because during slavery, black folk in many parts of the South – enslaved people – could not gather except for a funeral. That was one of the only occasions when the people in charge would allow them to gather. I think as Christians, they [the slaveowners] had to recognize that a funeral was an important event. Funerals, I believe, became especially important in the black community in part because there were so few occasions for people to gather and to enact or to talk about or to perform the values that they hold dear and to celebrate their dignity and the sacredness of life.
NS: I always felt from the first time I went on a second line that if you haven't been on one, there's something about jazz you don't know.
HR: A lot of people refer to the second line tradition as fundamental to the origins of jazz. Louis Armstrong talks about having played at second lines as a child, and certainly having admired jazz musicians. He wanted to be like them, and he saw them for the first time during jazz funerals, during anniversary parades. And you know, the social organizations in the black community that hired these bands week after week – not only for parades, but for dances and balls and other social events – really were crucial to that connection between the music and the community. And I guess – yeah, when you hear a brass band playing in the streets and you really begin to understand the kind of interaction between musicians and dancers, you can really see how fundamental that is to the kind of dialogue that's happening in jazz music. There's a wonderful quote [on p. 72 of] in Mick Burns's book – have you seen that? – Keeping the Beat on the Street: The Brass Band Renaissance, and it's an interview with Gregory “Blodie” Davis of the Dirty Dozen, who talks about how their music really grew out of the interaction between the band and the dancers, and the dancers challenging the musicians with their dance and the musicians having to come back and do one better. And the band practicing all week, thinking about what the dancers were gonna be throwing at them, and so there's that sense in which dancing is already very musical.
NS: I realize this is hard to do, but could you take a stab at describing how second line dancing works, how it moves, how it goes down the street, what the movements are?
HR: There's kind of a basic second line step, which is almost a strut that you do while you're moving quickly down the street with a brass band. But then there are people who are doing something entirely different, and they're the virtuoso performers, the virtuoso second liners, and they can be of all ages. When they start to really get into their dancing, there's often a circle that forms around them, and people start watching them and encouraging them. And then someone else will move into the circle and challenge them. It's often men dancing with men as well as men dancing with women or women dancing with women. So there's a real competitive challenge happening on the street, which then gets translated into the challenge between the dancers and the band members as well.
The feet are usually really close to the ground, but people are really light on their feet at the same time. There's also this incredibly athletic dancing, with people jumping up in the air and twisting, going down in splits, the kind of dancing that you would expect to see on stage somewhere, instead of . . .
NS: . . . on concrete.
HR: Yeah, and these people are wearing tennis shoes, because they're going to be walking for a very long time, so that has an effect on the kind of dancing that you see.
NS: It's an exhausting thing to go on a full second line parade. I always wonder how the musicians do it. Of course, they do take breaks, but even so, four hours of blasting away, making all the many feet of metal in a sousaphone vibrate by pushing air through it with your jaw muscles as you dance down the street in hot sun, dehydrated, and the tuba player's usually overweight to start with, which is why he wound up playing the tuba. It seems like a real physical ordeal.
HR: The brass bands who really have a commitment to the second lines, they're fit. And so are the club members and the regular second liners. Sometimes you'll see a band coming back to the street after having been away for a while, and you see them huffing and puffing and taking a break between songs, and at times the second liners start to become quite outspoken – "why don't they play something?" You don't get a lot of slack from the second liners if you're trying to rest.
NS: Do you have any idea how much distance is covered by a typical second line?
HR: I would say it's not unusual to cover six or seven miles, but some of them may cover even more.
NS: That's a long march.
HR: Yeah, absolutely. And when you think about dancers who are really into this – they go into this clowning mode – "clowning" is what they call it in New Orleans . They start doing things like climbing up telephone poles and dancing, or climbing onto rooftops and dancing. There's something about that. It's usually young men who do this. But think about all the miles they're climbing, as well as walking! And then they have to walk ahead of the group in order to be up there by the time the second liners pass by and see them, and then climb back down and run ahead again. The photograph that's above you is from the Circle Food Store, on St. Bernard Avenue and Claiborne, and you can see there's a dancer, dancing on the roof during a second line parade.
NS: I took a bunch of pictures of two dancers up on the overpass on Claiborne, that big overpass. It didn't look like much in the picture, actually, you couldn't really get the sense of these thousand of people watching these two guys dancing way up in the air on this concrete air. But the whole crowd was like . . .
HR: . . . stunned. One of the things about being in the second line is, you can't really see it when you're in it. You can see the people just around you, which might be 10 to 20 people, but if there's six thousand people at a parade, you're obviously not seeing most people. But if the route allows you to go over a bridge, then you're able to really look back and you can see the expanse of people. Some clubs try to design their routes to include a bridge or an overpass so that they can have that experience. There are two clubs that I know of that are doing that right now – the CTC, the Cross the Canal Steppers, they go over the Industrial Canal over into the Lower Ninth Ward, so that allows them to really have this incredible panoramic view. And they're going over this rickety old metal bridge. It's not really rickety, but it feels like it when you're on there, the whole bridge starts to move as people are dancing. And another group, the Nine Times, which is out of the Desire area, goes over the Almonaster Bridge , which is over a railroad track. When they talk about their route, they talk specifically about the importance of being on that bridge, and being able to see all the people you've brought out, and the people you've brought together, and they just take great pride in that accomplishment. And so at some point in their route, they're going to be able to look around and see all the people who have come together to support them.
NS: Let's talk now about what's happened since Katrina. Of course, Katrina happened just before Labor Day . . .
HR: Well, the Sunday before Labor Day is traditionally the second line of the Black Men of Labor, which is a social organization started in the mid-1990s. And as you can tell from their name, they were very self-conscious when they organized that they wanted to honor the dignity of black working men, and they also embrace a really traditional approach to the music, and to their clothes and their decorations. They make all their decorations themselves, and they often wear shirts and suspenders instead of expensive suits. The idea was to really honor the musicians and put more money in the music and less on their clothing. And since they're Black Men of Labor, they often wear clothes that recall a working-class heritage as well.
NS: And that of course didn't happen this year.
HR: Yeah, the Labor Day weekend was – well, just the weekend after Katrina, so of course the members of the organization had evacuated before the storm, or they were in the process of evacuating, or they were back in the city helping people, working in the city in boats and helping people get out.
NS: Would you care to speak in general terms about what has happened since the disaster?
HR: [long pause]. Well, we're talking right now in February of 2006, so it's been over five months since the storm, and the majority of the city's African American population is still living in exile, so I think for that reason alone the future of the second line tradition and the music that the second line organizations support is very much in question. The storm and the flood affected people from all walks of life, and it affected many areas of the city, and in many ways it cut across race and class in the way that it affected people, but now the floodwaters have receded. People's ability to return is very much determined by class. So many of the people who were the creators of the second line culture and the music really come out of working class families and neighborhoods, and most of the city's public housing developments remain closed. Even those that didn't flood. So it's hard not to feel that there's a major transformation happening in New Orleans and we don't know what it is yet, because it's changing all the time. But there really is a sense that this city will be dramatically different, and certainly right now it's a much whiter and a much wealthier city, and I don't think that that city can really support the second line tradition as it currently is.
NS: Now there have been some second lines since Katrina.
HR: We've had a few second line parades.
The first club to come out since the storm was the Prince of Wales. They had their anniversary parade, which would originally have been scheduled in October. They were delayed by a couple of months, but nonetheless, they came back, they came together, and they managed to put on a beautiful parade. Their route goes through uptown, and they were fortunate in that most of their route didn't flood, so they were able to go to some of the bars where they traditionally stop, and those bars were open. The Rock Bottom Lounge, which is where the club was really founded, on Tchoupitoulas Street, is on high ground, because it's basically on the natural levee. Many of the people in the Prince of Wales came out of families where the men were longshoremen, so they lived close to the river for that reason. So partly for that reason too, most of their route is still navigable, by foot anyway.
Most of the other clubs, their routes reflected where their members lived. Most of those clubs paraded through neighborhoods that were farther from the river, what people in New Orleans call Back of Town. And that means that they were downhill, you know, downslope in terms of the natural levee sloping down into what people call the Bowl. So some of the lowest areas of the city that were settled in the 20th century ended up with high concentrations of working-class folks and high concentrations of African Americans, so the majority of the social organizations that sponsored second line parades were in those Back of Town areas, and they were heavily flooded. It's not clear if that housing stock is gonna be repaired.
There was another parade that was organized since the flood. That was the All-Star Parade. And that involved numerous social organizations. I want to say, between 20 and 30 different clubs helped to organize it. They all wore basically a black T-shirt that just said, Renew New Orleans. And listed the sponsoring clubs on the back of the shirt. And this is certainly the first time that I know of in the history of second lining that clubs have paraded not so much as a club but as part of a larger whole, this All-Star second line parade. And in that way it was really a beautiful event. And because it was the first massive second line parade in the city, it also drew people from all walks of life who wanted to see a second line. People come to second lines looking for – now more than ever – looking for a sign that black culture is alive and well in New Orleans, and I think that a lot of people came, a lot of middle-class folks, white and black, came looking to see that New Orleans was coming back. Because the parade was well organized and planned in advance, people were able to get tickets to fly in from Atlanta and Houston and in some cases New York or Portland, and probably I would say at least half of the people who were in the clubs who paraded are not living in New Orleans. But they were here for that event. And sadly, after the parade, they had go back and leave the city. But at least during the parade they were announcing their intention to reclaim their city, to come back to New Orleans one way or another.
NS: It was a very large parade, as I understand, in terms of the turnout.
HR: It was huge. I counted – very approximately – eight thousand people, but I was doing that after the height of the crowd. And a lot of people leave. New people come in and join it, but a lot of people leave after a couple of hours, so the parade went until four o'clock, and I was probably counting around three o'clock.
NS: And the parade ended with a shooting.
HR: Yeah. Most of the paraders had already finished parading when the shooting started. I was not near the gunshots. I didn't even hear them. But I did feel the crowd kind of surging forward, and of course people in New Orleans do run when they hear gunshots and try to get out of the way. I think only a few intrepid reporters were trying to go toward the shots, but most people run in the other direction. So I felt the crowd surging forward and I was hoping it was a false alarm, but I found out later that there was a shooting. [It was] extremely saddening for the organizers of the event and the people who came back for it. And so far, the response of the police department has been – I think somewhat predictably – fairly severe. So they've announced that they're raising the fees for parade permits from approximately $1600 per club to $3605 dollars per club. And that's just for the permit.
NS: And that's what a lot of the clubs do all year long, is raise the money for those permits, right?
HR: For the permits, for the band, for their clothes.
NS: What's the budget of a typical second line? Any idea?
HR: You'll have to ask some club members. I have no idea. I think there's a huge range, because some people are quite proud of the fact that they'll spend ten dollars on their shoes. It's not about that for them. Whereas other clubs are quite proud of the fact that they've spent fifteen hundred dollars on their shoes. Showing that you're able to spend money is important for some of the clubs. So you'd have to say that the basic expenses for the club have to be ten thousand dollars, and for some clubs, considerably higher than that.
NS: Is there anything else that you'd like to say that I haven't asked you about? Do you have any other observations in general about this?
HR: I think I want to get back to the idea of the ghetto pass. I don't want to use that phrase, but I think there's definitely something to that. I've interviewed a lot of second liners who evidently didn't grow up with the tradition. Some of them aren't even from New Orleans , but they've come here and fell in love with this tradition. For many of them, the second line is the kind of event in New Orleans where they feel like they can be part of the whole city. It seems like, even though desegregation was forty years ago, in many aspects of our everyday lives in New Orleans we're still very separate from each other. And the second lines have created a place where people from different walks of life can share space. It's not for everyone -- there are lots of people who don't like second lining. But for many of us, it's provided an entree into the larger city. I first moved to New Orleans in the 80s to go to school, and I was told, don't go here, don't go there, don't ride the bus, ride the streetcar, don't go into the areas that are known as black neighborhoods, and it was through the second line tradition that I started to see that the city was – for one thing – much richer than I ever thought culturally, but also that I could be a citizen. That I could really live in the city. That I didn't have to be cloistered in only certain sections of the city, and that's really liberating.
We usually think of the ghetto as enclosing – obviously, in Jewish history, being a place where Jewish people had to be, or where black folk have had to live in American cities. But in a way, white New Orleanians have been very much sequestered by differences – perceived differences or actual differences – in wealth, race, class status.
NS: Ghettoization in New Orleans works very differently than any place else I've ever been, just because of the peculiar nature of the city's layout.
HR: People always talk about the checkerboard pattern that defined New Orleans historically, but when I moved to the city in the 80s that had already started to change. So what some people call Central City really became a black neighborhood, or you could call it a black ghetto. But that really was produced partly through legally segregated housing during the Jim Crow and then partly through white flight, starting in the '60s.
NS: And also in the 60s when the projects became all black. The St. Thomas [housing project] was originally for white people.
HR: Right. The projects were from the beginning racially segregated. But yeah, they went from being pretty much all white to being all black fairly quickly.
NS: Magnolia and the St. Thomas were both built in 1941. Magnolia was built as a black project, the St. Thomas was built as a white project. I talked to an older lady from the neighborhood, who told me that on St. Mary, by the St. Thomas, that's where the country-and-western bars were.
HR: Yeah, it's really interesting to think of the musical landscape having changed with the landscape of residence. And public housing had a huge impact on that. If you check out the Soul Rebels' piece "Free Yo’ Mind" there's a really amazing lyrical sequence about the projects in New Orleans , calling them out one by one as if they were cities.
NS: Do you have any observations about the relationship between the Mardi Gras Indian organizations and the second lines? I’m thinking of the Tambourine and Fan second line, which last year was a tremendous parade, and was also [the Mardi Gras Indian event] Downtown Super Sunday.
HR: The Tambourine and Fan event, which is usually the Sunday after St. Joseph's Day, so the Sunday after March 19, brings together social clubs and Mardi Gras Indians. The focus is definitely on the Mardi Gras Indians, but the clubs are there, so there's this kind of celebration of black street culture as a whole.
NS: Is Tambourine and Fan a social club?
HR: It's unusual, in that I think it's primarily educational, and [it's] modeled almost as a freedom-school concept. They put on this public event, but [the club] functions year round as a series of after-school programs, and a summer camp, and headed by Jerome Smith, who'd be a really interesting person for you to interview, who's a veteran of the civil rights movement. Something else about the Indians I wanted to say: we were talking about how strenuous the playing is for the brass band members, you know, playing and walking for four hours? But they do take breaks, there are these stops, where you go in and get some water or something else to drink. And what you see a lot of times is that the crowd is gathered outside the bar, because the overwhelming majority of the crowd can't go in the bar, wouldn't possibly be able to fit. But people often start to play the tambourine or other percussion that they have, and sing Mardi Gras Indian chants. So the Mardi Gras Indians take over when the band members take a break, during the second lines. When you start paying attention to who's walking directly behind the band, you see that the percussionists are also Mardi Gras Indians, so they're really amplifying the sound of the brass band, and contributing to it musically as well. They're often the ones who are calling out the lyrics. If the band members aren't singing, it's usually the percussionists right behind the band who are singing. So there's this real dynamic interaction between the brass band and the people walking right behind them. And those are often Mardi Gras Indians. Now they may not be men who sew elaborate suits for Mardi Gras day, but in terms of their social identity in the community, they identify as Indians. We usually think what makes you a real Indian is having callouses on your fingers showing that you're sewing, but it's also a social identity, and the music is one of the ways that people express that.
NS: Thank you, Helen.
HR: Thanks, Ned.
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