Salon.com > Larry Blumenfeld

Band on the run in New Orleans

Mon, 29 Oct 2007 10:53:00 +0000

On the evening of Oct. 1, some two dozen of New Orleans' top brass-band players and roughly a hundred followers began a series of nightly processions for Kerwin James, a tuba player with the New Birth Brass Band who had passed away on Sept. 26. They were "bringing him down," as it's called, until his Saturday burial. But the bittersweet tradition that Monday night ended more bitterly than anything else -- with snare drummer Derrick Tabb and his brother, trombonist Glen David Andrews, led away in handcuffs after some 20 police cars had arrived near the corner of North Robertson and St. Philip streets in New Orleans' historic Tremé neighborhood. In the end, it looked more like the scene of a murder than misdemeanors.

"The police told us, 'If we hear one more note, we'll arrest the whole band,'" said Tabb a few days later, at a fundraiser to help defray the costs of James' burial. "Well, we did stop playing," said Andrews. "We were singing, lifting our voices to God. You gonna tell me that's wrong too?" Drummer Ellis Joseph of the Free Agents Brass band, who was also in the procession, said, "They came in a swarm, like we had AK-47s. But we only had instruments."

“It ain’t easy in the Big Easy”

Tue, 28 Aug 2007 19:15:00 +0000

Ronald Lewis, a retired streetcar-track repairman with a homemade culture museum in the backyard of his restored Lower Ninth Ward house, doesn't think much about anniversaries. "But if it helps people understand my life and the lives of other people here in New Orleans," he said on Sunday, "if it makes them think about why we're here and we won't leave, let 'em have an anniversary."

There are fewer media folk in New Orleans gearing up for Wednesday's second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina than were here for last year's commemoration. Maybe that's a good thing -- the first time around most locals seemed genuinely annoyed by the drop-in presence of so many cameras and commentators, many of whom knew little of the city and craved simply a good setup shot and a ticket out of town. ("Get me some blight," they might as well have said at last year's media center, and very nearly did, "and a black man with a trumpet.") I remember one Ninth Ward family who stood by and watched as an anchorwoman held her microphone in front of their devastated home: "The producer said he doesn't want us in the picture," the father told me, holding his baby in his arms. This year, those disaster images now seemingly played out, maybe the coverage will get further beneath the surface, down to nuances of the issues that linger: housing, education, crime, federal and state aid, and culture.

Barack Obama in New Orleans

Fri, 06 Jul 2007 16:15:00 +0000

By 10:20 Thursday night, when Barack Obama took to the Essence Music Festival main stage, some 20,000 assembled at the Superdome had already witnessed well-choreographed song-and-dance (Ciara), heard hard-hitting rap (Ludacris), and received fiery faith-filled invocations (the "McDonald's Inspiration Celebration" with gospel singers Smokie Norfil and Vanessa Bell Armstrong). And they were soon to get a double dose of old-school pleas and promises from the Isley Brothers and the O'Jays.

So the crowd needed none of the above: Instead, calm and friendly straight talk fit the bill. That's what the senator from Illinois brought; dressed in a black suit and an open-collared white shirt, Obama was introduced in semi-frenzied fashion by author Michael Eric Dyson as the "next president of the United States ... rooted in his blackness but not restricted by his race." That last bit, with its implications about Obama's much-discussed "electability," prompted especially loud applause.

Not your father’s Ramadan

Wed, 26 Oct 2005 11:00:00 +0000

On Sunday evening at New York's Carnegie Hall, Youssou N'Dour was caught between an elderly Senegalese griot and an unhappy soundman. Seems the xalam, a five-stringed Senegalese folk lute, wasn't easy to mike. The opening concert of his four-night series just hours away, N'Dour nonetheless radiated calm.

N'Dour -- the most popular singer in Africa and the archetypal world-music star -- is used to reconciling antiquity with modernity. Besides, he's negotiated trickier divides.

In March 2003, on the eve of the most ambitious American tour of his career, N'Dour simply canceled. "As a matter of conscience," he wrote in a press statement, "I question the United States government's apparent intention to commence war in Iraq. I believe that coming to America at this time would be perceived in many parts of the world -- rightly or wrongly -- as support for this policy."

America’s new jazz museum! (No poor black people allowed)

Wed, 12 Oct 2005 15:10:00 +0000

It took a Category 5 hurricane to do it, but Katrina managed to blow jazz back onto the American radar screen. Those TV montages of physical devastation and desperate souls were accompanied by strains of New Orleans jazz, those benefit concerts filled with saxes and trumpets; the reporters arriving to cover it all flew into Louis Armstrong Airport. Save for the media-friendly efforts of trumpeter Wynton Marsalis and PBS poster boy Ken Burns, jazz rarely gets such play.

Much as we Americans like to pay lip service to jazz as "our national music," with the Crescent City its seminal home, we tend to favor jazz's quality as aural decoration over its contents as oral history; we stock up on classic reissues of past masters but rarely consider the music's meaning in our current lives.

The many high-profile jazz-based Katrina benefits -- including a five-hour Lincoln Center affair hosted by Marsalis, with Burns among its stars -- brought more than just jazz's sound into our lives. Placed in stark relief was whether jazz -- which Burns' 19-hour PBS series famously cast as a signal of American values and virtues on the order of the Constitution -- still carries currency when it comes to the issues Katrina raised: cultural identity, race, poverty, and basic decency.