Keeping the Beat on the Street (2 page)

In the beginning, there probably wasn't much difference between a brass band in New Orleans and, for example, northern England—“Shepherd of the Hills” played competently from a written score is going to sound very similar wherever it happens. What makes New Orleans brass band music unique is the way the musicians started with the same ingredients as everyone else and transformed them into a vital art form. Today, a brass band in New Orleans will kick off on a bass lick, play a continuous collective improvisation (no written music) and keep it going for as long as forty minutes. In northern England, the brass bands are still reading “Shepherd of the Hills.”

How did this happen? In the absence of recordings, we have to rely on contemporary accounts for the start of the process. According to Richard Knowles's excellent book
Fallen Heroes
(Jazzology Press) the emerging “hot” style of playing first appeared in a brass band context with the Tuxedo Brass Band, under the leadership of trumpet player Oscar Celestin, sometime after 1910.

Celestin also led a hugely popular dance band, and many of the city's top players (including some early jazz legends) worked for both organizations. We can only speculate on the extent to which improvisation and swing appeared on the street in those early days, although King Oliver's 1923 recording of the march “High Society” offers a broad hint.

In 1929, a film newsreel soundtrack captured the first recorded sound of a New Orleans brass band playing at a Mardi Gras parade. Although there's only a brief snatch of muffled music, a unique Crescent City characteristic can clearly be heard—the seductive, propulsive rhythmic device called the “second line beat.”

In simple terms, this describes a syncopated pattern on the bass drum that may be phonetically rendered as “Dah, Dah, Dah, Didit, Da!” Transfer this rhythmic feel to the horns, and the whole band swings—it makes you want to dance. Of course, there were many bands who could play both written music for formal events and, for want of a better word, improvised “swing” for the dancing crowd. Bands that couldn't, or didn't, read music, were dismissively called “tonk” bands by more formally inclined musicians. But it was the ability and inclination to depart from the written score that made New Orleans brass bands so special. In a sense, you could describe the whole creative evolution of brass band music as the triumph of “tonk.”

Over the next couple of decades, there were other stylistic changes—the rich, chorale-like scoring of formal funeral dirges gave way to the simpler harmonies of Baptist hymns, apparently in response to popular preference. The function of supplying the inner harmonies (the parts between the melody and the bass line) was originally allocated to the tenor and baritone horns, familiarly known as “peck horns.” By the 1940s, there was a collective tendency to replace them with saxophones. They probably made a band sound less resonant when playing written music, but they were more musically suited to the rhythmic and improvisational demands of playing “hot.” By the middle of the 1960s, many of the musicians in the brass bands worked nights in rhythm and blues bands, and this also changed the repertoire and the way it was played.

In the face of so much change, what do we mean by “tradition” in New Orleans brass band music? Ask any working musician in New Orleans today, and the probable response will be a tune list—something like “Oh yeah, man, we stick to the tradition. We play like ‘Just a Closer Walk,' ‘Bye Bye Blackbird,' ‘Second Line,' that kind of thing.” Trumpet player William Smith added the proviso “But don't expect the phrasing to be the same. It's not that clear cut.”
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Indeed it isn't. Irrespective of the material, the manner of performance reflects the contemporary nature of the musicians, and it always has. This is a living art form, not an exercise in preservation.

A member of Dejan's Olympia Brass Band (for many years, the number one brass band in the city) told me a story about working uptown for a neighborhood function. Milton Batiste, the trumpet player, had opened the evening by calling a play list of old songs—“Over in Gloryland,” “Panama,” and “Just a Little While to Stay Here.” Nobody danced until the disco started up, and then the man paid the band off and sent them home without playing their second set. “We should have played our rhythm and blues things for those people,” said my friend. “That traditional stuff, that's white folks' music.”

This is a bit of an oversimplification. “White folks and old folks” would be nearer the mark. People don't always know what they like, but they definitely like what they know. The older generation are obviously more comfortable with the music they grew up with, and white conventioneers, when they have any expectations at all, want to hear something that approximates Dixieland music. So white folks and old folks both prefer listening to those old tunes, but their way of participating in the music is quite different.

I was privileged to play at a funeral at St. Michael's church on Gentilly Boulevard in the mid 1990s. The band was Tuba Fats's Chosen Few, consisting of Anthony “Tuba Fats” Lacen (tuba), Mervyn Campbell (trumpet), Mick Burns (trombone), Frederick Shepherd and Ernest Watson (saxophones), Benny Jones (snare drum), and Lionel Batiste Sr. (bass drum). At the request of the family, the repertoire was drawn from the old Baptist hymnbook, the band wore uniforms and parade caps, played with great reverence and restraint, and marched (and slow marched) in formal ranks. Everyone knew why we were there, we all had our roles to play, and the whole event had a sense of purpose and completeness, the music and the grief feeding off each other in the morning sunshine. A few days later, a lady stopped me on the sidewalk on Decatur Street. “Excuse me, sir,” she said. “I just wanted to say thank you for playing so beautifully at my uncle's funeral on Monday.”

A few years later, I was lucky enough to pick up a job at the convention center with Andrew Hall's Society Brass Band. The band consisted of Barry Martyn (bass drum), Emile Martyn (snare drum), Wendell Eugene (trombone), Mick Burns (tuba), Chris Clifton (trumpet), and Joe Torregano (saxophone). Again, the band wore uniforms, and the repertoire was drawn from the old-time bag—“Fidgety Feet,” “Lord, Lord, Lord,” and so forth. It was the audience that was different.

At 5:00
P.M
., the doors to one of the lecture theaters opened, and hundreds of delegates poured out, wearing Mardi Gras beads in November. One minute they'd been listening to next year's marketing strategy or, even worse, an “inspirational address,” and within seconds, they were getting “Just a Little While to Stay Here” from a distance of less than twenty feet. Initial expressions of shock gave way to embarrassed grins (obviously, this was meant to be fun!) and off we all went for a “parade.” What we actually did was march round the narrow aisles of the exhibition hall (the sousaphone bell demolishing various overhanging signs), trailed by a very long crowd—three people abreast is the most those aisles can take. Then it was out of the building and over the street to a seemingly endless rendition of “When the Saints” while our audience clambered on to buses—the embarrassed grins had by now acquired a discernibly frozen quality. As far as the band was concerned, that was the end of the job, and the buses whisked the delegates away, to be force-fed their next “New Orleans” experience.

Both the funeral and the convention center jobs are part of a working brass band musician's routine, and both jobs paid about the same. In both cases, the bands played similar music. The crucial difference seems to me to be between the dignified ritual on Gentilly Boulevard, in which the mourners were participants, and the manufactured quality of the convention center parade, where the crowd were mystified onlookers.

My point (at last!) is that the synergy between the band and the crowd is a more significant part of the brass band tradition than the style of music being played.

Currently, there are probably more brass bands active in New Orleans than ever before. Exactly how many is uncertain, but twenty-five bands seems a reasonable estimate, and there are probably around a hundred and fifty musicians involved. Some bands' personnel is more or less constant, but for others it's a question of availability and budget, and the musicians change from job to job. New bands are being formed all the time, and the scene is constantly changing.

This book is not intended to be a fully comprehensive survey, and the way things are, I don't think that would be possible. There are no interviews here with the Hot 8, the Soul Rebels, or the Lil' Rascals, and there are many others that I didn't get around to. What I have tried to do is to trace major developments in the music over the last thirty years, and interview some of the key players. The information contained in the interviews records the musical evolution of the brass bands and the social and commercial pressures that caused these changes.

This isn't a music invented by record companies or marketing departments; it's one that grows on the streets, supported by the neighborhoods. The primary demand for brass bands is the second line parades and funerals held by the hugely expanded social and pleasure club network. Louis Armstrong's recollections of the early twenties in New Orleans are an indication of how far back the tradition goes:

The Second Line is a bunch of Guys who follows the parade. They're not the members of the Lodge or the Club. Anybody can be a Second Liner, whether they are Raggedy or dressed up. They seemed to have more fun than anybody. (They will start a free-for-all fight any minute—with broom handles, baseball bats, pistols, knives, razors, brickbats, etc.) The Onward Brass Band, Broke up a Baseball game, over in Algiers, La., when they passed by the game playing—“When the Saints Go Marching In.” The Game Stopped immediately and followed the parade.
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These clubs parade one Sunday per year (usually on the club's anniversary) and always hire a brass band for the parade, sometimes as many as three. In the early seventies, the club parade season ran from September to November; nowadays, there are parades most Sundays from September until May. There are well over sixty social and pleasure clubs currently active, and they create a steady grass roots demand for brass band musicians.

Where does this pool of talent come from? Up until relatively recently, straight brass bands—playing Sousa marches and marching in formation—were a feature of most public schools in the city. Prior to 1970, what few New Orleans brass bands there were consisted mainly of veteran musicians, who didn't work that often. The tendency among younger players was to regard these bands as relics of the past and, in the social climate following the civil rights movement, as having “Uncle Tom” connotations. There were
some
younger musicians working with the uptown nonunion bands like the E. Gibson Band, Doc Paulin, and Big Nat Dowe—Eddie King, Anthony Lacen, Gregg Stafford, and Albert Miller spring to mind—but there were not more than a handful of young musicians then. At that time, there were relatively few clubs, and not many bands either. The whole neighborhood parade scene was more or less moribund, and most people saw it as increasingly old fashioned and irrelevant.

Doc Paulin's band was operational under his leadership until just a few years ago, and he always encouraged younger talent by taking them into his band, providing on-the-job training. Individual musicians like Clarence Ford and Nat Dowe held impromptu lessons for aspiring youngsters on their front porches. Milton Batiste created and coached three different versions of the Junior Olympia band during the eighties, based largely on the Tambourine and Fan Club (a neighborhood youth sports and social club). And in a less direct way, musicians were role models for neighborhood youngsters. “When I was a kid, I remember musicians always had the nicest shoes,” recalls trumpet player William Smith. “They were sort of a bridge between the haves and have nots.”
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The beginning of the movement toward contemporary younger brass bands was undoubtedly Danny Barker's Fairview Baptist Church Brass Band, started in 1971. It was this band that first made brass band music “cool” for a generation of young people and made it commercially viable to have a band consisting mostly of teenagers. Although both the Fairview band and the various Tambourine and Fan youth bands were formed primarily for social reasons—keeping the youngsters off the streets—their combined musical influence on the brass band renaissance has been incalculable.

The first response of any New Orleans crowd to a brass band is to move—that is what the music is for. Dance fashions, and the music that makes them possible, change all the time, and this as much as anything had led to the perception of the old-style bands as out of date. By the mid-seventies, Dejan's Olympia Brass Band was reaching the crowds with rhythm and blues themes like “No It Ain't My Fault,” “Mardi Gras in New Orleans” and “I Got a Woman.” The Majestic Brass Band was doing “Majestic Stomp” (actually “Shake, Rattle, and Roll”) and “Hey Pocky Way.” The fledgling Hurricane Band had “Leroy Special” and several blues-based originals.

None of these bands had that much work on the sparse second line circuit, but they generated a collective style that came to brilliant fruition with the Dirty Dozen Brass Band. Despite the various members' modestly claiming that they didn't really do anything new, the Dirty Dozen changed the whole thing. Their first album (which the members of Rebirth Brass Band call their “bible”) was titled
My Feet Can't Fail Me Now,
originally a catchphrase used by the great black dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. The phrase had become a chant from the second line at Sunday parades, the band had made a song out of it, and it had become the anthem of the street. The distinctive thing about the title track is that, apart from a humorous run through the harmonies of “I Got Rhythm” a couple of times, the song has no chord changes—it's a series of staccato riffs over a fixed bass figure and against a busy pushing rhythm from the snare. It was the precursor of what is now called “funk,” “street,” “urban,” or “simple” music by the musicians, who draw a distinction between “street” and “jazz” playing—the former has a much freer approach to harmony and relies extensively on “open” chords and blues scales from the horns. The faster urgency of modern dance rhythm is achieved by filling in the beat on both bass and snare drum and adding extra percussion in the form of cowbell and tambourine.