Keeping the Beat on the Street (3 page)

Many of the clubs prefer “street” for dancing to, claiming that it has more soul and feeling—play them something with chord changes, and they stop dancing. Crucial to setting the groove is the bass horn “hook” on which street playing is based.

Veteran tuba player Walter Payton, for many years the foundation of the Young Tuxedo Brass Band, recognized the skill of the younger players: “I think the young brass bass players are great,” he told me. “I admire what they're doing, and I couldn't play with the Soul Rebels or the Rebirth without extensive rehearsals. I mean, they have arrangements, and those bass players, they're playing a part—they got a line that they're playing. I'd need a written line, that's the only way I could do it.” But the older generation often felt less than comfortable with the new sounds. As Tremé businessman Norman Smith observed,

The dirges were very distinctive—maybe that was a characteristic of the musicians who played them. There was not this jubilant attitude that we see now. Today we see many of the hymns played up tempo, and so you have masses of people who come around to dance to the hymns. We know that these are uninformed people who don't understand the real significance of what this is.

The music today is distinctly different—it's a lot faster and brighter and sharper; it's a lot more rhythmic in terms of the street dancing today. Those old guys played a different type of music—it was deeply spiritual. It's changed a lot. But then, we're all living a little faster than we used to. Everything must change, and it sort of meets the needs of the time.
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There are bands who describe themselves as “strictly traditional,” whose approach to both harmony and repertoire is more conservative, notably the Algiers Brass Band and the Mahogany Brass Band. However, neither of these bands, by their own admission, do much work for the social and pleasure clubs, and the Algiers band in particular seems to be gravitating toward the French Quarter, the convention center, and work overseas. The most successful of the contemporary musicians are able to play in both “traditional” and “funk” styles.

The rise of rap music and hip-hop; their infiltration into the New Orleans brass band scene; their prevailing ethos of materialism, instant gratification, and guns as fashion accessories; and the echo of these values in the social standards of the New Orleans neighborhoods often give rise to a regret for the loss of the past. Restaurateur Leah Chase explained, “We were religious, plain people, we were happy people, we were clean as whistles, we were starched and ironed; if we had moved on, but kept those things, we would be top of the heap of the black community.”
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As one resident told researcher Helen Regis, “We used to sleep outside at night in the screened porch. You can't do that anymore! Hmm. We didn't even have locks on our doors!”
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Regis then observes, “Such behavior would be lunacy today. But the bodily sensation of a gentle cool breeze momentarily brought back the memory of past pleasures and with it a bitter sense of what the city's regime of terror has cost us.”
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The rise in popularity of the new brass bands since 1980 has been paralleled, and perhaps helped, by a corresponding growth in local media exposure and an opening up of opportunities. Apart from the Sunday parades and funerals, the first level of opportunity was jobs in clubs and bars around the city. This gave rise to comment and features on the relatively new WWOZ radio station and regular publications like
OffBeat
. Prior to the eighties, New Orleans music attracted virtually no media coverage, but since the advent of media outlets such as these, bands can attain local celebrity status fairly easily. After all, music journalists have to write about something.

During the mid-seventies, Dejan's Olympia Brass Band had blazed a trail for others to follow, touring Europe, making local jukebox hits, doing prestigious out-of-town jobs in the U.S., and appearing in TV commercials and major feature movies. All of this had been unheard of before, but it opened things up for the bands that came later.

Today, all these opportunities are available to brass bands. Recording deals worth $250,000, nationwide TV documentaries—these are life-changing events. If you're in the right place at the right time, New Orleans brass band music can be very lucrative, if only for the lucky few. But for everybody in the brass bands, it starts (and rests) with the social and pleasure clubs and the second line.

Whether the revitalization of the brass bands gave rise to the increase in social and pleasure clubs or the other way round, I don't know, and I don't think it matters. In the 2002 parade season, there were forty-four parades scheduled, often using three bands each—that's a lot of work, and that's without the funerals and outside jobs that the clubs generate.

Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club with Tremé Brass Band, 1990.
Photo by Bill Dickens

Membership confers status and a sense of order. As Norman Smith explained, “People who participated in the clubs and the second lines were revered as individuals who were trying to maintain and preserve our culture. We were very poor, and there were too many mouths to feed for us to afford to participate in the clubs, but my family were very supportive of the participants. We had more second lines in the Tremé than anywhere else—we became a very traditional brass band-oriented community.”
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Helen Regis notes that the “clubs provide alternative role models for children coming up in the central city.” She quotes Buck Jumpers founder Frank Charles as saying, “All they [children] see is dealers and pimps” in the inner city neighborhoods, but they learn that in the social and pleasure clubs “you can be somebody.”
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What is often not appreciated is the considerable financial outlay involved for the social and pleasure club members. Brass bands cost around $1,500 for a four-hour parade (the duration of the city permit), a police escort costs $600, and individual club members sometimes spend as much as $1,000 on shoes alone. “At the same time that the city employs the iconic second line in its self-marketing,” notes Regis, “it heavily taxes the social and pleasure clubs for their anniversary parades.

Jolly Bunch parade, 1973, second line and band
Photo by Bill Dickens

They are required to buy permits, insurance, and police protection, which, with the price of the brass band, cost several thousands of dollars, a significant amount to clubs whose members hold down two or three jobs to meet their expenses.”
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Nevertheless, many members “spend from five to six hundred dollars” dressing up for their parades, says Norman Dixon. “It's according to how you want to look. The more money you put into it, the better you're going to look, and this is what it's all about. Once a year, you spend the money for yourself. You avoid your family, just to have that one day. The family's behind you all the way.”
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But the thousands of people making up the sixty or more clubs obviously feel that it's money well spent, just to feel the joyous energy of Sunday afternoons on the streets. As Walter Payton put it, “When you entertain the people, it bounces back, and you get that vibe, that electricity.”

How do brass bands achieve success beyond the local recognition of the second line? Basically, there are three obvious ways to earn a living: club appearances, touring, and recording. Each of these working situations releases the band from a combination of restraints. They no longer have to work outdoors, they don't have to play acoustically, and they don't have to be mobile. There are huge differences between presenting a forty-minute stage set and playing for four hours to an alfresco crowd.

If most of your jobs are on a stage, then, like the Dirty Dozen's are, it's logical to use a regular drum set. Once you've done that, then why not have a guitar or keyboards? There's nothing new in this: the old Onward Brass Band did stage concerts with a banjo, and Dejan's Olympia regularly played club dates with a lineup that included piano and conventional drum set. So the sound itself changes, the presentation has to be tighter, and the music will have more emphasis on vocals, solos, and entertainment content.

The recently formed Forgotten Souls Brass Band was aimed specifically at recordings and concerts. They get their massive percussion sound by using both snare and bass drum
and
a conventional drum set. And at least a couple of other brass bands have been making local club dates with a deejay and turntables!

In the early 1990s, the Young Olympia Brass Band was formed under the aegis of Milton Batiste, led by trumpet player Mervyn Campbell. The band worked under two different names: it was the Young Olympia by day for what the band called “traditional” events, and by night they were the Soul Rebels, supplying “funky” music for nightclubs and parties. The Rebels came up with their own musical thing. Their first CD,
Let Your Mind Be Free,
features a combination of influences—rap, funk, reggae, and jazz—and many original compositions, lots of vocals, tight arrangements, and blistering New Orleans energy. They've had a lot of success with club audiences—they were resident at Donna's Bar and Grill for a long time, and the last time I checked, they were holding down weekly engagements at El Matador, Le Bon Temps Roulé, and Cafe Brazil. But the Rebels band was never intended to work on the street. How can you rap without a microphone to thousands of people? So the title of their latest CD,
No More Parades,
seems a bit redundant, particularly considering that the cover photograph features possibly the least street-friendly of instruments, the vibraphone.

Bands like this have found their own niche success, and they play serious music. I think it's fair to regard them as from the brass band movement, rather than of it—although you'll often find the individual members of these stage bands on the street on Sunday afternoons, working for Benny Jones in the Tremé Brass Band!

Danny Barker
Photo by Marcel joly

“The Fairview Baptist Church is very crude and very small,” observed one contributor to the Louisiana Writers Project's
Gumbo Ya-Ya
. “There is a stove to one side; the long wooden benches are painted a dull grey. On the pulpit were more wooden benches, a piano and a preacher.”
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When this description was written, the church stood in an area called Pailet Lane; there were no sewerage mains or street lighting, cows grazed among the uncut weeds, and work had only just started on the St. Bernard housing project. But by the time Danny Barker returned to New Orleans in 1965, the area, immediately east of City Park had been considerably redeveloped, and the Fairview Baptist Church, by then a handsome and substantial building, stood at the end of a neat row of suburban houses on St. Denis Street. Pailet Lane seems to have disappeared from the New Orleans street directory.