Keeping the Beat on the Street Read online

  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.2

  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.”3

  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.

  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.4

  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.”5 As one resident told researcher Helen Regis, “We used to sleep outside at night in the scree
ned porch. You can’t do that anymore! Hmm. We didn’t even have locks on our doors!”6 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.”7

  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.”8 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.”9

  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.”10 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.”11

  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!

  BAND CALL

  Fairview Baptist Church Brass Band

  Hurricane Brass Band

  Chosen Few Brass Band

  Danny Barker and the Fairview Baptist Church 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.”12 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.

  Danny Barker, like so many other musicians, had left New Orleans and m
oved north to earn a living. He fashioned a long and illustrious career playing with, among others, Cab Calloway, Lucky Millinder, and Jelly Roll Morton. On return to the Crescent City, he moved back to the area near the Fairview Church.

  In 1972, Fairview pastor Rev. Andrew Darby approached Danny to form a youth brass band affiliated with the church; the stated aim was to keep the youngsters off the streets. The idea of having youth bands attached to churches was not new in New Orleans: in 1921, saxophonist Emanuel Paul got his start, along with Sam Dutrey, in a band attached to the Broadway Baptist Church in Carrollton. But whereas the Broadway church band folded after only a few weeks, the Fairview band was to prove almost too successful for its own good. As Danny was quoted as saying in the 1980s,

  When you give a kid a musical instrument, he does something with his personality. He becomes a figure, and he’s not so apt to get into trouble. Later on, the kids got into grass and narcotics, but in those days, families would encourage you to play music. There was something about playing music that gave you something special. You are not a waster or a bum. Now you can be a musician and still be those things, but generally you were a little something special when you were a musician.13

  He started the Fairview Baptist Church Band with the Reverend Darby and soon attracted thirty or so teenagers who already played in their high school bands. The band enjoyed considerable local success and spawned the even more popular Hurricane Brass Band, carried on into the late seventies as the Younger Fairview Band and then, for political reasons, as the Charles Barbarin Sr. Memorial Band. In 1983, Danny Barker did it again with the Roots of Jazz Brass Band, a venture that grew out of the Tambourine and Fan youth center on Hunter’s Field. During that time, the number of musicians who passed through these bands was quite astonishing. There was Leroy Jones, Gregg Stafford, Anthony Lacen, Joe Torregano, Revert Andrews, Lucien and Charles Barbarin, Daryl Adams, Gregory Davis, Wynton and Branford Marsalis, Michael White, Eddie Bo Parish, Nicholas Payton, Efrem Towns, Gerry Anderson, William Smith, Kirk and Charles Joseph, Kevin Harris, James Andrews, and many more. Small wonder that Joe Torregano said of Danny Barker, “That group saved jazz for a generation in New Orleans,” and Walter Payton added, “Danny Barker was like the Christopher Columbus of brass band music. He planted some good seeds.” Veteran bandleader Harold Dejan was even more fulsome: “Now, Danny Barker needs some credit for the Fairview Band. He started that little band with the children. All the boys that played with him; the fellows of the Fairview Band should honor Danny Barker. They should give him a plaque or a trophy or something, because all those boys he really stuck with.”14