Lewis Watts

New Orleans Suite


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the spring of 1970 Ellington went to New Orleans, at the invitation of the promoter George Wein, to perform at the first New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. On April 25 he premiered New Orleans Suite as a five-movement composition. Through these movements—”Blues for New Orleans,” “Bourbon Street Jingling Jollies,” “Thanks for the Beautiful Land on the Delta,” “Second Line,” and “Aristocracy a la Jean Lafitte”—New Orleans Suite expressed three objectives that defined many of Ellington’s longer works: representing place, representing history, and representing the cultural expressions that constitute places and histories. Ellington recorded these movements a few days later in New York, but he did not stop there. For he was simultaneously working on four additional “portraits” of prominent musical influences and collaborators associated with New Orleans. He recorded these additions—”Portrait of Louis Armstrong,” “Portrait of Wellman Braud,” “Portrait of Sidney Bechet,” and “Portrait of Mahalia Jackson”—on May 13. These newer pieces augmented and refocused the representational pallet of New Orleans, its history, and its culture by showcasing black and Creole inhabitants (albeit famous ones) and by expanding the references to musical style and genre.

      From our perspective, New Orleans Suite is not Ellington’s best work. As others have pointed out, the suite was hastily composed and inadequately rehearsed. Ellington created the work at a moment of transition in his band, symbolized tragically by the passing of saxophonist Johnny Hodges two days before the second recording session. We agree with those who point out that the individual pieces do not cohere well as a whole, even as we take exception to similar characterizations of other lengthy compositions, like the Far East Suite.1 But, as listeners, we still like most of the individual pieces on New Orleans Suite. More important, we appreciate what Ellington tried to represent as an outsider. New Orleans, like the “Far East,” was not home but rather a site of occasional visits that nonetheless had deep symbolic significance for him personally and professionally. His suite thus provides a suggestive frame for documenting and expressing our own complex affinities for New Orleans.

      Our New Orleans Suite expresses our long-standing interest in the city from afar. This interest was refocused by the catastrophic events in New Orleans beginning in the late summer of 2005 and also by the many ways people survived, overcame, and represented those events in the years since. Like Ellington, we have been compelled to survey the history, geography, built environment, and cultural matrix of New Orleans. We give particular attention to its black residents while also seeking to understand the complex and rapidly changing demographic and cultural scene in the city. At its core, this book conveys our impressions of the ever-changing position, role, and meaning of Afro-diasporic cultural expressions in New Orleans and its environs.

      Ellington’s New Orleans Suite provides further guidance as it surveys multiple genres. As put together on the Atlantic LP, the piece starts with the blues, ends with gospel, and has as its climax a celebration of New Orleans’s second line culture.2 The series of rhythmic figures that Ellington uses on the various pieces—waltz, Latin, blues, swing, and so on—evoke a spatial and cultural multiplicity that we also hope to represent. Also inspiring is the composition’s evocation of the contradiction that often defined Ellington’s work. According to Mercer Ellington, his father’s playful deconstruction of a “Second Line” in the suite is an example of the way he was often invested in categories—in this case trying to capture the distinctiveness of a culture and music—that he was also willing to interrogate and even reject. “He was really a glorified anarchist in the way he was so often a part of the very things he sought to knock down.”3

      Building from Ellington’s perspective, our New Orleans Suite joins the post-Katrina conversation about New Orleans. It pays homage to the city (and region) and its residents; maps recent, often contradictory, social and cultural transformations; and seeks to counter inadequate (and often pejorative) accounts of people and place. We also show how anxieties about the future of the city and its residents after the storm are now foundational to New Orleans cultural life. Yet New Orleans Suite is not a book solely about Katrina. The storm and its aftermath are among the catalysts for this project, and they figure prominently in this narrative. Yet we also try to situate Katrina and its aftermath within a broader history. We consider how the storm was both a transformative force and a vehicle for enabling long-standing processes to come into view.4

      Although we use modes of expression here that differ from Ellington’s, music remains a critical point of entry for representing place, history, and culture. We explore the multifaceted role of music in this region in the past and present, as well as the ways it illuminates complicated social phenomena in this city as it undergoes transitions of both short and long duration. Among these phenomena are the affinities and anxieties embedded in the production and consumption of black culture, which have been all the more apparent locally (as well as nationally) in the wake of Katrina. And as we look to the music, the social spaces it inhabits, the events for which it provides the soundtrack, and the rituals of which it is a part, we examine the linked themes of diaspora, history and historical memory, transformation, regeneration, and not least of all, survival. For, in the end, this is a story about how bad things have happened to people in the long and short run, how people have persevered by drawing upon and transforming their cultural practices, and what crises can teach us about citizenship, politics, and other issues.

      Finally, as a recording that lacks some polish and coherence, Ellington’s New Orleans Suite cautions us to beware of misrepresentation—especially of being out of sync with one another—as we similarly narrate a story as outsiders that is in thousands of ways each day being narrated from within. While we readily admit to the limitations of our outsiders’ perspectives, we also believe our concerns around this question of misrepresentation have made this a better story.

      REHEARSAL ONE

      LEWIS WATTS

      There is a long and rich tradition of African American photographers—indigenous, transplanted, and itinerant—providing their own impressions of the city, its architecture, and its people. In fact, photography was first brought to New Orleans by Jules Lion, a free person of color and established painter and lithographer who had emigrated from France in 1837. Lion showed his daguerreotypes in 1840 in the city, in an exhibition at the Hall of the St. Charles Museum. This exhibit marked the beginning of prominent black-created art exhibitions in the city.5 The tradition has been carried forth by Arthur P. Bedou, Villard Paddio, Florestine Perrault Collins, Marion James Porter, Carrie Mae Weems, Marilyn Nance, Chandra McCormick, Keith Calhoun, Roland Charles, Eric Waters, Girard Mouton III, Deborah Willis, and a host of others who have lived, photographed, or shown their work in the city.6 Their images have made site specific the black photographic project of, in Robin D. G. Kelley’s words, “locating and reproducing the beauty and fragility of the race, the ironic humor of everyday life, the dream life of a people.”7 Such work accomplishes this in the face of the crushing weight of stereotypical images, even as it is sometimes itself complicit in economies of misrepresentation. And it does so in part because of the participation of the subjects who inhabit the frame: men, women, and children who gaze back at the lens and at us with looks that appeal, scold, calm, love, and satirize. In other words, there is a dialogue between photographers and their subjects—people who craft their humanity through action and reaction.

      I joined this site-specific tradition in 1994, when, like Ellington in 1970, I traveled to New Orleans on a commissioned assignment. Long before that, the city had been on my radar as a place I wanted to explore as part of my long-standing survey of the African American cultural landscape. I had been working on documenting cultural connections between the U.S. South and the urban West and North and had devoted much attention to people who inhabited built environments, the architectural spaces in which human-created culture was manifest, and the visual evidence of time and migration. I was immediately attracted aesthetically to the city and have since made numerous trips back to photograph. I think my approach has been well suited to documenting the multilayered history of New Orleans. While investigating New Orleans, I have been reminded of William Faulkner’s comment about the South: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”8 I view the city’s atmosphere as a palimpsest that reflects its complex history and narratives. The “hothouse” composed of the built environment