privileged in a symbolic if not financial sense—may be seen as a sufficient reflection of the broader community's struggles for recognition, normalcy, and even survival.
One should instead stay attuned to the way traces of the contradictions that have defined the city's post-Katrina recovery are embedded in New Orleans music and also to the ways that music has served as one vehicle for creating these contradictions. We can examine how post-storm jazz funerals and second line parades have helped heal people and convinced them to stay in or return to the city. We can also look at the ways musicians are participating in progressive political projects. But another part of the story is how the New Orleans tourist economy is fundamentally exploitative in the wages paid to musicians and others and how honoring musical traditions following Katrina has served as cover for draconian political acts and social policies. We also need to contend with the ways that the production and consumption of New Orleans music facilitates an economy of cross-racial and cross-class desire that cherishes traditional culture bearers but can also ignore or breed hostility toward the needs of those members of poor or colored communities who are not engaged in such cultural work and whose presence—their assumed drain on resources, their criminal behavior—is read as a threat to everybody else's good time.
Adding to the challenge of mapping these contradictions is the fact that the fluidity and complexity of music scenes and audiences alike make it analytically dangerous to indulge in neat assumptions about how local music represents particular identitarian or political sentiments. Musical scenes bleed into and inform one another, artists are in dialogue across genres, and audience tastes are hard to pin down. Tom Piazza describes “the surprises that lurk so often around the corners of someone's seemingly straightforward identity. It is a lesson that one has to learn continually in New Orleans.” Yet it is precisely this indeterminacy that allows the story of this city to be embedded in the music. As Billy Sothern has remarked, “Here, the cultural synthesis of past and present creates a vibrancy and originality in our music that defies simple categorization, makes life interesting, and locates the culture squarely in New Orleans.”17 And on that last point Treme is quite incisive, as its creators represent, on camera and via its soundtrack, the multiple genres and hybrid expressions, the vast array of performance sites and spaces, and the diverse audiences that make up the New Orleans music scene. It is to the show's credit that it showcases, playing themselves or in character, not only prominent jazz and brass band musicians, but also venerable R&B stars like Irma Thomas, ex-underground rappers like the aforementioned Katey Red and Big Freedia and up-and-comers like Ace B (playing Lil Calliope), genre-bending bands like Bonerama, and those, like pop rock vocalist Susan Cowsill, who work in genres seldom included in celebratory genealogies of New Orleans music.
There are clearly modes of writing about music that play into the aforementioned distortions, but some post-Katrina authors have showed us how music can be deployed to explode neat, problematic narratives and assist in the process of remembering complicated histories and understanding the present and future through them. Clyde Woods calls the confrontation between the forces of oppression and social justice that we are forced to confront again in the post-Katrina era “the dialectic of Bourbonism and the Blues.” And he shows how various musical expressions, from the colonial to the present, not only can be placed within this dialectic but also bear the traces of this history. The singing, dancing, and drumming at Congo Square, the blues, second lines, brass bands, jazz, Mardi Gras Indians, gospel, R&B acts, and hip-hop all emerged out of a complicated social and cultural matrix and provided a mechanism from the eighteenth century to the present by which black New Orleanians in particular could challenge in direct and subtle ways the conditions and acts that threatened to dehumanize them.18 And Ruth Salvaggio shows us how music can disrupt the process of the intentional and unintentional forgetting of the traumas of the past. Building on comments by clarinetist Sidney Bechet, she describes the “long song,” which is both carrier of and metaphor for an enduring cultural memory, rooted in the racial and sexual regimes of slavery, that cannot be fully repressed. “It's a song that keeps breaking through the seams of a tidy history built on selective erasures and national amnesia. We can keep tracing this song farther and farther back because it always precedes history. . . . [I]t is a song about a problem that won't go away, about a pain-wracked body that keeps reemerging throughout history, or in sweltering attics after a flood.”19
As one writes about New Orleans music in the present, one must confront the return of history in often unexpected ways in the post-Katrina moment. Watts's photographs address historical return, and I have found myself looking to them for evidence of the ruptures that expose multiple pasts brought to bear on our present and future. These images ask us to consider multiple layers of local history and the exposure of this history and its contradictions by Katrina. And there are the chaotic aspects of this history, too, evident in photos that show the helter-skelter ways that New Orleanians’ life histories were jumbled together inside houses and tossed into the street by the water and reconstruction workers in the weeks after. Sometimes clarity about the past with present-day import can emerge from such chaos. For example, while peering into the bedroom of a busted home in the Lower Ninth Ward in 2006, the elegant framed bed and nightstand, forced upward at a slant by rubble that had floated into the room and settled underneath, reminded me (albeit in a distorted form) of the working-class elegance I came to know as a boy in the homes of grandparents and great aunts and uncles. It was a memory that spoke against the denigration, romantic victimization, and intrusive surveys (yes, we were implicated) of the neighborhood's fate while demanding a different way of telling their story. But the massive debris fields in the Lower Ninth, exposing as they did the complexities of people's lives, also remind the historian (of music, of other things) that to convey the story of history's return is tremendously difficult. But we must try.
So music, for better and for worse, is my vehicle for trying to write about New Orleans as a place and an idea. It is also my analytical and theoretical frame. I try to tread carefully because of the complexities of the scene, the political and cultural noise surrounding the music, the dangers of giving it too much attention, and the scholarly tendency toward distortion. But I enthusiastically take this on because I know that dissonance can be productive and quite beautiful. I am simultaneously jaded and naïve, but that seems the correct perspective when writing about New Orleans, its residents, its culture, and the ways they might help us choose the best direction to go as we stand at the crossroads.
MARDI GRAS INDIAN AFTER PERFORMANCE, JAZZ FEST, 2006
JAM SESSION WITH GLEN DAVID ANDREWS AND OTHER NEW ORLEANS MUSICIANS, JAZZ FEST, 2006
SET OF HBO'S TREME, 2010
ACE B (LIL CALLIOPE) AND FRIENDS, NEW ORLEANS, 2011
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REFLECTIONS ON JAZZ FEST 2006
My first visit to New Orleans after the storm and the levee breaks coincided with the 2006 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. This massive celebration of music, food, and arts and crafts started in 1970 and, in recent memory, has brought hundreds of thousands of people to the city's fairgrounds over two spring weekends. At Jazz Fest and elsewhere in New Orleans that week, Lewis and I witnessed familiar, though locally inflected, patterns of consuming jazz (and other forms of African American–rooted music). We were in differently integrated and not-so-integrated audiences in different kinds of performance spaces, where we saw evidence of nonblack people's (and some black people's) deep respect and collective desire for certain aspects of blackness and their simultaneous anxieties about a threatening black (and particularly poor black) presence.
Acts of identification and disidentification via black music have long histories, which in the United States can be traced back to the antebellum