The Cultural Loss of New Orleans

[DudeAsInCool]

Thomas Bartlett at Salon.com compiled an overview on New Orlean's musical community and the loss suffered by the hurricane disaster:

Friday, Sep 2, 2005

Around the Web

As Katrina's horrifyingly tragic impact on New Orleans continues to unfold, the hurricane's destruction of the vibrant music scene in the "City of Jazz" is coming into ever-starker contrast. "This could really cripple it," said Jon Cleary, one of New Orleans best-known keyboardists, currently recording with Bonnie Raitt in Los Angeles. "A lot of the fans who have money to go see music will be leaving the city -- and without audiences, clubs can't pay musicians, and then nobody gets gigs." Native blues man Dr. John told Rolling Stone that the spirit of the city will continue intact, even beyond the flooding of the physical one: "My heart's always gonna be in New Orleans. It ain't just the place, it's the whole culture. The music will survive; the people will survive." Alt-country singer Shannon McNally said to the magazine, "I'm just assuming that anybody I haven't talked to is on the road or in the Superdome, but I don't know. I'm a little numb. The best parts of New Orleans are underwater. And all those people that couldn't get out -- they're New Orleans."

In an Op-Ed in the L.A. Times that reads like a eulogy, Howell Raines writes about the unique loss that faces the U.S. with destruction of New Orleans: "In the personal realm, there is no relief like the relief arising from the safety of loved ones. In the civic realm, there is no communal grief quite like the sorrow of watching as a beloved city is hammered by an unstoppable malice ... This was the place where Thomas Williams of St. Louis became 'Tennessee' and where that much-ridiculed postal clerk from Oxford, Miss., made himself into William Faulkner, novelist. This was the place where you could come to find or lose yourself. In the back room of the Maple Leaf Bar on upper Magazine Street, my classmate Everette Maddox, a poet so precocious he was published in the New Yorker before he left the University of Alabama, succeeded after two decades of steady effort in drinking himself to death." Musicologist Ned Sublette, writing in Nick Sylvester's blog at the Village Voice, says "The destruction of New Orleans, from a cultural point of view, is too awful to contemplate." Sublette, who spent time in New Orleans as a Rockefeller Fellow researching the city's connection to the history of American music, says, "If our history and culture as a nation mean anything, New Orleans is central to it. And if we can save New Orleans, if we haven't lost it already, it has to be put back and saved right."

Beyond the loss of the city's vaunted music venues, there is the staggering loss of archival material. "Everything from documents to recordings to things that are in private hands [are lost]," Sublette says. "Many of the more serious archives are on higher floors -- presumably many of them have survived the flood waters. But what condition are they in? How quickly will cultural workers be able to get in and rescue the patrimony which is very important in understanding where American music came from?" One loss is already known to public radio listeners in the New Orleans area: The legendary community radio station WWOZ has gone off the air, and there is concern for its incredible collection of jazz, zydeco and Cajun. The blog Sawyer Hall says WWOZ is just one of a number of public radio stations that have gone silent in the aftermath of the storm. WWOZ's Web site, however, is still posting updates, including a list of area musicians who've been located, including Doc Otis and the Neville Brothers.

Thankfully, many other artists who were thought to be missing have been located. The legendary Fats Domino was rescued,though his exact whereabouts are still unknown, and producer and musician Allen Toussaint was found to be sticking out the disaster at the Astor Hotel. Fellow New Orleans resident Ani Difranco's Web site says she "evacuated her home-away-from-home in New Orleans the day before Katrina hit. Despite the article in Rolling Stone she is not too distraught to speak, but understandably a bit distracted." There is still a lot of speculation, though, about the fate of Big Star singer Alex Chilton, the latest news seeming to be that no one has spoken to him in the last few days. Powerblog has a list of others displaced by Katrina who've yet to be mentioned elsewhere, like Frankie Ford, Clarence "Frogman" Henry and Pete Fountain. Meanwhile, over at the Rebirth Brass Band's site, there's an ongoing head count of local musicians.

Of course, artists outside of New Orleans are busy trying to organize benefits to support Katrinas victims. In addition to tonight's live concert on NBC featuring Harry Connick Jr., Wynton Marsalis and Tim McGraw, New Orleans native Master P,whose home was destroyed by flooding, is working with BET to organize a telethon. Usher, Green Day and Alicia Keys are among the artists who will be part of a larger relief concert that will span four cities and air on MTV, VH1 and CMT. The Detroit Free Presswrites that New Orleans' own Dr. John and the Regal Brass Band will still perform in Detroit this weekend, despite missing uniforms and drums.

There are also a number of paeans to New Orleans popping up at MP3 blogs around the Web. One Louder links to songs by R.E.M. and Bob Dylan, Big Rock Candy Mountain presents songs from Professor Longhair and Tom Waits about the Big Easy, and News Hounds points to a classic song about an earlier flood, Memphis Minnie's 1929 version of "When the Levee Breaks." (via Brooklyn Vegan)

[14:15 EDT, Sept. 2, 2005]

http://www.salon.com/ent/audiofile/index.html

[Kooperman]

There are so many layers of sorrow concerning this hurricane devastation that it has become mind-numbing to even think about what lies in the future for the area, especially in New Orleans.

[DudeAsInCool]

Anne Rice on "What It Means To Lose New Orleans"

http://nytimes.com/2005/09/04/opinion/04rice.html

[method77]

I read a really good article on BBC about this. Shame

[DudeAsInCool]

Village Voice on the Cultural Loss

Beyond New Orleans, Katrina Destroys Music History Too

This loss is a human one first and foremost. But as word spreads that (among others) New Orleans R&B legend Fats Domino remains unaccounted for after the storm, media is more mindful this is cultural devastation too--destruction of primary information about the beginnings of American music, and of a currently thriving community of jazz and rap and everything betwixt.

To better understand the enormity of the situation from that perspective, we spoke with musicologist Ned Sublette. Last year Sublette, musician, label co-founder, and much-applauded author of Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo, spent time in New Orleans as a Rockefeller Humanities Fellow at Tulane University, doing hands-on research for a book about the city and its fundamental relationship to American musical history. Below are some of Sublette's reactions to the loss:

Intro

"The destruction of New Orleans, from a cultural point of view, is too awful to contemplate. And at the same time, everyone had contemplated it. Anyone who came to have dinner last year at my house in New Orleans heard me describe pretty much what happened, in advance. Not because I'm clairvoyant, but because it was well-known what would happen.

"The hurricane was not preventable, but the flooding that occurred was preventable. That levee break was preventable, the destruction of the marshland was preventable. And even if the flooding were not preventable, there was another failure, which was the complete failure of civil defense.

"It's very simple: the plan was--and everybody knew it--the plan was that the poor would be left behind to drown.

"As of Friday, I was 102,000 words into a book [i'm writing] about [New Orleans]. So I have been for months deeply synthesizing this. So for this to hit me now is just like--it's a mindfuck. Simple example: three weeks ago, I had somebody drive me past Fats Domino's house so I could take a picture of it. And that house is under water now. It's like the whole time I was there, I was on input, remembering things that might not be there next year, and I was conscious of that as I was doing it. I would say to people, it's as if we're midway between life and death here."

On the loss of primary historical information:

"Everything from documents to recordings to things that are in private hands [are lost]. Many of the more serious archives are on higher floors--presumably many of them have survived the flood waters. But what condition are they in? How quickly will cultural workers be able to get in and rescue the patrimony which is very important in understanding where American music came from?

"For instance, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall , the historian, went around from parish courthouse to parish courthouse looking at documents that many times were not considered to be of great importance. She managed to compile a databaseof the identities and nationalities of 100,000 enslaved Louisianans, from primary documents sitting in Louisiana. There are many secrets that those documents might yield up with some hard-working historians to examine them.

Congo Square and its Importance to American Music:

"Congo Square, there were gatherings of black people dancing and playing ancestral drums and singing in ancestral languages probably since the introduction of slaves by the French in 1719. There were gatherings in the French period, there were gatherings in the Spanish period--the gatherings continued up to before the Civil War. In the first half of the century in the United States, the English-speaking slave owners prohibited the playing of drums by blacks, because they could be used to signal rebellion.

But in Congo Square--it was the one place in the United States that black people were allowed to play drums with their hands. It's the one place where an African-derived drumming tradition directly continued. It may be that the Mardi Gras Indians, the groups of black men that dress in fantastical African-style costumes imitative of the motifs of the Plains Indians, it may be that their tambourine tradition derives from this. If so, this is the only direct descendant of the African hand-drumming tradition in African American music. In the years before recordings, this very fertile period between the end of slavery and the beginnings of recordings when we don't quite know what happened and what it sounded like, when there was music going up from Brazil to North America, the step that turned the music into jazz was taken in New Orleans. We know that."

New Orleans's Connection to Rock:

"If you're only looking at it from the rock and roll perspective, New Orleans is a fundamental city in the story. In 1949, Dave Bartholomew, who I hope evacuated in time, led the house band that backed up Fats Domino on his first hit, "The Fat Man", and became the first professional R&B studio band, the forerunner of the kind of thing that they would have in Motown. Singers like Little Richard, Lloyd Price, Ray Charles would come to New Orleans to play with this house band. Many of the first R&B and rock and roll classics were recorded in New Orleans.

Rebuilding New Orleans:

"You cannot abandon New Orleans. You can say that New Orleans has no viability as a business or industrial city. But if our history and culture as a nation mean anything, New Orleans is central to it. And if we can save New Orleans--if we haven't lost it already--it has to be put back and saved right. If we can somehow turn around the hateful direction this country is going in, and really save and fortify New Orleans, and really show the world that we as a nation can save our own cities, that our concept of homeland security means something, then we can be proud of ourselves. Right now we can't.

"We're not only watching history disappear. History is watching us disappear."

http://www.villagevoice.com/blogs/riffraff...a_destroy_1.php

[DudeAsInCool]

City full of art & soul

Plays a big role in U.S. culture

If you made your mark in the Crescent City, you got a marching band sendoff, as at '61 rites for Creole clarinetist Alphonse Picou.

From Louis Armstrong's cornet to Fats Domino's piano, little New Orleans has always held down a big corner of American popular culture.

Its voice has encompassed the demons of William Faulkner and the vampires of Anne Rice, the strut of Jelly Roll Morton and the quiet elegance of Wynton Marsalis.

The House of the Rising Sun was in New Orleans.

Marlon Brando's Stanley Kowalski screamed "Stella!" on the streets of the French Quarter. Edgar Degas painted in a big house on a quiet side street. All this adds up to a very different voice from that of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago or cousin Memphis to the north.

But it shares with those cities this critical trait: Take it away and the whole rhythm and style of America would be changed and diminished.

New Orleans is not an artifact of history, freeze-dried in some red-light-district parlor where Morton pounded out jazz piano.

No, New Orleans remains as vital a center of culture today as it was a century ago.

The New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, a 10-day event held in late April, is the country's single most exhilarating and important annual showcase for the rainbow of American popular music: blues, zydeco, jazz, gospel, country, rootsy rock 'n' roll.

Over the years it has become almost a 2-4/7 event, too expansive and eclectic to be defined even by artists as exceptional as the Neville Brothers. It grows each year and is undiluted by that growth. The talent is there.

Nor does New Orleans music stop when the festival ends. Music bars like the famous Tipitina's aren't kept alive by tourists, but by locals, who drop in nightly, order a drink, plant it on the wooden bar and head for the dance floor for a stately waltz or a lively two-step.

Fiddlers like Doug Kershaw or Michael Doucet of Beausoleil are famous not because they made slick videos, but because they picked up music that their ancestors had been playing in New Orleans since the early French and Creoles stepped off the boats in the 18th century.

The Spanish also ran New Orleans for about 40 years, during the Revolutionary War era, and that mix of cultures is a big reason New Orleans was different from the rest of the American frontier, where folks were more often from the British Isles.

New Orleans had the guitars and pianos, of course, but it also broke out brass bands and started developing a sound that eventually led to the city's single most critical contribution to American culture: jazz.

The exuberant New Orleans jazz sound developed in the early years of the 20th century through artists like Morton, Armstrong, King Oliver and Sidney Bechet, and soon it began making its way up the Mississippi toward Chicago.

There New Orleans jazz, like its cousin the delta blues, took on a harder sound. It also shifted in New Orleans itself as artists like the Marsalis family and Harry Connick Jr. picked up the mantle. But it never abandoned the foundation, and tunes like "When the Saints Go Marching In," "In the Sweet Bye and Bye" and "Just a Closer Walk With Thee" remain as recognizable as any popular songs in America.

The accessibility of New Orleans music has also made it highly adaptable over the years, so New Orleans was well represented at the dawn of rhythm and blues and rock 'n' roll.

Beyond Domino, an American institution, the city delivered hits from Frankie Ford's "Sea Cruise" to Ernie K-Doe's immortal "Mother In Law." It inspired songs from "The Battle of New Orleans" to "The City of New Orleans."

Nor is New Orleans culture just musical. Faulkner wrote his first novel there. Eudora Welty, Walker Percy and Robert Penn Warren wrote there.

These days, Rice's vampire books are so popular there's an Anne Rice store. James Lee Burke's first-rate Dave Robicheaux cop novels are all set in New Orleans, the same New Orleans portrayed in the 1987 Randy Quaid/Ellen Barkin movie "The Big Easy."

Perhaps the definitive confirmation of New Orleans' cultural vitality is the fact that New Orleans musicians years ago took the saddest of human rituals, a funeral, and turned it into a celebration of life, an exuberant march forward for those who live on.

If that seems bittersweet at a moment when the city is under the most devastating siege in its history and some of its living legends have been numbered among the missing, it may also be precisely the spirit with which New Orleans will rise again.

http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/343322p-292989c.html

[Potato]

http://www.coolfer.com/blog/archives/2005/...cane_impac.html

Not sure if this has been posted here yet or not... you guys seem to post everything.

[Kooperman]

It remains to be seen how New Orleans will be reconstructed...some fear that it will end up being rebuilt as a glitzy amusement park/corporate theme city format, losing the aura of antiquity it once had. The French Quarter didn't sustain much damage and should survive essentially as it was. But it's debateable if the dixieland jazz tradition will survive...many of the older club musicians may be floating in the water right now, and many of the genuine New Orleans street musicians and characters may be there with them.

[slum_goddess]

their entire approach to anything serious is nothing short of a joke. i read something over the weekend that said that despite bush's protests, they're gonna call on giuliani (and if they do, that's it for any new new orleans to even slightly resemble the old).

[DudeAsInCool]

New Orleans Musicians Ask if Their Scene Will Survive

New Orleans is a jazz town, but also a funk town, a brass-band town, a hip-hop town and a jam-band town. It has international jazz musicians and hip-hop superstars, but also a true, subsistence-level street culture. Much of its music is tied to geography and neighborhoods, and crowds.

All that was incontrovertibly true until a week ago Monday. Now the future for brass bands and Mardi Gras Indians, to cite two examples, looks particularly bleak if their neighborhoods are destroyed by flooding, and bleaker still with the prospect of no new tourists coming to town soon to infuse their traditions with new money.

http://nytimes.com/2005/09/08/arts/music/08jazz.html?8hpib

[DudeAsInCool]

NPR on the Spirit of New Orleans - Listen here:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4839549

[DudeAsInCool]

History is being flooded, too

Slave records, jazz archives, Jefferson Davis' mansion: Hurricane Katrina has put them all in peril.

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/09/...ives/index.html

[DudeAsInCool]

Artists on the run (slide show attached)

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/13/arts/des...arti.html?8hpib

[Kooperman]

But it's debateable if the dixieland jazz tradition will survive...many of the older club musicians may be floating in the water right now, and many of the genuine New Orleans street musicians and characters may be there with them.

''The middle-income musicians . . . they were part of the evacuation," said Bethany Bultman, one of the clinic's founders. ''But the evacuation of the poor people has been like this huge gill net that has sucked up all the street musicians, the brass band musicians, the Mardi Gras Indians, the gospel singers. And they're scattered in shelters all across the country."

For the complete article, click here:

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/living/ar...home/?page=full