Keeping the Beat on the Street Read Free Page A

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 screened 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