[Dixielandjazz] Mardi Gras Focusing battention on New Orleans & New Orleans Music

[Steve barbone]

Congratulations to all of the list mate band members who were lucky enough
(read smart enough) to work a gig or two this Mardi Gras season. If your
audience reaction was anything like ours, this was indeed the most EXCITING
series of Mardi Gras Gigs we have ever played.

Why? Because of articles like the one below from the NY TIMES. This is their
third serious article about Mardi Gras and Mardi Gras Music and New Orleans
in 2 days. The publicity has been enormous, all over the USA.

The hype is not about N.O. Jazz and Heritage vs. French Quarter Festival.
Both are vital to the music. It is about the tremendous public interest in
New Orleans and the music from ALL AGE GROUPS. And about those band leaders
among us that are carrying the torch forward.

Carpe Diem!

Cheers,
Steve Barbone 

New Orleans Exults in Its Old Self, if Only for a Moment

NY TIMES By JON PARELES - March 1, 2006  / Forum "Popular" music

NEW ORLEANS, Feb. 28 ‹ There was feathered gridlock on Mardi Gras morning at
the corner of Second and Dryades Streets in the Third Ward here. The Golden
Comanches tribe of Mardi Gras Indians, with a chief whose golden-feathered
headdress reached at least 10 feet high, was moving along Dryades. At the
corner of Second were the Wild Magnolias, another tribe, which had arrived
in a U-Haul full of its own feathered suits. The Stooges, a New Orleans
brass band, were on the corner too, playing Mardi Gras Indian songs like
"Hey Pocky Way" and "Let's Go Get 'Em."
 
The Indians ‹ African-Americans who feel tied to Native Americans by
bloodlines and a history of resistance ‹ have paraded informally at Mardi
Gras for more than a century. The big organized parades were elsewhere, but
as soon as the music started, the corner was packed with neighbors and
costumed spectators, shaking parasols and dancing to the funkified parade
beat. Queen Rita of the Wild Magnolias, wearing an explosion of turquoise
plumes, held up her arms to unveil messages on giant fans: "I Love N.O." and
"We are back." 

This was the New Orleans of self-made neighborhood celebrations and
homegrown jubilation: the culture most endangered by the depopulation of the
city. This year, the parade is not just a habit and a ritual, but an act of
will. Most members of the Stooges have relocated to Atlanta, and it's
uncertain whether the band will resettle in New Orleans. Many of the city's
Mardi Gras Indians, who sew their prodigious suits themselves, had to start
over and create in four months what usually takes a year. They practiced
their songs not at the corner bar, but in Baton Rouge, La., or Austin, Tex.
A car parked on a nearby street, with a sign saying it belonged to the Flag
Boy of the Golden Comanches, had Texas license plates.

Inevitably, there were fewer Indians on the streets this year than at Mardi
Gras celebrations over the past decade. But those who were in the city were
clinging fiercely to their music. At an Indian practice session on Sunday
night, at a shotgun-shack bar in the Third Ward, members of at least six
tribes ‹ among them the Black Eagles and the Young Navajos ‹ drummed and
sang the traditional songs, competitively and together, with an ecstatic,
trancelike intensity.

It seems everyone wants a piece of Mardi Gras good will. Britney Spears, who
is from Kentwood, La., was in town making charitable gestures toward a group
of local schoolgirls, in front of the cameras for "Good Morning America."
Movie stars waved from parade floats. But while Mardi Gras was a party for
tourists ‹ one the city welcomed ‹ it was an act of self-renewal for native
New Orleanians. Ivory Hall, of the Golden Comanches, had decorated his suit
with a dove holding an olive branch, like the biblical one that returned to
Noah after the flood. "Either you're going to cry about this thing all your
life," he said, "or you're going to go back and get into it."

On Monday night, known here as Lundi Gras, the New Orleans pianist Dr. John
played classic Mardi Gras songs at the House of Blues. But his band is
called the Lower 911 ‹ some members lost everything in their homes in the
Lower Ninth Ward ‹ and he very pointedly interspersed the party tunes with
other, more intransigent songs. At the end of his set, he bounced into the
hymn "I Shall Not Be Moved." After Mardi Gras, many of the revelers will
scatter back to their new homes, and others will go back to living in
trailers or coping with how to rebuild. Without housing for the city's
longtime residents, the culture of New Orleans will be up against the
erosion of mileage and time. In an interview a few days before his concert,
Dr. John said, "If they rip out the community where it all comes from, it's
ripping out where everything is connected."

Mardi Gras costumes can simply be a day's worth of glitter and flash, or a
whimsical disguise. But in New Orleans, they are often a deeper statement: a
hidden identity revealed, a message decorated with feathers and beads. In an
interview, Monk Boudreaux of the Golden Eagles tribe said that in eras past,
African-Americans who believed they had Native American blood would dress as
Indians on Mardi Gras day to reveal their "true self"; even in segregated
times, living in New Orleans was better than being placed on a reservation.
The Indian costume was not a disguise, but a disclosure.

This year, many of the people doing what their parents and grandparents had
done, in the places they had always lived, were for the moment not New
Orleanians. But they had come home from wherever the flooding had washed
them up to show their true selves.

For this year's Mardi Gras, New Orleans dressed as its old self, too: a city
with music pouring out everywhere, a city that dances rather than give in to
troubles, a city where traditions are joyously upheld. It is, for the
moment, an illusion. But today's Mardi Gras costume is one that New Orleans
would be happy to wear all year round.