[Dixielandjazz] New Orleans High School Bands

[Steve Barbone]

In New Orleans, Bands Struggle to Regain Footing

NY TIMES - By JON PARELES - February 20, 2007

NEW ORLEANS, Feb. 19 ‹ When the first Mardi Gras after Hurricane Katrina
took place last year, New Orleanians felt something vital was missing: the
strutting steps and triumphal horns of the city¹s proud, immensely
competitive high school bands marching between the floats.

The reason was obvious: Nearly all the city¹s schools were still shut, and
most of the students had been evacuated. This year fewer than a third of the
public schools in New Orleans have reopened ‹ many more are due this fall ‹
and much of the city¹s old population remains dispersed. But some of the top
high school bands are back: a rare, heartening sign not only for the parades
but also for the long-term vitality of New Orleans culture.

³Music is New Orleans, and marching bands are part of every phase of our
city¹s life,² said Allen T. Woods, the principal of Frederick A. Douglass
High School in the hard-hit Ninth Ward. His school¹s band was booked for two
parades in this Mardi Gras season, which began on Feb. 10. The members are
wearing matching warm-up suits, since band uniforms are still on order. But
they are marching. 

New Orleans has always been a city of parades, from Mardi Gras to jazz
funerals. When jazz began, it commandeered the trumpets and drums of
military bands, and the swagger and swing of brass bands have been among the
city¹s great musical resources ever since.

The high school bands have long been the incubator for New Orleans music,
and the training ground for generations of musicians. In this city¹s
wonderfully insular culture, band instruments like trombone and sousaphone
are as ubiquitous as guitars and synthesizers elsewhere. Before Katrina, it
wasn¹t unusual to hear young brass players jamming on New Orleans street
corners, and those musicians¹ first instruments might well have come from
high school stockpiles. Through the years, school music programs have put
horns, clarinets and drums into the hands of students who would never have
played them otherwise, and high school connections have jumpstarted
important New Orleans groups like the Rebirth Brass Band.

Brass bands repay the help. Dinerral Shavers, the snare drummer of the Hot 8
Brass Band, was hired to organize a marching band at L. E. Rabouin High
School, and his fellow Hot 8 members dropped in to help teach. But Mr.
Shavers was shot dead on Dec. 28 in one of a series of murders that led to a
large anticrime rally at City Hall on Jan. 11. The Rabouin High School Band
marched in this year¹s Mardi Gras parades.

³These bands play as important a role in the perpetuation of New Orleans
music culture as anything,² said Bill Taylor, executive director of the
Tipitina¹s Foundation, which has turned the long-running uptown club
Tipitina¹s into a nonprofit organization that provides instruments and other
help for musicians. Since New Orleans schools had long since cut back on
music education, the foundation started donating instruments to them in
2002. In 2006 it gave away $500,000 worth of instruments. ³This is about
keeping New Orleans New Orleans,² Mr. Taylor said.

And in New Orleans, unlike many other places, band membership means prestige
in high school. ³High school bands in New Orleans are as important as
football is in Texas,² said Virgil Tiller, the band director at St.
Augustine High School, whose Purple Knights, better known as the Marching
100, have been the city¹s most celebrated high school band.

St. Augustine is a historically black school, and its band integrated
20th-century Mardi Gras parades when they were invited in 1967 to appear
with the Rex Organization, the top Mardi Gras krewe. Spectators spat on them
and threw bricks and urine-filled condoms, Edward Hampton, the band¹s
founding director, recalled, but the students refused to brawl and just kept
marching. Since then, bands from black high schools have become mainstays of
Mardi Gras. Band programs are paid about $1,500 a parade.

Montreal A. Givens, 17, a trombonist who is a drum major in the Marching
100, lives alone in a trailer provided by the Federal Emergency Management
Agency so that he can finish out his senior year with the band. He¹s also an
honors student. His father, Lumar LeBlanc, leads a brass band, the Soul
Rebels, that was formed by New Orleans high school bandmates; Mr. LeBlanc
still resides in Houston.

³I came back here for the music,² Mr. Givens said in the school¹s band room
as the Marching 100 assembled for a parade. ³I took a hard hit, but I
couldn¹t stop my life because of the hurricane.²

Before Katrina, the Marching 100 actually had 150 to 170 members, including
baton twirlers and a color guard. Now it has about 90. The flood completely
destroyed what had been a newly built band room and all the school¹s
instruments and uniforms. At last year¹s Mardi Gras parade, some members of
St. Augustine¹s Marching 100 were part of a small but determined high school
band, the MAX band, that merged the returned students from three private
schools: St. Augustine, St. Mary¹s Academy and Xavier University Preparatory
School. 

³We proved we could do something positive in such devastated surroundings,²
said Lester Wilson of Xavier, who led the MAX band.

This year, as St. Augustine marched in the Krewe d¹Etat parade, there were
shouts and applause as its purple and gold uniforms came into view. ³This
band is the city¹s band,² Mr. Tiller said. ³When we march, it¹s amazing to
me how many people say: ŒThank you for coming back. If St. Aug¹s is back,
the city is coming back.¹ ²

Educators say that band membership, like other extracurricular activities,
helps to keep students from dropping out. Practicing an instrument,
particularly for the chance at the status of leading a section in a beloved
high school band, builds discipline. So do regular rehearsals ‹ the St.
Augustine band works five days a week, summers included ‹ and memorizing the
formations and instrument-swinging choreography used by New Orleans high
school bands.

But music has not been a priority for New Orleans schools struggling to
reconstruct buildings and entire academic programs. Paul Batiste, the band
director of the Sophie B. Wright Charter School, had his band practicing on
what he could afford from his own pocket ‹ just the mouthpieces for trumpets
and clarinets ‹ until instruments were provided by private groups, including
the Tipitina¹s Foundation and Mr. Holland¹s Opus. FEMA has also supplied
instruments to some schools, among them Douglass High School in the Ninth
Ward. 

Like other New Orleans institutions resurrected since Katrina, the high
school bands are stretched thin. They have fewer members than they did
before the storm, often operating at half their old numbers. They also use
more fledgling instrumentalists to fill the ranks.

³It doesn¹t sound like it did before,² said Shantell Franklin, 17, who plays
baritone horn in the band from Sarah T. Reed High School in New Orleans
East. Instruments to replace those ruined by rust and mold arrived at her
school only a month ago. ³We¹ve got a lot of beginners in the band,² Ms.
Franklin said. ³They¹re dedicated and they want to play, but they just can¹t
get the notes out right.²

Yet even at less than full strength, New Orleans high school bands are still
producing musicians to continue the city¹s musical legacy. Joshua Phipps,
who plays F horn in the marching band of McDonogh 35 High School and
saxophone in the concert band, was a beginner two years ago. His English
teacher suggested he join the band at Walter L. Cohen High School, now
closed; after Katrina, he enrolled in McDonogh 35, whose band has a citywide
reputation. 

Mr. Phipps had been thinking about basketball, but the band changed his
life, he said. ³At my first band practice, I just fell in love with the
sound,² he said. ³I practiced a whole lot, every day, and it was like a
hidden talent I didn¹t know I had.²

Like many a high school band member before him, he also has gigs of his own.
Mr. Phipps is in a brass band called the Truth, which plays for parties and
processions, along with a weekly downtown club date. He plans to study music
in college.

³I want to be a band teacher,² he said. Then he picked up his horn and
joined McDonogh 35¹s ranks for a Mardi Gras parade.