[Dixielandjazz] The Mardi Gras Journal

[Steve Barbone]

NY TIMES - Mardi Gras Journal - by Jon Pareles

DAY 5 | 02.20 10:47 P.M.  Two Glimpses

I had two glimpses of the new, post-Katrina New Orleans on Monday: one tidy,
one not. 

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The Upper Ninth Ward of New Orleans still shows flood damage from Hurricane
Katrina, even with houses under reconstruction. But at the intersection of
Alvar Street and N. Roman Street there are new, brightly colored
homes----lavender, saffron, powder blue, lime--that are part of Musicians'
Village, a project of the nonprofit Habitat for Humanity.

I met the New Orleans pianist Harry Connick Jr., who (along with Branford
Marsalis) came up with the idea of providing housing as a way to bring
musicians back to the city, and the executive director of New Orleans Area
Habitat for Humanity, Jim Pate, The 8.1-acre site of a vacant lot, where a
junior high school was demolished more than a decade ago, will hold 70 new
homes priced at $75,000 plus the sweat equity of helping to build them. Mr.
Pate said 70 to 80 percent of them will be sold to musicians.

Cinderblocks are stacked up to construct the Ellis Marsalis Music Center,
which will hold classrooms, computers, meeting rooms and a club-sized
performance space. 

It's a pragmatic approach to one of New Orleans' deepest problems: housing.
Musicians' Village is the largest new residential development project in New
Orleans, public or private. "It's the only show in town," Mr. Connick said.
(Habitat for Humanity also has plans to build houses on tracts of land it
has acquired in other neighborhoods.) The first 10 homeowners moved in
during August 2006; Freddy Omar, who leads New Orleans' top salsa band, is
one of the residents. Mr. Pate expects Musicians' Village to be completed
and fully occupied within a year.

Mr. Connick and Mr. Pate aim to recreate the way New Orleans neighborhoods
nurture musicians. For a city whose musical secrets are passed down by oral
tradition, 10 duplexes designed for the elderly will house older musicians
who can be mentors and community-center teachers.

Habitat has also thought through such details as how to extend credit to
musicians--looking not just at tax forms but at their gig books as proof of
income--and the way the houses sit on their lots: close to the street like
old New Orleans houses, with a large back yard for entertaining and front
porches to encourage New Orleanians' typical gregariousness. Because of the
high-water marks noted on nearby buildings, the houses are raised 67 inches,
more than two feet higher than the Federal Emergency Management Agency
guidelines that were released after construction began.

It may take some persuading, and budgeting, for musicians to buy homes,
something Mr. Connick insists is "a great change from the renter mentality."
The other catch is that this is a new, separate neighborhood, not a
reclaimed one. It has none of the funky ghosts that fill historical New
Orleans. The clean-lined houses, each only one color, are largely identical
to one another, with no Victorian-style gingerbread. Musicians' Village
looks, for the moment, like what it is: a housing development in progress.

But New Orleanians, both musicians and non-musicians, have a way of making
every environment their own. Mr. Pate said the musicians already living in
the village sometimes do noonday jams for the volunteer construction
workers--playing street music before the village's streets have been
built--and that the new neighbors have already been hiring one another.

Musicians' Village is one effort to take on the much greater housing and
jobs crises in New Orleans, and obviously not the complete solution. There
are also other ways to assist New Orleans music and musicians, among them
replacing lost instruments (as the local Tipitina's Foundation has been
doing), supporting music education and simply hiring bands to perform. Like
many post-Katrina efforts, Musicians' Village is a social experiment. Here's
betting that once the place is populated by musicians, it won't be so
orderly. 

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For me, the giant official Mardi Gras parades tend to blur after a while.
Only a few hold on to carnival's satiric bite. Most have bland themes--gee,
the circus--as they strive to impress crowds with the elaborate decorations
of their floats and the generosity of what's thrown from them.

But New Orleanians aren't about to let other people do their parading for
them. While the big krewes mount their spectaculars, Mardi Gras is also
defined by countless informal parades thrown by gaggles of friends who name
themselves krewes, make their own costumes and set out on spur-of-the-moment
parade routes, traffic or no traffic. It's a great city for wordplay: the
official Bacchus parade is spoofed by Barkus, featuring dogs, while the
historically black Zulu is fondly echoed (and used to be directly followed)
by Julu, which was started by the New Orleans Klezmer All-Stars.

I was led by locals to Monday's parade by the bohemian Krew du Poux, who had
gone all-out on costumes in a ghoulish mode. A scary clown with a
larger-than-life head wielded a giant mallet. Little Bo Peep carried not
just her crook but a sheep. Someone with a wagon was rolling around the new
dwarf planet Eris, about six feet in diameter and painstakingly textured and
painted. Someone else was riding around in an Uncle Sam hat on a cart
holding a giant carrion crow and a tombstone for New Orleans, described in
the epitaph as dead from neglect. Another crow wheeled around at one point
on a unicycle. Of course there was a band, oom-pahing away in a Kurt
Weill-Tom Waits style.

The parade ambled along nearly deserted streets, from the Upper Ninth Ward
into the Marigny district, until it came to one that was more like an alley.
Someone kept a lookout for the police. Out came shopping carts turned into
bumper cars, with shock absorbers made from tires; one was painted with the
words Bumper Bummer. Volunteers climbed in, other volunteers pushed, and as
the band played a relentless drumbeat, a full-scale demolition derby began,
ending only when one last cart remained untoppled. The krew's leader called
for another round, and another; the contestants shrieked threats at each
other; a spectator chanted "Kill! Kill!" A woman fan-danced amid the
vehicles. The clown bopped people with his mallet.

There was humor in the competition; there was also anger and unfocused
bitterness. New Orleans has always been a haven for arty misfits with a
taste for decadence. In post-disaster New Orleans, they also have a taste
for catastrophe: in sorrow and in rage, but also for the thrill of it.