[Dixielandjazz] Jazz Funeral celebrates rebirth of Coney Island

[Stephen G Barbone]

Norm Vickers sent the link to the list earlier, but for those whom may  
not have opened it, here is the copy. A Jazz funeral & parade   
celebrating a rebirth. Hey Tom Wiggins, must be plenty of gigs like  
this for your band.

Also, for those who are doing New Year funerals for the old year and  
rebirth celebrations in Unitarian Churches around the country, looks  
like the idea is growing rapidly.

We don't have anyone ppopping out of the coffin at our annual funeral  
for the old year at the Germantown Unitarian Society because it might  
scare the kids, however, it's a great idea for public events such as  
the one below.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone
www.myspace.com/barbonestreetjazzband


Jazzy Funeral Parade Marks Coney Island’s Death and Rebirth
By TIM STELLOH - NY TIMES - April 3, 2011
The funeral procession started slowly.

As it moved toward the Coney Island Boardwalk on West 12th Street on  
Sunday afternoon, the Jambalaya Brass Band played a hypnotic dirge.  
Pallbearers marched forward with a black coffin. The procession  
leaders, wearing dark suits and wingtip shoes, looked solemnly at the  
ground.

But when the group reached the Boardwalk, everything changed: The band  
switched to Dixieland jazz, and funeral marchers shimmied and swirled  
handkerchiefs overhead. A mermaid, wearing hot-pink high heels, a  
green skirt and a gold sash that said “Ms. Rebirth,” emerged from the  
coffin. And the procession’s leader, Darryl Young, began shouting.

“Yes to rebirth!” he said. “She is here!”

It was a traditional New Orleans jazz funeral, Coney Island-style.

The point, said James Demaria, the filmmaker and photographer who  
organized the event, was to memorialize the Coney Island of yesterday  
and prepare for the Coney Island of tomorrow.

Mr. Young, 43, a New Orleans native who has led such celebrations as  
far away as Paris, said: “We don’t want people to say, ‘How did they  
just end Coney Island and start this new thing?’ We want to put it in  
the light one more time.”

Mr. Demaria had read about the bitter dispute involving Ruby’s bar,  
Shoot the Freak and the other Boardwalk fixtures that came to be  
called the Coney Island Eight. The fight began last October, when  
Central Amusement International, a subsidiary of an Italian company  
that has a long-term city lease for much of the land and Boardwalk,  
told the businesses they had to leave by Nov. 15.

The group fought the battle against Central Amusement in court. In  
early March, the two sides reached a settlement: Shoot the Freak was  
out; the other businesses could stay. For one more season.

What happened to them was a little much for Mr. Demaria, 39, who grew  
up in Valley Stream, N.Y., and spent many weekends in Coney Island as  
a boy.

“It was a place for working people to go during the summer,” he said.  
“It was a place where you could go to the Boardwalk and have a hot dog  
with your family.”

Mr. Demaria visited New Orleans for a brief time in the early 1990s  
and returned in 2005, shortly before Hurricane Katrina, to shoot a  
documentary about the Tremé neighborhood, which gave birth to jazz  
funerals.

The funerals, which are “older than a nickel,” as Mr. Young put it,  
grew out of a mixing of West African and Christian traditions that  
along the way adopted brass-band music. They used to be strictly for  
the dead, but that has changed; they are now held for closed-down  
businesses, changing neighborhoods, even sports teams, Mr. Young said.

Dick D. Zigun, executive director of Coney Island USA, which runs a  
sideshow, the annual Mermaid parade and the Coney Island Museum, and  
who helped organize the funeral, called the event a poignant send-off  
for the old Boardwalk businesses and a symbol of a new, emerging Coney  
Island.

This summer, he said, the resort will have nearly as many rides as it  
did in the 1960s. Central Amusement’s Scream Zone, which includes four  
new rides and the first new roller coasters in Coney Island since  
1927, is set to open this month.

Mr. Zigun said that a handful of new bars had opened on West 12th  
Street, and that rolling chairs — the human-powered rickshaws that  
rolled down the Boardwalk from the 1920s through the 1960s — might  
soon return to the beach. The 500-pound Dreamland Pier bell, lost to  
the sea in a 1911 fire and rediscovered in 2009, was even back in  
Coney Island on Sunday — at Mr. Zigun’s multi-arts center for events  
that day.

It would be tragic, he said, if the Coney Island Eight were forced out  
and there was nothing to fill their place.

“But if it’s version 2.0 or 3.0, then this is a Coney Island for the  
21st century,” Mr. Zigun said. “It will remain New York’s summertime  
square.”

Still, the “death” part of that process has been particularly bitter  
for Carlo Muraco, who has owned businesses in Coney Island since the  
1980s and is a co-owner of Shoot the Freak and Beer Island, which was  
one of the businesses allowed one more season.

Not long after Mr. Muraco was told his lease would not be renewed, he  
got a telephone call. Shoot the Freak — an open space with props,  
signs and paintball guns — was being “bulldozed,” he said. His signs  
and guns disappeared and a wall went up in front of the business.

“They wanted it to be the entrance for the Scream Park,” Mr. Muraco  
said.

Mr. Muraco and his partner, Anthony Berlingieri, eventually settled  
with Central Amusement International for $25,000 — though he said that  
was “peanuts” for longtime business owners who have watched Coney  
Island bounce back after a long decline. (Central Amusement declined  
to discuss the matter.)

Still, Mr. Muraco is hopeful that Central Amusement may change its  
mind and allow the businesses to stay, though he is looking for  
somewhere else in the area to locate a park where Shoot the Freak  
would be welcome.

“It’ll be just like the old Coney Island,” he said.

Central Amusement has said in a statement that it wants to “extend its  
vision of a resurgent Coney Island to the Boardwalk,” but it is  
unclear what that vision is. A spokesman said the company would  
“address plans for the future come November.”

As Charles Denson, a Coney Island historian, watched the funeral from  
the Boardwalk, he said the event could ease tensions between the two  
sides.

“It’s a form of exorcism,” he said. “Maybe it’ll smooth things over.”