Can’t Be Faded: Twenty Years in the New Orleans Brass Band Game

There has been a weekly Sunday African-American second-line parade for 150 years in New Orleans--a diffused democratic street ritual of performativity enacted through dance, music, and stylin'. The main action focuses on the sponsoring Social Aid and Pleasure Club, who parade between the ropes with their hired brass-band, on-stage and for public consumption. Yet the so-called second-liners rolling and dancing outside the ropes provide the peak moments of aesthetic excellence in their claiming of interstitial spaces: on the sidewalks between the street and house-lines; on church-steps, atop truck beds or along rooftops; on porches, stoops, and billboards. Drawing on a living tradition of New Orleans African-American expressive culture, individuals display creative style as both personal pleasure and social invigoration. The physical gestures and non-verbal messages of this vernacular dance are here analysed through a series of images by second-line photographer Pableaux Johnson.

Download Full-text

5. Red Clark’s List New Orleans Street Jazz and the Eureka Brass Band in the 1950s

A Language of Song ◽

10.1515/9780822392071-006 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 81-104

Keyword(s):

New Orleans ◽

Brass Band ◽

The 1950S

Download Full-text

Dr. Michael White and the Widow’s Wail

City of a Million Dreams ◽

10.5149/northcarolina/9781469647142.003.0014 ◽

2018 ◽

pp. 279-297

Author(s):

Jason Berry

Keyword(s):

New Orleans ◽

African American Student ◽

Growing Up ◽

American Student ◽

Small Churches ◽

Student Body ◽

Predominately White ◽

Brass Band ◽

Catholic University ◽

Michael White

Dr. Michael White is a jazz clarinetist, bandleader, composer, jazz historian and professor from New Orleans. White grew up in the Lower Ninth Ward, moved to a predominately-white neighbourhood at age 7, and later attended Xavier, a Catholic university with a largely African American student body. Growing up, White was a voracious reader who enjoyed learning the clarinet and Spanish. He worked as a freelance clarinet player in Ernest “Doc” Paulin’s brass band for parades and funeral marches. White had an epiphany in 1978 when he discovered the work of George Lewis, who had died in 1968. Unlike the Creole clarinettists from family traditions of the Seventh Ward, Lewis drew his inspiration from the chant-like rhythms of small churches and the bent pitches of blues and country. White studied Lewis’s work, and also began researching the histories of the jazz players in his own family, including his ancestral cousins Willie “Kaiser” Joseph and “Papa John” Joseph. Like his idol George Lewis, White wanted to capture his people’s story through his music.

Download Full-text