New Orleans Music

In Louisiana’s French and Spanish colonial era of the 18th century, slaves were permitted to gather and sell goods every Sunday in a grassy field on the outskirts of the French Quarter that later became known as Congo Square. There, they played music and danced in the form of a ring shout, with small groups of instrumentalists, singers, and dancers arranging themselves into a circle surrounding a rotating cast of dancers. Because this tradition was allowed to continue until the 1840s, after the city became part of the United States, historians and musicologists have pointed to the Congo Square dances as crucial to the establishment of Africanized cultural traditions in New Orleans.

Musicologist Samuel Floyd locates “all of the defining elements of black music” in the ring shout, including “call-and-response devices; additive rhythms and polyrythms;…timbral distortions of various kinds; musical individuality within collectivity;…and the metronomic foundational pulse that underlies all Afro-American music” (1991, 267-268). The most detailed account of Congo Square, from an 1819 journal entry by architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe, makes reference to several of these characteristics. The many drummers, whose sound Latrobe compared to “horses trampling on a wooden floor” (1819, 203), were likely creating the complex polyrhythms that characterize ritual drumming in West Africa and the Americas. While one group of women was “respond[ing] to the Song of their leader” in call-and-response fashion, others were “walk[ing], by way of dancing, round the music in the Center,” creating what Floyd would recognize as “an activity in which music and dance commingled, merged, and fused to become a single distinctive cultural ritual” (1991, 266).

The slave dances in Congo Square provided a formidable basis for the development of the city as an epicenter of African American music, while also communicating to the fascinated crowds on the square’s perimeter. The only accounts of the dances were written by white spectators, and the most popular image associated with the dances, the drawing by E.W. Kemble, was illustrated in 1868, long after the dances ended, by someone who had never attended. Congo Square is then not only an important site for African cultural retentions and the future of American music, it also teaches us about race relations and myth making through music.

The former site of Congo Square is now Louis Armstrong Park, which is located in the Tremé neighborhood of New Orleans, Louisiana, just across Rampart Street north of the French Quarter. The Tremé neighborhood is famous for its history of African American music.

New Orleans is a city of parades, most famously the Mardi Gras processions that roll down the wide boulevards of St. Charles Avenue and Canal Street during Carnival season, but in all the seasons and in every neighborhood there are jazz funerals and parades known as second lines that fill the backstreets with a joyful noise. On Sunday afternoons from September through May, African American forms of music, dance, and dress are put on display in parades that have become symbolic of New Orleans and its association with festivity and pleasure. The upbeat tone of second line parades originates in the distinctive local tradition of jazz funerals.

The Jazz Funeral
Though funerals would seem an unlikely source for such a festive tradition, the jazz funeral celebrates life at the moment of death-a concept common among many cultures until the twentieth century. In New Orleans and elsewhere, Europeans and Anglo-Americans attended funerals with music that featured a brass band playing “solemn music on the way to the grave and happy music on the return.” There is also a history of rejoicing at death through music in West African burial traditions. In 1819, architect Benjamin Latrobe witnessed a continuance of this tradition at a black funeral in New Orleans. The funeral began with the mourners making “loud lamentations” and ended with “noise and laughter.” With the end of slavery, black funerals with brass bands became commonplace. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the funerals had become forums for the performance of a new style of music – jazz -eventually becoming known as jazz funerals. Simultaneously, the popularity of funerals with brass band music waned among white New Orleanians.

In the traditional jazz funeral, a prominent member of the community, often a musician and nearly always a black male, is “buried with music.” Benevolent and burial societies traditionally arranged these funerals, often offering the services of a brass band for an extra fee. The societies collected dues throughout the year to pay for members’ health care and burial costs. The musicians, funeral directors, family, and friends of the dead make up what is called the first or main line, while the crowd marching behind is collectively known as the second line. As the procession moves from the funeral service to the burial site, the first and second lines march to the beat of a brass band. At the beginning, the band plays dirges, somber Christian hymns performed at a slow walking tempo. After the body is laid to rest, or “cut loose,” the band starts playing up-tempo music, the second liners begin dancing, and the funeral transforms into a street celebration.

Second Lines
At some point in the late nineteenth century, the second line detached from the jazz funeral and developed its own identity. Organized by social aid and pleasure clubs, second lines wind through the neighborhoods of club members, making designated stops at their houses and other significant neighborhood sites, usually barrooms. From September through May, there is at least one parade every Sunday, often held on the anniversary of a club’s founding. Each club hosts fundraisers throughout the year and collects dues at regular meetings in order to pay for police permits, brass bands, and the coordinated outfits that members wear at their parade.

Anthropologist Helen Regis defines a second line parade as a public festival in which club members, musicians, and second liners come together to create “a single flowing movement of people unified by the rhythm.” At the head of the parade, club members wear suits and sashes that display the club’s name, often twirling matching umbrellas above their heads. For approximately four hours, they strut their dance moves in front of the band while the second liners fall in behind and along the side. Many second liners show off popular dance steps such as the high step and the buck jump. Others make their own sounds by singing, clapping, blowing whistles, hitting cowbells and beer bottles, and shaking tambourines.

Contemporary Parades and Jazz Funerals
Second line parades create a sense of community among participants, and the public nature of the spectacle makes parading a powerful representation of black New Orleans. This has led to debates among parading organizations and musicians about how parades and funerals should be presented in public.

In recent years, the jazz funeral tradition has opened up to include, most notably, young men and women who have died tragically young. At these funerals, the number of dirges performed is drastically reduced, altering the transition from dirges to up-tempo music that is the hallmark of the traditional funeral. Musicians no longer wear the traditional uniform of black band caps, white button-down shirts, and black dress pants, and instead dress in everyday clothes. Some tradition-minded organizations, such as the Black Men of Labor Social Aid & Pleasure Club, bemoan these changes and have sought to perpetuate parading traditions in an orthodox manner. Black Men of Labor organizes funerals for families who want to honor the dead with a traditional burial, and the club sponsors an annual second line parade in which musicians are required to dress in uniform and perform traditional music.

The power of parading as a symbol of local culture has also brought increased attention from spectators outside the community. Brass bands have made recordings of parade music since the 1940s and toured the globe as representatives of local culture since the 1960s. Photographs of community parades, particularly those of Michael P. Smith, began circulating in exhibits and books in the 1970s. Around this time, bands and second line dancers began to be hired for the entertainment of tourists and others. Today, these staged parades can be seen marching through the grounds of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival and the lobbies of the Convention Center.

The rhythm of community parades may have changed pace, but they have never skipped a beat. For every staged parade, there is a social aid and pleasure club marching through the backstreets to the whoops and hollers of neighborhood second liners. For every brass band that has been relegated to the halls of history, such as the Olympia or the Eureka, there is a Rebirth Brass Band or Hot 8 to fill the void in their own way. Each jazz funeral begins with a respectful dirge and ends with a cathartic dance. Even in a New Orleans that habitually packages itself as entertainment, the beat of the street remains closely tied to the rhythms of everyday life.

– Matt Sakakeeny

Focusing on music during the colonial and antebellum periods, we might expect that the city was most associated with the famed slave dances at Congo Square, which laid the foundation for jazz. But while these dances were a spectacle that received their share of commentary, most people associated New Orleans with opera and ballroom dance. In the 1820s, a pair of émigrés from Saint-Domingue organized the first permanent opera company in the country and established New Orleans as an elite cultural center through celebrated tours to the Northeast. In 1827, when their troupe visited New York and gave the Northern debut of no less than 30 operas, the praise was unanimous. The New York American gushed, “This company is as good as those heard in the provinces of France and superior to those heard in the Capitals of Europe outside France.”

At home, attendance at the opera reflected the diversity of the city’s inhabitants. The French were partial to the company at the Théâtre d’Orléans in the Vieux Carré while the Americans flocked to the St. Charles Theater. Each company offered segregated seating for free people of color: in 1820, white patrons of the French opera house could purchase a season subscription for 60 dollars while gens de coleur libres paid 50 for their section. The musicians were predominantly European immigrants but also included Creoles of mixed European and African ancestry as well as American carpetbaggers.

Concert music also flourished in halls offering separate seating for whites, free people of color, and slaves. Among the city’s many symphonic offerings there was the Negro Philharmonic Society, a full orchestra founded by black classical musicians. These were mostly French-speaking Creoles like Edmond Dédé, a violinist and composer who attended the Paris Conservatory and was part of a deep pedagogical tradition that included European and Creoles teachers and students.

Nearly every travel account of nineteenth-century New Orleans testifies to the city’s penchant for ballroom dance. William C.C. Claiborne, the first American governor, recoiled at the countless private dances, subscription dances, society balls, public dances, and taxi dances where New Orleanians intermingled. After one month in the city, the governor wrote to Secretary of State James Madison and apologized for “calling your attention to the balls of New Orleans, but I do assure you, sir, they occupy much of the public mind.”

Ballrooms were spaces where racial, ethnic, religious, and national identities were negotiated to the tunes of the latest contredanses. For example, in his monumental book – Music of New Orleans: The Formative Years -, historian Henry Kmen recounted a ball soon after the Louisiana Purchase where antagonisms between Americans, Creoles, and the French ancienne population played out on the dance floor: The Americans were agitating for the Virginia reel and the jig in place of the waltz and cotillion. To prevent just this the Creoles, for their part, turned out in force. Both sides carried arms to the conflict…Addressing the angry Americans, a [creole woman] cried: “We have been Spanish for thirty years and the Spaniards never forced us to dance the fandango; neither do we want to dance the reel or jig.” The municipal authorities ruled that there should be a set order of two French quadrilles, one English quadrille, and one waltz in turn, while Governor Claiborne ordered that an officer and 15 troops be present at every public ball.

There were also “quadroon” balls, where elite white men danced with creole women as a preface to concubine arrangements known as plaçage, and “colored” balls that were theoretically restricted to blacks but were continually crashed by whites. A weekly ballroom schedule might include a night for whites only, another for white men and creole women, and a third for free colored only, but the ordinances enacted to maintain these boundaries were virtually ignored. The Globe Ballroom was closed in 1855 for allowing “tricolor” balls, and police raiding a free colored ball in 1834 found that two-thirds of the men they arrested were slaves.

The echoes of these musical pasts cannot be fully measured in the jazz, brass band, blues, and funk of latter-day New Orleans. These are the styles that come to mind today when we ask ourselves “What is New Orleans?” But for patrons at the Théâtre d’Orléans or the Globe Ballroom, just as for spectators at Congo Square, the city’s musical reputation was built on the sheer plenitude of offerings and their freedom of accessibility.

– Matt Sakakeeny

By the time of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, New Orleans was already a music city, offering bals masqués, opera and ballet, military parades with brass bands, choral masses, and virtually nonstop street serenading-all of which coalesced to give birth to jazz. Most people think of New Orleans jazz as a single original jazz idiom, or musical style, when in fact it retains distinctive stylistic features tied to festival traditions within a discrete, regional culture. Even today, the musical practices rooted in neighborhood and family affiliations often influence musical styles and trends among traditional and modern jazz musicians more than national market trends.

In the Antebellum period, weekly “ring shouts” at Place Congo in New Orleans (municipally sanctioned from 1817 to 1856) highlighted the pervasive presence of African and Afro-Caribbean musical sensibilities, also apparent in performances by the black street crier Signor Cornmeal at the St. Charles Theater in 1837, where he alternated with French and Italian opera. Over the course of the nineteenth century in New Orleans, the diversity arising from French, Spanish, and African cultures in the colonial period grew to include European, Caribbean, Latin American, and Asian immigrants, presenting local musicians with a vast array of raw materials from which to draw in making music.

Beginning in the late nineteenth century, styles of dance underwent a dramatic shift away from polite, measured, and hierarchical nineteenth-century fare (i.e., quadrille, schottische, waltz, mazurka) to more suggestive, all-purpose steps such as the slow drag, two-step, one-step, and foxtrot, which suited the new musical genres of ragtime, blues, Tin Pan Alley popular tunes, and jazz that were coalescing in the early twentieth century.

Despite the pall of racial segregation instituted by the state legislature in the 1890s and validated by the U.S. Supreme Court with the “separate but equal” doctrine in the Plessy v. Ferguson decision in 1896, music provided opportunities for people of diverse backgrounds to get together. Much of this activity was made possible by neighborhood settlement patterns that predated segregation. Tremé, the lower French Quarter, and the Seventh Ward (clustered in the downtown area below Canal Street); Central City and the Irish Channel (uptown, above Canal Street); and Algiers (on the West Bank) were all characterized by crazy-quilt settlement patterns, interspersing Creoles, blacks, whites, Jews, Hispanics, and Latinos next door to each other within blocks.

In the period from 1895 to 1925, most jazz musicians came from these neighborhoods, where the outdoor music was taking place. The “hotter” and more expressive dance music that came to be known as jazz catalyzed the attraction of young people. Thus, this musical style, rooted in the good-time practices of the uptown African American community, spread rapidly throughout the metropolitan area, into the rural hinterland, and across the nation.

Traditional New Orleans jazz is band music characterized by a front line usually consisting of cornet (or trumpet), clarinet, and trombone engaging in polyphony with varying degrees of improvisation (without distorting the melody) and driven by a rhythm section consisting of piano (although rarely before 1915), guitar (or, later, banjo), bass (or tuba), and drums delivering syncopated rhythms for dancing (usually, but not always, in common or 4/4 time).

Jazz transformed leadership roles within the older tradition of New Orleans dance bands: In 1900 violinists led the ensemble, but by 1917 their numbers and influence had diminished as volume levels rose and the lead melody role fell to the cornet, then to the trumpet. Within the early jazz ensemble, the clarinet plays obbligato to the lead (primarily with arpeggiated runs), and the trombone engages in various rhythmic pops, growls, and slurs, while also adding harmonic variations and occasionally covering bass lines.

Guitar/banjo and piano reinforce the chord progression and rhythm, while also adding fills during breaks and pickups. The string bass accentuates the first and third beats, sometimes shifting to percussive slap-style eighth-note patterns, especially in the “out chorus,” the final measures of the piece, which were performed with extra energy. The introduction of “trap” drum sets in the 1890s was a major technological leap that enabled intensification and consolidation of rhythmic functions. In a traditional rhythm section, the drummer combines syncopated “press rolls”-even, recurring double-beats, 32 to 64 beats to the measure-and backbeats on snare with ground beats on bass drum. Cymbals are used sparingly, generally for crashes on the upbeat during out choruses or choked accents in stop-time breaks.

In 1913 the Six and Seven-Eighths String Band of New Orleans engaged in collectively improvised polyphony without brass, reeds, and drums. Gilbert Frank was leader of the Peerless Orchestra in 1905, where he played “hot” piccolo, while his brother Alcide, a violinist, led the Golden Rule Orchestra, which contemporaries characterized as “hotter” than the band led by Buddy Bolden, the first cornet king of jazz. Eventually, saxophones entered the New Orleans front line, as seen in photographs of the Fischbein-Williams Syncopators (1923), Sam Morgan’s Jazz Band (1925), Celestin’s Original Tuxedo Jazz Orchestra (1928), and the Jones & Collins Astoria Hot Eight (1929). Marching bands that played for second-line dancers in the street, like the Onward Brass Band (a “reading” band that adapted to “faking” around 1905 when jazz became popular) and the Eureka (organized in 1920 as a jazz brass band), usually consisted of ten to 12 instruments: three trumpets, two reeds (originally clarinets; after World War II more likely saxophones), two trombones, brass bass, and snare and bass drummers.

What all these bands shared was a style of playing “hot” dance music that suited the demands of a diverse, music-loving clientele, whether in cabarets, at dance halls, on riverboats, or in the streets. Solo improvisation was not common in New Orleans jazz bands until the mid-1920s, as documented on the recordings of the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, Clarence Williams’s Blue Five, and Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five.

Traditional New Orleans jazz entered the American entertainment mainstream in two ways between 1907 and 1917-through touring and phonograph records. Prior to the first jazz recordings by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band in New York in February 1917, New Orleans musicians had already traveled widely throughout North America. For example, the Creole pianist and composer Jelly Roll Morton left the city in 1907 and remained itinerant for most of his life; the Original Creole Orchestra worked the Pantages vaudeville circuit from 1914 to 1918, including Canada; and Tom Brown’s Band from Dixieland played cabarets and theaters in Chicago and New York in 1915.

In 1922, Kid Ory’s Sunshine Band made the first recording by a black New Orleans jazz band in Santa Monica, California, for the obscure Nordskog label. It was the recordings made by New Orleans musicians in the Chicago region from 1923 to 1928 that became the basis for widespread recognition of jazz as an American art form. Continuing the pragmatism that had characterized their musical experiments back home, these musicians employed diverse strategies, while also remaining true to the community cultures on which New Orleans-style jazz was based.

In 1923, King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band (featuring Louis Armstrong) relied exclusively on “head” arrangements (tunes worked out in advance and learned by rote) to prepare for its recording sessions, including titles like “Canal Street Blues,” “Snake Rag,” and “New Orleans Stomp.” Beginning in 1925, Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five supplemented the occasional use of sheet music with head arrangements and spontaneous ideas generated in the studio to achieve an identifiable sound, leading to recordings like “Heebie Jeebies” (1926), “Struttin’ with Some Barbecue” (1927), and especially “West End Blues” (1928), which were acclaimed as jazz masterpieces.

By 1930, the multiplicity of musical possibilities inherent in traditional New Orleans jazz as an idiomatic playing style had amply demonstrated the genre’s potential for open-ended artistic expression. Yet, several coinciding factors spelled the end of the line for traditional New Orleans jazz as a force in the entertainment market: the rise of radio and implosion of the phonograph record boom that had sustained many jazz artists throughout the 1920s; the onset of the Great Depression; and the shifting musical fashion apparent in the rise of big bands whose highly arranged scores left no place for the small-band collective improvisation associated with New Orleans.Only Louis Armstrong continued, fronting a big band that bore little resemblance to the New Orleans-style recording units that had made him famous in the previous decade.

Despite the trends associated with the swing era (represented by clarinetist Benny Goodman’s rise to stardom in 1935), some New Orleans jazz bands persevered and even flourished during the 1930s. Beginning in 1934, New Orleans trumpeter Louis Prima inaugurated a show business career that included jazz, swing combos, big band, Italian ethnic, and rock-and-roll phases, keeping him in the vanguard of American popular entertainment for nearly four decades. Perhaps the most surprising development of all, however, was the “New Orleans Revival” that attended the publication of the early history Jazzmen (1939) by Frederic Ramsey and Charles Edward Smith. This book sparked a highly publicized resurrection of the careers of cornetist Bunk Johnson and trombonist Kid Ory in the 1940s, conceived as an antidote to the rise of bebop and modern jazz in the World War II period. The revival brought previously unknown musicians (particularly the clarinetist George Lewis) to public attention and led directly to the establishment of Preservation Hall in 1961, based on the belief that traditional New Orleans jazz was noncommercial, community-based music that should be protected from the machinations of the music industry.

Although New Orleans jazz came very close to extinction during the 1930s, it found ways to survive through experimentation and reinvention. After World War II, a new generation of local musicians interested in modern jazz, including drummers Earl Palmer, Ed Blackwell, and James Black; pianists Ellis Marsalis and Ed Frank; and saxophonists Alvin “Red” Tyler, Nat Perriliat, Harold Battiste, and Edward “Kidd” Jordan, showed that there was room for multiple styles within the New Orleans jazz continuum. This trend continues as the tradition finds new ways to reinvent itself. More recently, the most vital segment of the jazz community has been the new wave of brass bands emerging in the wake of guitarist/banjoist Danny Barker’s Fairview Baptist Church Christian Band experiments in the 1970s, including the Dirty Dozen, the ReBirth, the Hot Eight, and the Pinettes (an all-female group), whose imaginative inclusion of bebop and hip-hop into street repertoire enhances the tradition.

New Orleans was founded by Catholics but has a long tradition of black Protestantism that dates back to Emancipation, when tens of thousands of freed slaves and their offspring moved off of rural plantations and into the urban center of New Orleans. The famed Jazz Funeral tradition begins with the brass band playing slow sacred dirges followed by up-tempo hymns. And there is a long tradition of black gospel coming out of the city’s numerous Baptist, Sanctified, Cogic and other churches. Mahalia Jackson was born and raised in Uptown New Orleans and became the most prominent gospel singer starting in the 1940s after moving to Chicago. In the late twentieth century, Bishop Paul S. Morton performed and recorded extensively with the Greater St. Stephens Baptist Church and Full Gospel Baptist Fellowship choirs

Mardi Gras Indians are African Americans who form “tribes” or “gangs” that hold weekly practices in bars throughout New Orleans and then march through the streets on Mardi Gras day and other recurring dates. In these public ceremonies, Indians dress in elaborate hand-sewn costumes, or “suits,” and sing chants as they travel in search of rival tribes. When two tribes meet, the chiefs compete with one another by shouting boasts and insults and by displaying their feathered and beaded suits. The fierce Mardi Gras Indian, his suits, and his songs have all become recognizable symbols of New Orleans’ unique local culture, and yet they have remained more closely tied to communities and neighborhoods than other, more accessible, local traditions such as jazz and Creole cuisine.

The precise origins of Mardi Gras Indians are not known and remain hotly contested. Some Indians and researchers claim that the history begins with the intermixture of blacks and American Indians during slavery times, when many escaped slaves sought shelter with Houma, Chitimacha, and other Indian tribes living in the swamplands surrounding the city (Martinez 1989; Lewis and Breunlin 2009). Others have linked the first accounts of blacks masking as Indians to the visit of Buffalo Bill’s West Show to New Orleans in 1884-5 (Smith 1994). It is also unclear whether there is a direct relationship between the Mardi Gras Indian tradition and other ceremonial and musical masquerading traditions among African diasporic communities, such as the junkanoo parades throughout the Caribbean. However Mardi Gras Indians emerged, the significance of the Indian warrior fighting domination clearly had a powerful resonance among former slaves and their descendents who were subject to Jim Crow law.
Membership in a Mardi Gras Indian tribe is voluntary and based on social networking rather than birthright. Tribes are organized with very specific roles for each member, following a system begun by early tribes such as the Creole Wild West and Yellow Pocahontas. The big chief is the tribal leader, often assisted by second chiefs and queens. The spy boy marches several blocks in front of the chiefs and queens, seeking out other gangs. He relays directions to the flag boy, who notifies the presence of another tribe to the chief by waving a flag or stick. When tribes meet, the wild man clears a path among the onlookers so the chiefs can face-off. Though these positions are frequently refilled according to the changing membership of a tribe, the hierarchy of the tribal organization – akin to a military unit – is strictly adhered to, and matters of any significance fall under the authority of the chief.

Mardi Gras Indian culture is characterized by fraternity within the tribe and competitiveness with other tribes. The Indian embodies fierceness, and a particularly masculine representation of fierceness that has historically relegated women to supporting roles; there are few queens and the other ranks are virtually always filled by men. In this way, the big chief and other tribe members correspond both to the figure of the American Indian who “won’t bow, won’t kneel” in the face of adversity, as well as the protagonists of African-American songs and stories of “big men” such as John Henry and “bad men” such as Stagger Lee.

Historically, the fierceness of the Mardi Gras Indian was tested through violent encounters between rival tribes from the uptown and downtown districts at a location referred to as “the battlefield.” These clashes, called “humbugs,” dissipated greatly during the latter half of the twentieth century, partly because of increasing pressure by local police and partly because certain chiefs, most notably Allison “Tootie” Montana of the Yellow Pocahontas, redirected the competitive nature of Indian showdowns away from violent confrontation and towards pageantry (i.e. the suits, language, and songs of the Indians).

The suits of the Mardi Gras Indians are the most celebrated aspect of the culture. Every Indian sews a new suit to be unveiled on Mardi Gras morning, which requires a staggering investment of time and money, as well as the creative ability to sew feathers and beads in unique patterns and distinctive color schemes in a way that expresses the individuality of the chief and his tribe. As Indian suits have become increasingly elaborate, they have also become identifiable according to two dominant styles: the uptown style uses beaded panels to tell a story with images (such as an Indian using a tomahawk to break a slave’s chains) while the downtown style uses three-dimensional geometric designs (such as the headdress of an Egyptian pharaoh). These and other styles are prevalent among tribes located throughout the city; they are not bound to strict rules because the central aspect of the tradition is to reinvent itself in the form of a new and innovative suit every year.

The language of the Mardi Gras Indians is the most elusive and mysterious aspect of the culture. Made up of English and French as well as invented words, the speaking and singing of the Indians is a form of verbal art that resists precise translation but is widely understood by Indians. In many Indian songs, “hoo na nae” is substituted with the phrase “let’s go get ‘em” while “tuway pockyway” is heard so frequently that it’s meaning is entirely dependent on the situation.

The songs of the Mardi Gras Indians are the most popular and accessible aspect of the culture. At Indian gatherings, songs are arranged in call-and-response fashion, with the chief improvising a solo vocal and the gang responding with a repeated chant (“shallow water oh mama!”; “big chief got a golden crown!”). A “second line” of percussionists accompanies the chants with tambourines, cowbells, and “found objects” such as beer bottles. Popular chants have also become the basis for rhythm & blues, soul, funk, and hip-hop recordings, including James “Sugarboy” Crawford’s 1954 rhythm & blues recording of “Jock-A-Mo,” which became a national hit as “Iko Iko” 11 years later in a girl-group arrangement by the Dixie Cups. The music and spectacle of the Indians has also spawned tribute songs, such as Earl King’s “Big Chief,” popularized by pianist Professor Longhair in a 1964 recording.

In 1971, Bo Dollis and the Wild Magnolias were the first Indians to make a commercial recording of their own music, using a group of funk musicians to arrange Dollis’ “Handa Wanda.” Under the musical direction of pianist, composer, and arranger Wilson Turbinton (“Willie Tee”), the Wild Magnolias recorded two LPs in the early 1970s and toured the U.S. and France. Indian funk was given a sizeable boost in 1976, when the Wild Tchoupitoulas tribe recorded an album with arrangements by the city’s most acclaimed funk group, The Meters. On the record and in performance at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, lead vocalist Joseph Landry (“Chief Jolly”) was accompanied by his nephews the Neville Brothers (Art, Charles, Aaron, and Cyril) who, like Willie Tee, had grown up following the Indians on Mardi Gras day. Music composed for these recordings, such as the Magnolias’ “New Suit” (1975) and the Tchoupitoulas’ “Meet De Boys on the Battlefront” (1976), now reside alongside “Big Chief” and “Iko, Iko” as the most prominent and durable signs of the Mardi Gras Indian tradition.

Musical recordings and staged performances brought extraordinary recognition to what had been a relatively obscure and even secretive community practice, alerting a much larger public to the tradition of masking and chanting. The increased attendance of Indian parades on Mardi Gras day and especially the proliferation of official cultural exhibitions – museum shows of costumes, Indian parades at local festivals, concert performances of traditional chanting, etc. – owe much to the ongoing popularity of Indian music.

Mardi Gras Indians are a prominent and vital thread in the tapestry of local culture. Once only seen on Mardi Gras day and St. Joseph’s night by a select few, today the Indian has become a fixture at events all over the city and throughout the year. Super Sunday has become a popular springtime outing for a diverse crowd of spectators who come to see the tribes in three neighborhoods, uptown, downtown, and the West Bank. At the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, tribes are hired to parade through the fairgrounds and appear onstage. Chiefs such as musician Donald Harrison Jr. and the late plasterer Tootie Montana became respected public figures and voices of the community through their Indian-related activities. And new tribes have continued to form even after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, demonstrating the fierceness and vitality of this cherished local tradition.

– Matt Sakakeeny

New Orleans rhythm and blues refers to a type of R&B music from the U.S. city of New Orleans, Louisiana, characterized by extensive use of piano and horn sections, complex syncopated “second line” rhythms, and lyrics that reflect New Orleans life.

Distinct innovation and creativity, in combination with a musicality unique to the New Orleans area distinguish this sub-genre. It was also a major influence on ska and reggae, the former being a local variation on New Orleans R&B and jazz, such as the Fats Domino song Be My Guest.

New Orleans has a long, unbroken tradition of “Piano Professors” that stretched back to the ragtime era with Tony Jackson and his disciple Jelly Roll Morton, peaked in the R&B era with Fats Domino and Professor Longhair, and continues today with pianists including Dr. John, Allen Toussaint, and John Cleary. In a musical city associated most with horns and drums, the piano is a unique instrument. Because it covers the full musical range on its 88 keys, one musician can entertain an audience, as Jelly Roll did in the famed bordellos of Storyville at the turn of the 20th century.

Funk has its roots in the syncopated rhythms of New Orleans drummers, who influenced James Brown and other international stars of funk music when the style emerged in the mid-1960s. Producer Allen Toussaint was the local architect for many funk recordings in New Orleans, ranging from Lee Dorsey’s “Working in the Coal Mine” to Dr. John’s album “Gumbo.” The house band on Toussaint’s sessions included Art Neville on keyboards, Zigaboo Modeliste on drums, George Porter on bass, and Leo Nocentelli on guitar. Known as The Meters, the band recorded several albums of mostly funk instrumentals which only increased in popularity after they disbanded in the late 1970s, and were heavily sampled in hip-hop recordings. Long after funk disappeared from the pop music charts, the style has remained a signature sound of New Orleans, and many of the city’s current bands play funk (Galactic, Trombone Shorty and Orleans Avenue, Dupstafunk, etc.), as do the most popular brass bands (Rebirth, Hot 8, Soul Rebels, etc.).

Hip-hop holds a tenuous place in New Orleans culture. On the one hand, the city is associated with traditional styles of jazz and brass band that are challenged by the aggressive sounds and themes associated with hip-hop. On the other hand, hip-hop can be viewed as simply the latest in a long lineage of musical styles that derived from African approaches to music making in New Orleans dating back to the slave dances at Congo Square.

The region’s most distinctive genre is Bounce, which emerged out of the clubs and housing projects in the late 1980s and features a distinctive drum “track” known as the “Triggerman” beat. In the 1990s, several transgender rappers entered the Bounce scene, and that movement was later dubbed “Sissy Bounce.”

New Orleans also boasts two internationally famous hip-hop record labels: Master P’s No Limit and the Williams brother’s Cash Money. Many local rappers recorded for these labels and received global attention, including Mannie Fresh, Juvenile, Mystikal, and Lil Wayne.

In the city known as the “birthplace of jazz,” traditional jazz has always found an audience while modern jazz has struggled. Traditional jazz is considered a musical entertainment suitable for dancing, while modern jazz since bebop arrived in the 1940s has developed as a serious music meant for intellectual appreciation. Local New Orleanians seeking social dance music and tourists who are marketing traditional jazz in venues such as Preservation Hall have not been as supportive of modern jazz.

Despite the challenges, many modern jazz musicians have come from New Orleans. The first generation of musicians, including saxophonist Harold Battiste, pianist Ellis Marsalis, and drummer James Black, formed the “All For One” collective in the late 1950s, one of the first black owned record labels in the US. Drummers Ed Blackwell, Vernel Fournier, and Idris Muhammed all left their hometown to establish international careers with leading musicians. That was also the case for Ellis’ sons Wynton and Branford Marsalis in the early 1980s, along with saxophonist Donald Harrison Jr., trumpeter Terence Blanchard, and trumpeter Nicholas Payton a few years later. That group of musicians studied at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts (NOCCA), as have many younger modern jazz musicians, including Jonathan Batiste, Christian Scott, and Troy “Trombone Shorty” Andrews.

New Orleans music continues to flourish in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In fact, research by Tulane professors Nick Spitzer and Matt Sakakeeny argue that it was culture – and above all, music – that paved the return for many. This is both because the return of local culture gave many New Orleanians a sense of “home,” and because culture is the basis of the tourism industry, which in turn provides the infrastructure for the local economy. The readings below show how the return of second line parades (Breunlin & Regis), brass bands (Sakakeeny) and a host of other musical styles (Spitzer) give us a sense of the contemporary New Orleans landscape.