Joyful Noises and Joyless Measures in New Orleans

Posted on Jul 2, 2010

AP / Alex Brandon

Alana Jones, left, leads the Treme Brass Band through the French Quarter of New Orleans in a 2007 parade to call attention to the plight of musicians.

By Larry Blumenfeld

(Page 3)

It’s a tough time for Mayor Landrieu and NOPD Superintendent Serpas to give this issue due attention. On June 25, Serpas announced a major reorganization of the department, conducted just as the U.S. Department of Justice begins a civil investigation into the NOPD. And topping Landrieu’s to-do list is dealing with the fallout from the continuing environmental disaster from the failed BP oil well.

Yet issues pertaining to music and culture remain elemental to the city’s continued recovery and its ongoing identity. And Landrieu seems uniquely equipped and predisposed to address them in a logical and sensitive manner. In his previous job, as lieutenant governor of Louisiana, Landrieu fostered an aggressive cultural-economy agenda, which included high-profile conferences and specific legislation creating tax incentives for the film and music industries. Prior to that, as an attorney, he successfully litigated a 1998 case on behalf of French Quarter clubs that facilitated the striking down of the state’s “amusement tax,” which some considered a plague on the New Orleans music and entertainment industry. As seems required in politics these days, Landrieu, upon taking office, promised “change.” And yet his call had a specific flavor. “Change, real change, transformative change, enduring change, comes from the streets,” he insisted during his inaugural address at Gallier Hall. So too, he well knows, does the culture he wishes to promote. His approach to the current cultural matter reflects as well on his role, announced earlier this month, as chairman of the U.S. Conference of Mayors Tourism, Arts, Parks, and Entertainment & Sports Committee.

Now is a moment for Landrieu to signal a clean break from the policies (or lack thereof) of his predecessors, and of long-standing but ill-serving local laws relating to culture, by leading a charge toward sensible reform and rewritten ordinances. While he and his City Council consider the ordinances that tell bands like To Be Continued to keep quite past 8 p.m., why not revisit the full scope of cultural policy that is at odds with New Orleans’ true identity? Why not open the door to a more sensible approach to zoning, and why not give a place at the policy table to musicians and culture-bearers so prominently featured in the tourism ads?

It may well be a new day in New Orleans. Councilwoman Palmer met with members of the To Be Continued band earlier this week, and held another meeting with stakeholders in this issue. “We’re at a really great point,” she told me, “where, instead of simply reacting, we can craft better policies that reflect how we really feel about culture.” She said that all the relevant ordinances are on the table and that she and Landrieu are intent on following through.

Episode three of “Treme” featured another scene worth remembering. Trombone Shorty sits in the green room prior to a New York City post-Katrina benefit concert, eating a slice of pizza and talking to fictional trumpeter Delmond Lambreaux (played by Rob Brown): Delmond is a New Yorker now, swept up in a modern-jazz milieu that makes his hometown seem, to him, somewhat backwater.

“Don’t you miss home?” Shorty asks.

Delmond doesn’t miss a beat. “In New Orleans, they hype the music but they don’t love the musicians. The tradition is there but that city will grind you down if you let it.”

Fictional though he may be, Delmond has a point.

A while back, Mary Howell recalled for me a time, in late 2005, when “illegal music” was all over town. “Music was popping up everywhere,” she said. “In places that never had it and never will have it again, in some that have since been shut down. That was a sign of life, a blood transfusion, a hit of oxygen when we needed it.

“I used to get worried that this specific law or that policy would crush the music,” she said more recently. “But I’ve found some relief in finally and deeply understanding that these laws are problems—they are obstacles, irritants—and they are problematic—unjust, unequally enforced. But the thing is that the music and the culture survives despite it, and finds its way around, over, and under these laws.”

She’s right, and yet this deep and abiding truth perhaps invites a dangerous notion: that a culture developed in opposition to subjugating force requires or is somehow served by or at least lives well in spite of the occasional, capricious and overriding slap-down. But a culture born of struggle needn’t be condemned to struggle, a music that won’t die doesn’t have to endure blow upon non-lethal blow. If New Orleans wishes to restore or even re-create itself, the city would do well to think about this idea.

I’ll never forget, in 2007, at one of Landrieu’s cultural-economy forums, Grenada’s Ambassador Denis G. Antoine saying, at the height of a crime wave: “New Orleans is a perception. When we talk about safety: How safe do you feel? It’s not just about crime, it’s about how safe do you feel to be you?”

Thus far, Palmer and Landrieu, just months into their respective offices, are sounding the right notes regarding recasting a cultural policy that has long been woefully out of tune. Maybe they can do as the brass bands do: Pick up the rhythm, and collectively improvise something useful that everyone can fall in line behind. We’d all feel safer.

Larry Blumenfeld has written about New Orleans culture, politics and recovery for Truthdig, The Wall Street Journal, The Village Voice, Salon and other publications. He was a 2006-7 Katrina Media Fellow for The Open Society Institute.

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