It was a distinct honor and the oddest of pleasures to edit Harvey Pekar’s work for Jazziz magazine in the late 1990s. When I saw the film based on his life and celebrating his work, “American Splendor,” I wondered if I was part of the composite editor Harvey referred to simply as “asshole” in a scene wherein Harvey can’t find his Ornette Coleman recording, and needed to file his review. I remember well the phone call in which Harvey called me a “garden variety Jew” in a combative tone when I queried his commentary about Sephardic musical themes, in a review about a John Zorn album.
Which brings me to Paul Shapiro, a wonderful tenor saxophonist I first heard during his long tenure with the Microscopic Septet. Shapiro is a player Harvey would love; I imagine Harvey wrote about him at some point. My point of connection for all of the above is that Shapiro has a new album, “Shofarot Verses” within the Radical Jewish Culture Series of Zorn’s Tzadik label, which interprets last of three sections of the Musaf (additional) service recited on Rosh Hashanah. Here, as in his other work, Shapiro reflects the seriousness of musical purpose, natural sense of humor and essential Jewishness embodied in Harvey’s work, too.
To celebrate, there’s a comic strip in the tradition of Pekar (this was his favorite mode of communication), written by Jeff Newelt, and drawn by Joseph Remnant. (both worked with Pekar on his final graphic novel “Cleveland”).
If you’re in New York City, there’a a “Shofarot Verses” launch concert June 19, 2014 at Eldridge Street Synagogue.
And all of this gives me good excuse to pull out an short piece in memory of Harvey that I filed for Jazziz after his death, in 2010, below: Continue reading “Harvey Pekar, Paul Shapiro & Me: No Garden-Variety Jews”
Credit: William Gottlieb/ Courtesy Library of Congress via Flickr
New York City has quite a few streetsigns that honor iconic jazz musicians where they once lived. The corner of 88th Street and West End Avenue in Manhattan is “Arturo ‘Chico’ O’Farrill Place,” for the Latin jazz bandleader and composer who died in 2001. My favorite, at the cul-de-sac on West 63rd Street, off West End Avenue, is “Thelonious Sphere Monk Circle” (though it took a while for the city to get that one right).
Perhaps no musician is more deserving of such an honor than pianist Billy Taylor,because he quite literally brought jazz to New York’s streets in exalted and empowering fashion. Taylor will get his due when East 138th Street between Fifth and Madison Avenues, near where he raised his family, gets dubbed “Dr. Billy Taylor Way” through a ceremony from 4-6pm on June 21. (The page on the Harlem Cultural Archives website says “bring your lawnchair and enjoy the festivities.”)
That’s just the sort of invitation Taylor offered New Yorkers in all five boroughs through JazzMobile, the nonprofit music organization he founded in 1964 with arts patron Daphne Arnstein. Jazzmobile’s annual Summerfest stood as the city’s oldest continuous summer event devoted to jazz, reaching 100,000 listeners annually, mostly where they live. A wheeled float transported by pickup truck served as the stage at most sites, setting up shop for a night in one community or another.
Taylor, who enjoyed a storied musical career (he was house pianist at Birdland during its heyday) and served as arts correspondent for CBS-TV’s “Sunday Morning” and for National Public Radio), reflected on all that in 2010, just months before his death, for a Wall Street Journal piece.
As he explained, in 1964, after hearing of plans to reduce arts programs in New York schools, he used his then-daily radio show on local station WLIB as his pulpit. Continue reading “Dr. Billy Taylor Way Honors A Pianist Where He Lived”
Ornette and Denardo Coleman, in 1969/ photo courtesy of the artist
The musicians who’ll gather Thursday evening (June 12) at the bandshell in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park for “Celebrate Ornette: The Music Of Ornette Coleman” come from all over music’s landscape.
Such range is fitting, as is the concert’s site. Coleman is most clearly identified as an iconic jazz master and a founding father of free jazz (a term that, despite its muddied meaning today, signified something as the title of Coleman’s 1961 LP). Yet as an alto saxophonist (as well as on trumpet and violin), and as a bandleader and composer, it’s fair to say that Coleman, now 84, is father to the ideas that drive and distinguish the best modern jazz (maybe even what makes it ‘modern’), and the most innovative music across a range of other styles. His music befits the rolling hills and trees of Prospect Park: It, too, is an engineered environment brilliant enough to celebrate what is natural and organic.
Ornette Coleman is also father to Denardo Coleman, a drummer who first played on one of his father’s recordings at age 10. Now 58, Denardo still generates from his trap set the firm but subtle pulses that define his father’s rhythmic sensibility; he’ll do so at the helm of a quintet that will serve as Thursday’s house band.
Denardo also projects both the air of compassion and dismissal of convention that are bedrock attitudes of his father’s work. Those two qualities more than any stylistic sense form the logical thread through the list of musicians on this program, presented jointly by Celebrate Brooklynand the Blue Note Jazz Festival: Henry Threadgill, James Blood Ulmer, Laurie Anderson, Patti Smith, Ravi Coltrane, Bill Laswell, Bruce Hornsby, Flea, David Murray, Geri Allen, Bachir Attar and The Master Musicians of Jajouka and Thurston Moore, among others (perhaps including Ornette).
As a critic and journalist, I’ve written about Ornette Coleman’s music and interviewed him many times through the years. (Here’s one Wall Street Journal piece from a decade ago.) As a father, I’ve been able to share Ornette’s music with my boy, Sam. As a human being, I just like to live in the world this music calls up whenever I can: This concert promises to be a communion, onstage and off, of folks who feel the same way. Continue reading “A Son’s Tribute to the Father of Many Things: Celebrating Ornette”
Charles Gayle will be honored for Lifetime Achievement on the opening night of this year's Vision Festival.
To call New York City’s annual Vision Festival this country’s essential gathering of avant-garde improvising musicians is both true and incomplete.
The music is world-class, sure, and never predictable or rote. As bassist William Parker, one of the event’s founding figures, told me for a 2010 Wall Street Journal piece: “The aesthetic isn’t so easy to define. Nobody does notated pieces. There is improvisation in each band, which sometimes comes out of jazz, sometimes blues or world music or European music or just what I call the X-factor.”
So there’s that X-factor.
There’s also dance, poetry, film, visual art, not to mention the one thing absent from most of the festivals that dot New York from June through August—a true and deep sense of community.
That community is filled with musicians who defy easy description. Some, like Cooper Moore, design and build their own instruments. Some, like Parker, don’t so much bend rules as craft their own systems for musical development. Even in such a context, this year’s honoree for Lifetime Achievement (there’s one showcased at each Vision Fest), Charles Gayle, stands out—for the peculiar beauty of his music and his unwavering pursuit of elusive truths through art. Not to mention his versatility: Gayle, a singularly expressive saxophonist, is also a compelling player on piano and bass.
On opening night of this year’s festival, which runs from June 11 through June 15 at Brooklyn’s Roulette, Gayle will play all three instruments in separate sets during an evening in his honor. The last of these features an all-star “Vision Artist Orchestra” that includes tenor saxophonist Kidd Jordan. Jordan is revered as an educator and mentor in his hometown, New Orleans, yet his music is rarely heard and not often genuinely appreciated there. At the Vision Festival each year, Jordan is received in deserving fashion, as a conquering hero. Continue reading “New York's Vision Festival Honors Its Heroes And Gathers Its Tribe”
Percussionist Román Díaz leads a his new project, El Gallo Mistico, during “Jazz at the Crossroads: The Dance of Eleggua" at Minton's Supper Club in Harlem.
I’d not yet been to Minton’s, the new supper club that revives a storied Harlem name on 118th Street, until this week.
I can tell you that the cuisine, under the direction of executive chef Alexander Smalls, is both fine and creative. But a new series “Jazz at the Crossroads: The Dance of Eleggua,” which continues each Tuesday night through August, was the real lure for me.
This past Tuesday, alto saxophonist Yosvany Terry and his brother, bassist Yunior Terry, who were born in the town of Florida, in Cuba’s Camagüey province, and live in New York City, performed in a group that showcased their father, Eladio “Don Pancho” Terry. The elder Terry is a violinist the founder and director of the “Orquesta Maravillas de Florida,” an important band in the Cuban charanga style. He is, perhaps most notably, a master of the chekeré, the beaded gourd used for percussion; in his hands, it can direct a group with the authority and flair of drummer Roy Haynes’s trap set. The group at Minton’s performed a mixture of traditional charanga tunes and more modern jazz, some drawn from the books of Yosvany Terry’s brilliant and forward-leaning bands. Yet this was no survey or fusion; the set was an example of how Afro Latin music, grounded in traditional rhythms and flecked with modern jazz’s full stylistic palette, can flow pretty much wherever it wants without losing its spiritual heft and sense of musical purpose.
That’s what this new series is about, according to Dita Sullivan, whose recent credits along similar lines “New Dimensions in Jazz” and “A Cuban Drum Series,” both produced for Manhattan’s Jazz Standard. Continue reading “Dancing With Eleggua, Weekly, at Minton's in Harlem”
The sky was blue, the sun bright and the temperature comfortably cool on a late-April Friday for the start of the annual New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival.
The prior day, the atmosphere within New Orleans city council chamber was overheated, the mood dark for the business at hand: a proposed revision to the city’s sound ordinance, the product of some five years of discussion and research, several recent months of impassioned activism and a last-minute flurry of behind-the scenes emails. If such a policy debate seemed far removed from jazzfest’s visceral pleasures, it likely had greater bearing on the practice of New Orleans jazz and cultural heritage.
At the Fair Grounds, the racetrack that becomes an outdoor music venue each Spring, the pleasant forecast held through jazzfest’s seven days of programming—good news for the performers and audiences at the event’s dozen stages and its many vendors of food and crafts.
Back at City Hall, the outlook for policy reforms remained cloudy at best once the city council deadlocked, 3-3, thus balking at a proposed ordinance revision.
The revisions would have dictated new methods of measurement and acceptable decibel levels for sound along a particularly loud section of the French Quarter’s Bourbon Street (based on an exhaustive study by acoustician David Woolworth, whose Oxford, Miss.-based firm was hired by the city council).
Perhaps more to the point for musicians and their supporters, the revised ordinance would have accomplished two citywide goals: decriminalizing violations to the sound ordinance (subjecting musicians and others to fines but not to potential arrest); and rescinding Section 66-205, which states: “It shall be unlawful for any person to play musical instruments on public rights-of-way between the hours of 8:00 p.m. and 9:00 a.m.”
Never mind that many tourists come to New Orleans with the specific expectation of happening upon musical instruments being played on street after 8pm. And never mind that City Attorney Sharonda Williams argued on that Thursday before the city council that the curfew—first enacted in 1956—was unconstitutional. Williams explained that the present law was inconsistent with Supreme Court precedent establishing music as protected speech in the first place, and that any restrictions on such need be “content neutral and narrowly tailored.” She said, “The concern here is that this is about musical instruments. It’s not even about music in general. It is not about recording music. It is not about sound. It’s about a particular class of people.”
In her final meeting as council member before stepping down, following the recent election, Jackie Clarkson sought to get around that thorny issue by proposing an extension of the curfew restrictions, to read: “It shall be unlawful to operate or play any radio, television, phonograph, musical instrument, loudspeaker or sound emanating device….” Clarkson, who is white, seemed genuinely surprised when another council member, James Gray, who is black, commented that “there are many black men on the corner who won’t understand that city council passed a rule that tells a police officer that if anyone is on the corner with any sound emitting device they will be cited.”
This year wasn’t the first time the annual Jazz & Heritage Festival formed ironic contrast to the truth beyond the Fair Grounds, and pointed to New Orleans jazz and heritage in terms of protected forms of speech. In 2007, three days before members of the Nine Times Social Aid & Pleasure Club danced their way through Fair Grounds—in the festival’s mock second-line parade with a brass bands—its members were represented in federal court, fighting to protect that century-old tradition as it played out in real streets. A consortium of Social Aid & Pleasure clubs filed a lawsuit against the city, and defeated jacked-up permit fees for weekly second-line parades on First Amendment grounds. (The Nine Times club members were out in force during jazzfest’s first weekend.)
At the city council meeting the day before jazzfest’s start, attorney Ashlye Keaton gave some longview context to all of this, citing early 19th-century mayoral designation of Congo Square as a place for African drumming, and more recent history: the moment in June 2010 when quality-of-life officer Ronald Jones Jr. served notice on the TBC Brass Band (which stands for To Be Continued, as in a cultural tradition). The band had set up shop, just as they’d been doing most Tuesdays through Sundays since 2002, on the corner of Bourbon Street and Canal, in front of the Foot Locker store. At issue were two ordinances, including the above-mentioned Section 66-205. As NOPD spokesman Bob Young described it to me in 2010, “This is not enforcement per se. No one was cited. They were presented with a letter advising the musicians that they were in violation of the law.” Still, serving notice of these ordinances and requiring signed acknowledgment seemed tantamount to enforcement. At least the message was clear enough: Your next note is illegal.
At this year’s event, the TBC Brass Band played one of jazzfest’s sought-after stages, not coincidentally named for Congo Square. After the band’s well-received set, TBC trombonist Joe Maize, explained that the band no longer played on that Bourbon Street corner. “We were going to graduate from playing on that spot anyway,” he told me. “But we always think about the younger generation. If they can’t play on the street the way we did, they’re not going to have the chance to learn, like we did, how to reach an audience and how to control an audience. If we wouldn’t have played on that spot for a decade, we wouldn’t have been able to play here today.”
New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu, who opened his second term with an impassioned inaugural speech on May 6 at a recently renovated Saenger Theater, was at the jazzfest press tent four days earlier, for an announcement that Shell will continue as the event’s presenting sponsor through 2019, when the festival celebrates its 50th anniversary. When I asked him about the city council’s failure to revise the sound ordinance, Landrieu said he was encouraged about the discussions to date, and that he hoped a reconstituted council (as of May) would find proper legislation. As for the curfew? “It has to go,” he said, “because it focuses on a narrow set of people, and not on a level of noise.”
More recently, Scott Hutcheson, Advisor to the Mayor for Cultural Economy, sent me the following comment via email regarding the curfew: “Upon advice of the City Attorney, the enforcement for the sound ordinance will concentrate on the issues of sound levels at certain times which are clearly outlined in Table 1 of the ordinance and which addresses these levels as they concern public rights of way. We will work on addressing the curfew specifically with the new Council and continue to stand by the City Attorney’s advice on the constitutionality issues raised by the curfew itself.”
It is easy to dismiss the legitimate concerns of residents and business owners regarding noise and nuisance, and fundamental right to privacy and peace. One also runs the risk of caricature when demonizing those, such as members of two groups, Vieux Carre Property Owners, Residents and Associates and French Quarter Citizens, which have been especially active around these issues, as opponents of culture. And yet that’s how the battle lines have generally been drawn—well-heeled residents groups with easy access to power against musicians and supporters who feel embattled and too often shut out of the process. It is unreasonable to expect residents to accept any level of sound at any time in the name of culture. It is equally unreasonable to, for instance, expect a brass band member to know that a police officer has been instructed to ignore an ordinance outlawing his street performance, or to feel sanguine in that knowledge if he did. And, more to the point, it is hard to understand how a city that markets itself as “music city” would leave an unconstitutional ordinance on the books that specifically targets musicians, leaving revived enforcement as an option should political winds or neighborhood profiles change. As a matter of principle, the curfew is indefensible. As a practical matter, it’s just bad policy. As a symbol, it’s even worse. By removing it, and by creating clear and enforceable limits to sound based on time, place and scientific measurement, the city council can pursue legitimate policy rather than fuel ongoing conflict.
Mayor Landrieu appears to understand that. At jazzfest, he told me, “There is a way to organize culture without killing it.” However one feels about attempts to organize culture in principle, that’s the job of coherent policymaking.
The process itself is revealing. There was an odd but telling moment during the city council committee public comment by Arline Bronzaft, who as advised four different New York City administrations on noise issues and was present at the request of Bronzaft seized upon the move away from the word “noise” and toward “sound” in describing the issue and even naming the new ordinance: “Mr. Woolworth deemed ‘sound’ to be a more respectable word than ‘noise’ because sounds can be both pleasant and unpleasant whereas noise is definitely deemed to be unpleasant to the listener.” David Freedman, general manager of listener-supported WWOZ-FM (by any estimation the flagship station for New Orleans culture) offered a rebuttal of sorts with his public comment: “To treat New Orleans music performance as just another unwanted, uncontrollable and unpredictable noise—is to totally not get the centrality of this special joyful noise to the identity of our culture and economy.”
Freedman questioned the appropriateness of Bronzaft’s opinion: “Now, after five years of discussion among those of us most passionate about this issue, and five weeks of intense activity among those of us most affected by excessive sound, comes in our midst people from out of town who presume to tell us what is good for us in New Orleans.”
I agree with one aspect of Freedman’s attitude—the identity and economy of New Orleans are, as he put it, “dependent on the tourist experience driven by their expectations of engaging in our local music culture in the clubs and on the streets” in ways that defy any meaningful correlation to New York City. For those who live in New Orleans, those who travel there regularly in real life or just in their minds and hearts and those who treasure its culture from afar, this story demands attention. At a moment when an as-yet-undefined “new” New Orleans rubs up against whatever is left of the old one, the present issue speaks volumes regarding what is exceptional about New Orleans, and how the city might best support and nurture (as opposed to simply promote) that.
Ask a trombonist like Joe Maize or another musician, or anyone in the committed community that keeps culture at the core of everyday New Orleans life—second-line paraders, Mardi Gras Indians, club owners, lawyers and the hundreds mobilized through the nonprofit Music and Culture Coalition of New Orleans (MACCNO)—and they’ll tell you that current calls for change regard two things more so than any specific decibel levels: Policies that nurture and protect a still-vital indigenous and seats for culture-bearers at the policymaking table. The former highlights what has always been exceptional about New Orleans. The latter is what any American city, including New York, needs if it values culture on a par with commerce.
In that way, this story also highlights one way in which New Orleans is not particularly exceptional. In New York, and in nearly every city with a distinctive cultural history (which is to say most cities), the process of cultural policy inevitably confronts a question: What happens when those who spark redevelopment in a city build upon the cachet of culture but don’t want that culture next door?
Bronzaft’s testimony notwithstanding, it isn’t hard to connect what’s going on in New Orleans with, say, New York City, in many respects. I was struck by what Mary Schmidt Campbell, dean of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and former Commissioner of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, had to say at a recent panel discussion titled “Jazz and New York: A Fragile Economy,” hosted by the City University of New York’s Graduate Center. When asked by critic Gary Giddins about the vitality of Manhattan’s so-called “jazz loft scene” during the 1970s and ’80s, Campbell said, “It’s a real paradox. The poverty of the city during that time, in an ironic way, worked to the advantage of artists. Now, as neighborhoods have grown more attractive, the very artists who pioneered have to find somewhere else to live and work. We need to completely rethink what kind of investment we want to make in culture before it’s too late.”
Not long before I left New Orleans, I sat on the front porch of clarinetist Evan Christopher, who arrived in New Orleans 20 years ago in search of what he calls “a specific clarinet language.” Christopher now part of the city’s distinctive cultural landscape, though in contexts far removed from the streets (in between jazzfest weekends, among the best live-music offerings was a performance by Christopher’s Django à la Créole, at a venue he developed for himself, within a MidCity’s wine bar). Still, his perspective speaks well to this moment.
“For me, the battle is not about our right to do something,” he told me. “The battle is to keep neighborhoods vibrant. The battle is about framing our culture in a way where it’s connected to a sense of how people live here. And how visitors engage the notion of living here.” Troy "Trombone Shorty" Andrews, who grew up in he Tremé neighborhood, closing jazzfest's Acura Stage on May 4
The next day, having reveled in both jazzfest’s offerings and the wealth of great gigs in between the Fair Grounds events, I stood on North Robertson Street, just off St. Philip, in Tremé, for another now-annual celebration, Tuba Fats Tuesday. It’s named for Anthony “Tuba Fats” Lacen, who died in 2004 and who was a mentor to many of the musicians who now define New Orleans brass-band tradition. In the lot next to the Candlelight Lounge, where the Treme Brass Band still holds court weekly, near the spot where a musical procession for another deceased tuba player was notably shut down by police in 2007, stirring up much controversy, the TBC Brass Band played, and then gave way to a yet younger band. Two boys, no more than 8 or 9, danced with two men who looked to be in their seventies or eighties. Tremé, long a hothouse for New Orleans indigenous culture, is fast changing, gentrifying during the past several years more rapidly then any such transformation I’ve seen in New York. I couldn’t tell if what was going on that Tuesday was a last glimmer of something soon gone or a fresh spark.
The answer lies as much in the actions and attitudes, the ordinances and intentions of city council as much as in the notes issued from trumpets and trombones, and the beats to which the faithful dance. Images: flag, Douglas Mason; Trombone Shorty, Zack Smith, both courtesy of New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival
Time flies. When I got a call from Jen Shyu the other day, we realized it had been more than two years since last we spoke at her Bronx apartment for a Wall Street Journal story.
Here’s how I began that piece:
Lettered tiles crisscrossed the coffee table in singer Jen Shyu’s Bronx apartment, remnants of an unfinished game of Bananagrams—a sped-up, free-form variant of Scrabble. How fitting. A playful yet rigorous approach to language animates her stirring music. Sounding fierce at times, ruminative at others, displaying tonal precision and an intuitive rhythmic sense, Ms. Shyu is among New York’s most invigorating vocal presences. And perhaps the most enigmatic.
Yet it’s inadequate to call Shyu a singer. In a video for her new multi-media work, “Solo Rites: Seven Breaths,”—a collaboration with the celebrated Indonesian director, Garin Nugroho—she calls herself “an experimental jazz vocalist and composer, a multi-instrumentalist, dancer and researcher”—which sounds like a mouthful yet also seems accurate.
When last we spoke, Shyu was about to leave for year in Indonesia, her great-great-grandmother’s birthplace, on a Fulbright scholarship to study dance and improvisational singing traditions. But her planned year in Indonesia turned into almost three, she explained, traveling also to South Korea, East Timor, and Vietnam, among other places, where she studied, composed, performed in villages, taught and, and collaborated with local artists.
Before she left, a friend urged her to watch Nugroho’s film, “Opera Jawa,” in which Shyu sensed the “fresh marriage of tradition and modernity I was seeking in my work.” Continue reading “Jen Shyu Returns Home & Unpacks Her Ancestry”
The rapper Nas will be touring this summer, performing in full the material from his breakthrough 1994 recording, “Illmatic,” 20 years after its initial release.
Blue Note Records, through its new parent company, Universal Music, has released an remastered and expanded edition of singer Cassandra Wilson’s “Blue Light ‘Till Dawn.” The new CD bears a sticker that says “20th anniversary edition,” which is sort of a fudge, mathwise—the CD originally came out in November, 1993. Yet that doesn’t discount the fact that, like Nas’s album, Wilson’s was a game-changer for artists, listeners and music labels. (Wilson’s U.S. tour, on which she’ll perform “Blue Light” material, begins May 3.)
There are attitudes and aesthetics that might link Wilson’s and Nas’s 1990s achievements. There’s also blood.
Nas’s dad, Olu Dara, a musician I’ve written about several times, played brilliant and concise cornet on Robert Johnson’s “Hellhound on My Trail,” on Wilson’s “Blue Light.” He’s from Natchez, Miss., not too far from Jackson, where Wilson was born and raised.
Dara lent Wilson more than just his distinctive tone: As she tol told me in an interview for Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal piece, Wilson gained from him this lesson—”to honor and not hide where I’m from.”
Part of Wilson’s awakening involved picking up the guitar she’d hidden in fear that “the ‘jazz police’ would come looking for it.” That one was a Martin acoustic. I like the photo above, because it shows her playing the red Fender she played recently for new project, Black Sun. Continue reading “When Cassandra Wilson Turned on Her Blue Light”
The Louis Armstrong Summer Jazz Camp 20th Anniversary Concert Series Fundraiser (May 1) will showcase tenor saxophonist Kidd Jordan
The good news: The New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival swung into gear last weekend with mostly sunny skies, moderate temperatures and three full days of music. On Saturday, you could have paraded through the Economy Hall tent behind the Treme Brass Band, caught Robert Plant deconstructing Led Zeppelin tunes with his fascinatingly weird Sensational Space Shifters band at the Samsung Galaxy Stage, and ended up at the Jazz Tent, where saxophonist Branford Marsalis’s band delivered a smart, tight and imaginative dose of jazz-quartet interplay. On Sunday, back at the Jazz tent, you could have heard singer John Boutté doing what he always does, just a little better.
The bad news: The day before jazzfest kicked into gear, the New Orleans City Council punted on a chance to rescind a shameful (not to mention unconstitutional) 1954 ordinance that declares: “It shall be unlawful for any person to play musical instruments on public rights-of-way between the hours of 8:00 p.m. and 9:00 a.m.” It was a sour note of legislative dysfunction in a city yet to discover quite how to support its indigenous culture.
(Here’s some background to that issue, and here’s Richard Rainey’s Times-Picayune piece reporting on that council meeting.)
I’ll have more to say about all that—the story’s far from through—and more to report from jazzfest, which continues Thursday through Sunday.
Often the best part of jazzfest in New Orleans is the stuff that happens in between weekends at the Fair Grounds, the horseracing track that becomes a multistage arena once a year. This year, some of these events are benefits. Here are a few: Continue reading “Between Jazzfest Weekends, New Orleans Honors Elders and Supports Young Musicians”
A January protest over sound ordinances inside New Orleans city council chambers.
I’ve seen New Orleans jazz culture through fresh eyes this past week, those of my five-year-old son Sam: Sunday afternoon, perched atop my shoulders, looking down as the TBC Brass Band sounded off while members of the Pigeon Town Steppers Social Aid & Pleasure Club, one by one, came out the door of Silkey’s Lounge to begin their annual second-line parade; and Monday evening, sitting cross-legged on a front-row cushion at Preservation Hall, looking up as trumpeter Leroy Jones led a sextet through “St. James Infirmary.”
I’m also seeing it through eyes that have grown jaundiced—my own—by the tensions surrounding a culture that defines and uplifts New Orleans and yet seems always embattled. Such was my feeling as I sat on Monday morning at City Hall for a meeting of the city council’s Housing and Human Needs Committee and listened to public discussion of a proposed revision to the city’s sound ordinance. This particular matter, which has great relevance to the daily lives of brass-band musicians and other culture bearers as well as to property owners and club owners, has been the source of much controversy for nearly five years.
Sam and his mom are headed back to New York City. I’m staying put for another couple weeks. Before I head to the Fair Grounds this weekend for the annual Jazz & Heritage Festival, I’ll be back at city council chambers tomorrow for what may or may not be a decisive moment regarding the city’s sound ordinance and its approach to cultural policy.
There’s a rich and urgent story concerning a constellation of ordinances that have long inhibited New Orleans jazz culture and a new groundswell of activism surrounding them, in a city still redefining its identity.
The current skirmish was sparked in part by an incident in 2010, when the TBC band was served notice by police shortly after setting up shop, just as they’ve been doing most Tuesdays through Sundays since 2002, on the corner of Bourbon Street and Canal, in front of the Foot Locker store. The band had run afoul of Section 66-205, which says, “It shall be unlawful for any person to play musical instruments on public rights-of-way between the hours of 8:00 p.m. and 9:00 a.m.”
Yet most of the lobbying and legislating in recent months have centered around setting acceptable decibel-level limits to sound—a laudable goal that has given rise to some fascinating science (chiefly from David Woolworth, whose Oxford, Miss.-based firm was hired to consult) and some serious local infighting. Continue reading “Much Noise About Sound: New Orleans Reforms (Maybe) Its Ordinances”
