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.”
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
Much Noise About Sound: New Orleans Reforms (Maybe) Its Ordinances
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”
Whole Gritty City
It’s not often that a documentary about how real culture transforms actual lives airs on Saturday-night network TV.
I’m not talking about a lucky aspirant getting plucked out of ordinary existence and voted into stardom by a celebrity panel (though I suppose that’s a form of transformation, too, and maybe even a vehicle for someone’s idea of culture).
What I mean is the way that rigorous and deep training by musicians steeped in both excellence and jazz culture offers boys and girls in New Orleans a path away from danger and despair and toward something admirable, promising and, yes, frequently swinging.
That’s the story told by “The Whole Gritty City,” a poignant, feature-length documentary that goes behind the scenes with three dedicated New Orleans marching band directors— Wilbert Rawlins Jr., Lonzie Jackson and Derrick Tabb—and that airs this Saturday, Feb. 15 (9pm EST, 8 Central). No narration. No voiceover commentary. Just real life, real music and the connections and contrasts between the two. And sometimes the camera is held by one of those young musicians. (You can find a trailer here, and another website with useful links here.)
The film is billed as “48 Hours Presents: The Whole Gritty City,” and the link to the true-crime newsmagazine program makes sense, not just because the school-based marching-band programs in New Orleans may be among the city’s most effective safeguards against violent crime, but due to the genesis of the film itself.
I first met Richard Barber, a “48 Hours” editor-producer (who created this film with cinematographer and photojournalist Andre Lambertson) in early 2007, in New Orleans. Barber was researching a “48 Hours” episode investigating two murders that sent shock waves through New Orleans. Continue reading “Whole Gritty City”
New Orleans Hears Arguments About Noise Ordinance, as Ray Nagin Faces Charges
I’m tempted to call today “Ray Nagin Faces Federal Charges Day.”
Just a week after celebrating the inspiring life and legacy of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, and reliving the messages within his memorable sentences, comes the beginning of a high-stakes public corruption trial against former New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin.
Nagin, who was the mayor that faced the fallout following the 2005 levee failures and flood in New Orleans, now faces a different sort of fallout. And we’re considering the message that might be contained in a different sort of memorable sentence. (Here’s a neat timeline of how Nagin got to this moment.)
Nagin was also the mayor who presided over a ravaged New Orleans that didn’t exactly welcome its indigenous jazz culture back in the wake of the flood. If you’ve been reading me, you know that I’ve stayed pinned to that story. (Here’s one chapter, from 2007.)
So today, I’ll not follow Nagin’s drama and instead stay glued to my screen, watching live online coverage of a different kind of public hearing in New Orleans—a meeting of the city council’s Housing and Human Needs Committee, to discuss a hot-button issue of vital importance: a revision to the city’s sound ordinance. Continue reading “New Orleans Hears Arguments About Noise Ordinance, as Ray Nagin Faces Charges”
Glorious Noises and Inglorious Ordinances
I took this picture yesterday in New Orleans—not at night in a music club, but rather shortly past noon on Friday in the city council chamber. There were five sousaphones, six trombones and a good many saxophones, trumpets, drums and guitars, not to mention the guy with the harmonica. To say that these musicians and the roughly three hundred people following them stormed city hall would be incorrect. City officials opened the door and ushered them in. Yet those assembled marched purposefully, to take a stand.
“We’re here to bury the noise ordinance,” said Glen David Andrews, among the city’s most recognizable players, before raising his trombone and leading a dirge-like rendition of the hymn, “Just a Closer Walk With Thee,” which can be heard at nearly any jazz funeral before the body is “cut loose” and the spirit set free.
The body politic that had set Friday as the date for a Housing and Human Needs Committee meeting wasn’t present, save for one city council member and a few staffers. That meeting—expressly meant to invite public comment about a revision to the city’s noise ordinance that the council proposed right before Christmas, and around which has since grown a steady groundswell of concern and protest—was canceled Thursday evening. (A good primer on the background was provided by Richard A. Webster’s piece on Thursday for The Times-Picayune’s Nola.com site.)
Andrews’ sentiment notwithstanding, the noise ordinance at issue isn’t dead and buried, just postponed and slated for further revision. The spirit of this next proposal remains an open question. Though the noon committee meeting didn’t happen, a rally scheduled for 11am at Duncan Plaza, just across from City Hall, did. When it was over, the musicians and participants headed over to City Hall, filling the meeting chamber. Soon the musicmaking gave way to individual testimonies. With local elections just weeks away, it was noteworthy that the only council member in chambers to listen, LaToya Cantrell, was also the only one running unopposed. The image of musicians, club owners, culture-loving locals and out-of-towners speaking before a panel of mostly empty chairs seemed a metaphor for a policymaking process that appears out of sync with, and often out of sight of, its constituency. Yet these comments were duly recorded, and they could, along with the sheer presence of hundreds in the chamber, enlighten the next legislative step.
I’d half-expected the council to cancel the meeting. But I didn’t expect a text informing me so just as was boarding a Thursday-night flight. I got on anyway because I’ve been following this particular issue for nearly four years—here’s one piece from back then—and because, for the past eight, I’ve tried to trace a larger context of New Orleans ordinances and enforcement strategies that, in a city whose calling card is live music and spontaneous cultural expression, have inhibited or even repressed that expression for a very long time—according to the timeline included in Freddi Williams Evans’ book, “Congo Square: African Roots in New Orleans,” roughly 200 years.
I needed to show up and stay on the story. And besides: Who gets off a plane that’s about to head to New Orleans?
Yet I don’t want to editorialize here, or cast anyone as hero or villain. It’s easy to frame a situation that pits city officials and a small but influential pocket of homeowners and businesspeople against scores of musicians, club owners and music lovers as a culture war: And to some extent there is one—maybe always has been one—going in in New Orleans. But like all exercises in policy as it affects people’s lives and livelihoods and most stories in general, the truth is more nuanced and complex than simply good against bad or right versus wrong.
I intend to write at greater length and with more depth and balance about this situation as it continues to play out. In the coming days, I plan to speak with the city council members and supporters of the original ordinance that I’d hoped to quote from the canceled meeting. According the a statement posted on the city council website Thursday evening, a new ordinance proposal will be put forth soon, with a meeting scheduled Jan. 27 for public comment. It’s unclear right now precisely who is working on this revision, when it will be made public and what it will say.
I will say this about the previous proposal. By and large, the musicians didn’t like it. Nor did many club owners. The acoustician hired by the city council to lend the hard science of decibel-level measurement and expertise in “sound management,” David Woolworth, felt it did not accurately reflect his findings and suggestions. Perhaps worse still, those in the city’s cultural community felt largely locked out of the process by which it was conceived. Still, if there is requisite political will, there is time and common ground enough for a meaningfully progressive compromise.
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.
I think 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?
This stuff is coming to a city council near you if it hasn’t already. (A piece by Matthew Kassel in Friday’s New York Observer, in which I’m quoted, gets at some of that as related to New York City.) At Friday’s rally, blue T-shirts bearing the slogan “Listen to Your City” were distributed by members of the Music and Culture Coalition of New Orleans (MaCCNO), a group that has lent focus and civility to the organizing around this and related issues, and which is a good clearinghouse for information about it all.
Before I left the city council chamber, attorney Mary Howell—who has worked on these issues for decades, and who wore the bright-green cap emblazoned with “Legal Observer” that, regrettably, has come to be commonplace at certain New Orleans parades and street-culture events—recalled a similar outcry and much smaller rally 17 years ago. That one followed the arrest of a group of musicians, mostly in their teens or younger, including Troy Andrews, better known these days as Trombone Shorty. Back then it was mostly kids out on Duncan Plaza, she said, saying essentially just, “Stop this.” She thought about how much more focused and better informed, let alone larger, the crowd on hand was this time around. “The message here is,” she said, “‘We’re ready for our seat at the table, and we’re demanding it.'” And once we were inside City Hall, she pointed out to me that someone had affixed a sticker to the city council seal on the chamber lectern.
I’ll hold my pen still beyond this for now. And I’ll simply spill out these quotes from the rally, as spoken by Sue Mobley and Hannah Kreiger-Benson, on behalf of MaCCNO. What follows are their words. More of mine to come.
The city council thought they could push an ordinance through under the cover of Christmas and throw out years of community input and their own commissioned study. And they thought that because it’s always been true. New Orleans uses its musicians and culture-bearers, its venues and cultural workers. They use us to drive the economy, to draw new talent, to provide the soundtrack of political rallies and marketing campaigns. But they treat the people who make the culture like second-class citizens, and they’ve gotten away with it forever. They assume we aren’t paying attention, that a one-day rally is all were capable of. And sometimes, that has been true. But it’s not true anymore….
Throughout MaCCNO’s work, we have seen the issues around regulation framed in the press and in our opposition’s statements, as a conflict: Musicians versus residents. That framing works on the assumption that resident equals upstanding citizen, and musician equals rabble-rouser who disturbs the quality of life. And it raises the really fundamental question of who gets to judge what is “good” and “bad” in our shared urban landscape. We live here. We work here. We vote here. We are the residents….
We’re here today celebrating a victory, but pushing back against this noise ordinance is just the beginning. In New Orleans, music and culture need a seat at the table. And the city council is just going to have to find a bigger table.
Photos: Above: Larry Blumenfeld: below: William Archambeault