Save Our Brass!

photo by Chris Carson

   What you don't hear too often in the surreal but fading news of tragedy and rescue out of the blown out neighborhoods of New Orleans is a secret of sound woven deep between the washed away communities, and homes and families-for generations moving across these once beautiful streets-and just like that, all of it gone. The whole world is close to losing one of the very few true American sounds. The New Orleans neighborhoods swallowed by the winds and toxic sea-the Ninth Ward, a sweep of the Treme, all of New Orleans East, Gentility, Mid City, the Sixth Ward-held the jewels of the city. The jewels that are the people who've inherited the ancient African and Indian rhythms and poured it out into the irreplaceable New Orleans beat. Once a great port of the south, the gateway of the Mississippi, the city became a collision of cultures let loose and free, birthing heroes like Buddy Bolden, Mahalia Jackson, Louis Armstrong, Wynton Marsalis, Branford Marsalis, Duke Ellington, Fats Domino, Louie Prima, Tuba Fats, Professor Longhair, to name a few. The Hot Eight Brass Band, The Rebirth Brass Band, The Soul Rebels, the Lil' Stooges, The New Birth Brass Band, the Treme Brass Band, Preservation Hall, The Pinnettes, Coolbone, the Lil' Rascals, playing all over the city in the big and small clubs, out on the streets during the weekly Social and Pleasure Club Sunday Second Line parades, these keepers of sound, the streets where folks used to walk up and down and come to learn the beat of this city which is the backbone rhythm flowing behind nearly all the American music you might happen to hear whether you feel it and know it or not. All gone in a way it might not come back. A modern Diaspora. No homes to come back to. No system to fit back in. Instruments gone. Scattered. So like that, in our time a slim chance to support and preserve a piece of unique sound which allows us to enjoy something beautiful you won't ever hear pure anywhere else. The real question becoming what we all might lose if we don't.

Though clearly influenced by the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, this project serves multiple and equally important purposes outside of hurricane relief:

1. Provides the opportunity for students and the public to learn about and experience a cultural tradition seldom heard in this area.
2. Represents an important contribution to keeping this cultural tradition alive at a time when it is difficult to continue in its New Orleans home.
3. Provides work for individual musicians, otherwise many will have to find non-musical work in other communities -- a big threat to continuing the unique musical traditions of New Orleans if they don't return!
4. Creates a positive and energetic cultural picture of New Orleans, to help combat or even displace the negative images we are being currently bombarded with, and a way for students and the community to respond to the disaster in a positive way.