Gretchen Caverly

1. In New Orleans, It Bubbles Up From the Streets Authenticity and Identity in the Post-Katrina Music Scene Gretchen Caverly

2. Research Questions • What are characteristics or trends in authentic New Orleans music? • What are some effects of Hurricane Katrina on the New Orleans music scene?

3. 12 formal interviews Men and women More white than black informants Either professional musicians or professionally involved with the music scene Informants

4. Fieldwork • Musical performances in different areas of the city (uptown and downtown) • Mostly in clubs or music venues, some street music • December 2007/January 2008

5. Artistic Authenticity Culture as art Specific traits, such as technical, stylistic details Subcultural Authenticity “Natural to the community” A holistic way of life Authenticity (Thornton 1996)

6. “When you listen to the music you can look at two things, percussion and melody. Or harmony rather. Percussion is syncopated, and they have a particular pulse, the Hey Pocky Way groove or whatever you want to call it. …then harmonically you have this thing that is true of blues music all over the south, where they mess with the minor third and the major third, make them very ambiguous… if you make it ambiguous you make it a certain kind of feeling that no one can really explain and that’s what sums up the blues. And then you can get to flatted fifths and minor sevenths and other stuff too but essentially New Orleans has all that stuff but it also has a very strong tradition of very complex, sophisticated harmonic arrangement. A lot of the Creole musicians play classics and had to in order to get work. So it’s a world removed from the blues you’d hear in Mississippi or Texas. Old New Orleans music was very very sophisticated and the players were very good. Also it’s predominately a horn town, so most of the songs are in the flat keys, unlike Mississippi or Texas or Chicago, which were dominated by guitars.”

7. syncopated, pulsing percussion ambiguous minor-major third complex harmonic arrangement heavy brass influence Artistic Authenticity

8. Subcultural Authenticity Physical Spaces and Events Interactive Performances Participation

9. “They [Astral Project] played at Rock n’ Bowl. Which is very dancing and zydeco, R&B type place. And people got right up front, like they normally do, whoever’s playing, George Porter, Snooks [Eaglin], whoever it is, and they started swaying to the music and before long Astral Project, who are all world class musicians and can play any style, their music was changing in reaction to the fact that people were participating. So the more their music changed, the more people began to participate, and by the end of the set, the dance floor was as crowded as if it was the Neville Brothers, and everyone was rocking out saying, little did they know, without really realizing they were listening to a band that usually plays in a sit down setting, nobody talking, nobody smoking, and the people nursing their beers! So you know countless examples of that.”

10. “…the Stooges Brass Band, young guys, I’ve been watching them since probably, shit probably, bet you nobody in the band’s over twenty five. And I’ve been watching them play since they were, you know, twelve, thirteen, fourteen years old. And they were in Atlanta, and I saw them yesterday, the guy the leader of the band, and I asked him, he said, ‘Oh man, Atlanta didn’t know what to do with us!’ They still don’t! They still don’t, you know?’ So when I saw them they actually came and played in Chicago when I was there and it was the strangest thing, you know, because here you have this amazing New Orleans brass band, that just generates such energy when they play for New Orleanians that people just dance, and everyone was just standing watchin’ em. And you could sense that they were like, come on people, somebody please shake a tail feather!”

11. Hurricane Katrina: Celebration and Escape The Immediate The Lingering

12. The Immediate “Symbols are, in the first place, highly pertinent to a people’s reaction to disaster. Symbols influence shared behavior. Equally important, symbols can be utilized and manipulated by different factors involved in a disaster, and thus become political. Disaster spoils pattern, and matters in the state of disruption become less restricted. The potential for change becomes greater, to the point that disorder itself can become part of the pattern. …as for individuals facing or experiencing catastrophe, they engage the symbols evoking their predicament in an almost visceral manner. …the symbolic process provides a continual feedback system in which the symbol must be integrated with experience if a deeper understanding is to be the end result.” Anthony Oliver-Smith, 2004

13. “After Katrina it was amazing. I mean this place [the Maple Leaf] was ground zero… They fired up generators, they didn’t have ice, they didn’t have anything! They powered the band with the generator, you know, and they had to play, I think the music started at like four in the afternoon because the curfew was like eight o’clock! And it was the same thing, it was like people going wild, like it was four in the morning and they were all on acid during Mardi Gras. But it wasn’t. It was just people with that energy.” Jay

14. “I got back as soon as I could. I think it was about eight to ten weeks after the storm… we did do a gig fairly soon, yeah…. I think within a day or two of getting back we were at the Maple Leaf [Bar] playing. And everyone was still shell-shocked, and really no one knew what the long-term implications were, and was just worn out and weary and tired and beaten up, so it felt pretty good actually to get up and play some funk, and everyone in the audience was ready for it, it was good actually. … It was one of those situations where the music is just very medicinal, you could just tell it was making everybody feel better to have some music. It was sort of a collective sigh of relief, chugging of beers.” John C.

15. “People go to see us play for two reasons: to celebrate life and to escape life. After Katrina, there was a lot more escape—a lot of folks who were gutting houses, dealing with Hurricane Katrina life, and they came out to the music and thanked us. I realized about three to five months afterwards that the music was an important escape, a means of letting go before returning to their normal lives. The bars were meeting grounds where people went to figure out what was going on. The music was key in holding the city together at that time.” John G.

16. The Lingering • Loss of Youth Music Culture • Creeping Homogenization • Expanding the realm of the Jazz Band

17. “Katrina will affect the future because kids who learn to play the trumpet in elementary school and around the corner and in the communities they live in are scattered now. The Treme, which is where the jazz bands are from, is scattered. The school music programs where kids started playing their music aren’t there now. Five, ten, fifteen years in the future will see a big shift in the base of the musical community.” John G.

18. “Unfortunately their lofty ideas are part of mainstream America, you know? And someone needs to take them by the hand and say, this is how we behave here.” Jay

19. Other Research Questions • Do characteristics of the New Orleans music scene correspond with characteristics that are traditionally correlated with third world countries? • How do the ways that these characteristics are perceived affect the relationship between New Orleans and the rest of the United States? • What are the implications of these perceptions for New Orleanian musicians, both at home and on tour?

20. Special Thanks To: • The Sociology/Anthropology department, especially Dr. Ben Feinberg and Dr. Lara Vance, for their support and forbearance this year • Candace Anthony, for midnight brainstorming sessions and much more • Jenny Bagert, without whom this project would have been completely impossible • Jonno Frischberg, for opening the door • Family and Friends, who have provided boundless support, inspiration, and love throughout this process

21. Questions?

22. Works Cited • Campanella, Richard. 2006. Geographies of New Orleans: Urban Fabrics Before the Storm. Lafayette, LA: Center for Louisiana Studies • Cantwell, Robert. 1993. Ethnomimesis: folklife and the representation of culture. Chapel Hill, NC: University of Chapel Hill. • Etheridge, Robbie. 2006. Bearing Witness: Assumptions, realities, and the Otherizing of Katrina. American Anthropologist. 108(4): 799-813. • Firth, Raymond W. 1973. Symbols: public and private. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. • Gaunt, Kyra. 2002. Got Rhythm?: difficult encounters in theory and practice and other participatory discrepancies in music. City and Society. 14(1): 119-140. • Hebdige, Dick. 2002. Subculture: the meaning of style. New York, NY: Routledge. • Jencson, Linda. 2001. Disastrous Rites: Liminality and Communitas in a Flood Crisis. • Anthropology and Humanism. 26(1): 46-58. Jenkins, Henry. 2006. People from That Part of the World: The Politics of Dislocation. • Cultural Anthropology. 21(3): 469-486. • Keil, Charles. 1987. Participatory Discrepancies and the Power of Music. Cultural Anthropology 2(3): 275-283. • Lipitz, George. 2006. Learning from New Orleans: The Social Warrant of Hostile Privatism and Competitive Consumer Citizenship. Cultural Anthropology. 21(3): 451-468. • Meintjes, Louise. 2003. Sound of Africa!. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. • Oliver-Smith, Anthony, Hoffman (Ed.). 2002. Catastrophe and Culture: The Anthropology of Disaster. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press.

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