A Night of Treme To Benefit the Make It Right Foundation Fund Raiser at the House of Blues
Decatur Street, French Quarter
Saturday night, August 28, 2010
New Orleans
8:45 PM
Bummer. It looked like I was going miss the biggest music event of the summer, the "Make It Right NOLA" Fund Raiser Brad Pitt’s organization was putting on tonight.
“We’ve been sold out for weeks,” the man said when I blithely walked up to buy a ticket at the box office on Decatur Street.
No wonder.
The A Night of Treme To Benefit the Make It Right Foundation concert featuring Lloyd Price, John Boutte, Jon Cleary, Irma Thomas, Coco Robichaud, Kermit Ruffins, Paul Sanchez, Doreen Ketchens, James Andrews, Rebirth Brass Band, and the Guardians of the Flame Mardi Gras Indians was a knockout lineup.
There’s gotta be a way, I thought, I’m gonna get inside.
For over an hour I maintained sentry duty, patrolling the 100 feet between box office window and alleyway entrance to the House of Blues. Irma Thomas, “The Soul Queen of New Orleans” emerged from a doorway next to my post after finishing her turn in the rotation at about 9:30 pm. Phyllis Montana LeBlanc, a resident of New Orleans East and major character in HBO’s Treme series, was standing a few feet away having a cigarette with some friends. I was awash in glitterati.
I’ve been watching a very busy, official-looking man in a dark blue suit who’s been pacing back and forth from the box office to the alleyway entrance to the House of Blues and handing envelopes with tickets to groups of well-heeled people.
“I came to New Orleans from Boston for the Rising Tide 5 New Media Conference today,” I started, in an attempt to get some credibility. “Any chance you have tickets?"
“We’re going to release some tickets from corporate sponsors who haven’t claimed them. Head down to the box office.”
I ran.
Five minutes later, I was inside what felt like one of those phone booths that college students try to fit into in massive numbers to achieve Guinness Book of Records status. Except this booth had fabulous music.
10 pm. Lloyd Price was just singing his last notes. I’d missed a sizable handful of acts but who cared. The energy inside was insane.
“We’re doing a Professor Longhair set,” James Andrews announced and launched into ”Big Chief.” Soon he was joined by his talented wife Karen Andrews for “Oo Poo Pa Doo,” a Jessie Hill song long associated with Professor Longhair (1918-1980), whose songs are indelibly associated with New Orleans.
Naturally, everyone in the house knew the choruses. A raucous serve and volley ensued. Andrews is a piece of work - dancing, playing, showing off - and the crowd loved it. “This is Treme talkin’,” he shouts, proclaiming New Orleans the center of the universe.
I hear a voice behind me saying, “There he goes braggin' again,” and felt someone tugging on my shirt.
Kenneth Terry, the great Treme Brass Band trumpet player I talked with at The Candlelight Lounge three nights before shouts, “Hey, how you doin’! I just played with Rebirth earlier tonight, playing with them again at the After Party outside on the patio. Try to get back there!”
The emcee gives a shout out to Shannon Brown, who’s been relentlessly pounding away on a huge drum set. “He was one of the first back here. There were no restaurants open and the only place we could eat was his kitchen. I’ve got to tell you, I love my momma’s cooking but Shannon gives her a run for her money.” Stories like this will be passed down like ones still circulating about Hurricane Betsy that crushed New Orleans in 1965.
Big Al Carson, mainstay of the Funky Pirate on Bourbon Street, romps into “It’s Carnival Time” with a Creole band backing him up. He's followed by John Boutte who sings a beautiful rendition of a gospel song “I’ll See You There” and wraps up with the "Treme" theme song (the one he sings on at the outset of every HBO Treme show), which, of course, everyone sings along with.
The Rebirth Brass Band, New Orleans crown jewel of brass bands, marches on stage (there's Kenneth Terry) with every performer I've seen to finish the Treme song with an avalanche of joyous sound. By this time the Make It Right Foundation’s bash has lifted the House of Blues foundation off its slab.
Earlier in the show, the Make It Right Executive Director introduced a smiling an impeccably dressed Melba Leggett Barnes, whose home at 1744 Tennessee Street Make It Right rebuilt.“I love my new house and want to thank Make It Right for their work.”
In a recent press release, Brad Pitt said, “While Katrina gave us the opportunity to think creatively about how to make green homes affordable for the low-income families who need them the most, it shouldn’t take a hurricane to make that happen in other cities. Our plan is to take what we have learned in New Orleans and help other communities build healthy, safe and affordable green homes. Our hope is to make these homes the norm, not the exception.”
There’s still a long way to go in rebuilding the Lower Ninth Ward but it would have been a much longer bleaker road had Brad Pitt not stepped in. Makes you wonder why the hell local, state, and federal officials couldn’t be making such good strides themselves.
More than 4000 homes in the Lower Ninth Ward were destroyed by the storm. The surge of water caused by the breach in the Industrial Canal levee washed many homes clean off their slab foundations.The Make It Right Foundation built 50 homes by December, 2009 and will have 150 built by December, 2010.
‘We’re gonna make New Orleans better one note at a time,” James Andrews shouts at the end of the show.
One note at a time, one house at a time, one neighborhood at a time…it will not be easy but if any city has the resilience to do it, it’s this one.
Trumpeter James Andrews...
.gets the house rockin' ...
The Guardians of the Flame Mardi Gras Indians Indians chant...
John Boutte sings gospel...
and everyone in a soaring finale singing "Treme"
Fuzzy photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.
New Orleans: On the Eve of 5th Anniversary of Katrina
“You’re not in America, you’re not in Louisiana, you’re in New Orleans.”
New Orleans cab driver August 7, 2010
That’s a pretty universal sentiment down here. When you stir the stew of music, culture, food, close knit neighborhoods, community action groups, crime, corruption, weather, category 5 hurricanes, and political screw ups with the cultures of Creole, African-American, French, Sicilian, and hardy settlers who originally populated the place and season it with how they manage to live together, you get “New Orleans”. By any metric, this mix of ingredients should not add up to a city its citizens would love. But it does.
Five years ago, Katrina drowned the city. The storm broke it in ways it wasn’t broken before. The black community that makes up the majority of the city remembers a history of being left to hang out to dry after Hurricane Betsy in 1965 and felt it happening again with Katrina in 2005. Conspiracy theories about how and why the levees failed persist in these communities.
Remember video clips of people in New Orleans waving “HELP US” signs from rooftops of houses in over 20 feet of water in the aftermath of Katrina in 2005. Remember wondering why the National Guard, Red Cross, and FEMA didn’t show up a day after CNN began filming the horror? Remember thinking the scene looked like it must be happening in some third world country an ocean away?
How does this city balance the duality of injustice and inequality on one hand and exuberance for life on the other by continuing to let the good times roll in their lovable quirky ways ? There’s an old Lloyd Price song titled, “I Don’t Know Why I Love You But I Do.” Maybe that’s how New Orleanians feel about their city.
This is my fifth visit to New Orleans since the storm. The fact that I love the city certainly colors my writing about it so here on the eve of the fifth anniversary of Katrina, there are some things I’m sorting out.
What kind of city could recover from this disaster? We’re talking about a city that had a crummy infrastructure, a pitiful school system, a police force known for brutality, a crooked politician to go along with every honest hard working one, and a slowly meandering undercurrent of racism perceived by the black residents.
I’m convinced this is the only city in the world that could have withstood the destruction -emotional and physical - and kept on keeping on. Maybe the fact the place was dysfunctional in its own idiosyncratic way helped prepare them for the aftermath. When I say it marches to the beat of a different drum, I mean that literally and metaphorically.
What did they have to hold on to when all hell broke loose in 2005 and the water filled their neighborhoods like a bathtub? Tires, planks, tree branches, and each other. They also had what no other city in America has. An attitude, a way of life, and a way of deflecting or absorbing all the bad juju and finding salvation in music, food, and family.
Still, New Orleans is far from recovered from Katrina’s assault August 29, 2005.
Katrina wasn’t particular. She hammered black and white residents with equal ferocity. Rebuilding is a maddeningly slow process. Tree branches and upside down cars and the contents of living rooms don’t block the roads today. Red tape, bureaucracy, and insurance companies continue to do that.
Charity Hospital, the one in which most of New Orleanians were born and hold in high regard, is closed and slated for possible demolition. A controversy rages over the demolition's effect on citizens and the neighborhood that will be torn down with it. There are still few local schools for neighborhoods like the Lower Ninth Ward and Charter Schools are a work in progress.
Of the five thousand who lived in the Lower Ninth, only a quarter have returned. The residents who owned their own homes there, which was most of them, have struggled to rebuild. In most cases, the only thing left of their houses is the concrete slab and the steps that led up to it.
Renters and the elderly have suffered the most. Housing stock has decreased, rents have soared. Out in the diasporas of Houston, Atlanta, and elsewhere, these people don’t have the economic wherewithal to return. The size and makeup of New Orleans 2010 is a "matter of wild uncertainty ” even after the 2010 census.
More than 3/4 of the state’s population was born in Louisiana. Many residents in New Orleans have never ventured far from their own neighborhoods. If these still-displaced people don’t return, the oral histories and the fabric of close-knit neighborhoods in every devastated area of the city will have drained away like household belongings in the flood water.
New Orleans was practicing Facebook long before the internet version was born. Social networking took place on front porches, in churches, social aid and pleasure clubs, music and food joints all over town. The storm drowned people. The resulting dislocation of residents threatened to drown a social network stretching back generations upon generations.
A big chunk of the people of color who were directly affected by the storm felt discarded, discounted, and disrespected. Many thought they were getting the shaft because they were black. After watching TV for two weeks after Katrina, and after learning the history about Hurricane Betsy in 1965 and the great flood of 1927, I see the reasons for their deep-seated distrust of government, and the essentially white power structure that runs it.
To add to African American distrust of the white power structure, after the flooding there was a movement to level the Lower Ninth Ward and pursue an urban renewal plan in their prized location, a potentially commercially-rich area. Residents drew the line. They hollered, petitioned, and stood up for their turf.
Their emotional levee held. The neighborhood is still there. Some homeowners rebuilt on their own. Organizations like Common Ground Relief are rebuilding houses one at a time. Brad Pitt’s “Make It Right” has quietly pitched in to build state of the art, elevated storm proof houses alongside of the traditional one story homes in the ward.
Pitt included residents in every single phase of the process, an example of how one white guy understood the process begins with the people who are being served.
“He’s beautiful,” said a young black taxi driver on August 5. He wasn’t talking about Pitt’s face.
The same driver said some residents of the Lower Ninth believed the government intentionally blew up the levee in their ward in 2005 (to protect other, read "white" neighborhoods in he city). He said his grandmother heard a low rumbling boom just before the levees flooded New Orleans when Hurricane Betsy ripped through the city in 1965.
“Could have been what happened this time,” he said matter of factly. “Just sayin’.”
He wasn’t the only one who wondered. Those flood waters unleashed an undertow of suspicion that lingers today.
In fact, during the great flood of 1927, the government did dynamite an earthen levee 13 miles south of New Orleans to save the city’s levees from being breached. It killed as many as 1,000 people and displaced about 700,000 more. Race was not a factor. This rural area was populated with poor black and white farmers.
I begin to wonder when I hear stories like this. I cringe when I watch Spike Lee’s controversial 2006 documentary “When The Levees Broke.” My government’s utter incompetence in dealing with Katrina was breathtaking. The US government takes the cake for ineptitude but New Orleans and Louisiana state officials have to be held accountable for not making enough racket during the past thirty years as the odds of disaster gradually increased as 2000 square miles of wetlands disappeared to make way for channels oil companies use to transport oil from sea to city. Oil money talks.
I could go on.
The magnitude of Katrina’s devastation would have pounded any other city to the canvas for the count. This city, still majority black, will not bow to natural disaster. Why? Family, history, religion, and pride. Roots run deep. Whether they will survive intact is an unanswered question.
I know the French Quarter and its surrounding neighborhoods are not the most conclusive ways to judge how they’re doing five years down the line. During two visits this summer, I’ve wondered why the black population, which was about 60% before the storm, didn’t have a chip on the shoulder the size of the Superdome.
In the music clubs and bars I’ve spent time in there are patrons of all ages and races. The music that makes this city tick originated in the black community. Think Mardi Gras, Jazz Fest, Satchmo SummerFest. Take that away and the city you have is not New Orleans by anyone’s definition.
The music here is a gift. The unsettling fact that many musicians, especially younger ones, live in at-risk neighborhoods and have died at the hands of others in those same neighborhoods - highlights the less publicized aspects of the good times city.
And yet, at every place I visit, I see people making it their business to have fun, let the music stir their souls, share beer and laughter together because they want to, have to, and need to. They deal with the cultural and political duality of life in this quirky city by declaring that these places are neutral grounds, places where the music shouts that the ties that bind us can be more powerful than the differences that divide us.
Letting the good times roll doesn’t mean letting yourself get rolled over. That may be the biggest difference between 2005 and 2010. Can I get an Amen on that?
August 26, 2010 in Commentaries, Louisiana, Travel | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)
Tags: Brad Pitt, Charity Hospital, Common Ground Relief, Katrina Fifth Anniversary, Make It Right, Rising Tide 5