Promoting New Orleans Second Line Culture Outside NOLA

[Zydekitten]

Hi, Threadhead Nation. I wanted to pass this along to you from my friend Gloria . . . in the hopes of promoting second line culture outside of New Orleans (maybe this will help forestall complaints about "noise" during second line parades ;))

Memo to: New Orleans Cultural Friends

From: Gloria Powers (Gambit, Big Easy Awards, Louisiana Living History Project), www.anewmuse.com (http://www.anewmuse.com)

Ref: SECOND LINE CELEBRATION PACKAGE AVAILABLE TO TOUR

I am now packaging an authentic New Orleans Second Line Celebration through my company, A NEW MUSE, LLC. I want to make you aware of my efforts and capabilities in hopes of obtaining your support to promote booking this package for events and festivals around the US and around the world. I am hoping to find support to enable this package to be used for cultural tourism promotions, for activities that need cultural ambassadors, and to have recommendations and referrals as appropriate.

THE NEW ORLEANS SECOND LINE CELEBRATION PACKAGE:

It consists of a Grand Marshal (New Orleans-style, but using talent that can give lecture demonstrations on Louisiana cultural heritage, music and dance), The Black Men of Labor Social Aid & Pleasure Club (six men in dress outfits with umbrellas), the Treme Brass Band, (multi-year winners of the Traditional Brass Band category at the Big Easy Awards and NEA Heritage award winners), a gospel group (Lois Dejean and the Johnson Extension), and Mardi Gras Indians with drummers. The full package is 34 people traveling.

We will do street parades, concerts and workshops & lecture demonstrations (musical and cultural).

I am going to the World Music Expo (WOMEX) in Seville, Spain from October 23-28 in hopes of re-connecting with festival producers from my 7 years of booking and road managing Michael Ray & the Cosmic Krewe, and to make new contacts that can help me bring authentic NEW ORLEANS SECOND LINE CELEBRATIONS around the world. I’ll pursue some US events and festivals also.

I’m still working on my website, but please check it out, www.anewmuse.com (http://www.anewmuse.com/). There are still information pages and links going up over the next two weeks.

However, until then this is what I want people to know:

I am a cultural anthropologist (M.A., LSU ’76) gone astray as a special events coordinator for Gambit Weekly in New Orleans (I have produced the Big Easy Entertainment Awards for 17 years), I am the project director of the Louisiana Living History Project (we bring Historic characters into the French quarter each December, sponsored by the New Orleans Tourism Marketing Corp),

I have 25 years experience producing music concerts (from Sun Ra to Allen Toussaint), multi-arts shows using musicians, dancers, visual and spoken word artists, and for seven years I managed Michael Ray & the Cosmic Krewe, performing award-winning Jazz Funk of the Future. During that time I was booking gigs at arts centers all over the USA and at festivals around the world.

I also worked on a fabulous project telling the story of the Creoles of Color here in New Orleans, the northern capital of the Caribbean, it was called the VoDu Macbeth, that had residencies at 15 universities and arts centers around the country - then 9/11 funding problems in the arts world brought that to a halt (before it was ready for main stage productions), but we had a score by Alvin Batiste and had the #1 Afro-American dance guru, Chuck Davis, doing our choreography.

The creator was a phenomenal artist named Leni Sloan who has an outstanding history in the dance world, then as an arts administrator with the National Endowment for the Arts, he was the head of the NOLA Arts Tourism Partnership. He founded the Louisiana Living History Company for which I continue to serve as Project Director. He is now the head Of Cultural Tourism for the State of Pennsylvania, but has agreed to serve as a Grand Marshal and Master of Ceremonies for the NOLA package.

Much of my current work is involved with Carol Bebelle and the Ashe Cultural Arts Center, an urban New Orleans institution that is amazing in its reach. I am heavily involved with the African American arts community here in New Orleans. I stopped managing Michael Ray in 2000 (he continues to work as trumpeter for Kool & the Gang internationally).

Through The Big Easy Entertainment Awards, I have always maintained my connection to the top performers in the city. In 2004 I brought a group to Bilbao, Spain to present an authentic New Orleans Jazz Funeral for a Festival of Sacred Rites, 29 people, it was a huge success. Now I am expanding on that idea…two years behind my original plan due to the Hurricane Katrina disaster.

As I worked for many years with the late great Sun Ra and his trumpeter Michael Ray, I became good friends with Kidd Jordan and Alvin Fielder, so it looks like I’ll be handling some of their bookings, also. Nice to have some avant-garde jazz in my life again. And I’m in conversation with Kermit Ruffins, Luther Gray and Bamboula 2000 and Ausettua Amor Amenkum and Kumbuka Drum & Dance Collective.

I’m sending this message in hopes you will find my efforts in packaging and road-managing this project of value in efforts to promote Louisiana Arts & Culture… and, in hopes you will refer producers of events, festivals, organizations and government entities to my office for possible bookings.

All the artists involved are hopeful we will have many opportunities to bring an authentic NEW ORLEANS SECOND LINE CELEBRATION around the country and around the world.

I look forward to getting your feedback!
And your referrals!

Gloria Powers

[papafrog]

most excellent...
thanks zk...

[NYMAMA]

coool Bud has made me promise that I have a 2nd line when he dies. I guess he figures he'll go first( or he 's hoping he will:o )

[papafrog]

Hi, Threadhead Nation. I wanted to pass this along to you from my friend Gloria . . . in the hopes of promoting second line culture outside of New Orleans (maybe this will help forestall complaints about "noise" during second line parades ;))

up

[Zydekitten]

Continuing the discussion about New Orleans second line cuture, here's a nice editorial piece from the T/P this week. It's by Nick Spitzer, host of American Routes, syndicated all over the country on your public radio station....and produced right here in New Orleans by folklife hero Nick. You can also find it online here: http://www.americanroutes.org/

Learning from the second-lines
Thursday, October 11, 2007
Nick Spitzer

A year ago I shared a stage with trombonist and singer Glenn David
Andrews as he held more than 2,000 listeners transfixed singing the
old hymn to peace and eternity, "Down by the Riverside."

The event was at prestigious Strathmore Hall near Washington, D.C.,
for the National Endowment for the Arts' Heritage Fellows concert at
which the Tremé Brass Band were honorees.

I've seen him many times since, playing in Jackson Square or out at
second-lines, and I know the passion Glenn brings to New Orleans music
and his ability to articulate the value of our neighborhood culture.

So it came as a shock to me last week when he and his brother Derrick
Tabb were led away in handcuffs near the end of an early evening
memorial procession for a cousin. The charges: disturbing the peace
and parading without a permit in the heart of Tremé.

Jazz funerals, with their roots in West Africa, medieval Europe and
Christian America, pre-date our city's police department and certainly
the permits the police want marchers to have.

From summoning the spirits with drums to praising the Lord with a
horn, jazz funerals and related mourning activities are not as
predictable as the regular, permit-sanctioned second-lines of social
aid and pleasure clubs. But then, death is not predictable, especially
among the young black men of our city.

What is consistent, however, at these events is the remarkable
co-mingling of sorrow expressed in slow-paced hymns and dirges such as
"Just a Closer Walk with Thee" and the hope for a better life in the
hereafter implied in joyful upbeat songs like "I'll Fly Away"
(ironically, the live sound track ended by the police last week). In a
city where serious crime often goes unprosecuted and unpunished, jazz
funerals make the streets momentarily sacred and safer.

The neighborhood-based jazz parades are communities of music and dance
in motion, celebration and social commentary, dating back at least to
the 1880s -- the end of Reconstruction, a time of increasing
oppression into the Jim Crow era that followed.

Today under a new kind of duress, and in a vacuum of citywide
leadership, the second-lines and organizations that sponsor them are
the largest social and political unifiers we have at the neighborhood
level. They still offer "social aid and pleasure" in a time of trouble.

While most residents are glad to have police protection for the
parades, funerary or otherwise, too often what they've gotten has been
harassment by officers lacking direction and training from the top.

One officer at this scene said, "We don't change laws for
neighborhoods." But in fact we do, when neighborhoods are designated
as "historic" -- the nearby French Quarter being a national and local
icon of such a shift in legal status dating to 1936.

Some Tremé residents blame the recent arrests on newcomers ready to
call the police at the first sound of a trombone in the street.

Perhaps those willing to dial 911 should recall the old adage: When
you move near a sawmill you can expect to hear the sound of cutting
wood. If you don't like the jazz and street rituals, you should
consider living elsewhere.

In addition, having well-respected musicians hauled away in handcuffs
is not good for the city's global image as a place where traditional
creativity and revered music flourish, attracting more culturally
aware tourists -- the ones who stay and spend on cultural experiences.

The social aid and pleasure model has been replicated by other New
Orleans institutions: Tipitina's long offered a place for old-school
musicians to play, and now raises money for players in need; the
Silence is Violence campaign marches across the city to demand police
and judicial attention in neighborhoods wracked by murder;
"voluntourism" groups encourage visitors to do home-building by day
(social aid), and go to music clubs and restaurants by night (pleasure).

Yet despite New Orleans' emerging image of both joie de vivre and "can
do," there is still too often an undercurrent of official neglect
about the very culture that uplifts us most.

The hundreds of second-lines each year -- jazz funerals, weekend
celebrations of a saint, ancestor, founder, mother or simply the bliss
of flamboyantly expressing yourself in the collective -- are among our
greatest vernacular assets. They artistically pull the diaspora home
as our unofficial social and emotional Road Home program.

Writ large, the second-lines are the metaphor for marching together to
a future renewed city, connected positively to its past. It's time to
lay down our "sword and shield, down by the riverside," drop the
charges and let that tradition flourish.

. . . . . . .

Nick Spitzer is creator of the public radio program "American Routes"
and professor of folklore and cultural conservation at the University
of New Orleans. His e-mail address is mail@amroutes.org.

[glinda]

It's time to lay down our "sword and shield, down by the riverside," drop the charges and let that tradition flourish.
Well said, Mr Spitzer. AMEN.

[Michelino]

Continuing the discussion about New Orleans second line cuture, here's a nice editorial piece from the T/P this week. It's by Nick Spitzer, host of American Routes, syndicated all over the country on your public radio station....and produced right here in New Orleans by folklife hero Nick. You can also find it online here: http://www.americanroutes.org/

An eloquent overview...thanks.

[Frosty]

A great piece! Thanks.

[freebo]

Great gosh almighty!

Nick Spitzer for mayor!

[mightyradgumbo]

Nick Spritzer writes:
"Yet despite New Orleans' emerging image of both joie de vivre and "can
do," there is still too often an undercurrent of official neglect
about the very culture that uplifts us most."

Unfortunately I believe the official neglect has gone past the "undercurrent" stage to the "running rampant" stage at this point. Well written article and a point I assume is shared by most if not all on this bored.