Transcript for the Piece Audio version of In Praise of New Orleans Brass Bands

An Homage to New Orleans, Home of the Brass Bands

The second time I drove to New Orleans from Brooklyn, I made sure to enter by way of the Causeway over Lake Pontchartrain. The Causeway is 24 miles long, which means that for 24 miles you glide over water, New Orleans either just behind you, or even better, ahead to the left. I love New Orleans. I love its Caribbean-ness and its craziness. But maybe more than anything, I love the brass bands. As I drove into New Orleans over Lake Pontchartrain my hand reached instinctively for the radio: 90.7, WWOZ. It was the brass band hour.
In my northern safety, I comb over my memories. I fill the air with music from the Crescent City. I flip through my photographs and pretend that those particular colors and shadows are still intact. It’s like a loose tooth I can’t keep my tongue from wiggling. Like feeding an addiction. I can’t stop touching New Orleans or feeling that pinprick of pain. I’m on a hurricane binge.
I can’t get New Orleans off my mind. And I can’t stop listening to brass bands. They’re amazing. Just take the tuba. It’s huge, and so more often than not, there’s a big guy playing it. Or should I say wearing it? The tuba is kind of like a brass boa, and you weave yourself into it: arms, hips, and most important of all, lips. I love the way it sounds. Like the core of your body, a brass om.
Then there’s the trumpet. Or even better, the trumpets. Which, with the right amount of pause and punch, they flirt and slide into stunning syncopation. I could say more, but what’s the point? Let’s listen.
The best though, is when everyone’s together: drums, bass drum, sax, trumpets, trombone, tuba, and sometimes even a little electric guitar. Some variation of all that. Collectively, they’re miraculous.
There’s strut in the sound of brass. There’s party and life and get up, but best of all is the strut. There’s nothing sexier than a trumpet player with the moves. Maybe because it’s such a celebration. It’s about here, now. There are no sad songs, no dirges. Brass bands scream life: the joy we make with the most basic of elements, that which we cannot live without: air.
The natural habitat of the Brass band is the street. One night, hanging out at my friend John’s house in the Treme, seven different brass bands went by, duking it out with their horns. In New Orleans. brass bands make the music we dance behind at funerals because when someone dies, there’s no better time to bless life. They lead the way for all the second lining, all the social club events, for Mardi Gras and every other parade, and in New Orleans, most events call for a parade. In a city famous for its to-go cups, it’s the horn on horn backed by beat which is the biggest drug of all. I can follow that sound for hours.
Brass is an alloy: a combination of copper and zinc, or maybe tin or small amounts of other metals. How fitting. In a city which prides itself on the culture which comes from a mix, it is the gumbo metal, brass, which anchors nearly all musical life -- not just the brass bands.
When people come together and play instruments, they do more than make music. They transcend the moment. It’s like they lift up, and they take along those of us who hear them. Good music reorders time and space. It changes the world, even if it’s just for a little while. Making music that does this for people is maybe the closest human beings can get to being like god. It’s what New Orleans is all about.
If you want to give to the venerable and endangered WWOZ or to find out if any of your favorite New Orleans musicians made it out to safety, go to http://www.wwoz.org/welcome.shtml.
You’ve been listening to the Soul Rebels and The Stooges, and by the way they’re all okay. I checked. From Brooklyn, New York, this is Eve Abrams.