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PREFACE

FOUNDATIONS

Edward Kennedy Ellington from the District of Columbia composed and performed music for over fifty years. He made quite a name for himself. Along the way, he transformed American music, especially that which some (though not often Ellington) have called jazz. His grace, charisma, and artistic chops inspired a great many reviews and studies of the man and his music, and many photographs. These representations have made Ellington one of the archetypal figures who, for better and for worse, have helped to generate the layers of cultural meaning—a kind of noise, if you will—that have become inseparable from the sound.

In the spring of 1970 Ellington went to New Orleans, at the invitation of the promoter George Wein, to perform at the first New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. On April 25 he premiered New Orleans Suite as a five-movement composition. Through these movements—”Blues for New Orleans,” “Bourbon Street Jingling Jollies,” “Thanks for the Beautiful Land on the Delta,” “Second Line,” and “Aristocracy a la Jean Lafitte”—New Orleans Suite expressed three objectives that defined many of Ellington’s longer works: representing place, representing history, and representing the cultural expressions that constitute places and histories. Ellington recorded these movements a few days later in New York, but he did not stop there. For he was simultaneously working on four additional “portraits” of prominent musical influences and collaborators associated with New Orleans. He recorded these additions—”Portrait of Louis Armstrong,” “Portrait of Wellman Braud,” “Portrait of Sidney Bechet,” and “Portrait of Mahalia Jackson”—on May 13. These newer pieces augmented and refocused the representational pallet of New Orleans, its history, and its culture by showcasing black and Creole inhabitants (albeit famous ones) and by expanding the references to musical style and genre.

From our perspective, New Orleans Suite is not Ellington’s best work. As others have pointed out, the suite was hastily composed and inadequately rehearsed. Ellington created the work at a moment of transition in his band, symbolized tragically by the passing of saxophonist Johnny Hodges two days before the second recording session. We agree with those who point out that the individual pieces do not cohere well as a whole, even as we take exception to similar characterizations of other lengthy compositions, like the Far East Suite.¹ But, as listeners, we still like most of the individual pieces on New Orleans Suite. More important, we appreciate what Ellington tried to represent as an outsider. New Orleans, like the “Far East,” was not home but rather a site of occasional visits that nonetheless had deep symbolic significance for him personally and professionally. His suite thus provides a suggestive frame for documenting and expressing our own complex affinities for New Orleans.

Our New Orleans Suite expresses our long-standing interest in the city from afar. This interest was refocused by the catastrophic events in New Orleans beginning in the late summer of 2005 and also by the many ways people survived, overcame, and represented those events in the years since. Like Ellington, we have been compelled to survey the history, geography, built environment, and cultural matrix of New Orleans. We give particular attention to its black residents while also seeking to understand the complex and rapidly changing demographic and cultural scene in the city. At its core, this book conveys our impressions of the ever-changing position, role, and meaning of Afro-diasporic cultural expressions in New Orleans and its environs.

Ellington’s New Orleans Suite provides further guidance as it surveys multiple genres. As put together on the Atlantic LP, the piece starts with the blues, ends with gospel, and has as its climax a celebration of New Orleans’s second line culture.² The series of rhythmic figures that Ellington uses on the various pieces—waltz, Latin, blues, swing, and so on—evoke a spatial and cultural multiplicity that we also hope to represent. Also inspiring is the composition’s evocation of the contradiction that often defined Ellington’s work. According to Mercer Ellington, his father’s playful deconstruction of a “Second Line” in the suite is an example of the way he was often invested in categories—in this case trying to capture the distinctiveness of a culture and music—that he was also willing to interrogate and even reject. “He was really a glorified anarchist in the way he was so often a part of the very things he sought to knock down.”³

Building from Ellington’s perspective, our New Orleans Suite joins the post-Katrina conversation about New Orleans. It pays homage to the city (and region) and its residents; maps recent, often contradictory, social and cultural transformations; and seeks to counter inadequate (and often pejorative) accounts of people and place. We also show how anxieties about the future of the city and its residents after the storm are now foundational to New Orleans cultural life. Yet New Orleans Suite is not a book solely about Katrina. The storm and its aftermath are among the catalysts for this project, and they figure prominently in this narrative. Yet we also try to situate Katrina and its aftermath within a broader history. We consider how the storm was both a transformative force and a vehicle for enabling long-standing processes to come into view.⁴

Although we use modes of expression here that differ from Ellington’s, music remains a critical point of entry for representing place, history, and culture. We explore the multifaceted role of music in this region in the past and present, as well as the ways it illuminates complicated social phenomena in this city as it undergoes transitions of both short and long duration. Among these phenomena are the affinities and anxieties embedded in the production and consumption of black culture, which have been all the more apparent locally (as well as nationally) in the wake of Katrina. And as we look to the music, the social spaces it inhabits, the events for which it provides the soundtrack, and the rituals of which it is a part, we examine the linked themes of diaspora, history and historical memory, transformation, regeneration, and not least of all, survival. For, in the end, this is a story about how bad things have happened to people in the long and short run, how people have persevered by drawing upon and transforming their cultural practices, and what crises can teach us about citizenship, politics, and other issues.

Finally, as a recording that lacks some polish and coherence, Ellington’s New Orleans Suite cautions us to beware of misrepresentation—especially of being out of sync with one another—as we similarly narrate a story as outsiders that is in thousands of ways each day being narrated from within. While we readily admit to the limitations of our outsiders’ perspectives, we also believe our concerns around this question of misrepresentation have made this a better story.

REHEARSAL ONE

LEWIS WATTS

There is a long and rich tradition of African American photographers—indigenous, transplanted, and itinerant—providing their own impressions of the city, its architecture, and its people. In fact, photography was first brought to New Orleans by Jules Lion, a free person of color and established painter and lithographer who had emigrated from France in 1837. Lion showed his daguerreotypes in 1840 in the city, in an exhibition at the Hall of the St. Charles Museum. This exhibit marked the beginning of prominent black-created art exhibitions in the city.⁵ The tradition has been carried forth by Arthur P. Bedou, Villard Paddio, Florestine Perrault Collins, Marion James Porter, Carrie Mae Weems, Marilyn Nance, Chandra McCormick, Keith Calhoun, Roland Charles, Eric Waters, Girard Mouton III, Deborah Willis, and a host of others who have lived, photographed, or shown their work in the city.⁶ Their images have made site specific the black photographic project of, in Robin D. G. Kelley’s words, “locating and reproducing the beauty and fragility of the race, the ironic humor of everyday life, the dream life of a people.”⁷ Such work accomplishes this in the face of the crushing weight of stereotypical images, even as it is sometimes itself complicit in economies of misrepresentation. And it does so in part because of the participation of the subjects who inhabit the frame: men, women, and children who gaze back at the lens and at us with looks that appeal, scold, calm, love, and satirize. In other words, there is a dialogue between photographers and their subjects—people who craft their humanity through action and reaction.

I joined this site-specific tradition in 1994, when, like Ellington in 1970, I traveled to New Orleans on a commissioned assignment. Long before that, the city had been on my radar as a place I wanted to explore as part of my long-standing survey of the African American cultural landscape. I had been working on documenting cultural connections between the U.S. South and the urban West and North and had devoted much attention to people who inhabited built environments, the architectural spaces in which human-created culture was manifest, and the visual evidence of time and migration. I was immediately attracted aesthetically to the city and have since made numerous trips back to photograph. I think my approach has been well suited to documenting the multilayered history of New Orleans. While investigating New Orleans, I have been reminded of William Faulkner’s comment about the South: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”⁸ I view the city’s atmosphere as a palimpsest that reflects its complex history and narratives. The “hothouse” composed of the built environment and the musical, cultural, and spiritual practices in the city have presented to me a compelling and complicated set of aesthetics. In other words, I am drawn to New Orleans as a place that wears its past and present, as well as its heart, on its sleeve.

I was scheduled for a fall 2005 Artist in Residency at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans, but Hurricane Katrina derailed these plans. I was able to get into the city six weeks later, with access to various parts of it made possible by being “embedded” with the National Guard. But most of the residents were still gone. I felt great loss entering the city after the storm because of that absence. I also grieved for the loss of access to the artistic and cultural life of the city that the residency would have provided. My loss, of course, was minuscule compared to what people who lived there were facing, and in the end, post-Katrina visits to the city exposed layers and complexity in New Orleans that were not available to me before. I have been able to see more clearly how much the people and culture functioned as the connecting tissue and activating agents for the visual elements that had originally drawn me to the place. Moreover, I have seen parallels between what the storm did to dislodge so many of New Orleans’s African American residents and the demographic changes wrought by urban renewal and gentrification in other places I have photographed and researched, like West Oakland, the Fillmore in San Francisco, and Harlem. The strong feelings that have emerged from making these connections have provided much of the inspiration for my contributions to this volume.

Also inspiring have been the attempts of New Orleanians to keep the “essence” of their city from disappearing in the wake of Katrina. That struggle has indeed been a central element of our observation of place. My research and photographs of New Orleans before and after the storm have yielded deep relationships with artists, curators, musicians, and other cultural practitioners, who have granted access to cultural practices, ritual, and physical parts of the city that were only partially available to me in eleven years of photographing before the storm. My experience has been that the people of New Orleans are very protective of the image and culture of their city, but for the most part people of all walks of life have been very generous to us, because we both try to approach our research with a personal and professional background that places the specific narrative here in a global context. The collaboration with Eric has also been a great way to open my eyes and rethink my reactions to places and events.

REHEARSAL TWO

ERIC PORTER

There is a long history of writing about and otherwise representing music in New Orleans as a means of situating this city in larger narratives concerning diaspora, nation, race, blackness, and so on. People from New Orleans have been invested in this project, and outsiders have too. This work has continued into the post-Katrina present, with many, often elegiac accounts emerging that map this complex cultural terrain and quite often stake a claim for the national and global importance of local expression.

I made several visits to New Orleans during the sixteen years prior to Katrina, beginning with one on the way to a family reunion in Shreveport. I was also interested in New Orleans as a jazz scholar, well aware of the importance of the city to that genre’s history and, more generally, to the history of music in the Americas. Important to that story have been the ways that New Orleans’s social and cultural environment has informed the complex meanings that accompany jazz and other forms of music.⁹

Like others in the field of jazz studies, I have been interested in understanding music and its meaning in their broader social and political contexts and also in the ways music has been mobilized—by musicians and others—to make social commentary and perhaps even change the world. Following long-standing trends in cultural studies and cultural history, I have tended to look at cultural production as a contradictory site. Genres, communities, and even singular expressions can simultaneously reinscribe power and provide a means of resisting, or at least negotiating, it. Music can express a progressive or even revolutionary orientation or philosophy along one axis of power (say, race) while being simultaneously retrograde on another (say, sexuality). And like many other African American writers, I have understood that trying to say something smart about the music is a project of political and even moral import. Thus New Orleans has seemed to offer a lot when thinking about power and paradox in and through music.

Although I was not able to visit the city until eight months after the storm and what some call the “federal flood,” I was, like many, profoundly affected, beginning that fateful August, by the humanitarian and political implications of Katrina and the threat posed to New Orleanians and their cultural scene. I was also captivated by the ways people turned to music for sustenance in the wake of the storm, and how New Orleans culture was mobilized, for better and for worse, by people with varying and sometimes conflicting interests, to rebuild the city and help (or not help) those who were displaced or otherwise affected by the storm.

Responding to Katrina as a scholar quickly became an imperative and, as the complexity of Katrina’s aftermath and the representation thereof unfolded, an analytical challenge. Attending an early 2006 symposium at the University of California Santa Cruz, where Lewis and I both teach and where he presented his wonderful photographs, provided the catalyst for writing something about the city in the post-Katrina moment. To make a long story short, Lewis and I talked at the symposium about a collaborative project on New Orleans and, after successfully putting together a grant proposal to fund a visit to the city that May, began this collective effort in earnest.

Admittedly, I initially imagined that my contribution to the volume would be based on a much deeper and systematic engagement with archival sources and a large collection of interviews that I hoped to conduct during lengthy stays in New Orleans, but the profession and life more generally got in the way. I also recognized quickly that a tremendous amount of excellent writing on the phenomena that interested me most was being produced by scholars, journalists, activists, and artists with deeper connections to the city than I could ever have. So my approach has been to rely significantly on secondary literature to develop an understanding of some key phenomena that I witnessed (and was directed to by generous local contacts) during visits to the city in 2006, 2008, and 2010. Others’ scholarship has also helped me understand issues I encountered in the myriad media representations of post-Katrina New Orleans over the past seven years. And of course, I have drawn immensely from Lewis’s photographs. I have learned much from their content, and I like to think they have enabled me to bring more art to my writing. Ultimately, I hope that my outsider status—my somewhat different investments in the subjects at hand, the experiences I bring as a scholar interested in the broader (even global) implications of local phenomena, my fascination with paradox, and perhaps also a kind of analytical distance—can provide a distinctive perspective on some familiar subjects and maybe even some new insights.

COMPOSITION AND PERFORMANCE

Our New Orleans Suite is composed with our preferred modes of professional communication: analytical writing and photographs. As a “suite,” the book’s organization follows the logic of two definitions of that term. A suite, of course, is a set of musical compositions designed to be performed and heard in succession. But please consider this a composition that has developed out of a kind of improvisation—a creative exchange between us that proceeded in often unplanned and unexpected ways as we have shared ideas over the phone and e-mail, in conversations in Eric’s living room, when sitting in front of a computer screen in Lewis’s studio, and most important, while walking and driving around New Orleans together in 2006, 2008, and 2010. The conversations and shared observations have been mutually influential, in terms of identifying the key themes around which this story coheres and in terms of their effects on where we have taken our individual narratives. So, on that note, we also envision this book as a “suite” that is analogous to an integrated set of computer applications that operate as a whole and share data.

We present here groups of photographs and written sections that form two narratives. We intend for these to operate independently but also to represent in tandem New Orleans’s cultural history and its recent transformations. At times the mutual influence will be quite subtle, requiring active and creative interpretation on the part of the reader. At other moments the dialogue will be clearer. We also hope to convey in this implicit and explicit dialogue the cooperative process of creating this volume as well as a deeper level of analysis that emerges from such collaboration. One way to think about this collaboration is as a “jam session,” where we riff separately and in unison on ideas and variations on themes.

We invite you, the reader, to make your way through this book as you see fit. Some may choose to focus first (or solely) on the photographs. Others may move first to the text. One might, while reading the written sections, go back to individual photographs for illustration of issues encountered there. Or one could, while surveying photographs, check the index for textual references to Mardi Gras Indians, second lines, jazz funerals, and other subjects represented in the images.

But here is what we think it means to read this book from front to back, with the idea of a suite (and a jam session) in mind. The first section of photographs provides a foundation for those that follow. It portrays the atmosphere of the city, the cultural practices and environmental conditions that Lewis encountered and was directed to by many friends and acquaintances in visits over the years. Most of the photographs in this section predate Katrina, although he also includes a few post-Katrina images that reflect enduring qualities that have survived the natural and human-made disasters. Eric’s written sections 1 and 2 are also foundational. In section 1, “New Orleans, America, Music,” he provides a brief meditation on the political, social, cultural, and moral scene one must engage with when writing about New Orleans and its music post Katrina. Section 2, “Reflections on Jazz Fest 2006,” conveys some of our impressions of the first iteration of this event after Katrina. The key issue Eric ponders here is the complicated notion that “the culture” can enable the reconstruction of New Orleans, which is a recurring theme in the words and images.

One crucial component of our shared data is the specific destruction wrought by the storm and levee breaks and what many have described as the additional catastrophe caused by the response to the crisis by the government and local elites. Eric tells some of that story briefly in sections 1 and 2, and Lewis expands upon it in the first section of the large group of photographs that follow. There he uses his long-term interest in the “cultural landscape” as a filter for reacting to the specific effects of the storm on the environment. He reflects further upon its impact on local culture and the ways people responded, for better and for worse. Some photos are from several weeks after the storm, while a number were taken during the spring 2006 trip, when Eric was also present. Their shared conversation while traveling through the city on this visit shaped each contributor’s analysis of what they encountered and thus also became part of the shared data for the suite.

The large group of photos continues with two sections dedicated to the rituals that have sustained people before and after Katrina, with particular attention to traditional African American practices. The first section, on second line parades and funerals, includes photographs taken before the storm and during several later visits to the city. The second section includes photographs from Mardi Gras in 2007 and 2008. Eric’s written sections 3 to 5 follow and provide a parallel take on rituals and transformations to them. Section 3, “Parading against Violence,” examines some of the different ways cultural workers and their allies have employed traditional and alternative second line practices in the struggle against criminal and state violence and have, in the process, opened up space for an interesting referendum on who bears responsibility for violence in post-Katrina New Orleans. Among other things, Eric discusses a 2008 Lundi Gras second line that also appears in some of Watts’s photographs, providing another set of shared data. Section 4, “Reconstruction’s Soundtrack,” looks at the ways post-Katrina recordings by local musicians comment on the transformations in the city following the storm, speaking forcefully for an equitable reconstruction of the city and ultimately theorizing New Orleans as a zone of radical potential forged out of the often mundane, sometimes heroic relationships of its citizens and sustained through alliances with outsiders. Finally, section 5, “To Reinvent Life,” focuses on cultural shifts that are happening along with demographic transformations and changing spatial relationships in the city. It suggests that future writing about New Orleans would benefit by conceptualizing the city as a node in overlapping diasporas, the site of multiple experiences of displacement in the past and present.

Much of the inspiration for these last two written sections came from encounters during our April 2010 visit to the city, when we witnessed the paradoxical ways that New Orleans was recovering from the disaster five years later. That visit more or less coincided with the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, which has produced a new set of challenges while reminding us that the 2005 storms are part of a much longer history of people surviving and celebrating under difficult conditions.