The Heart and the Hips of a City
Films consider New Orleans culture through its groove.
by LARRY BLUMENFELD – JAZZIZ, November, 2020
What gives New Orleans music its singular sound and unmatched allure? Many films have addressed this question. Few answer as compellingly as Always for Pleasure, Les Blank’s 1978 love letter of a documentary. As plot, that film follows second-line parades and other processions that run like river currents through city streets, punctuated with private revelations. Trumpeter “Kid” Thomas Valentine muses on mortality; Blank cuts to a jazz funeral. A young Irma Thomas (New Orleans’ “Queen of Soul”) shares her recipe for red beans-and-rice; when she speaks of “coming to a boil” and sustaining “a slow burn,” she might as well be addressing the subtleties of the music in which she is steeped.
Documentaries about New Orleans culture abound, each with its own ray of enlightenment. Royce Osborn’s All on a Mardi Gras Day reveals essential and enigmatic traditions, such as New Orleans’ feathered-and-beaded Black Indians. Lily Keber’s Bayou Maharajah showcased one in the long line of brilliant and idiosyncratic New Orleans pianists, James Booker.
In early March, things were going along swimmingly for director Michael Murphy’s Up From the Streets, which considers the city’s history through the lens of its music. Clarinetist Michael White performed before the film’s well-received screening at the D.C. Independent Film Festival’s opening-night gala. Then the COVID-19 crisis took hold fast. Movie theaters were closing. Everything was closing. Murphy and White headed back to New Orleans, where the music scene quickly got put on hold.
Murphy wondered if he was cursed. Make It Funky, his first (and aptly titled) feature-length ode to his hometown, had been scheduled for release in 2005 — just as Hurricane Katrina hit. Back then, Murphy turned his film into a fundraiser for the city’s recovery. This time, in connection with his distributor, London-based Eagle Rock Entertainment, and the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation, Up From the Streets was made available as a “virtual cinema release,” with funds benefiting both independent cinemas and the New Orleans cultural community. (It’s now available through most streaming services.)
“I opted for breadth instead of depth,” Murphy told me of his new film. “You can’t tell the story of 300 years in 104 minutes unless you have a roadmap. If people are interested, they can investigate further.” He included both archival and original footage of New Orleans musicians making great music. The voices that comment range from local heroes, such as drummer Herlin Riley and trumpeter Terence Blanchard (who serves as the film’s primary narrator), to the many stars from afar who’ve been drawn to the city, like Robert Plant and Bonnie Raitt. Yet these aren’t “talking heads.” Instead, we get dropped into conversations about New Orleans music — why we love it, what it means, how it feels. At one point, Blanchard, Riley and Preservation Hall Jazz Band leader Ben Jaffe discuss recent trips they each took to Cuba and a shared awareness of their hometown’s enduring musical bond with that island nation.
A pervasive sense of purpose shines through. “I’ve sat down with so many New Orleans musicians,” Murphy says, “and they’ve all talked about their struggles and about how their music became a vehicle to address wanting freedom and social justice. From early on, I wanted to build that into the film.” Murphy also gained a more current perspective of this culture’s continuity. “Toward the end of making the film, I learned a lesson,” he says. “I knew that bounce music was huge internationally, and that the New Orleans rap and hip-hop scene was influential. But I did not understand the connections there. When I asked artists like Big Freedia and Mannie Fresh, they said: ‘Hey, this music comes from Congo Square, from jazz and from funk. It’s call-and-response. This is the New Orleans story continuing.'”
Buckjumping
Such intergenerational and cross-cultural connections as well as this larger sense of purpose resonate throughout Keber’s latest film, Buckjumping. Keber was born and raised in the North Carolina mountains and moved to New Orleans in 2006. Her Bayou Maharajah grew from the curiosity she developed while working as a bartender at Vaughan’s, a beloved New Orleans spot, where she first heard James Booker’s music on the jukebox: Who could have made such distinctive sounds? Buckjumping reflects her fascination with the swinging, swaying and undulating movements that define her adopted hometown’s everyday life.
“Where I’m from, if people dance at all they move like they haven’t discovered their hips,” Keber says. “But in New Orleans, hips lead the way. I am mesmerized by the relationship of New Orleanians to movement — to the very specific and provocative ways that people move here, and to their complete lack of shame about it, the pride and purpose they invest in it.”
Keber follows key figures from various New Orleans cultural communities, including Mardi Gras Indian Aussetua AmorAmenkum, rapper Mia X, bounce music pioneer DJ Jubilee and hip-hop/rap producer Mannie Fresh. She guides us through preparations for the annual second-line parade of the Nine Times Social Aid & Pleasure Club and leads us into the Golden Sioux Gang’s Black Indian practice at the Uptown bar, Handa Wanda. Edna Karr High School’s dance troupe hits St. Charles Avenue for a pre-Mardi Gras Muses parade. “HaSizzle The Voice” emcees a bounce night. “Hustler” introduces us to the world of drag in backstreet clubs. Keber’s is the only New Orleans documentary I know of that approaches the visceral excitement and casual intimacy of Blank’s Always for Pleasure. (When Mia X demonstrates her “witches’ brew” for a seafood boil, it comes off like an homage to that Irma Thomas red beans-and-rice scene.)
Buckjumping includes no archival footage — “I didn’t want to risk dipping into nostalgia,” Keber says. It creates a deep sense of history nevertheless. In Lafayette Cemetery #2, a member of the Young Men Olympian Benevolent Association details the late-19th-century founding of his club: “When I’m dancing, I have the spirit in me from all those who are dead and gone,” he says. Later, during bounce night at a local club, HaSizzle the Voice explains how his dance culture “frees your soul and your spirit” by “going back to the ancestors.”
Keber means to showcase the connections between these disparate dance styles — as personal and political expressions, as expressions of both joy and resistance, and above all else, as a spiritual means of transcendence. And she wants to highlight their primacy. “In New Orleans, these are our high cultures,” she says, “and they must be respected as such. We talk about New Orleans musicians all the time, but who are these musicians really playing for?”
Ellis Marsalis For All We Know (Newvelle)
This last session by the late pianist, playing solo and in duet sessions with his youngest son, drummer-vibraphonist Jason, was recorded in New Orleans just weeks before his death at 85, from complications of COVID-19. One of four recordings in Newvelle’s lavish New Orleans Collection series, it is both a touching capstone to his career, and, via Ellis’ early compositions, a window into a brief yet fascinating bebop-based moment of New Orleans jazz creativity.
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