Old habits die hard in New Orleans, and that's the best hope for the survival of wonderful, peculiar culture the city flaunts at Mardi Gras.
Last year, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, people who had lost everything still made themselves a Mardi Gras with costumes, music, ritual and hedonism--not because their troubles had ended, but because Mardi Gras was a reason to stay and live through them. This year, in a city that's still much reduced in population and still has intractable problems, Mardi Gras remains a matter of local pride and persistence.
It's a little more familiar in one important way: local high-school bands, which were all but absent last year, are strutting through the parades again. Even at half strength, they're a sign that a next generation of musicians is wielding sousaphones and trombones. And the clubs are full of stalwart local bands, playing their regular weekly club gigs for crowds slightly swelled by tourists, but full of people who know all the words and just when to shout them.
Soul Rebels, a brass band, resumed its habitual Thursday-night gig at Le Bon Temps Roulet as soon as it could after Katrina: commuting from Houston and Baton Rouge, playing donated instruments to replace those destroyed by the flood. On Thursday night, the sousaphone bomped and hip-hop chants punctuated scrappy, freewheeling versions of New Orleans favorites like "Little Liza Jane" and "Hey Pocky A-Way." The place was so tightly packed that there was barely room for couples to bump and grind, though that didn't stop them, while a woman with a bucket for tips snaked her way through the crowd. After the set, the band plugged its CDs, its website, its next three gigs in the next few days.
In Tipitina's, another uptown club, the long-running Rebirth Brass Band -- a name chosen two decades before Katrina -- was also making people dance, with its more muscular, more richly arranged version of brass-band music, rooted in soul, funk and Latin music as well New Orleans jazz and parade traditions: "We gon' hold it on," they insisted in a hip-hop stretch. The music built to one plateau, made people scream, switched tunes and built again from there, again and again, thrill upon thrill, until it eased off with a version Marvin Gaye's "Let's Get It On" as an implicit suggestion for post-club recreation. Of course, there would be another gig the next night, and the next; it was the Mardi Gras habit, something to hold on to.
Last year, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, people who had lost everything still made themselves a Mardi Gras with costumes, music, ritual and hedonism--not because their troubles had ended, but because Mardi Gras was a reason to stay and live through them. This year, in a city that's still much reduced in population and still has intractable problems, Mardi Gras remains a matter of local pride and persistence.
It's a little more familiar in one important way: local high-school bands, which were all but absent last year, are strutting through the parades again. Even at half strength, they're a sign that a next generation of musicians is wielding sousaphones and trombones. And the clubs are full of stalwart local bands, playing their regular weekly club gigs for crowds slightly swelled by tourists, but full of people who know all the words and just when to shout them.
Soul Rebels, a brass band, resumed its habitual Thursday-night gig at Le Bon Temps Roulet as soon as it could after Katrina: commuting from Houston and Baton Rouge, playing donated instruments to replace those destroyed by the flood. On Thursday night, the sousaphone bomped and hip-hop chants punctuated scrappy, freewheeling versions of New Orleans favorites like "Little Liza Jane" and "Hey Pocky A-Way." The place was so tightly packed that there was barely room for couples to bump and grind, though that didn't stop them, while a woman with a bucket for tips snaked her way through the crowd. After the set, the band plugged its CDs, its website, its next three gigs in the next few days.
In Tipitina's, another uptown club, the long-running Rebirth Brass Band -- a name chosen two decades before Katrina -- was also making people dance, with its more muscular, more richly arranged version of brass-band music, rooted in soul, funk and Latin music as well New Orleans jazz and parade traditions: "We gon' hold it on," they insisted in a hip-hop stretch. The music built to one plateau, made people scream, switched tunes and built again from there, again and again, thrill upon thrill, until it eased off with a version Marvin Gaye's "Let's Get It On" as an implicit suggestion for post-club recreation. Of course, there would be another gig the next night, and the next; it was the Mardi Gras habit, something to hold on to.
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