Jazz is woven into the fabric of New Orleans. Its wild, soulful, vibrant, colorful tones fill the air as I walk through the streets of the French Quarter or as I’m in a restaurant eating spicy crawfish and gumbo. Its syncopated rhythm welcomed us on our first night in New Orleans on Bourbon Street, an informal group of street musicians filling the humid night air with their music.
These street musicians are the ones, the people on the ground and in the streets, where jazz is first born and comes to life. Having played both violin and piano for many years of my childhood, I know firsthand how difficult the style of jazz is. Whereas classical Baroque or Romantic era music follows simple patterns, rhythm, and style, the beauty and complexity of jazz is its wild and eccentric freedom, the refusal to be bound by convention and instead be pure emotion, syncopation, and improvisation coming from the artist. Jazz was always the most complex and most difficult to master of the many different styles, and yet for many, it seems to flow naturally out of their artistic selves.
Jazz statue in Louis Armstrong Park
Buddy Bolden, legendary cornet player, is one of these people. When people think of jazz and New Orleans, Louis Armstrong usually comes to mind. However, it was Bolden’s work as a pioneer in the field that paved the field for a young Armstrong, playing in the red-light district of Storyville, to hone and popularize the style of music Bolden performed. In our book for this period of our bookpacking experience, Michael Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter, Bolden’s story is displayed in a fragmented, syncopated form to mimic the style of jazz he brought to life.
“Though I knew Buddy’s blues before, and the hymns at funerals, but what he is playing now is real strange... He’s mixing them up. That is the first time I ever heard hymns and blues cooked up together.”
The story is presented in what seems as bursts of unrelated thoughts, highlighting not only Buddy’s unstable, fragmented mental state, but also as a nod to the rifts played in jazz music as scenes and descriptions of the story suddenly lurch into unpredictable new ideas. The improvisation is what makes jazz so unique, as the music can range from pain to sheer joy depending on the performer, a celebration or a mourning or even both at once. We see this in the book, how Bolden’s bursts of thought and streams of consciousness in the novel illustrate the highly evocative and emotional process that is jazz.
While we were able to hear this musical improvisation on the streets of New Orleans in the French Quarter, nowhere were we able to better see and experience jazz at its most celebratory and enthusiastic than at the Second Line Parade that Sunday afternoon featuring the Money Wasters Social Aid & Pleasure Club and the Dignified Achievable Men Social & Pleasure Club.. After having frantically run about searching for the Divine Ladies, we finally found another group—the Money Wasters, parading on St. Bernard Ave. and Claiborne Ave. Social clubs are rooted in tradition and necessity, many having been formed to help its members through illness and burial costs. During the “second line season”, there’s nearly always a social club parade to be found around Tréme or Central City each Sunday afternoon. After passing a small group of players and a few floats, we finally found the main attraction—with a large crowd of people, the second line, exuberantly dancing on sidewalks and in the streets to the music of a brass jazz band. As our class joined in, dancing, parading, soaking up the music, the sweat, the sheer joy and pure energy as we traveled down the streets of New Orleans in this one beautiful moment in time. Even as much as we stood out from the crowd that was there, we were welcomed with open arms and invited to join into the event that declared the vibrancy and refusal to be silenced that this community declares. There’s no way of capturing that moment as eloquently as I wish to be, as there’s no way to feel that palpable warmth and excitement that swept over me as we watched and paraded with people who just exuberantly celebrated life through music and dance.
There’s an interesting emphasis on the senses in Coming Through Slaughter. More so than any other type of music, jazz is heavily influenced by sensory emotions, it being a very rhythmic music that almost dares the listener not to sway or move as the music swings by on its bluesy path. I found myself in a trance listening to the music at Preservation Hall, where our class was able to listen to a group of extraordinary musicians play the trombone, piano, drums, sax, clarinet and cornet in a style that Andrew mentioned as being true to how the groups of Buddy’s time would have played. There’s a moment towards the end of the novel where Buddy is now in an insane asylum, where he would be kept until his death. While he’s there, he slowly stops speaking, instead going around touching things. As a violinist, I know how important touch is to the playing of the instrument—it’s the connection between the instrument and the brain, unconscious movements that draw the sound out of the body of the instrument into the world.
“He does nothing, nothing at all. Never speaks, goes around touching things.”
Music is the soul of the city of New Orleans. It draws out every raw emotion and shares it generously for the world to see. It’s what connects one person to another in this human experience called life down here, a universal language we communicate in and through, an emotional experience, and it truly is such a blessing to be able to witness this all firsthand.