ONE
Our view from the restaurant—St. Louis Cathedral, and the big band playing in the square. It’s almost fitting that you can’t see much of the musicians in this video I took—in my mind, they were part of the atmosphere.
I was sitting at a restaurant on the edge of Jackson Square, its doors and windows flung open to the fresh air. The sun was out, the birds were chirping, the bells of the St. Louis Cathedral were tolling. Then—to top it all off, a big band set up shop right outside. Before long, our conversations were drowned out by the hopping, shaking, earth-quaking good music. This is the atmosphere of New Orleans, the backdrop to my prized literary adventures.
Kamryn jumped up and down in her seat. “I love this song! I was hoping I would get to hear it on this trip! It’s Little Liza Jane.”
This moment struck me—I was warmed by her joy. I’d never be able to tell one song from the next, but Kamryn recognized the song instantly. To me, the big brass bands were practically a part of the scenery, but to Kamryn, a musician in the USC marching band, this moment—this song—were an integral part of her experience. Kamryn’s excitement reminded me that each of us on this trip has our own expertise, our own backgrounds and interests, that we bring to this class. When my eye is attuned to pick out spooky vibes, Kamryn is seeing the trip through her lens of musical appreciation. We each have a “thing” that jumps out at us. Even as we embark on this journey together, our shared experiences remain entirely subjective and defined by our tastes.
Taste is, of course, subjective—but a city like New Orleans, a city driven by art and music and architecture and culture, brings to mind the issue of aesthetic values. How do we define “good” taste? Who gets to decide what “good” taste is? These values determine what character of the city gets preserved, what art is sold in galleries or on the wrought-iron fence surrounding Jefferson Park, what music is played at Preservation Hall versus Frenchman Street versus the dive bar on the outskirts of town. Aesthetic values determine which elements of culture make their way into the city’s myth-building.
Photo of Preservation Hall in full swing, from NewOrleans.com. As no phones were allowed, I was unable to get a photo myself. This official photo shows the old-school flair of the jazz band at Preservation Hall.
At Preservation Hall, we had the privilege of listening to world-renowned jazz musicians. They played for a reverent audience packed into a wooden room. We stood for 40 minutes—gladly!—behind rows of benches arranged like pews at the altar of jazz. No phones allowed—one guy even got chastised for breaking this rule—because church was in session. This was music you were meant to feel, with no filters. Preservation Hall boasts the greatest of the great, the bastion of old-school jazz, and altogether has a very high-brow feel.
But jazz wasn’t always so well-respected. When jazz first came on the scene at the beginning of the 20th century, critics disparaged the genre for being a formless, unsophisticated explosion of feelings. This criticism was blatantly racially motivated; white critics targeted Harlem specifically as the origin of all degeneracy via jazz music. Just as later generations criticized rap music as a somehow inferior genre of music, white critics have repeatedly sought to delegitimize the innovations of Black music.
Our fourth Bookpacking text, Coming Through Slaughter by Michael Ondaatje, personifies those early days of jazz through its fictionalization of the life of jazz trumpetist Buddy Bolden. Taken at face value, the book is a confusing read, a text meant to be experienced more than understood. With a non-chronological plot and choppy, poetic style, Coming Through Slaughter jumps between bits and pieces of Buddy’s life. Through the course of the novel, it is revealed that Buddy got in a violent altercation with a customer at his barber shop over an alleged affair with his wife Nora. Then, Buddy disappears—drops off the map for two years, until Nora hires his friend Webb to find him. Buddy has been living with another woman, and returns to playing music at home, until a mental health episode causes him to spend the rest of his days in a psychiatric institution. The form of the novel, haphazard and loose at times, coalesces into a larger narrative about violence, mental health, and music, coming together like the crescendo of a jazz solo.
Messing with the prose form to translate the experience of jazz to text feels like an undeniably high-brow move. It pushes the boundaries like all the most lauded contemporary literary fiction. But nonetheless, it’s a bold choice, and a risky one where commercial markets are concerned. Most importantly, experimenting with form to create something new, something meant to be entirely felt, is the very essence of jazz embodied. With Coming Through Slaughter, Ondaatje stays loyal to his subject matter, and in the process defies the standard conventions of what is deemed “great American literature” by the taste-makers of our time. Jazz necessitates this type of defiance to aesthetic authority, in order to keep its spirit alive.
TWO
The Second Line parade comes to a halt, but the dancing never stops. The brass band plays on.
Our next formal encounter with jazz was not so formal at all, with that homegrown feel that encapsulates the loose spirit of the music itself; we marched with the Second Line parade, just behind their marching band. All dressed in blue, the band played lively and bright, and the parade ebbed and flowed to a stop seemingly at random, meandering with the freedom of a jazz riff. It broke form, just like Coming Through Slaughter, an expression in and of itself. The parade itself added an experiential component to the jazz, but the best part of all was the happiness on everyone’s faces—a whole community come together, inviting us into their midst without question, letting us join in the dancing with open arms.
I was riding on this high when Bella and I caught an uber back to the hotel.
“Did you see the Second Line?” our driver asked. She was an older white woman and she had picked us up just off the parade route.
“Yes,” I told her, “It was beautiful!”
“Beautiful,” she said “huh.”
Bella and I glanced at each other—there was something in her tone.
“Second Line is just trash,” she said, “Look how they trash the streets. That’s all they do—trash.”
The pleasure of the afternoon came to a crashing halt in that uber. I was flabbergasted—that someone could witness what I had experienced as such an outpouring of community, joy, and resilience, and see only trash. What shocked me even more was our driver’s eagerness to tell us exactly what she thought of the Second Line.
Her words were racism, plain and simple, under the guise of an aesthetic claim. She made the implicit distinction between a “respectable” parade, one with artistic merit and aesthetic value, and a morally condemnable display. I find it hard to imagine that Mardi Gras parades don’t also leave behind their fair share of litter.
This interaction was all the more infuriating because we were reading Coming Through Slaughter, reading about the genius musician whose creativity at these very parades planted the seed that would grow into a bonafide musical revolution. In New Orleans, jazz is woven into the fabric of life and death, and it belongs to the people partying down Washington Ave, not just the people who can afford $50 front-row seats at Preservation Hall.
THREE
Francesca and I sat in our shared hotel room, frowning at each other with our respective covers pulled up to our chins. It was 11:30 PM. It had been a long day in the hot sun, and we were so tired. But it was our last Thursday in New Orleans—and Thursday was supposed to be THE night to see live jazz at Vaughan’s Lounge.
We grumbled. “Should we even go?” “Like, I’m just so tired. But I really want to.” “We’ll see other jazz. Ughhh but I really want to go!” Et cetera.
In the end, we fought against the lethargy with every fiber of our collective beings and pried ourselves out of bed and into the uber. And I can’t tell you how glad I am that we did. In the spirit of Bookpacking: Carpe Diem. Amen.
A short clip of Corey Henry & the Treme Funktet playing at Vaughan’s Lounge. Their weekly Thursday night performances draw the locals out in droves.
We pulled up at Vaughan’s after midnight, still sleepy but with spirits lifted. Opening the doors to the bar, the energy shifted. It looked like any other bar, but everyone seemed like a local. The music was loud, really loud, loud enough to fill the air and vibrate through your chest, but it was smooth on the ear like honey on the tongue. It never pierced.
As we made our way into the crowd, the barrier between musician and audience, music and person seemed to grow even thinner. I almost couldn’t believe that I was hearing this music with my own two ears—it felt like it was being transmuted directly into my head, almost too seamless to be believed. The performance was exhilarating. They played without a hitch, each song keeping me up on my feet and moving. One guitar solo could not be described as anything other than liquifying. The band, Corey Henry & the Treme Funktet, played a fusion of jazz, funk, and hip hop elements that felt wholly original, a testament to the artistic merit of these oft-maligned genres.
Our class stands in front of a mural recreating the only existing photograph of Buddy Bolden. He is highlighted with the golden halo, cornet in hand.
Even as I was dancing to the music, I found myself growing strangely sad. I was mourning even as I listened to these songs for the first time that this wasn’t being recorded. I wanted to replay that solo, that song, that moment, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to even before the moment was up.
But there are no existing recordings of Buddy Bolden’s trumpet-playing, his groundbreaking innovation, the birth of a genre. And Michael Ondaatje wrote Coming Through Slaughter without access to his sounds, only based on one surviving photograph of Buddy with his band and the testimony left in his wake. No one can ever replay Buddy either. At Vaughan’s I understood: jazz is meant for the moment, and the moment alone. It must be felt through your veins like the thrum of a crowd.