Jazz Religion, the Second Line, and Black New Orleans
Richard Brent Turner
Language: English
Pages: 200
ISBN: 025322120X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In his new book, Richard Brent Turner explores the history and contemporary significance of the popular religious traditions, identities, and performance forms celebrated in the second lines of the jazz street parades of black New Orleans. The second line is the group of dancers who follow the first procession of church and club members, brass bands, and grand marshals. Here musical and religious traditions interplay. Jazz Religion, the Second Line, and Black New Orleans examines the relationship of jazz to indigenous religion and spirituality. It explores how the African diasporist religious identities and musical traditions―from Haiti and West and Central Africa―are reinterpreted in New Orleans jazz and popular religious performances, while describing how the participants in the second line create their own social space and become proficient in the arts of political disguise, resistance, and performance.
neighborhood clubs where New Orleanians of every race, color, and style gather on certain nights of the week to party and dance to the music of the Dirty Dozen and Rebirth brass bands. Members of these bands perform in what are known as “second lines,” the jazz street parades and processions of black New Orleans that follow the “fi rst procession” of church and club members, secret societies, and grand marshals. On that Saturday, I partied all night and into the wee hours of Sunday morning. The
provocative links to the themes of solidarity and resistance as expressed in the culture of late-nineteenthcentury black New Orleans, and the emergence of the Mardi Gras Indian second lines. The contemporary global popularity of groups such as Boukman Eksperyans and Ram has brought the spiritual and political energy of Rara bands to the United States. These bands rallied international support for Haiti’s political struggles in the 1990s by performing outside the United Nations, in Brooklyn, New
Church in Tremé.108 Lou isi a na Cr eol e a n d th e M a r di Gr a s In di a n Or a l Tr a dition Chief Montana speaks fluent Creole. His mother, who was about ninetyfive years old at the time of the author’s interview in 1997, had a stroke in the mid-1990s which left her paralyzed on her right side. However, Montana said, “she perks up and begins to speak when her son speaks” to her in Creole. Th is is the same Creole language that is spoken by Haitian sequin artists and members of Rara bands.
According to Karen McCarthy Brown, “it is not a point of acess to the most powerful of one’s own family dead; instead it is the main shrine for Gede, representative of all the dead.”114 Because Vodou is a more powerful and popular religion and more of a competitor to Christianity in contemporary Haiti than in New Orleans, tensions have arisen between Vodou and the Catholic Church regarding the rituals at the Kwa Baron in the Port-au-Prince Cemetery.115 On the other hand, because contemporary New
Chicago Press, 1990); and David Elliott Draper, “The Mardi Gras Indians: The Ethnomusicology of Black Associations in New Orleans,” Ph.D. diss., Tulane University, New Orleans, 1973. 68. Berry, “African Cultural Memory in New Orleans Music,” p. 8. See also Florence E. Borders, “Researching Creole and Cajun Musics in New Orleans,” Black Music Research Journal, pp. 18–20, National Conference on Black Music Research, New Orleans, Louisiana, October 15–17, 1987, paper. 69. Sec Allan Lomax, Mister