New Orleans Suite by Watts Lewis

Author:Watts, Lewis
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520273870
Publisher: University of California Press

MUSICA LATINA, MAGAZINE STREET, 2010

ROSE TAVERN, CENTRAL CITY, OCTOBER 2005

UPTOWN, CARROLLTON NEIGHBORHOOD, 2011

5

TO REINVENT LIFE

Terence Blanchard's 2007 album A Tale of God's Will is the musical response to Katrina I have listened to the most. In addition to enjoying its haunting textures, plaintive solos, and affirming modulations, I like it because it helps me think about New Orleans as an intersection of diasporas. Opening with “Ghosts of Congo Square,” the album situates Katrina and post-storm cultural production in a long history of displacements and related cultural fusions. The piece begins with polyrhythmic bass and drum lines, replicating a Congo Square drumming and dancing circle. When the musicians chant, “This is a tale of God's will,” in dialogue with Blanchard's trumpet, they put a Christian god into dialogue with an African spirit world. Blanchard and Lolis Elie's liner notes interrogate the myth of Congo Square as the origin of jazz, that famously creolized North American art form, acknowledging an important site of cultural regeneration that is also defined by histories of almost unimaginable horrors. Congo Square was also a place, they tell us, “where they displayed the severed heads of men who revolted against slavery.” These souls of Congo Square, then, “saw much and I have a feeling that they understand more deeply how this current, devastating, heartbreaking pain fits into the larger saga of God's will. They saw the worst before we did. Perhaps they understand better than we do how a story such as this one unfolds in the end.”1 Putting Katrina into such an epic continuum of spiritual reckoning is aided by the invocation, on “Ghost of 1927” and “Ghost of Betsy,” of the souls lost in other floods that disproportionately affected poor people. Such pieces, of course, also situate New Orleans in the natural world on which it rests and connect it to a patchwork of geographical networks.

The opening of the track “Levees,” gesturing toward the calm before the storm, bespeaks the “laid back pace” of life in New Orleans, which is at once a creolized response to life's difficulties and a cause of collective complacency toward the deplorable conditions some residents have faced. “Wading Through,” “The Water,” and “Funeral Dirge” depict the tragic circumstances that followed the breaking of the levees. Blanchard composed these four pieces for Spike Lee's award-winning 2006 documentary When the Levees Broke, and they provide much of the film's soundtrack. With Lee's visual analogue in mind, Blanchard's music enhances our understanding of the tragedy of Katrina, as it invokes memories of those who died during and immediately after the storm, the harrowing experiences of survivors, the long-term health problems, and the social costs. The diasporic experience thus continues into a new moment of exodus.

But A Tale of God's Will also speaks of reconstruction and survival. Indeed, with elements of it also contributing to the soundtrack of Lee's more affirmative 2010 film If God Is Willing and da Creek Don't Rise, the compositions by Blanchard and his band members convey a shared commitment to reinventing the city and the lives that produced it.

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