Keeping the Beat on the Street (23 page)

There's just something about being in your own place. If some manager told me I had to move away from home to find a wider market, I'd probably end my career right there—I could never leave New Orleans. I'd be up there in New York or somewhere, crying my eyes out in some hotel room, when I could be hanging out in the Tremé, laughing my ass off. Don't get me wrong, I like money, but I just need enough to cover the bare necessities that makes me happy, and it doesn't take much. More than that, and I'm overexcited.

Back inside Vaughan's, as I listen to the band roaring through “Skokiaan” and munch a dish of the red beans and rice that comes with the cover charge, it occurs to me how enviable Kermit is. He has what he wants, and wants what he has.

Milton Batiste, 1993
Photo by Mike Peters

As Milton Batiste, a trumpeter with Dejan's Olympia Brass Band, explained in the mid-eighties,

The Tambourine and Fan was a club formed in conjunction with the New Orleans Recreation Department, to entertain the kids, and to teach them about dance, our culture, our heritage and to keep them off the streets, against drugs and other criminal activities.

There is a place in the seventh ward on Claiborne Avenue where the club house is situated on city property, under the overpass. There were Mardi Gras Indians, there were dance teams, and there were sports—football, baseball and basketball.

In it were a few musicians, young boys playing instruments. Freddy Kohlman and a couple of older musicians had at one time been helping these young musicians to learn to play. They had a band; they called it Tambourine and Fan Brass Band. It was getting nowhere. I stepped into the picture and said to the director, Jerome Smith, “I'd like to come in and tutor these guys and show 'em how to play the tunes and help out.” We had summer camp, every summer with these kids, and I would go maybe twice a week to the fieldhouse and sorta try to shape them into what would become a band.
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The band Milton took over became the Junior Olympia band, but there had been other people besides Freddy Kohlman helping at the fieldhouse. Danny Barker had formed the Roots of Jazz Brass Band a couple of years earlier, and immediately before that, the Tambourine and Fan Club had spawned the Young Men Brass Band.

The musicians from these bands turned into quite a catalog of talent. There were Stafford Agee, trombone (Junior Olympia, regular Olympia, Rebirth); Revert Andrews, trombone (Junior Olympia, All Stars, Dirty Dozen); Keith Anderson, trombone and bass horn (Regal, Rebirth, Dirty Dozen, Olympia); Tanio Hingle and Kerry Hunter, drums (Junior Olympia, regular Olympia, New Birth); and Kenneth Terry (Junior and regular Olympia, Regal, Rebirth, Tremé) among others.

In a very real sense, the clubhouse under the overpass produced a vital contribution to the ongoing New Orleans brass band scene.

It was this aspect of Tambourine and Fan that I had originally intended to discuss when I made the appointment with its director, Jerome Smith. But we digressed, and I'm really glad we did.

Moving force behind the Tambourine and Fan Club
Interviewed at the Tremé Community Center, St. Philip and Villere Streets, October 2002

Tremé Community Center, St. Philip and Villere
Photo by Barry Martyn

Tambourine and Fan is really an extension of the Mississippi Freedom Schools, a backdrop from the civil rights movement. I was involved in much of that, the freedom riders and the sit-ins and the jails and all those activities. There was always, when I was a young boy, music at the school across the street [Craig School] before this community was ruptured, one, by the Armstrong Park, and two, by the 1-10 expressway. The expressway took and ruptured the rhythms of the neighborhood. For example, when I was a boy in the neighborhood… see this box? Without anyone telling a kid—these things happen as if by osmosis
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most of the youngsters started playing on boxes and bottles, etc., etc
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Now, if a band was to come through the neighborhood, at times, a few of us would jump out of the windows of Craig School to follow the procession. Where this building stands, you had the great Batiste family, right across the street from the school. So that meant, with that family, you had music right there. That family is the root of the original Dirty Dozen, the kazoo band. So all that was happening on this block
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What happened, when those trees was taken down [on Claiborne], that was a gathering place—it was an extension of every house in the neighborhood, for all kinds of celebration and participation and rites of passage. Where the 1-10 came through, a lot of families had to move out. So that affected the observation and participation and total acceptance of the musical inheritance. In this area at one time or another, on every block, somebody could play something. So that was a serious intrusion. And all that affects the mentality of folks. On occasions of joy and sorrow, you do not have that groundswell of participation that you once had. That's a serious negative
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I think it was basically racist, 'causepeople were helpless. I mean we did not know that was going to happen. It was like, you would go to sleep at night, and when you wake up the next morning, the trees are gone, that kind of thing. Because there was an absence of power on this side, this black side, this neighborhood. Plus no respect for it. There's a lot of hypocrisy in terms of loving the music that was popularized by Louis Armstrong, but they destroy the ingredients that made Armstrong—see, that's so crucial
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One of the things that happens now, young people don't have—it's something more important than a musical instrument—is the vision and the sound. Because if you don't have that vision, and you don't have that sound, the instrument's not going to happen. The kids are not going to pick up the boxes, they're not going to pick up the bottles. That vision, and that sound, drives you towards trying to copy what you see with those men on the instruments. But you have to have the rituals of community for this kind of music. Once the rituals are threatened, then it affects the music
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It's affected in many ways, even today. There's a certain kind of dignity that's dictated by occasion and moment—but once this linkage is broken, the kids lose the lessons of being appropriate to the moment. At funerals and even, in many ways, the social gatherings—what they call the second lines, from the marching clubs—there was always certain protocols ingrained by being a witness to them, as opposed to having a written script. We know the limits and the inner dynamics of certain things. We knew the placement, as it related to person and participation
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What kept the old order stable wasn't just having jobs but having each other. You had each other before a job came into being. The sense of having each other—one thing about the city being called the Big Easy: it was almost impossible, in the time I'm talking about, for anyone to go hungry
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You had an extension of family that was beyond your physical dwelling, and the music is more powerful than your economic placement. We are not talking about the music in terms of the day of the funeral, or the day of a second line. The music here was daily, and all day. One thing I had enjoyed when I first went to New York: I stayed up on 110th Street, and when we came out in the morning, I heard all these drums; late that night, they were still playing. It reminded me of the way you hear things in bits and pieces on the blocks in the area here
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Now, the music, the sound, to me, indicated a kind of personal linkage. No one was complaining about the sound. As opposed to the intrusions in this neighborhood—folks are complaining about the music at night, because it disturbs them. Now, when I was a young man, there was no disturbance. Music could go on all day, all night, because it was ingrained into the spirit of the people. So folks leave, and intruders come in and have no sense of what we loosely call the “culture,” but what is greater than the word “culture,” it was about a life existence where the music and the people were one and the same
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When I was a boy, we had a full-time music teacher, years ago, across the street at Craig School. We don't have a full-time music teacher now—may get it once or twice a week. That's not good enough. That's a disrespect for the heritage, that's a serious disrespect. It's almost vulgar, not to have a full-time music instructor across the street from a park that's named after Louis Armstrong. It's sinful
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Until it's time to do showcasings—cutting down on the educational budget, you can relate that to the White House—they say they don't want to leave no child behind. But there's no universal guarantee on class sizes, there's no universal guarantee on music in the schools, there's no universal guarantee on improving teachers' pay. So there's something in the White House that's dangerous to the total existence of elevating people to the levels of certain kinds of equality. And that's right across the country. The other thing is it was clearly at a time in history when, on the black side, you were locked out in a more rigid sense. It forced you inward to find a kind of comfort that enables you to make the day
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For example, even in the funeral processions, older musicians can lay on a note with a certain kind of spiritual grace that younger musicians are not able to achieve. They're conditioned by another kind of circumstance. They tend to have, in some strange way, a disconnect—it makes them rush towards giving a kind of emotional nourishment coming out of that horn. And that destroys the majestic feeling. As Harold Dejan said, “Have patience. You have to bring yourself to it.” And Danny Barker said, “Don't rush it.” And that grace would come from that restraint
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The dancing changed because it's conditioned by another kind of social approach; there's been a rupture of the protocols. For example, some young people who were exposed to the Olympia band—Tanio Hingle and a few others that came off Hunter's Field Tambourine and Fan—they were exposed to Batiste and Mr. Dejan. Once they got into a thing with the older musicians, they can enter that, because they had a direction; they bring their person to it in a different way
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But there's been a breakdown in terms of the music and the church. The generation of Mr. Dejan, and others, when they play the hymns and the dirges and that kind of thing, the instrument is only an extension of the voice, which is about their participation in that environment, where the processions were an extension of what came out of the church, that dictated a certain dignity that was accepted by whoever
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Now, because youngsters are not church based, in terms of dealing with the rituals, that makes for a certain kind of emotional projection. So the dance has changed—it hasn't lost the energy but a certain kind of grace and dignity
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It's a definite: change will be. But I don't think there's been any change in the breeding of people; there's no change there. Within the music, when the disconnect becomes serious enough, it will not be able to be defined in terms of how it was created originally. And that would definitely bring about a loss
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I seriously think that the music and the culture are going to split, because one of the things that's troubling: there was music for the sake of the music, for the sake of the spirit. There is now a kind of thing that's like the American presence coming into the village, and then commercialization can affect what was hidden, what was protected by separation from that
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There is an absence of the broad-based spiritual connection, and certain feelings cannot enter the music. There's a broader-based breakdown of community rituals, too. This ability, in New Orleans, of saying, “Good morning” and “Good evening,” as simple as that is—that loss speaks of a kind of devaluing of a collective dignity. Because what that says is that I care about you, and you care about me—for me to recognize your presence and your humanity. That's been lost, and that will definitely affect the creative process. If that's not a part of the music, that recognition of universal humanity, then we lose that; we don't carry it over to everything we do
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