Ten Years After: The State of New Orleans Music and Culture

An impassioned panel and audience discussion that took place in New Orleans on August 24, 2015.

A decade after the federal levees failed, nearly drowning New Orleans, the city’s music culture has survived. But in the face of excessive parade fees, ongoing harassment of musicians and Mardi Gras Indians, noise ordinance disputes, zoning problems, and an expanding economy that has left most of black New Orleans behind, can New Orleans culture thrive?

This panel discussion featured artists at the grassroots of New Orleans’ indigenous cultural traditions. They explored the challenges and opportunities in post-Katrina New Orleans for brass bands, jazz musicians, Social Aid & Pleasure clubs, Mardi Gras Indian gangs and other culture bearers of the city. Audience members, some of them important cultural figures themselves, avidly participated.

Moderator:

Larry Blumenfeld

Writer on music and culture for The Wall Street Journal. His writing on post-Katrina New Orleans has also appeared in the Village Voice, Salon, Truthdig, and others.

Participants:

Tamara Jackson

President, the Social Aid & Pleasure Club Task Force and the VIP Ladies & Kids; Executive Director of Silence is Violence, a nonprofit campaign for peace in New Orleans

Bennie Pete

Founding member, leader & sousaphone, Hot 8 Brass Band

Evan Christopher

Clarinetist, composer and advocate for New Orleans culture and the city’s indigenous

music traditions

Howard Miller

Chief, Creole Wild West; president of the Mardi Gras Indian Council; veteran carpenter

Fred Johnson

Director, the Neighborhood Development Foundation; founding member of the Black Men

of Labor; former spy boy with the Yellow Pocahontas Mardi Gras Indian gang

Jordan Hirsch

Writer and advocate for New Orleans’ cultural tradition bearers; founding Director of Sweet

Home New Orleans, staff writer for HBO's Treme

Lolis Eric Elie

Author, former Times-Picayune columnist; co-producer, Faubourg Treme: the Untold Story of

Black New Orleans; story editor, HBO’s Treme

The program was presented at Basin St. Station by The Crescent City Cultural Continuity Conservancy (C5), a Louisiana not-for-profit corporation established for the purpose of educating and galvanizing support for the continuation of New Orleans’ tradition of rich cultural expression.