Trailer: A TASTE OF HEAVEN: The Heartbreak Life of Raymond Myles, Gospel Genius of New Orleans

Raymond Myles Teaser from Peter Dandrea on Vimeo.

Form vs. Content: Ella Fitzgerald Scats "One Note Samba" in NOLA (1969)

Ella Fitzgerald in NOLA (1969) accompanied by Tommy Flanagan on piano. This performance is reminder of theorist and critic Stuart Hall's point that "style" is not mere husk, but also the substance of Blackness.

"It's the Most African City in North America": 'Black Folk Don't' in NOLA

BlackFolkDont:

 

What's so special about New Orleans, Louisiana? Well the crew of Black Folk Don't headed down South for this season to find out just that! Because black folk don't do New Orleans, OK, they totally do!

Blair Underwood and Director Emily Mann Talk 'A Streetcar Named Desire' on the Melissa Harris Perry Show

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Black Student-Athletes and Coaches Gather for Success Summit in New Orleans

Student-Athletes and Coaches Gather for Success Summit in New Orleans

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Trang Hamm, tran...@gmail.com, (503) 780-1624

March 30, 2012

Local high school athletes, coaches, and youth development experts will gather in New Orleans for a student-athlete summit using sports to bolster young black males’ confidence, education, and positive self-image. GameBreakers, a summit organized by UWANTGAME and supported by the Open Society Foundations’ Campaign for Black Male Achievement, will take place on Sunday, April 1, at Dillard University. The event coincides with the NCAA Men’s Basketball Final Four Championship.

Several well-known figures from the sports world, including ESPN sportscaster Mike Hill, will be leading the summit’s interactive workshops and a panel discussion on personal, professional, and academic development. The  panel, titled “The Influence of Sport on African American Males,” will feature leaders representing high schools, universities, athletic organizations, and professional sports teams, including Talman Gardner (McDonogh 35 College Prep), Vic Richard (New Orleans Recreation Development Commission), Bernard Griffith (Dillard University), Keith Gill (American University), and J.J. Polk (New Orleans Hornets).

“Athletics is an excellent platform for building up young men,” said UWANTGAME executive director Joe Branch. “Many have what it takes to play well and compete on the playing field, but off it, they struggle. GameBreakers is meant to help young men succeed not just in sports, but in the classroom, their homes, and employment.”

Almost 80 percent of black males participate in organized sports. Coaches typically become mentors and huge influencers in their lives and need better tools to help them navigate complex life issues.

“As a football coach, I know about that desire to reach young athletes and mold them into men,” said Frontline Solutions’ Micah Gilmer, who is leading the GameBreakers coaching workshops.  “We want to address that desire by offering a series of workshops tailored to coaches.”

“Our school is extremely happy to join with GameBreakers and allow our student-athletes a second to none experience in terms of reaching the next level of success,” said Edna Karr High School athletic director Roch Weilbaecher.

UWANTGAME helps high school student-athletes reach their potential in academics, athletics, and personal growth through one-on-one mentoring relationships with successful former collegiate athletes. Serving as a co-organizer of GameBreakers is Frontline Solutions, a social change organization that is helping change happen. The Admiral Center and Tides also are supporting and collaborating on GameBreakers.

For more information, visit uwantgame.org/gamebreakers and follow @UWANTGAME on twitter.

###

Bearing Witness: Mahalia Jackson & The Sanctified Bounce

The 7th Annual Mary Louise White Symposium

State University of New York College at Fredonia

November 4, 2011

Music and Literature: Legacies in Harmony

A Symposium in Honor of Mahalia Jackson’s Centennial

Bearing Witness: Mahalia Jackson & The Sanctified Bounce

by Mark Anthony Neal

The everyday realities of New Orleans citizens prior to Hurricane Katrina stood in stark contrast to America’s view of itself, particualry before the recent finacial crisis. Prior to Hurricane Katrina, nearly 20% of the city’s 450,000 residents live below the so-called poverty line.  Within the black community in the city, about 30% of that population was below the poverty threshold, though the national average for Black Americans was about 25%.    The national poverty levels for all Americans was 12.7% in the year before Hurricane Katrina.   In otherwords, the black poor in New Orleans–based on a statistical map that captures little of the challegnes faced by those just above the poverty line—represented nearly three times the rate experienced by the average poor American.   For those musicans who toiled in the city and represented its unique cultures nationally and internationally, their music was often a way to bear witness—to testify, if you will—on behalf of the city’s people and their spirit of resistance.  Though the sanitized image of Mahalia Jackson, that her record companies Decca and Columbia largely contrived in a effort to cross Jackson over as a beacon of “Black Respectbility” stood in opposition to the decidely secular, sexual and profane sounds and images of New Orleans, Jackson's musical sensibilities, like many of her peers born and rasied in the city, always bore witness to its spirit.

The livelihoods of many of New Orleans working class and working poor communities were inextricably tied to their roles as service workers in the tourism industry.  In other words, for much of the year, some sections of New Orleans were little more than underdeveloped outpost—not  of some so-called “third world” nation, but right in the United States.  As Lynell Thomas writes, the city’s tourist industry “invites white visitors to participate in a glorified Southern past.  Black residents, if they appear at all in this narrative, appear as secondary characters who are either servile or exotic—always inferior to whites and never possessing agency over their own lives.”  Thus perceptions of of the black poor on display at the the New Orleans Convention Center or in the Louisana Superdome were framed by a national imagination that had historically viewed them as service workers or at best, entertainers.  In many ways, the coverage of Hurricane Katrina survivors functioned as little more than a national travelogue.  

In his essay “On Conjuring Mahalia: Mahalia Jackson, New Orleans and the Sanctified Bounce,” scholar Johari Jabir suggest that it was this very travelogue quality of New Orleans culture that led to Jackson’s now signature performance in the film The Imitation of Life.  In the Douglas Sirk film, Jackson is featured performing “Troubles of the World,” a classic New Orleans funeral dirge. Citing Laurent Berlant’s reading of Imitation of Life, Jabir notes that Sirk deliberately framed Jackson’s image as grotesque; the director himself described Jackson as a “large, homely, ungainly” woman when her first witness her at a performance at UCLA, bringing to mind how ineffective Jackson’s record was in really controlling how white audiences read her, and indeed it was this grotesque image of blackness writ large that Sirk aimed to present as a means of highlighting, ironically, black humanity in the face of immense tragedy.  As Jabir writes, “When Mahalia enters the film with her New Orleans dirge interpretation of “Troubles of the World,” we are reminded of that at any moment, centuries of historically repressed crying, ‘weeping and wailing’ buried deep in the souls of black folk, could erupt.”

In contrast to the kind of natural emotional release that Jabir, himself bears witness to, the invocation of New Orleans cultural and musical history in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina was more akin to a marketing plan. In the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the failure of the levees in New Orleans, there were many high profiles efforts to raise awareness about the cultural legacy of New Orleans.  Many of those efforts centered on the exaltation of New Orleans Jazz, with many events aimed at providing shelter and support for Jazz musicians dispersed by the tragedy. New Orleans Jazz seemed the most important resource to be protected in the months after Katrina, more so than the people who made the city such a vital and important, ever evolving cultural outpost. Lost in the focus on New Orleans Jazz—arguably one of the nation’s most important cultural exports—are other forms of musical expression that were and continue to be crucial to the survival and spirituality of New Orleans and its citizens, including those who have yet to return.

Though Jazz was a critical component of Black political discourse and intellectual development throughout the 20^th century—jazz musicians like John Coltrane, Billie Holiday, Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln are some of the most resonate examples of creative intellectuals—New Orleans Jazz is often depicted as being tethered to some imagined past, in which race relations and the power dynamics embedded in them were far more simplistic.   Indeed films like The Princess and the Frog and The Curious Case of Benjamin Buttons and the television series Treme (despite it’s progressive political critiques) contribute to a nostalgic view that New Orleans Jazz as a dated, static musical form that offers an “authentic” alternative to more commercially viable forms of popular music like rap and R&B music.  Much of this has to do with the relationship between New Orleans Jazz and the leisure and tourist industries that were so vital to the city’s economy.  In this context, mainstreams desires to save New Orleans Jazz and to protect its musicians are less about strengthening the links between Jazz and Black cultural resistance—a resistance that historically fermented in New Orleans—but maintaining the economic vitality of what Johari Jabir calls the “theater of tourism” in which Black bodies are rarely thought of as citizens but laborers, servants and performers.

In the introduction to the book, In the Wake of Hurricane Katrina: New Paradigms and Social Visions, the late scholar Clyde Woods places New Orleans Jazz in a much broader context, as part of what Woods has famously described as a “Blues tradition of investigation.”  As Woods notes in his essay, “Katrina’s World: Blues, Bourbon and the Return to the Source,” historically the city of New Orleans and the region was “latticed with resistance networks that linked enslaved and free blacks with maroon colonies established in the city’s cypress forests swamps.”  These traditions of resistance would manifest themselves after Emancipation and beyond in the form of “societies and benevolent associations; churches, second lines, pleasure and social clubs; brass bands, the Mardi Gras Indians” and of course New Orleans Jazz. Two practices also linked to resistance in New Orleans are Bounce music and what Jabir again refers to as the “sanctified swing,” embodied in the genres of Rap music and Gospel respectively.

One piece of post-Katrina cultural expression that gives voice and presence of the kinds of resistance that Woods highlights is the documentary Trouble the Waters; a film which troubles the national memory of places and spaces such as New Orleans. Indeed there’s a  haunting presence about Trouble the Water, a presence that is immediately felt by anybody who has had the chance to journey across the city of New Orleans in the past few years.  While tourists travel about downtown New Orleans and the French Quarter blandly commenting on  the limited hours of some of the city’s more authentic haunts, and the Lower 9^thWard continues to serve as the most lasting monument of the destruction, portions of the city remain a decidedly  barren reminder of the vibrant living cultures that once existed in the city.  Of course where there is no people, there is no culture and the slow pace of recovery in the city suggest that something more sinister might be in play.  Nevertheless, if Hurricane Katrina offered the rationale for what might be the only most contemporary example of ethnic cleansing in the United States, then the power of Trouble the Water comes from its brazen ability to summon the voices and spirits of those—who by force or choice—have not returned.  As such Trouble the Water is a striking intervention, for a city that lacks the bodies—and the political wills that such bodies possess.

Trouble the Watertells the story of Kim Roberts, a 24-year-old New Orleans resident and aspiring rapper and her husband Scott, as Roberts documents their experiences before and after the hurricane on a hand-held video camera.  Produced in collaboration with Tai Leeson and Carl Deal, the very fact that the film exists speaks to the economic realities of so many Katrina Survivors.  As Rivers told the Brooklyn Rail, “We’d run out of money. We had about a hundred dollars left, and we was like, “We ought to try to see what we could do with this tape; we might find somebody we could give this tape to; well not give it, but either sell it, or license…you know, see what it’s worth.”  Robert’s comments capture the DIY ethic that has informed hip-hop geneartion expression, but also taps into more traditional African-American sensibilities that can be best captured in the notion of “make a way out of no way.” If we think about survival as distinctly improvisational mode of navigating in the world, Trouble the Water finds it grounding by harnessing the rhythms of black improvisation via Robert’s audio and visual narration.

There’s a telling scene early in the film, when Roberts travels the streets of New Orleans alone shortly  before the storm and sings to herself “On My Own” in reference to the Patti LaBelle recording.  Seemingly a random utterance, the reference would have a particular resonance to African-American audiences familiar with Labelle, who possesses iconographical stature in many black communities.  Mirroring the sampling practices of contemporary hip-hop, the film is littered with such references, offering audiences the possibility of gaining greater literacy in Black New Orleans culture and African-American culture more broadly.  In another example the Roberts’s family dog is named “Kizzy” in reference to a popular character from the groundbreaking miniseries Roots.  Within black vernacular expression, the term has been utilized as a metaphor for overburdened black women.  In fact, Robert’s deployment of African-American vernacular culture as part of the metaphorical shelter that she and her comrades construct in response to Hurricane Katrina helps establish Roberts as the most credible intellectual agent in the film, despite her claims to the contrary early in the film. Robert’s use of black vernacular culture is akin to what Woods more formally describes as the “blues tradition of investigation and interpretation.”  According to Woods, “the blues began as a unique intellectual movement that emerged among desperate African-American communities in the midst of the ashes of the Civil War, Emancipation, and the overthrow of Reconstruction.”  More specifically in the context of Roberts’s narration, Trouble the Water, “draws on African-American musical practices, folklore, and spirituality to reorganize and give a new voice to working class communities facing severe fragmentation.”

Though Roberts and her husband survive the hurricane, Trouble the Water still serves as tribute to those who were lost in the storm and I’d like to suggest the film serves as a kind of “second line” performance—the parade of dancing, shuffling bodies that occurs, often after a funeral.   According to musician Michael White, “at the time of their origin, these parades offered the black community an euphoric transformation into a temporary  world characterized by free open participation and self expression through sound, movement and symbolic visual statements.”  White adds that “impositions and limitations of ‘second class’ social status could be replaced by a democratic existence in which one could be or become things not generally open to blacks in the normal world: competitive, victorious, defiant, equal, unique, hostile, humorous, aloof, beautiful, brilliant, wild, sensual, and even majestic.” As such Trouble the Waters serves as a critical intervention into a national memory that would rather ignore the cultural gifts that New Orleans gave the young country, the dead bodies that were sacrificed in the midst of catastrophic circumstances,  as well as the possibility of rebirth that the Katrina-Politians—those bodies dispersed by the floods—embody.

Mahalia Jackson knew a great deal about second lines.  According to Jazz historian Robert Marovich, Jackson was “exposed to, fascinated by and, most assuredly a participant in the second line of New Orleans Marching and Funeral bands.”  Though Jackson came to prominence in Chicago, the legendary Gospel singer was born and raised in New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward.  Jabir suggest that one of the reasons that Jackson is rarely thought about with regards to New Orleans has to do with “the ways the canon of New Orleans music is recognized exclusively through the lenses of blues and jazz.”  More importantly Jabir writes, the impact of New Orleans music on Jackson—what she called “a rhythm we held on to from slavery days”—allowed her to bring an element of “swing” (associated with Jazz) to the decidedly anti-secular Gospel tradition of the mid-20^thcentury. 

Using the example of Jackson’s often-recalled performance of “Didn’t It Rain” at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival (for which she was heavily criticized by the “true believers”), Jabir suggest that Jackson’s performance of the song anticipates the Hurricane Katrina disaster that occurs more than thirty years after her death. Jabir is not so much suggesting that Jackson had the capacity to tell the future—though the history of the region might suggest otherwise—but that the “sanctified swing” that marked her music and others like Duke Ellington (or Wynton Marsalis if you listen to In This House, On This Morning) is “a heartbeat, a pulse driven by a persistent rhythm” adding that “if music were a living organism, the pulse would hold the music steady, sustaining life  in the midst of various rhythms.” Ultimately, according to Jabir, Jackson’s performance of  “Didn’t It Rain” is a “tenacious hope that finds the singer describing the disaster, accepting it, and living in spite of it”—a gift to those who would come well after Jackson who could grab hold to the “sanctified swing” when faced with their own survival.

Marovich offers even more distinct connections between Jackson’s New Orleans roots or routes, if you will, to sample a bit from political scientist Richard Iton.  Marovich specifically five such examples in the “Rhythmic Pulse or “bounce” of Jackson’s music, her use of thematic variation and impr0visation—what Amiri Baraka has classically called the changing same, Jackson’s mode of attack—accenting the first note the way a jazz trumpeter might start a solo, the physicality of her performance, akin to the frenetic energy she witnessed during second-line celebrations, and finally her trafficking in black southern church vernacular.

Even less regarded by the mainstream consumers of New Orleans music is rap music, as most popularly represented by figures such as Lil’ Wayne, Juvenile, Master P, Mystical and others.  Yet Woods suggest that even Hip-Hop culture in New Orleans is an articulation of the “Blues tradition of  investigation” particularly in the form of the regionally specific genre of Bounce music.  The New York Times recently chronicled a contemporary strain of Bounce known as Sissy Bounce, though the genre’s roots go back to the late 1980s. It was the 1990 song “Where Dey At” by MC T. Tucker that helped give the style some prominence beyond New Orleans.  Woods connects Bounce to earlier forms of New Orleans musical expression, as harkening back to “critiques of the plantation bloc found in the Calinda song and dance tradition perfected on Congo Square [the “birthplace” of Jazz] during the 18^thcentury.

In her essay, “‘My Fema People’: Hip-Hop as Disaster Recovery in the Katrina Diaspora” Zenia Kish pushes the connection between Bounce and New Orleans Hip-Hop more explicitly.  As Bounce created an autonomous New Orleans based riff on Hip-Hop, it informed Hip-Hop’s responses to Katrina including Mia X’s “My Fema People,” 5^th Ward Weebie’s “Fuck Katrina (The Katrina Song)” and The Legendary K.O.’s now famous “George Bush Doesn’t Care About Black People.”  Though mainstream rap artists like Jay Z, Lil Wayne, Kanye West, Mos Def, and Juvenile (“Get Your Hustle On”), offered responses to Katrina, Kish suggest that tracks like those from Mia X and 5^th Ward Weebie offered a “collective first-person perspective” of the “frustrations, humiliations, and pleasures grounded in specifically local knowledge of the multiple socioeconomic disasters that intersected with Katrina.”

Melissa Harris Perry on the 6th Anniversary of Hurricane Katrina

MSNBC's Melissa Harris-Perry marked the sixth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina with a searing monologue about what she saw as the country's failure to learn from the disaster on Monday's "Rachel Maddow Show."

“Where Dey At?”: Bounce and the ‘Sanctified Swing’ in Post-Katrina New Orleans

“Where Dey At?”: 

Bounce and the ‘Sanctified Swing’ in Post-Katrina New Orleans

by Mark Anthony Neal | NewBlackMan

In the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the failure of the levees in New Orleans, there were many high profiles efforts to raise awareness about the cultural legacy of New Orleans.  Many of those efforts centered on the exaltation of New Orleans Jazz, with many events aimed at providing shelter and support for Jazz musicians dispersed by the tragedy. New Orleans Jazz seemed the most important resource to be protected in the months after Katrina, more so than the people who made the city such a vital and important, ever evolving cultural outpost. Lost in the focus on New Orleans Jazz—arguably one of the nation’s most important cultural exports—are other forms of musical expression that were and continue to be crucial to the survival and spirituality of New Orleans and its citizens, including those who have yet to return.

Though Jazz was a critical component of Black political discourse and intellectual development throughout the 20^th century—jazz musicians like John Coltrane, Billie Holiday, Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln are some of the most resonate examples of creative intellectuals—New Orleans Jazz is often depicted as being tethered to some imagined past, in which race relations and the power dynamics embedded in them were far more simplistic. 

Indeed recent films like The Princess and the Frog and The Curious Case of Benjamin Buttons the television series Treme (despite it’s progressive political critiques) contribute to a nostalgic view that New Orleans Jazz as a dated, static musical form that offers an “authentic” alternative to more commercially viable forms of popular music like rap and R&B music.  Much of this has to do with the relationship between New Orleans Jazz and the leisure and tourist industries that were so vital to the city’s economy.  In this context, mainstreams desires to save New Orleans Jazz and to protect its musicians are less about strengthening the links between Jazz and Black cultural resistance—a resistance that historically fermented in New Orleans—but maintaining the economic vitality of what Johari Jabir calls the “theater of tourism” in which Black bodies are rarely thought of as citizens but laborers, servants and performers.

In the introduction to the  book, In the Wake of Hurricane Katrina: New Paradigms and Social Visions, scholar Clyde Woods places New Orleans Jazz in a much broader context, as part of what Woods has famously described as a “Blues tradition of investigation.”  As Woods notes in his essay, “Katrina’s World: Blues, Bourbon and the Return to the Source,” historically the city of New Orleans and the region was “latticed with resistance networks that linked enslaved and free blacks with maroon colonies established in the city’s cypress forests swamps.” 

These traditions of resistance would manifest themselves after Emancipation and beyond in the form of “societies and benevolent associations; churches, second lines, pleasure and social clubs; brass bands, the Mardi Gras Indians” and of course New Orleans Jazz. Two practices also linked to resistance in New Orleans are Bounce music and what Jabir refers to as the “sanctified swing,” embodied in the genres of Rap music and Gospel respectively.

Though Mahalia Jackson came to prominence in Chicago, the legendary Gospel singer was born and raised in New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward.  Jabir suggest that one of the reasons that Jackson is rarely thought about with regards to New Orleans has to do with “the ways the canon of New Orleans music is recognized exclusively through the lenses of blues and jazz.”  More importantly Jabir writes, in his essay “On Conjuring Mahalia: Mahalia Jackson, New Orleans, and the Sanctified Swing,” the impact of New Orleans music on Jackson—what she called “a rhythm we held on to from slavery days”—allowed her to bring an element of “swing” (associated with Jazz) to the decidedly anti-secular Gospel tradition of the mid-20^th century. 

Using the example of Jackson’s often-recalled performance of “Didn’t It Rain” at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival (for which she was heavily criticized by the “true believers”), Jabir suggest that Jackson’s performance of the song anticipates the Hurricane Katrina disaster that occurs more than thirty years after her death. Jabir is not so much suggesting that Jackson had the capacity to tell the future—though the history of the region might suggest otherwise—but that the “sanctified swing” that marked her music and others like Duke Ellington (or Wynton Marsalis if you listen to In This House, On This Morning) is “a heartbeat, a pulse driven by a persistent rhythm” adding that “if music were a living organism, the pulse would hold the music steady, sustaining life  in the midst of various rhythms.” Ultimately, according to Jabir, Jackson’s performance of  “Didn’t It Rain” is a “tenacious hope that finds the singer describing the disaster, accepting it, and living in spite of it”—a gift to those who would come well after Jackson who could grab hold to the “sanctified swing” when faced with their own survival.

Even less regarded by the mainstream consumers of New Orleans music is rap music, as most popularly represented by figures such as Lil’ Wayne, Juvenile, Master P, Mystical and others.  Yet Woods suggest that even Hip-Hop culture in New Orleans is an articulation of the “Blues tradition of  investigation” particularly in the form of the regionally specific genre of Bounce music.  The New York Times recently chronicled a contemporary strain of Bounce known as Sissy Bounce, though the genre’s roots go back to the late 1980s. It was the 1990 song “Where Dey At” by MC T. Tucker that helped give the style some prominence beyond New Orleans.  Woods connects Bounce to earlier forms of New Orleans musical expression, citing the refrain “Fuck David Duke, Fuck David Duke, I say, I say” from “Where Dey At” (in response to the KKK leader who was elected to the Louisiana legislature in 1990), as harkening back to “critiques of the plantation bloc found in the Calinda song and dance tradition perfected on Congo Square [the “birthplace” of Jazz] during the 18^th century.

In her essay, “‘My Fema People’: Hip-Hop as Disaster Recovery in the Katrina Diaspora” Zenia Kish pushes the connection between Bounce and New Orleans Hip-Hop more explicitly.  As Bounce created an autonomous New Orleans based riff on Hip-Hop, it informed Hip-Hop’s responses to Katrina including Mia X’s “My Fema People,” 5^th Ward Weebie’s “Fuck Katrina (The Katrina Song)” and The Legendary K.O.’s now famous “George Bush Doesn’t Care About Black People.”  Though mainstream rap artists like Jay Z, Lil Wayne, Kanye West, Mos Def, and Juvenile (“Get Your Hustle On”), offered responses to Katrina, Kish suggest that tracks like those from Mia X and 5^th Ward Weebie offered a “collective first-person perspective” of the “frustrations, humiliations, and pleasures grounded in specifically local knowledge of the multiple socioeconomic disasters that intersected with Katrina.”

As so many of the Power brokers in New Orleans and the State of Louisiana draw on a distorted vision of New Orleans music, to cultivate a connection to an imagined past, Bounce, the “sanctified swing” and the “Blues tradition of investigation” all conspire to keep the “people” of New Orleans—what I call the Katrina-politans in reference to Taiye Tuakli-Wosornu’s concept of Afropolitans (Africans of the world)—connected across time, history, space and place.

Work-in-Progress | Close Ties: Tying On A New Tradition (film)

Close Ties: Tying On A New Tradition

A Documentary project in New Orleans, LA by Park Triangle Productions

Close Ties: Tying on a New Tradition provides an intimate look at a rites of passage ceremony that connects teenage boys with male role models. The "Tie Tying ceremony" held at New Orleans barbershop, "Mr. Chill's First Class Cuts", was created by Dr. Andre Perry and Wilbert “Chill” Wilson as a way to strengthen communities struggling with crime, poverty and alarming high school drop out rates. Cultural traditions have been the cornerstone of African American communities for centuries. Close Ties examines the impact of this new tradition and shows us how tying a necktie --- an act associated with men who embody professionalism and prestige --- can inspire high school boys to commit to a life of achievement and success.

During the event, the boys participate in a tie-tying demonstration, where role models from around the city instruct the youngsters on how to create distinguishing knots with their neckwear. Each of the boys also receives the opportunity to get professional grooming with a haircut and a shoe-shine. The final component of the event is one-on-one mentorship that each student receives from a male role model from the community. The youth participating in this tie-tying ceremony are boys selected from several schools in New Orleans.

Close Ties documents the mentors and the youth during and after the ceremony, where we see the men encourage and support the boys’ academic and career endeavors. The development of these mentoring relationships creates a lasting impact, one felt by students, parents, teachers and the community as a whole.

Find Out More @ Kickstarter

'Left of Black': Episode #27 featuring NOLA Artist Bruce Davenport, Jr.

Left of Black #27
w/ Bruce Davenport, Jr.
March 21, 2011

In a special episode of Left of Black, featuring a live audience, host Mark Anthony Neal talks with New Orleans artist Bruce Davenport, Jr. about surviving Hurricane Katrina, the cultural significance of New Orleans’ high school marching bands, and using his sketches to keep New Orleans’ culture vibrant.

***

→Born and raised in New Orleans’ Lafitte housing projects, artist Bruce Davenport, Jr. lives and works in the now-infamous Lower Ninth Ward, devoting his time to meticulous graphic reenactments of the local musical culture of junior high and high school marching bands, those that were decimated by the levees breech and those that survive. His current exhibition “All I Need is 1 Pen” at the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University was curated by Diego Cortez.

***

Left of Black is a weekly Webcast hosted by Mark Anthony Neal, Professor of African & African American Studies at Duke University and produced in collaboration with the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University.

Trailer: 'The Whole Gritty City'

from thewholegrittycity.com

"Once that band gives you that down beat...just for that brief two or three minutes you forget every problem you had. You have no cares in the world...Yeah it must be nice to live like that with no cares in the world" - Wilbert Rawlins Jr.

Living in a city traumatized by a flood and besieged by street violence, there's a deep longing to have "no cares in the world". But New Orleans is also the birth place of jazz: a community that to this day draws on a deeply rooted musical culture. For thousands of kids in the city's marching bands music is an escape, a refuge and a lifeline.

The Whole Gritty City is a documentary feature film currently in post production, and planned to be released early in 2012. It tells the story of three New Orleans marching bands as they push to prepare for Mardi Gras parades, and three band directors battling for their students' lives and souls. It shows lives stopped in their tracks by the violence of the streets, and the power of music to lift and sustain the survivors.

Bruce Davenport Exhibition Opens @ John Hope Franklin Center

March 17 - May 14, 2011

Bruce Davenport Jr. -- All I Need Is 1 Pen
-- An exhibition of Works on Paper --

Exhibition Curator, Diego Cortez

***

Thursday, March 17, 12:00 - 1:00 PM, John Hope Franklin Center

Artist Bruce Davenport Jr. interviewed by professor Mark Anthony Neal on Left of Black, Franklin Center, Room 240

Thursday, March 17, 5:30 - 7:00 PM, John Hope Franklin Center

Opening reception for All I Need Is 1 Pen, an exhibition of works on paper by New Orleans artist, Bruce Davenport Jr.

***

On view at the Franklin Center Gallery will be the exhibition All I Need Is 1 Pen, a show comprised of works on paper by Bruce Davenport Jr. as well as a short video from the upcoming Richard Barber film The Whole Gritty City, which documents both the marching band culture of New Orleans and Davenport Jr.'s artistic work in response to that culture. Davenport Jr.'s work is on the cusp between folk art and contemporary art and seems to undermine the terminology of both worlds.

Bruce Davenport Jr., son of a preacher and community activist, was born in New Orleans in 1972, grew up at the 6th Ward Lafitte Projects, and currently lives in the now infamous Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans. Throughout his schooling he was involved with the junior high and high school marching band cultures which are a major force in Mardi Gras and the overall musical culture of New Orleans. Following Hurricane Katrina, and the devastation to the city and its schools, about half of which remain closed today, Davenport Jr. decided to document the past glory of this unique culture in his drawings. Davenport Jr.'s work has been featured in many exhibitions in the U.S., including at the C.A.C., New Orleans, Dieu Donne Gallery, NYC, Lambent Foundation, NYC, Martin Luther King Jr. Library, New Orleans, Prospect 1.5 and Prospect.2 (Dan Cameron, Curator), New Orleans, AS IF Gallery, NYC and Ballroom Marfa, TX. His work has been collected by major collectors throughout the world. He has donated his works to many of the schools and libraries in New Orleans.

Bruce Davenport Jr. is represented by AS IF Gallery in New York (www.asifgallery.com). Diego Cortez is an independent curator based in New York. More information can be found at www.lostobject.org.

From The Lost Soul Archives: Raymond Myles @ Greater St. Stephens in New Orleans

The Late, Great New Orleans Gospel artist Raymond Myles performing at Bishop Paul Morton's Greater St, Stephens in New Orleans.