Project Katrina

Elaborate funeral processions are an essential and historical part of the New Orleans’ culture. The impromptu processions honoring the passing of someone of distinction, especially a musician dates back hundreds of years. For many African American residents who have returned to the city this tradition offers them at least one sense of normalcy and community left from the pre-Katrina days. So you think the local government and police force would have some understanding. Well you would
be sadly mistaken:

On the evening of Oct. 1, some two dozen of New Orleans’ top brass-band players and roughly a hundred followers began a series of nightly processions for Kerwin James, a tuba player with the New Birth Brass Band who had passed away on Sept. 26. They were “bringing him down,” as it’s called, until his Saturday burial. But the bittersweet tradition that Monday night ended more bitterly than anything else—with snare drummer Derrick Tabb and his brother, trombonist Glen David Andrews, led away in handcuffs after some 20 police cars had arrived near the corner of North Robertson and St. Philip streets in New Orleans’ historic Tremé neighborhood. In the end, it looked more like the scene of a murder than misdemeanors.

“The police told us, ‘If we hear one more note, we’ll arrest the whole band,’” said Tabb a few days later, at a fundraiser to help defray the costs of James’ burial. “Well, we did stop playing,” said Andrews. “We were singing, lifting our voices to God. You gonna tell me that’s wrong too?” Drummer Ellis Joseph of the Free Agents Brass band, who was also in the procession, said, “They came in a swarm, like we had AK-47s. But we only had instruments.”

We there you have it. A traditional that before Katrina could be a tourist attraction and has been around for hundreds of years can now get you arrested. I guess it is just a matter of time till we read a story about a 65 year old man getting “stun gunned” outside Preservation Hall for playing some Louie Armstrong