Following Music

There was a day in New Orleans that was the perfect example of why I try not to turn down invitations. (And also why I should never leave my camera behind, no matter what I think I’m going to be doing.) A friend, who lives in Providence, but happened to be in New Orleans while I was–I don’t suppose it’s that strange to find people flocking to New Orleans during Mardi Gras–told me she had a friends from Rhode Island playing at the Cake Cafe and asked if I wanted to come see them with her. I envisioned a couple of folks with acoustic guitars sitting in a coffee shop and singing something that sounded suspiciously like Mumford and Sons. I should’ve known better.

We biked down to Cake Cafe from Mid-City. I had ridden a bike for the first time in six years the day before, and I still didn’t feel completely back at home perched up on that seat. I was exercising parts of my legs I hadn’t even known weren’t being exercised and I was a little weak-kneed when we arrived at the intersection of Chartres and Spain.

Standing in front of the Cake Cafe were two marching bands, one in a uniform of red and gold, the other in yellow and black. They were battling each other from opposite sides of the street when we got there, and set off shortly after. The ones in red and gold were the Rhode Islanders we were here to see. We never actually stepped foot inside the Cake Cafe. After puzzling out a position in which both of the bikes, and one of their front wheels, could be locked with one small u-lock we walked briskly after them, figuring we could track them by ear.

We paused at the first intersection we came to, and cocked our heads, catching a faint brass line from our left we continued on in that direction. The possibility that we were chasing the wrong band, that there was another brass band close enough by to fool us, crossed our minds, and I loved that that was a possibility, that this city could be so full of music we could be following the wrong tune.  As we reached the next corner and couldn’t detect any further musical cues we asked a passing group of people if they’d seen any marching bands go by.

They had. And so we were on the trail again. We found them only a few blocks later, on Frenchmen. They’d collected a crowd and were trading off songs again. Cars did their best to get through the intersection. People stepped into a bar to buy a drink and then back out onto the street to listen some more. The red and gold band, (Extraordinary Rendition Band) played ‘Killing Me Softly with His Song,’ which, let me tell you, feels completely different when played by a brass band. Joyous almost. I ran into the women who hosted the Superbowl party. They were wandering through the streets celebrating along with everyone else.

Eventually the two bands moved on and we followed behind them, along with assorted other non-musicians. They continued to pick up followers as we progressed through the streets, more than just the folks who knew them already, or knew them tangentially, like me. People would stop to listen to a song when they were stationary somewhere and then wander behind them down the middle of the street when they moved on again.

They stopped in the Neutral Ground of Elysian Fields and put on another act. The yellow and black band, Minor Mishap, tended to make a show of things; like when they all lay on the ground for the piccolo solo and then slowly raised themselves up as the waltz progressed.

Heading on from there we circled back past Cake Cafe. People came out on to their stoops to watch and dance as we passed. I smiled and danced back at them, while trying to give the impression that I was not part of the show.

It was when they reached Architect Street (actually an alley mascarading as a street), where the roof of one of the warehouses hangs over the asphalt, creating an enclosed space, that I realized just exactly how happy I was to be here, following marching bands through the streets of New Orleans. The sound, which had already been impressive, echoed from all sides here. It blasted from the corrugated tin roof and pulsed off the cement walls.

There have only been a few times in my life where I felt compelled to dance, where the need to move with the music overpowers my own self-consciousness about the way my body moves. This was one of those times. I have no idea how long we stayed under that roof while the musicians traded eights and the people who’d followed them–both those who knew them and those who’d stumbled across them in the street and been pulled along by the music–danced wildly. It felt like hours. One of the trumpet players climbed on top of a pylon and regaled us from there. A woman danced with her dog. The sousaphone player galloped around, riding her instrument like it was a horse. A small child in a stroller fell asleep despite the tumultuous noise and his father rolled him away eventually.

It was funny that the most quintessentially New Orleans experience I had was brought to me by a bunch of people from Rhode Island and Texas. It did cement for me however that Austin was the right place to go next. (Maybe I’ll run into Minor Mishap again while I’m here.)

The youngest member of the bands, a boy who’d painted his hair to match his band’s colors, who played the saxaphone marvelously, and whose mother marched along behind carrying a snare drum just in case it was needed, led the procession away from Architect Street and to their final stopping place: a bar called Mimi’s in the Marigny. The bands filled it with music for awhile. The bartender didn’t look annoyed by this turn of events, exactly, but she certainly didn’t look amused either. I tried to imagine becoming inured to this, tried to imagine this being routine and not incredible. I couldn’t do it.

One of the things that made this experience so special had to do with my relationship with the bands that marched in the more official Mardi Gras parades. I invented an alternative way of scoring my enjoyment of a parade, because I didn’t really want to base it on how many plastic things I caught (even though I did send a package home filled with the most prized trinkets–the wizard’s hat I wore as part of my costume Mardi Gras day, the plastic cockroach that made my friend shriek when a parader handed it to her, and more–despite trying to act like I was above them). The rubric I came up with consisted mostly of how many non-blurry photos of floats I managed to snap and how many of the marching bands were actually playing when they passed. Usually it was just the drum line keeping a beat, so if that line of trombones was blasting when they walked past I felt like I was lucky. But here was an entire parade that was just music. No plastic trinkets, just people who clearly enjoyed making noise together. It was everything I didn’t know I wanted out of a parade. Plus I got to follow it around, instead of passively waiting for it to march by me.

Eventually the music was over, and it was time for drinking, and photo ops, and small talk, and all the other assorted bits of socializing. It felt easy to be part of this group; it felt like I knew them already. The Rhode Islanders were driving back to feet of snow either today or the day after–they couldn’t manage to stay through Mardi Gras Day. It was hard to imagine that reality right now. That’s one of the things this trip has done for me, is made everyone else’s realities seem closer, but despite that, imagining a snowy and silent city was a stretch while standing in the street watching three saxophonists, the child included, sit on the curb and improv together.