Roll With It: Brass Bands in the Streets of New Orleans by Matt Sakakeeny (review)

The aftermath of the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 has generated many stories of resilience, hope, and survival pertaining to the experiences of New Orleans musicians, including Jason Berry’s epilogue to the revised edition of Up from the Cradle of Jazz (2009), Keith Spera’s Groove Interrupted (2011), John Swenson’s New Atlantis (2011), and Eric Porter’s and Lewis Watts’s New Orleans Suite (2013)—all valuable studies. Matt Sakakeeny’s Roll with It adds significantly to this narrative trend and provides perhaps the most in-depth and focused account yet. The book presents cogent case studies not only of the vicissitudes confronting members of the brass bands in question (Hot 8, Rebirth, Soul Rebels, etc.), but also of the challenges facing a team of local scholars who combine advocacy for the brass band “second line” tradition with dedication to its documentation, and of the embedded infrastructure problems related to racism, poverty, violence, and invisible service economies deriving from neo-liberal political and economic agendas that affect them all. Sakakeeny’s rendition of the voyage of personal discovery that accompanied his fieldwork is especially noteworthy and engaging, generated partly by the inevitable catharsis that Katrina entailed for anyone who cares about New Orleans, but even more profoundly grounded in the lessons learned from interaction with his informants as they struggled to regain their individual and collective identities through the act of making music.

As an ethnomusicologist, Sakakeeny is particularly interested in assessing brass band activity as a multi-faceted form of labor that bridges the gap between service to the indigenous black community and capitulation to the imperatives of cultural tourism and institutionalized festival traditions (such as “Jazz Fest”), but he is careful to let the musicians speak for themselves as they negotiate for power against the various constraints that threaten to overwhelm them. Sakakeeny’s study is replete with insightful analysis of the strategies used by brass band musicians to regulate parades by manipulating tempo, volume, and repertoire to gratify “second liners” and to guide them safely through the streets. There is also a wealth of useful historical information, including new perspectives on the role of brass bands in jazz’s origins, issues related to cultural dynamics and the reconfiguration of tradition with the rise of Harold Dejan’s Olympia Brass Band in the 1960s, the rejuvenation that occurred with Danny Barker’s Fairview Baptist Church Christian Band experiments in the 1970s, and the new wave of experimentation and fusion with modern jazz and popular music styles (such as hip hop) driven by the Dirty Dozen Brass Band and others that has dominated the scene for the past 30 years. Willie Birch’s magnificent artwork and afterward evoke the visual richness and spirituality that enriches “second lines” and provide further enticement for readers to experience for themselves both the solemnity and unbridled joy that animate “second line” parades in New Orleans.