Taking It to the Bridge: Music as Performance

Cutting Loose: Burying “The First Man of Jazz”

125 Joseph Roach Cutting Loose Burying “The First Man of Jazz” With madness, as with vomit, the inconvenience is mainly to the passersby. —Joe Orton A New Orleans jazz funeral is a parade you can’t watch. Your line of sight is traversed by the swirling crowd of mourners and revelers called the “Second Line.” They follow the brass band, the corpse, and a logic of their own. As they approach, the choice you have to make is between standing on the sidewalk feeling stupid or joining the procession, which before it’s over is as much about dancing as it is about marching. In a “traditional” jazz funeral, understanding that no two funerals are identical and that traditions change with the times, there are two main parts: the slow and the fast. A dirge-tempo march to the burial ground with the body comprises the first part, which in more recent times frequently ends not at the grave but when the hearse leaves for the distant cemetery. “Just a Closer Walk with Thee” is a favorite hymn tune for the first part. The second part, with the deceased no longer physically present, is given over to up-tempo numbers, especially those with ribald meanings in their lyrics and titles, of which “I’m Glad Now That You’re Dead, You Dirty Dog” is not unrepresentative of the tradition. The threshold between the two parts is marked by the defining moment of the whole performance—“cutting the body loose”— which expresses both grief for the deceased and joy for his (or sometimes but less frequently her) escape from the sorrows of a sinful world or at least from Louisiana. In the mid-1990s the traditional jazz funeral underwent a transformation led by younger musicians playing for their deceased peers, many of whose violent deaths were attributed to battles over drugs, and those who 126 • taking it to the bridge mourned them. Emergent ensembles such as the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, the Rebirth Brass Band, and the New Birth Jazz Band reinterpreted the traditional repertoire in terms of rhythm and blues, funk, rap, and hiphop . The dirge disappeared and the dancing got dirty—nudity, profanity, and flagrant intoxication characterized the behavior of teenaged Second Liners, much to the disgust of the traditionalists. When the great jazzman Danny Barker passed (in New Orleans no one beloved passes away), his survivors asked that he not be given the traditional public send-off because he had been scandalized by recent excesses. At that moment in the history of New Orleans jazz funerals, the relationship of “cutting the body loose” to the phrase cutting loose, meaning to break out of established behavioral norms, emerged in ways that were suggestive albeit obscure. Such obscurity—and double entendre—are familiar problems to historians of jazz. Experts have on various occasions proposed Arabic, African, Creole, French, Old English, Indian, and Spanish roots in their etymologies , which vainly seek to trace the pristine phonological emergence of jazz out of the hopeless tangle of vulgar tongue-twisters—jass, jasbo, jaser, jaz, chaz, chasse, razz, spasm, and jasm (that is, jism).1 Even before this AfricanAmerican musical and kinesthetic style—featuring propulsive syncopation of ragtime and blues materials, polyphonic ensemble playing, improvisation , solo riffs, and dance provocations—had a settled name or myth of origin, commentators and the public had imagined it as both an authenticating practice of African-American culture and a sexual incitement, troubling the Eurocentric boundaries between the sacred and the profane.This analysis typically entails an account of the city of New Orleans as the real and the imagined locus of pure jazz origins, examining how, in the words of Eric Hobsbawm, “‘New Orleans’ became a multiple myth and symbol: anti-commercial, anti-racist, proletarian-populist, New Deal radical, or just anti-respectable and anti-parental, depending on taste.”2 In the light of Hobsbawm’s notion of an invented tradition, I want to examine Michael Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter (1976), in which the novelist attempts to render the musical life of the city of New Orleans through a combination of fictional and documentary narratives. Ondaatje, using documents from turn-of-the-century New Orleans and quotations from oral histories in the Hogan Jazz Archive at Tulane University, narrates the imagined inner life of “the first man of jazz” Charles “Buddy” Bolden (1876?–1931), the legendary cornetist whose playing is spoken of with awe to this day, even though he never picked up his horn again...