New Orleans, Louisiana.
Three months after.
Antoine Baptiste is running to catch up a second line band in the Tremé, trombone in hand. He has got himself a gig standing in for Trombone Shorty. When he arrives after explaining himself to the band he hollers “play it for the money boys, play it for the money” and they break out into ‘Feel like funking it up’.
And so opens Treme the HBO drama that premiered in April 2010 - not quite five years since Hurricane Katrina hit the city of New Orleans resulting in destruction and the loss of over one thousand lives.
The Tremé, the oldest African American neighbourhood in the USA, and is just north of the famous French Quarter, and it took the full force of Hurricane Katrina but survived serious flooding because it is on higher ground. Treme the television drama is the story of how the residents of the Tremé tried to rebuild their lives three months after America’s most destructive hurricane to date.
Treme spans four series and 36 episodes and if you have never watched it you are in for a real treat; it is American drama at its absolute best. Not that should be surprising given that it was created by David Simon and Eric Overmyer who were also responsible for ‘The Wire’, a series often cited as the best American television drama ever created. It had pedigree.
Here's that opening scene.
Treme is as much about a place as it is the people that live in that place and call it home.
It was in the Tremé that free people of colour first lived in American and as Wendell Pierce, who plays Antoine Baptiste, explains, “In Tremé captured Africans could listen to the music of European brass bands and they combined those two sounds into jazz. Um pah pah turned into um…pah a douba douba douba boom boom yeah”.
So the Tremé, a working-class inner suburb of New Orleans, was effectively the birthplace of jazz and unsurprisingly it seeped into the cultural soul of the place.
Nowhere is that more clearly expressed than in the tradition of the second line.
Here at death there is no greater honour at your funeral than to have, after the close family - the first line, friends and neighbours who with a jazz band make up the second line. To the cemetery a dirge is mournfully played but on departure - post the funeral - the band, driven by the drum, kicks up party style, literally funking it up. The cost of the second line was met by the social and pleasure clubs that glued together the working communities of the Tremé.
Although Hurricane Katrina certainly dealt a blow to the Tremé, that was not the event that has been most damaging to this unique culture and community.
That has been urban renewal and the changing demographics of the resident population, partly as a result of gentrification.
In the 2000 Census, 93% of the population of Tremé was Black. By 2020 it was just 58%.
The old working class culture of Tremé, the neighbourhood bars and Black owned business have now been subsumed by fancy coffee houses and packaged ‘jazz and blues’ experiences all projecting a perceived and sanitised ‘authenticity’. The old communities that had developed unique musical and cultural traditions such as the Mardi Gras Indians are increasingly difficult to sustain as long standing member sell up and move out, or are moved on by the city authorities as a response to redevelopment or they have simply aged and died.
In 2010, HBO's Treme captured the freewheelin’ bohemian ‘pioneer’ gentrifiers of the Tremé: the chi- chi gumbo restaurants, the French Quarter clubs and the new wealthy residents and older moneyed dynasties - but also there were the itinerant drug-dependent musicians, the casual street gun crime and the brutality of the city's policing especially during the Hurricane Katrina crisis. It is a moment in time in a place.
Echoes of this culture and sound undoubtedly remain, and New Orleans retains its reputation for the birth-place of Black American music, whether jazz or blues, while Mardi Gras still attracts tens of thousands of people from all over the World.
However, you can save yourself the air-fare, the handing over of your DNA and social media history to the US border control or run the risk of ICE picking you and deporting you, by finding 36 hours to binge watch Treme.
References and reading.
Wendell Pirece’s New Orleans - a tour of the neighbourhood thanks to 'The Guardian'
Tremé Neighbourhood Civil Rights Trail
Tremé: Death of a neighborhood, survival of a culture
Black Masking Indians: A historical New Orleans Carnival tradition
Carl Lee is retired but was a lecturer at The University of Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam University, taught A level Geography for 20 years at Sheffield College, is the author of five books about geography and has a PhD in economic geography. He has been nuts about music since buying his first single in 1973: 10cc’s 'Rubber Bullets' if you were wondering.
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