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The Boys in the Bands |
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Creole, meme. However, Alphonse didn't mind. He knew he was good and he listened to his playback with a serene smile, thinking of the old days. . . ,
"Those were happy days, man, happy days," Alphonse Picou shot a smile at me that was as warm as old New Orleans. "Buy a keg of beer for one dollar and a bag full of food for another and have a cowein. These boys don't have fun nowadays. Talking T)out wild and wooly! There were two thousand registered girls and must have been ten thousand unregistered. And all crazy about clarinet-blowers P
Neither this rocklike old tinsmith nor his brother felt the torment that later crept into jazz. Picou played a joyous pure-toned Creole clarinet with never a dirty tone or a blued note. Only the syncopation reminded one that this was early jazz. As Picou saw it, jazz consisted of "additions to the bars-doubling up on notes-playing eight or sixteen for one." This urbane New Orleans ragtime, salty with. West Indian rhythms, was the inspiration for Morton's best melodies, tunes that recall the days when he tagged the serenade bands along Rochblave and Tonti Streets, goggling at Picou and his Creole cousins.
These artisans, home-owners, and shopkeepers knew that they were better off than the mass of Southern Negroes. Lodge members and union members, their parades voiced the strength and solidarity of their workingclass organizations. Their bands poured out a joyful and triumphant kind of music, music much safer to sing through instruments than to put into words, down in Dixie; music that spoke of a proud and militant history.
Under tolerant Spanish and French rule in Louisiana, mulatto children were sent to school, taught trades, and given professional jobs. Freedmen of color helped to win the Battle of New Orleans under Andy Jackson. Before 1861, these colored Creoles accumulated fifteen million dollars worth of property, much of it in slaves; they organized literary societies and musicales and published their own newspapers, while the craftsmen amongst them built the lovely churches and |
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