"If this were a Movietone News item... and you were in a darkened movie palace of the thirties awaiting the feature, you'd see ropes being thrown off, gangplanks being lowered, steamer trunks being unloaded, and passengers starting gaily to stream off. They'd bring up the sound track- something stirring, to suggest the march of time." - Paul Hendrickson
The scene starts before the first note, before the eighty minutes the band keeps the bar'crowd waiting under low light and lower ceiling. It starts before a catfish dinner next door and the bottles of Abita served by a bartender named Kiss, resident of New Orleans by way of Brooklyn, to a traveler named Joshua, resident of Brooklyn, by way of Los Angeles and a sliver of the world. The true iris-in starts before anyone reading this was born, and before their grandparents' grandparents, but it's been shown in bars throughout this city and this country, and in this particular dive on Tuesdays for twenty years.
That eighty minutes of anticipation dissipates the instant the first notes leap out of the armada of brass packing the stage, the firing squad unmuzzled. The dead time comes alive with the sound of the New Orleans big brass band, all horns and jazz'told'fast. An American artform played at our national volume and speed. Tempos of weathervanes outpacing clocks.
They're telling our story like we always do, through tall tales turned gospel. Our American flamenco.
In bars in Sevilla and the East Village I'd heard plucked guitars and metal kissing wood convey the éxodo migration of Moors out of the Middle East through North Africa and into the South of Spain, coming to rest in the Andalusian peninsula but recalling the struggle, those caravan centuries, in every shuffle'heel'stamp'clap with tornadoing wrists and flourishing skirts of silken fire, wailing tones of Arabic like weeping muezzins.
The same story grown more profound for its congruency, wandering lines remaining parallel, sociology transcending mathematics, geography. The tale of history from below reaching the surface. That People's One of the United States. Yeah yeah the same story told instrumental but unequivocally American in this overpack'd room where sound and energy can't escape. The stage pregnant with ten wailing musicians. A near dozen historians blowing out biography with brass. Their notes competing like generations for legacy, harmonizing like neighborhoods to weave communities, districts forming cities. 50 equaling 1.
Ten'minute jams of the same notes, the same two'steps coming back and back again with little subtleties added to their nature to make the progress each generation's own echoed victory. Orville Wright becoming Neil Armstrong. J. Fenimore Cooper to F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Crane to Cormac. Homer Plessy to Rosa Parks, and Jackie Robinson to Barack Obama. Every tragedy our own scars worn with somber defiance. Or just defiance. Remember the Maine to Never Forget. The Twin Towers to One World Trade. Enduring the Great Depression, and the lesser ones of jilted hearts and corporate layoffs. Down the years history comes fast like machine-gun ratatats and tambourine jangles. Hurricane Betsy. Andrew. Katrina. Sandy.
And then we reply.
The scene always starts in utero, before we realize we're actors, authors, autobiographers, but it's the story of America in every note. In every two-syllable chant as the audience proclaims the band's name in incantation. Shouted constantly, hoarsely, fiercely. As mantra, as battlecry, as promise, as the myth each generation galvanizes into reality.
"RE-BIRTH."
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