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FEATURE:
Jazz Funerals
January 30, 2004 Episode no. 722
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BOB ABERNETHY: Now, the jazz funerals of New Orleans. They go back to the beginning of the 20th century, and dozens of them are still held every year. In most cases, they are the funerals of musicians, or members of what are called social and pleasure clubs. New Orleans is known as "The Big Easy," but -- as Jason Berry reports -- its jazz funerals are powerful spiritual celebrations of both life and death.
JASON BERRY: When a musician dies, the community gathers to say farewell, a cutting loose of the soul from earthly ties. The ceremony begins at the wake, inside the funeral home.
Jazz funerals are a heartbeat of New Orleans. The origins [of this] tradition lie in the colonial era, as French brass bands played in large processions honoring generals and politicians. At the same time, in a public park called Congo Square, African slaves gathered in large concentric circles, ring dances, honoring ancestral spirits. Gradually the two traditions came together -- the line and the ring -- creating a new form of burial ceremony, and with it, a new music called jazz.
MICHAEL WHITE (Musician): People come to jazz funerals in New Orleans because it's part of the spiritual celebration. We celebrate and laugh at life. We celebrate and laugh at death. We dance at the occasion. We're happy because you're going to a better reward. We're sad because you're not here anymore. We're sad because we're going to miss you. We're happy because you're going to a better place, permanently.
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BERRY: The funeral continues with the casket coming out of the church to the slow solemn tolling of the dirges, hymns of sorrow and loss. When the time for mourning is over, the band launches into up-tempo music, and the street dancers break into spontaneous choreographies.
Mr. WHITE: I realized that in a sense I was like an inheritor of this spirit or tradition that goes all the way back to Congo Square. And through that, all the way back into the core of Africa.
SYBIL KEIN (Historian): Many of the slaves believed that when they died they would go back to Africa. It was the belief that they carried with them and [that] sustained them and gave them hope, and this too became part of the cultural memory that slaves in Louisiana had of African rituals, of African thought and African view. You didn't have to mourn death, you had to celebrate it. It was an idea of celebrating death, which, of course, you'll see in jazz funerals.
BERRY: Jazz funerals hold a mirror to a city of great beauty and great poverty. The music is a memory of the city, and, come what may, a form of beauty that endures.
Mr. WHITE: And I think, in a sense, there is a sort of euphoric atmosphere of the jazz tradition that kind of recalls what heaven must be like. And so we try to celebrate that cause. So the music is joyous and happy.
BERRY: For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, this is Jason Berry in New Orleans.
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