episode 11: interventions

In Fall 2007, I collaborated on a brass band workshop with the Rebirth Brass Band and students from school marching bands all over New Orleans. At the end of the night, snare drummer Derrick Tabb asked me if I would help him launch an afterschool music program targeted towards younger kids who were not getting being educated in music in their schools. I was able to get a few instruments and a little bit of money donated, but it was the herculean efforts of Derrick and Allison Reinhardt that got Roots of Music up and running.

On May 22, 2008, Roots of Music launched with Derrick, Lawrence Rawlins, Allen Dejan, and Shoan Ruffin teaching about 40 kids aged 9-14 the rudiments of music. Our talks with the school district had gone nowhere but Tipitina's offered up their club as a rehearsal space, so every weekday, all summer long, the teachers and students piled into the hot, dark, musty bar, beaming with enthusiastic smiles.

Seeing Reginald Williams open up a brand new tuba case and hold the instrument for the first time on that day is something I'll never forget...

Diggy

Later that summer I saw Reginald standing around after rehearsal, so with Derrick's permission I offered him a ride and he politely declined, saying he was waiting for his brother Jaron to finish practicing. Jaron then appeared, trumpet case in hand, so we climbed into the car, I asked where I should take them, and we were all stunned to find that we live a few blocks from each other.

Bear

Witnessing "Diggy" and "Bear" learn how to play music has made me realize the power of music in positively shaping the lives of kids in New Orleans. Listening to them practice scales on my street, helping them figure out the melodies to brass band songs in my yard, and watching them march in Mardi Gras parades in their resplendent Roots of Music Marching Crusaders uniforms is a endless supply of pride and joy. Like many before them, they have music in their blood - Diggy's dad is the rapper Tec-9 from the 90s rap group UNLV and their uncle is trombonist 'Big' Sam Williams - and like many before them, they've had music teachers who have intervened in their lives and taught them how to be productive young men in addition to teaching music.

The short-lived Street Runners Brass Band posing for a group shot in my yard, Summer 2009

Diggy and Bear lost their older brother to violence but they didn't let this tragedy slow them down: Diggy graduated from Roots of Music (which now runs a fully operational 'school' at the Louisiana State Museum with over 100 students) and he plays trombone with the greatest high school marching band in the city, O. Perry Walker, led by Lawrence Rawlins' brother Wilbert. You can see him and his brother featured in a preview for the amazing documentary The Whole Gritty City.

You can also see Bear throughout Season Two of Treme. There he is in the opening scene, practicing the tunes to "When the Saints" and "I'll Fly Away" while walking past cemeteries on All Saints Day and murder scenes that same night.

As for the rest of the episode, I'm bowing out of that discussion. I'm no TV critic, I'm no fan of the music that happened to be featured this particular week, and I've had some people positively intervene in my own life at various points who have taught me: If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all.

Better to praise Treme for sponsoring a fundraiser for Roots of Music and the New Orleans Musicians' Clinic earlier this year, and to suggest that you help support Roots of Music by making a donation or attending their Marching to New Orleans Gala on May 20.

episode 10: renewal

For 90 minutes last night the only sound in my house was the din of the TV and the hypnotized silence of four viewers glued to the set, interrupted only by the occasional weep or gasp.

The season finale of Treme was emotionally gripping.

Frankly, draining.

Intimate stories of heartache and anger counterbalanced by lightness; visions of feathered people, stoic buildings, and abandoned vehicles emerging from shadowy hues; everpresent sounds of poignant guitars and rejoicing horns. David Simon went solo on the script for this one and he created a monumental sendoff to what has to be the most illuminating season of television about this fragile city. ("Sure was better that K-ville," was the first thing my wife said as we snapped back into the real world.)

We didn't need a cliffhanger to bring us back for more next year. The few lingering questions - Will Janette flee the Big Apple and dart back to the Big Easy? Will Creighton get his jazz funeral? Will Annie get wacked by Sonny or find comfort with Davis or both? - could easily go unresolved in order to make way for new themes, a la The Wire. But the changing of the seasons raises the question of renewal, of what directions the screenwriters will take the show in as they move it forward, and it's a testament to the show's effectiveness that so many New Orleanians have an opinion on this.

Here's mine.

The Treme team are masters of evocation. The words, the music, the cinematography are beyond captivating; they're capturing. The show is a fictional keyhole into intense realities and like all art it can condense the really real in a way that allows viewers/readers/listeners to make connections we would otherwise pass up or take for granted. The connections in season one are all about intimacy: between families, friends, strangers, the city they share, and ultimately between the creators of the show and a subject that is so clearly meaningful to them.

Treme stays close to the ground, offering such a revealing close-up of emotional connection that we walk away each Sunday evening knowing more than we ever knew about this city and its people. But there is a disconnect happening as well, and it is not at the ground level, or even at the local level, but at a much broader level.

The impact of Katrina on the lives of New Orleanians is immeasurable but the root causes and lasting effects of this impact are not. Katrina was a systemic failure of institutions before, during, and after the flood. Long before August 29, 2005, government agencies laid a pattern of neglect from lost wetlands to shoddy levees to the massive reduction of FEMA in favor of Homeland Security. Dysfunctional school systems and the insecurities of service work ensured that black New Orleanians were more vulnerable to the failed response of the flood. And do I need to even address that particular failure, or can I just point to a few anecdotes like, oh say, the fact that tens of thousands of people were stranded outside the Convention Center for five days while a military commander prepared an armed attack mission to deliver water? Or the fact that the troops and the megacorporate winners of no-bid contracts could not be effectively deployed to help Americans because they were fighting Iraqis? That the city police department is so infested with corruption that there are currently eight federal criminal investigations into officers' actions in the immediate aftermath of Katrina?

Fast forward to operation Deepwater Horizon (or are we stuck on pause?): Governmental deregulation once again leading to corporate gluttony and, go figure, another massive crisis to give those in the Gulf a sense of shared purpose through cultural and material loss.

These institutions shape the lives of New Orleanians not because we live in some isolated babylon but because we are Americans who happen to have paid the dearest for the ceaseless expansion of this dysregulation nation since 9/11.

The impact of 9/11 couldn't be portrayed only through New York's financial 'culture' or Washington's political culture because the attacks on the twin towers and the Pentagon were (intentionally) emblematic of the far reach of empire. The deregulation of Wall Street generated a financial crisis that changed all of our lives. Katrina, too, can stand as a lesson to all Americans, not only because of the possible eradication of a singular place, but because it was itself an ominous sign of trouble at home, in your home, wherever you are, whether or not you can walk down the street and order a po-boy and dance at a second line.

Of course, the Treme team has no responsibility to make these connections. And it's not as if the characters walk around in a vacuum: there are city councilmen and insurance agents and good cops and bad cops too. But this team is so abundantly capable to make this case to the American people; to harness the power of dramatic fiction that they use so effectively in intimate settings to situate these day-to-day experiences at the subterranean level of global connections without sacrificing the ground-level closeness.

Before Treme aired I read somewhere that Simon thought his story of New Orleans would resonate with audiences unfamiliar with the city because Katrina was a bellweather for the financial crisis, a foreboding sign of institutions run amuck. This piqued the interest of New Orleanians (OK, maybe just me) because part of the brilliance of The Wire was its capacity to show how institutional corruption effects the lives of policemen, politicians, dealers, dock workers, and school kids.

Now, Treme is not The Wire and it shouldn't be. There is no romance of distinction for Baltimore and that gave the creative team an almost blank-slate on which to inscribe politics at the everyday level through the lives of diverse characters. New Orleans and Katrina are too distinctive to permit that degree of interchangeability: Baltimore could maybe be your town or a town near you, and the devastating effects of bureaucratic corruption resonate everywhere, but New Orleans is not Indianapolis and Katrina is nothing but Katrina.

An unprecedented disaster and an exceptional place in the hands of great poets makes for compelling drama, but when all the 'otherness' of New Orleans creates an intoxicating fantasy world of local culture then the opportunity to challenge viewers about the state of the nation is lessened. I worry that Post-Katrina New Orleans could become just another fantastical storyscape of fundamentalist bigotry or backwoods vampirism in the eyes of viewers who might feel more connection and proximity to the characters if they saw how their lives were shaped by the same forces.

It's not a fair comparison, of course, and the surreality of black men in feathered costumes or crowds of mourners dancing in a graveyard does not have the innocuous, cartoonish, fringe quality of Mormons or bloodsuckers. But neither is New Orleans an imaginary museum of curiosities - a thing apart - because it is tied to America and the world through connections that are not readily visible. I say make more of an effort to uncover them, for the sake of New Orleans and for the sake of good drama too.

There are signs that the creative minds at Treme will complicate things in this subterranean direction. Regardless, I'm looking forward. But until then I'm signing off. I've got to write a book and that requires me to move off of the blogosphere and onto the word processor. See you in season two.

episode 9: precipitations

The heat is rising on Treme as we gear up for the season finale next week. Two plotlines that will be familiar to some are taking centerstage:

- Did professor Creighton Bernette kill himself? The trauma of Katrina was too much for some New Orleanians to bear, among them documentary filmmaker Stevenson Palfi. And Bernette's character is based on the similarly overweight and ferocious Ashley Morris, who died in the aftermath of the storm (though Morris died of a heart attack, not suicide, and he was in Florida at the time of his death in 2008, while his wife and kids were home in New Orleans).

- Is chef Janette leaving the Big Easy for the Big Apple? The topsy-turvy world of post-Katrina sent  as many diehards a-packing as it brought YURP's a-coming. But Janette's dilemma is one that predates Katrina: do those "only in New Orleans" moments make up for the city's dysfunctional infrastructure? The question is particularly cutting for those in the music and restaurant industries who prop up the local tourist economy but are essentially service workers and are the last to get paid. ("Would you rather have a funtional economy or a 4-hour lunch?" asks Davis. "Is your check from the tourism board in the mail?" Janette shoots back.)

But rather than deliberate these developments, I'm going to precipitate future ones... for next week is shaping up to feature the most alluring and mysterious topic in Treme: Indians!

As I've said before, Mardi Gras Indians are African Americans who dress in elaborate handsewn costumes and parade through the streets, singing chants and facing off against one another, on Mardi Gras day. Big Chief Albert Lambreaux of the Guardians of the Flame tribe couldn't mask on the first Mardi Gras after Katrina because he was in the lock-up for punching a cop in the face instead of bowing down to those who protect and serve.

Confrontations between police and black Indians go way back.

Mardi Gras Indians channel the fierceness of the American Indian warrior in symbolic battles ("humbugs") over suits ("who's the prettiest?") and verbal sparring matches using idiosyncratic words ("Indian talk"). But historically humbugs were not limited to the symbolic realm. Until the 1940s or so, rival tribes from the Uptown and Downtown neighborhood met at an in-between site known as "the battlefield" where there was often bloodshed. One of the fiercest chiefs, Brother Tillman, was sometimes jailed during Mardi Gras to maintain order. (Lambreaux, anyone?) The violence dissipated around mid-century, some say because of police crackdowns and many more say because chiefs decided to redirect their disputes into the symbolic realms of masking, chanting, and talking.

Tootie Montana was the most celebrated chief of this new phase of Indian warfare. Tootie was The Chief of Chiefs. And he was The Prettiest. He worked days as a lather, preparing the moldings and frames for plastering, and then he worked nights and weekends sewing the prettiest suits ever to grace the streets. He had help from his wife Joyce, daughter-in-law Sabrina, and son Darryl, who was named Big Chief of the Yellow Pocahontas tribe in the 1990s when his father threatened to retire. But Tootie masked until his death at 82 in 2005 because he was fierce and hardheaded, earning the admiration of future chiefs who would always show respect by kneeling in front on him on Mardi Gras day, even if his unbending determination caused friction at home (as shown in the film Tootie's Last Suit).

Tootie's powerful presence came from his work with a needle + thread rather than hatchet + spear. But the police continued to harass him and other tribes, breaking up Indian gatherings ostensibly for stopping traffic and parading without a permit. This was especially true on St. Joseph's Night, March 19, when Indians take to the streets again to show off the suits that rival tribes may have missed on Mardi Gras day. Large crowds of African Americans in the streets at night is not something New Orleans police receive sensitivity training about. They tend to burst on the scene in great numbers, lights flashing and sirens whirring, hands on their billy clubs. (As they may also do during a jazz funeral in the Treme, after insensitive neighbors make noise complaints.) (Davis, anyone?)

This is precisely what happened on St. Joseph's Night 2005, when cops forcibly dispersed Indians from marching as they have done for a century or more. There was community outrage, and the issue was brought before a City Council meeting, where Tootie took the pulpit and gave an impassioned speech that situated the encounter within a lifetime of police harassment that dated back to Jim Crow days. He then collapsed of a heart attack and was pronounced dead, as his family and fellow Indians gathered around him to sing the Mardi Gras Indian prayer chant Indian Red. If there is ever a need to demonstrate the power of culture and music then this moment will quell any doubts, and it is hauntingly captured in Tootie's Last Suit as well as reporter Katy Reckdahl's piece, which like so many of her other stories linked from here, is proof that she is the city's best (only?) investigative journalist.

How will Simon and his crew treat Chief Albert Lambreax's return to the mask on St. Joseph's Night for the season finale? The only hint we have is the most recent episode's meeting between Lambreaux and Lieutenant Colson, who urges Lambreaux to keep the peace:

LAMBREAUX: Tootie died on the battlefield that day.
COLSON: But Tootie wasn't looking for battle.

Will the chief punch a cop? Kill somebody with a pipe? Or take the high road, like Tootie did, and preside with willful benevolence.

Simon should know what to do with this one. After all, my friends saw him out on St. Joseph's night this year, following the Indians with some cast members and ordering up some BBQ off a grille parked in front of the Sportsman's Corner. My wife and I had just left to take our daughter to bed so we missed him, but I can tell you there was no bloodshed or police confrontations to witness, just some amazing suits + songs to go along with the beer + BBQ.

episode 8: insinuations

The calendar works differently in New Orleans. The change of seasons is usually subtle and almost always very late. Even the holidays arrive late, starting on Twelfth Night and peaking on Fat Tuesday when the rest of the country is trying to stick to their New Years resolutions. It's the most visible example of how New Orleans is as much a Caribbean as an American city, relating to its French (Catholic/indulgent) founding that distinguishes it from the rest of the Anglo (Protestant/ascetic) U.S. Even after 200 years of American rule, Mardi Gras still rules the calendar for New Orleanians, and for a few weeks the entire city bounces along to the same soundtrack: a handful of songs that are rarely heard outside the city limits but are as familiar as gumbo to everyone within them.

All on a Mardi Gras Day is one of those songs. When Dr. John released it in 1970 it went absolutely nowhere - the insider references to parade rhythms and Mardi Gras Indians singing Tu Way Pocky Way would have been lost on a national audience - and the song wasn't even included on the Dr.'s greatest hits CD. But it's inescapable in New Orleans during Mardi Gras, spilling out of barroom doors and car windows as revelers walk through the streets of the city. A book and a documentary movie took the song's name. So did this episode of Treme and we hear it in the background as creepy Sonny indulges in a scene of Mardi Gras debauchery (that includes my wife Alex and friend Chris from the Skeleton Krewe as extras!). Mardi Gras music seeps through the whole show, insinuating itself into the lives of the characters just like Mardi Gras insinuates itself into the lives of New Orleanians.

Professor Longhair is the acknowledged king of the jukebox during Carnival season and, much like his piano disciple's Mardi Gras Day, the Professor had his own Indian-themed recording that became a Carnival staple even as it failed to get notice elsewhere. Big Chief was written and sung by Earl King on a 1964 single with a startling horn arrangement by Wardell Quezergue and a finger-bending piano riff that is required learning for every New Orleans pianist. The song is incidental to a restaurant scene early on in the show, but later Longhair gets name-checked by Creighton Bernette as the family goes about their Mardi Gras morning preparations to the sound of Go to the Mardi Gras, which Mardi-Gras-flag-waving Creighton suggests "should be our national anthem." 

The tune's path from obscure relic to (localized) national anthem is long and twisted. Longhair recorded it with his band the Shuffling Hungarians at their first recording session, in 1949, as Mardi Gras in New Orleans, but the single was taken off the market because the session violated union rules. Ahmet and Neshui Ertegun "discovered" Longhair a year later playing at a house party across the river, and they released Mardi Gras in New Orleans as his first single for Atlantic Records. (Identifiable by the clave rhythm.) Surprise, surprise, it bombed. So the piano professor stripped all the local references from the lyrics and re-cut it as East St. Louis Baby, and when that didn't fly he went into his first of many musical retirements, working instead as a professional card shark.

But his Mardi Gras song kept coming around every year, so Longhair returned to the studio in 1959 and made a record under the name Go to the Mardi Gras that finally hit. (Identifiable by the parade beat on the snare drum.) This is the version that has inundated the ears of Mardi Gras revelers for 40 years, including jazz impresario George Wein, who heard the song in a neighborhood bar in the late 1960s when he was in town laying plans for the debut of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. "Who's that?" Wein asked his protege Quint Davis. "It’s not anybody, it’s just a song that comes on every year at Mardi Gras," responded Davis. "You find that guy," directed Wein, and Davis obliged, eventually locating Longhair at the One Stop record shop where he was sweeping the floor. Davis put Longhair onstage at the first Jazz Fest and managed his career for his last, and most successful, decade. From that point forward, Longhair became enshrined in the New Orleans canon: the city's most iconic club was named for his song Tipitina and Go to the Mardi Gras finally became recognized as more than "just a song that comes on every year."

There's beaucoup Mardi Gras songs winding in and out of this episode - Al Johnson's R&B romp Carnival Time, The Meters' slinky Hey Pocky A-Way (a funk arrangement of the Indian chant Tu Way Pocky Way) - and Janette even stumbles through a solo take on Iko, Iko, yet another Indian chant made into a Mardi Gras standard, and the only one to become a national hit as the Dixie Cups' follow-up to Chapel of Love in 1964.

All of these songs are inextricably linked to this city's identity; they're all evidence of a musical style that I've always thought we should simply call "New Orleans Music"; and they all have deep histories and associations locally if not elsewhere. I'll end with one more, Do Whatcha Wanna by the Rebirth Brass Band.

Rebirth made their first record, Here to Stay, in 1983 when founding members Kermit Ruffins, Philip Frazier and Keith Frazier were still students at Joseph S. Clark High School in the Treme neighborhood. The record put the kids on the map, allowing them to tour outside the city a bit, but locally they were just another brass band until they recorded a single in 1987.  

Do Whatcha Wanna was a radical departure from the brass band tradition. It featured Ruffins singing a solo vocal, which had no precedent in a tradition identified with instrumentals and group singing, and further, Ruffins sang about life on the street - "do whatcha wanna... hang on the corner" - in a hip-hop way that broke with the respectable themes of spirituals and light popular tunes that make up standard brass band fare. The song became an overnight sensation when it beat out the latest rap records on a local radio call in show for eight straight weeks. Rebirth inherited the mantle of top brass band from the Dirty Dozen, who by then were on the road too often to maintain a regular gig schedule in their hometown, and Do Whatcha Wanna became the latest in a long line of songs that are, to paraphrase Ernie K-Doe, "internationally famous locally." (Make sure to purchase the version of the song labeled "Part 3".)

Do Whatcha Wanna provides the soundtrack for a party that draws Janette, Davis, Annie, Delmond, and others throughout the day. We also hear pianist Tom McDermott play a Mardi Gras standard of a different sort, If Ever I Cease to Love, the theme song for Rex, the elite carnival krewe that parades on Mardi Gras day, when the royalty are recognized as the "Kings of Carnival." Since 1872, the Rex parade has stood for pomp and circumstance, and their holiday ends with a lavish ceremonial ball where an eerily masked King sits at a throne alongside a debutante cherub as the exclusive membership bow before them one-by-one. An orchestra plays ballroom dance music along the lines of If Ever I Cease to Love, which is what greets Antoine Batiste when he arrives home from his Mardi Gras exploits and finds his wife passed out on the couch while the Rex ball beams from a TV set. "That might put me to sleep too," Antoine dryly observes before hitting the sack himself.

Some of the funkier Mardi Gras music puts me to sleep too, including two songs featured prominently as bookends to this episode, Chuck Carbo's Second Line on Monday at the top and Tommy Malone's Fat Tuesday at the end. But whether their tastes run hi-brow, lo-brow, or no-brow, New Orleanians dance to their own drummer on Mardi Gras day.

hiatus

Treme is on hiatus this week and so am I.

Here's whats on all our minds:



If you don't know the original, get you some Smokey Johnson.

episode 7: gigs

One of the most representative exchanges of dialogue in Treme was back in Episode 1 when chief Albert's daughter Davina reluctantly left her father to live in the flooded remains of Poke's bar. She calls her brother Delmond for help, but the musician tries to recuse himself:

DELMOND: I’ve got gigs.
DAVINA: We all got gigs, Delmond. Life is a goddamn gig.

Everyone in Treme is doing a balancing act on a highwire: getting gigs, keeping gigs, playing gigs, and trying to finish the gig and wind down. One thing I remember about New Orleans after Katrina is that everybody seemed to be working overtime - regular work but also rebuilding, finding contractors, dealing with insurance, staying in touch with displaced friends and family, etc. - and most everybody seemed to be partying overtime also - drinking, eating, just about everything but sleeping - to counteract the work and suffering. It was zaniness that became normalcy because it was so routine, and the ensemble cast and episodic scriptwriting of Treme is ideally designed to capture the everydayness of the lunacy.

Life is a goddamn gig and Treme is all about the layers of responsibility that the gig entails:

- LaDonna searches for her brother Daymo, and when she finally locates his body she has to withhold the information from her family so as not to obliterate the joy of the first Mardi Gras season since the flood.
- When he's not teaching, Creighton holes himself up in his home office to plug away on his blog, er, I mean literary masterpiece, while his lawyer wife Toni singlehandidly saves the world.
- Annie gets an audition with the Pine Leaf Boys and then purposefully blows it, seemingly out of a sense of responsibility to her loser boyfriend/busking partner/piano man Sonny. (OK, so life is not a goddamn gig for everyone. The only thing Sonny seems to work at is his cuckoo crazy pose.)
- Janette is forced to close her restaurant and downsize to a roving BBQ trailer, selling her kitchen items to uberchef John Besh for some pocket change. (Katrina temporarily took away buildings and brought food trucks in its wake, particularly "taco trucks" operated by new Latino arrivals.)
- Even rolling stone Davis McAlery shows some determination in this episode, slinging his CDs, brokering a deal with a judge, and helping Janette get the BBQ fired up @ Bacchanal wine bar.

Albert Lambreaux is on more of a quest than a gig. He's broken into the unflooded-but-shuttered BW Cooper housing projects (aka The Calliope), occupied an apartment, notified the media and police, and ignited a community protest against HUD/HANO. There were actual protests against the blatantly racist housing policies post-K, and they were somewhat effective in getting a tiny percentage of public housing back open, though most (including The Calliope) have been demolished to make way for mixed-income housing. It's an effective dramatization to have the protest sparked by a Mardi Gras Indian chief, who is traditionally a figure of both fierceness and fraternity within the community.

And finally there's Antoine Batiste, who moves through this episode with a degree of quiet determination that we haven't seen from him yet. Antoine gets steady work in a brass band that welcomes arrivals at the New Orleans airport (yes, this gig has long been a way of promoting cultural tourism), but as usual, his success is put in perspective by his trombone nemesis Troy Andrews, who arrives with his older trumpet-playing brother James from the Portland Jazz Festival, and takes a moment to sit in with the band, make Antoine eat his trombone dust, and then have his chauffeur escort him to the limo. (James and Troy play the 1960 New Orleans R+B hit Ooh Poo Pah Do, written and sung by their grandfather Jessie Hill, with the unforgettable line: "I'm gonna create a disturbance in your mind.")

After the gig, Antoine goes to visit his mentor Danny Nelson in the hospital but finds he has passed, which leads to the inevitable jazz funeral. "You gonna second line back?" asks Nelson's daughter. Antoine responds something like "Danny would give me hell if I didn't," and the Royal Players Brass Band strikes up the old spiritual "I'll Fly Away," which is the standard choice to mark the shift between the period of mourning to the post-burial celebration of death. Even death is a goddamn gig that creates responsibilities for the living.

episode 6: light/heat

Treme doesn't have a lead actor. Its based around an ensemble cast. And Treme doesn't have a unifying plot. Its not a cop show, or a show where everybody is stranded on an island and is trying to get off. Each episode cuts back-and-forth between people from vastly different social positions in vastly different situations and what connects them together is the shared experience of being in post-Katrina New Orleans. The place and the culture are the glue.

Its a bit of an experiment in script writing, if you ask me, and since you asked I'll admit that I'm not sure how effective it is. I love this place and these people and I still find myself looking for a storyline to make me care and keep coming back, because the scriptwriters' determination to "get New Orleans right" by deluging viewers with authentic local culture and dropping localisms at every turn ("Always for Pleasure!" "There's Pride on Bourbon Street!") doesn't necessarily make for good TV. If local culture is the protagonist of Treme, than culture needs to get out more and do stuff rather than always trying on different outfits and looking at itself in the mirror, pouting when it doesn't like what it sees and smiling when it does. I find this more crucial to the show's significance that the insider/outsider authentic/inauthentic New Orleanian/non-New Orleanian debates that have ensnared Simon.

In Episode 6, its Mardi Gras, or the lead up to it, that binds the scenes together. More than Christmas and New Years, its the Carnival season (Twelfth Night to Fat Tuesday) that's the apex of the yearly calendar for New Orleanians, and this week we're smack dab in the middle of the festivities. But this is not the Bourbon Street frat-party hurricane-and-titties Mardi Gras, its those parties that constitute Mardi Gras for locals from every strata of the city: the Indian "gangs" are busily preparing their suits... the elite Mardi Gras Kewes are having a ball... and those in-between are irreverently parading in the streets.

Albert Lambreaux's Mardi Gras Indian tribe, the Guardians of the Flame, is gaining momentum on the march toward their first Mardi Gras post-Katrina. At least since Emancipation, black Indians have marched through the streets on Mardi Gras morning in elaborate handsewn costumes that honor Native Americans who “won’t bow, won’t kneel." Every year, the members of the tribe come out in a new suit that takes months to sew. Albert enlists his ladyfriend to cut fabric while he stitches beads and feathers, and the whole gang gets together to practice chants like "Shallow Water, Oh Mama" that Indians sing while they move through the city on the search for other tribes.

Its hard to imagine a group more emblematic of black working-class resistance than Mardi Gras Indians, and as you might imagine, tribe members are often at odds with law enforcement and city government. This history gets a Katrina-treatment in Treme as Albert battles to have the housing projects reopen. "My gang needs someplace to live," Albert tells his councilman's assistant after being offered a tiny FEMA trailer while the projects remain shuttered. "They're like refugees in they own country." And so it will stay, with Albert living at Poke's bar while his second chief sews patches for his costume in a van parked outside.

If Katrina, and especially the governmental response to it, have created obstacles for Albert's tribe, surprising opportunities have arisen for others. With the eyes of the world on New Orleans and its distinctive traditions, any New Orleanian who can claim to be a "culture-bearer" has the potential to step into the spotlight. Albert's son Delmond is touring the U.S. with Donald Harrison Jr.'s modern jazz band in a kind of "New Orleans Revue" with the banjo-toting trad jazzman Don Vappie. Onscreen and in real life, Harrison bridges the traditional and modern, comfortable playing contemporary bebop or singing Indian chants he learned from his father, Big Chief Donald Harrison Sr. of the (actual) Guardians of the Flame. (Or mixing all of the above on his startling CD Indian Blues.)  But Delmond is younger and hasn't struck a balance yet. Tradition all smacks of pandering. He wants to stake out new territory, and for him that means cutting his New Orleans roots.

Before a show, Harrison suggests they "give the people of Arizona what they want to hear" by closing with Iko, Iko, Mardi Gras Mambo, or (gasp) Saints, all local standards that Harrison has reinterpreted throughout his career. Delmond protests and wins the battle but loses the war: the next night in Houston the band encores with Iko and by the time the tour hits Snug Harbor in New Orleans Delmond is thoroughly conflicted. His dad socializes at the bar while the band plays a lot of notes and only seems to take interest when talking with Harrison chief-to-chief. Later, Delmond stops by Indian practice and allows himself to tap his foot to the beat and sing along before jetting back to NYC.

The Katrina spotlight is also shining on Tulane English prof Creighton Bernette, whose incendiary YouTube rants about the governmental drowning of his beloved city have made him a cause-celebre and renewed his publisher's interest in his long-dormant novel. Creighton begrudgingly promises his agent that he'll get back to work, but he'd rather be marching through the French Quarter to the sounds of the Panorama and the Stooges brass bands at the Krewe du Vieux parade that kicks off the Mardi Gras parade season.

But Katrina was not an equal-opportunity employer, and trombonist Antoine Batiste has found himself left out in the rain. Or hung out to dry. Missing the boat? Anyway, he can't get a gig, even a spot on a Dr. John tour that was handed to him by Philip Frazier of the Rebirth Brass Band but went to the younger, hipper Troy "Trombone Shorty" Andrews instead. (Shorty, needless to say, would never show up to a black-tie affair in a suit because his old stained tux got shrunk in the washing machine.) When Kermit Ruffins throws Antoine his scraps - subbing in a big-band at a Mardi Gras ball - Antoine is grateful but deflated. Playing charts of swing standards is not Antoine's idea of creative expression (i.e. its not authentically "New Orleans"), and though his spontaneous solo on the warhorse Take the A Train earns him a smattering of applause from the polite dancers, the glare shot by the bandleader will surely have more of an effect on Antoine's fumbling quest for a steady paycheck.

Like a lot of the music in this episode, this performance seems designed to leave us cold. The lighting, the cinematography, and the sound of the modern jazz and big-band scenes are muted in comparison to the vibrant practice session at the Indian bar. For those viewers in search of locating where authenticity begins and ends, the look and sound are a kind of thermometer for gauging the way Simon and his team assign value. But for those in search of an intimate, cohesive story, Treme may be giving off more light than heat.