Mardi Gras / New Orleans
"I'm not sure, but I'm almost positive that all music came from New Orleans."
--Ernie K-Doe, NOLA musician
http://www.mardigrasindians.com
On Fat Tuesday "tribes"of anywhere from fifteen to thirty working-class black men put on elaborately beaded and feathered Indian costumes that they have been designing and sewing all year and formally parade through black neighborhoods, dancing, singing and chanting in a unique style and patois, of spyboys, flagboys, big chiefs and what to outsiders can sound like nonsense. The musical/dance/chant forms are African call and response patterns filtered through the historical New Orleans experience.
New Orleans musicians have inserted Mardi Gras Indian music into American music. In the 1920s, New Orleans jazz musicians recorded Mardi Gras Indian songs. There were several Mardi Gras Indian call and response chant/songs that were hits in the 1950s, notably Sugar Boy Crawford's Jock-a-Mo.
Professor Longhair used polyrhythmic Mardi Gras Indian music in his performances, and insisted on upright pianos (rather than grands) so he could rhythmically kick the baseboards. One percussionist explained playing with Professor Longhair: "If the drummer is playing a certain rhythm with his foot, and Fess got something happenin' with his hands, syncopatin', it's best for you to play in the spaces where nothin is happenin and kind of blend in with the drummer and the bass player" Then in language that evokes the chanting/singing/dancing parades, he says, "It's just backwards and forwards your hands and your brain, your eyes, your ears, and it's just flowin like that into a rhythm.
--from George Lipsitz, Time Passages.
"He's a seminal force, a guru, an original
creator of the New Orleans piano style ... the teacher of great
players like Fats Domino, Allen Toussaint, Mac Rebbenack, James
Booker, and Huey Smith. All acknowledge him as The Great Master."
--Jerry Wexler
Professor Longhair (nee Henry Roeland Byrd and aka Fess) ( 1918 - 1980) was a legendary New Orleans blues musician, noted for his unique piano style, which he described as "a combination of rumba, mambo, and Calypso", and his unusual, expressive voice, described once as "freak unique".
His career in music began in the 1930s, dancing for tips. "The very first instrument I played was the bottom of my feet, working out rhythms, tap dancing. We used to dance all up and down Bourbon Street."
In the late 1940s, he sat in on piano at the Caldonia Club while Dave Bartholomew's band was taking a break. He was an immediate hit and Bartholomew, later famous as Fats Domino's bandleader and collaborator, was fired. The band all had long hair and were dubbed Professor Longhair and the Four Hairs.
He
began recording the following year. His signature song, "Mardi Gras in
New Orleans" (still the theme song of New Orleans Mardi Gras) was
recorded in 1949 under the name Professor Longhair and the Shuffling
Hungarians. "I had one Hindu in the band, but there weren't no
Hungarians," he explained.
Professor Longhair and others reproduced African forms throught the Mardi Gras Indian based music, and then musicians around the world "knowingly and unknowingly absorbed mardi gras indian music into the basic vocabulary of rock and roll." The New Orleans drummer Earl Palmer laid down the solid "parade beat" behind the R&B of Little Richard and Sam Cooke, and the melodies and chord progressions of a parade song reappear in Rock Around the Clock. --George Lipsitz
Louis Armstrong was the greatest of all Jazz musicians. Armstrong defined what it was to play Jazz. His amazing technical abilities, the joy and spontaneity, and amazingly quick, inventive musical mind still dominate Jazz to this day. Only Charlie Parker comes close to having as much influence on the history of Jazz as Louis Armstrong did. Like almost all early Jazz musicians, Louis was from New Orleans.
We
were clowning around in the studio while the musicians were on break.
It was just the three of us using drumsticks on ashtrays and glasses
singing Iko Iko. We didn't realize that Jerry and Mike (producers
Leiber and Stoller) were in the control room with the tape
running....We had never planned on recording it....(The song) is the
type of thing the Indians have always used, inventing new words as
they march along." --Barbara Hawkins, of the New Orleans female trio The Dixie Cups, explains how their 1965 hit Iko Iko was recorded.
