Author Archives: Treme Blog

June 27th 2011

Treme Wrap-Up: The Storm, The Storm, The Storm

Antoine Batiste. HBO Treme.[SPOILER ALERT] Last year, I asked Wendell Pierce if Antoine’s financial and musical instability were functions of Katrina, his musical limitations or himself. He couldn’t answer because he hadn’t seen scripts yet that would clarify that issue, and I doubt he’s seen them this season either. One thing’s clear, though—the issues he faces have less to do with a hurricane and more to do with pre-existing conditions. Yes, he has stepped up as a teacher and as a parent (a bit), but he blew off one of his band’s shows to play with Henry Butler (that might lead to a European tour) and he tried to hijack Kermit’s crowd. This week, he can’t control his ego and sings answering lines during Wanda Rouzan’s version of Dorothy Moore’s “Misty Blue” (the original produced by Wardell Quezergue) until she blows up at him and quits the band onstage. When Cornell’s girlfriend sings, Antoine gives Desiree a reason to wonder if he’s cheating. He hovers over her—even though she’s a bandmate’s girl—like he’s going to do her on the set break.

We’ve seen the womanizing throughout the series, and we saw his inner ham when he was onstage with Bonerama earlier this season, so the question we’ll likely find an answer to at some point next season is whether a band can survive with such a shaky leader, and whether Antoine is self-destructive or he lacks control of his urges.

The other character who’s having a bad season is Davis, who’s being forced to face his limitations. Last season and early this season, he could come up with crazy schemes and get away with being an *ahem* “overachiever.” Once other people and their hope and money are on the line, his musical limitations are a liability, not an eccentricity. It’s hard to watch him be aced out of his band by Alex McMurray and partially bumped off the album that he hoped would launch his (exceedingly unlikely) musical career, and it’s interesting to watch Steve Zahn play Davis as being in a perpetual state of being stunned disbelief, snapping out of it only long enough to care for Annie. I think his relationship with her hit its apex at Christmas when she showed up in a bow and played for him; now, it feels more caring and friendly, like his relationship with Janette.

Other Notes:

- At the impromptu memorial for Harley, Davis talks about how Harley seemed to travel the world. In an interview earlier this year, Steve Earle (who played Harley) remembered meeting Luke Winslow-King when Winslow-King was busking in Rome.

- In another art-mirrors-life moment, Susan Cowsill leads the group in the singing of “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” but she changes the line, “for to carry my mother away” to “brother away.” In context, it makes sense, but the moment’s resonant because Cowsill lost her brother Barry after Katrina, and her shows from the first half of 2006 were very public displays of grieving. By the spring of 2007, loss was part of her musical subtext, but it was no longer the dominant note.

- This season’s police stories have dovetailed with 2011 in interesting ways. Earlier in the season, Danziger Bridge made an appearance, and now the question of details appears, suggesting that police work has been compromised by the officers’ detail activities for years, though it returned to the front page of The Times-Picayune recently. The reference to the coroner’s office in St. Gabriel in the show performed a similar function.

- Antoine’s history of stiffing cabbie’s is so bad that a taxi driver’s actually happy when he only tips a dollar on a $20 fare.

- It sure looks like we’re going to get a Purple Rain-like scene to resolve the Harley/Annie story. As long at the Time show up to play “The Bird,” I’m good with that.

- Since there’s not time this season to wrap up the story of Sonny and the Vietnamese woman he loves, I assume that means next season will explore how the Vietnamese community fit into the New Orleans story.

- This episode was bad for the one thing Treme does that makes me nuts: scenes with New Orleans musicians that seem to exist just to get them in, and dialogue that tells us who they are. I was glad to see Harold Battiste make an appearance, and maybe the relevance of the scene will emerge in later viewings. First time through, it seems like it was there to put Harold in the scene. Similarly, if Delmond and Dr. John were going to debate whether recording in New York and New Orleans (at Piety Street Recording) was different, they wouldn’t have to identify Uganda Roberts, particularly since the episode before, Albert had brought up Roberts. Did it have to be Chris Thomas King’s house that Hector tried to buy?  Those moments clunk, no matter how well-meant.

- Speaking of Hector, one element of his character that’s easily missed in his story is how much he’s like any out-of-towner who moves here. He relishes the magic of the food, music and way of life the same way that people do who moved here after a Jazz Fest or Mardi Gras. No one on the show’s having more fun than he is, partially because he has the money to enjoy it – no doubt – but also because the city’s charms are all new to him.

–Alex Rawls

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June 20th 2011

Treme Wrap-Up: Worlds vs. Worlds

[Spoiler Alert] This season, Treme has pitted the characters’ little worlds – whether physical or mental – against the real world of conflicting priorities and values that returned in 2006, and the results haven’t been pretty. LaDonna has spent this season dealing with the consequences of having her little world, GiGi’s, no longer feel like her haven, and last night she couldn’t even go into it.

Davis fancies his band as a modern New Orleans version of Funkadelic, but like George Clinton, he discovers that people prefer the good times of the Lil’ Calliope-led Parliament to his theatrical political satire. Antoine’s desire to be big-time leads him to take his band out of the neighborhood bars that were filled with regulars to Frenchmen Street, where he faces the real musical world and a lack of a built-in audience. How does he solve the problem? The way he too often does – shortcuts, in this poaching Kermit Ruffins’ audience, even though Ruffins propped him up last season when he was down on his luck.

Hector faces is own version of this dynamic when he leaves the halls of power and tries to buy people’s property door-to-door, finding people resistant for reasons that have nothing to do with money.

It’s harder to read Lambreaux’s story this season because the character’s so bottled up. Is he depressed or angry because of post-Katrina circumstances, or has he always been a hard man to deal with? Is he a fish out of water in NYC, or is he just an arrogant prick? That ambiguity makes him fascinating, and the scenes with him in the recording session are really uncomfortable, lightened by the bemusement of Dr. John at the whole scene.

Most dramatically, Annie is forced into the real world with the shooting of Harley. The cameras stalking Harley and Annie as they walked said something was about to happen and made his performance of Hank Williams’ “I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive” poignant. The scene made perfect sense (hate to disagree with Maitri at Back of Town), down to Harley’s slightly superior but well-meaning final comment, “You’re making a bad mistake, son.”

But his death will likely force Annie to own her song and her art, and it will likely put the wheels in motion to end her relationship-of-convenience with Davis. She split from one man who watched out for her in his fashion in Sonny, and she’s had her second musical mentor taken from her. As she slowly embraces her need to take responsibility for herself, she’ll likely see how little Davis brings to her life and move on.

Notes:

I usually restrict myself to observations that Dave Walker doesn’t make at Nola.com, where he’s encyclopedic in his rundown. Here are a few quickies:

- That is Peter “Spider” Stacy of the Pogues busking with Harley and Annie. Stacy is currently a Bywater resident.

- The episode ends with Allen Toussaint’s “Tipitina and Me” from the benefit album Our New Orleans. The track is Professor Longhair’s “Tipitina” played in a minor key, and according the producer Joe Henry, the track became his inspiration for Toussaint’s The Bright Mississippi album, which Henry produced:

“It sounded old world, it sounded classical, deeply rhythmic like tango, with New Orleans rhythm but also had a deep blues tonality,” Henry says. On a cross-country flight, he scoured his iPod for songs that might similarly showcase Toussaint’s rich musical voice, even though a jazz album seems counterintuitive as a follow-up to The River in Reverse, which celebrated his songwriting.

–Alex Rawls

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June 16th 2011

Love’s in the Air for “A Night in the Treme”

Kermit Ruffins on HBO's Treme
“Tell people a little bit about Congo Square, about social aid and pleasure clubs, about Mardi Gras Indians, and do a tie-in to the music.” That’s HBO Treme actor Wendell Pierce‘s thought behind “A Night in the Treme,” the concert tour he narrates, which features a variety of New Orleans artists, many of whom have made cameo appearances on the show. Different stops on the tour feature different artists, including the Rebirth Brass Band; Donald Harrison, Jr.; Kermit Ruffins; Dr. Michael White; Christian Scott; Cyril Neville; James Andrews; Glen David Andrews; the Soul Rebels; Big Sam Williams; and Ivan Neville’s Dumpstaphunk.

The tour began on June 10 in the Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco, and has since performed in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. Writer Jay Sacher drew up a description of the night in San Francisco, saying:

The music was good. Better than good. Fantastic. Full of energy and swing…The Rebirth Brass Band ruled the second half. And then they invited the ladies on the stage…Suddenly, festive Mardi Gras umbrellas sprung up and bobbed along to the music.

Before the Chicago stop, Howard Reich previewed the show in the Chicago Tribune, writing: “These musicians represent both New Orleans modernism and tradition, their music as fresh as today’s headlines but also steeped in historical musical rituals.”

In Mike Joyce’s review of the Washington, D.C. stop in the Washington Post, he wrote, “The performance delighted and nearly deafened a capacity crowd with a series of blasts from the vast wealth of music that has poured out of the Crescent City for ages.”

He goes on to describe Dr. Michael White’s “Elegant phrasing during ‘St. James Infirmary’” and how the “Rebirth Brass Band won over the audience with the force of their exuberant personalities during individual showcases and collective romps.” Joyce concludes his review saying that “Near the end of the show…the ushers stood like disciplined sentinels amid the frenzy until one of them, a middle-aged woman, suddenly broke ranks and busted loose, nearly dancing her shoes off for a brief moment. In an evening filled with huge ovations, she may well have received the biggest of them all.”

Here is a list of future tour dates and cities:

JUNE

6/23 – Brooklyn, NY

6/23 – New York, NY

6/24 – New York, NY

6/25 – New York, NY

6/26 – Saratoga Springs, NY

SEPTEMBER

9/17 – Monterey, CA

OCTOBER

10/22 – Atlanta, GA

NOVEMBER

11/11 – Ann Arbor, MI

For more tour information visit TremeOnTour.com.

–Eli Gay

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June 13th 2011

Treme: Bulldogs and Napkin Ladies


I may have made my dramatic television debut this weekend as “Guy on the Right” during Susan Cowsill‘s scene on this week’s episode of Treme. I qualify this not because I’m not sure I was there—I was, standing at the front of the stage in front of Sam Craft—but because I’m out of the country at the moment and have yet to see the episode to see if I got any screen time. I was an extra for this scene, and here’s the story.

At the request of the production company, Cowsill reached out to people who might have seen her at Carrollton Station in 2007. I got the call, as did Sue Ford and Jeff Beninato and Karen Dalton-Beninato (who interviewed Susan about the Treme experience) and a few other people I recognized by face but not name. We met at Southport Hall, where we signed in and had our clothes inspected by people from wardrobe. Since I have a mild allergy to Hawaiian prints, I was concerned when one woman thought I might have to change into one of their shirts from the floral family, but it was decided that my white western shirt with red pinstripes wasn’t too white for the camera and I could go with what I had.

Many of the extras were friends and fans of Cowsill, while others liked the show. There were some who seemed to be semi-pro extras who were supplementing their income with regular extra stints, and there were a few women who dressed as if they hoped to be discovered in the ranks of the extras. I was there out of curiosity, and was slightly worried that someone I knew from the production would spot me and run me off because I’d know about and might write about a scene that had yet to play. After I ran into music supervisor Blake Leyh, though, I realized that wasn’t going to happen and relaxed.

From there, we were moved to a parking lot near the Station where we waited as a cold front blew in. A crew member recognized that my friend Julie was shivering in her sleeveless purple dress and went into wardrobe to find her a sweater. When a light rain accompanied the cold breeze, they moved us into the Frat House. I hadn’t been in it since it was Jimmy’s, but nothing in the men’s room had changed in the intervening years. Still woeful.

After another 20 or so minutes of waiting, someone—possibly the director—walked in and started to point at some of us. “Bulldog,” he said to some of us, while others were simply passed by. Once he’d worked his way through the lot of us, all bulldogs were called to go next door to the Station. Julie, the Beninatos and I were bulldogs, so we were among those who lined up outside the bar while the interior was being prepped for the shot. We stood by a table and watched sadly as one prop wrangler emptied cases of beer into a tub and refilled the bottles with varying amounts of NA beer. The refilled drinks were set on a table with a grid drawn on it, and as we went in, we were given a beer and a number. That number was our spot on the grid, and when we’d walk outside during breaks, we returned our drinks to a wrangler who put them in the appropriate number spaces.

Once inside and armed with a half-bottle of lukewarm O’Doul’s masquerading as a Corona, I was positioned near the stage, right behind Alexis Marceaux—who I likely totally eclipse on camera—and near to Paul Sanchez. We were all less than 10 feet from the stage, with a track behind us that a camera ran on while shooting the band. Steve Earle and Lucia Micarelli were playing a guest spot with Cowsill, and the scene started with the band playing “Just Believe It,” after which Cowsill asked Annie (Micarelli) if she wanted to play her new song. Harley (Earle) encourages her, but Annie demurs and Cowsill starts “Crescent City Sneaux.” And cut. I don’t know yet if that’s how it ended up on the screen, but that’s what they shot over and over again.

Fortunately, that was less boring than it sounds. Cowsill rarely sings a song the same way twice, so versions had nuance differences that were in some cases significant, keying in on the hopeful nature of “Just Believe It” for one take and the song’s defiant subtext in another. One of her gifts is her ability to make contact with the relevant emotions when singing, so while not all takes were equally powerful, each take was deeply felt and moving. Each take ended before we wanted it to because “cut” came during a Micarelli violin solo that was also hot and different each time, and we wanted to hear it played out.

Between takes, wranglers blotted Earle and Cowsill with handfuls of napkins because the bar’s air conditioning was shut down for shooting. They bantered with each other and familiar faces in the crowd, catching up on what was happening with mutual friends. At one point between takes, Earle played a verse of “Gulf of Mexico” from his then-upcoming album I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive.

After an hour or so of shooting with the first set up, a camera was moved to my right to get a shot from the extreme right back toward Cowsill, and the process repeated itself. Beyond getting Cowsill and Earle in the same shot—I assume—it also gave the audience Alexis Marceaux’s point of view and likely got her in the shot. If a white arm made the shot, that’s me.

During breaks, everybody went outside to stand around in the streets, musicians and crew alike. I’ve now interviewed Steve Earle three times, so we know each other from the phone, but we had a chance to talk outside for a few minutes. Co-producer Eric Overmyer co-wrote the episode, and he was on hand and surprised to see me milling about. Since the weather had cleared, the non-bulldogs were standing around outside the Frat House. Some joined conversations with friends; others stayed on their side of the street waiting to be invited off the sidewalk.

I’d have been bummed if I wasn’t a bulldog. Late in the afternoon, the track that ran across the room 10 feet from the stage had been moved to the back of the room and everybody was brought back in so that the scene could be shot with a bar full of people, a process that lasted 45 minutes tops, then it was over. The band did two or three takes and one full-length version of “Crescent City Sneaux,” during which Paul Sanchez, obviously touched by the performance, turned and said, “It feels like 2007.” The band’s not the band she had then, but he was right. For the first half of 2006, Cowsill’s shows were some of the most public displays of grieving that I’d seen as she dealt with the discovery that her brother Barry had died in the days after Katrina. By the end of the year, though, she was very much in touch with her emotions onstage but she wasn’t a prisoner to them. “Crescent City Sneaux” stopped being simply heartbreaking and became something that moved from pain and joy in moments. It was that version that she performed to end the shoot, though it got a little ragged when they tried to incorporate the Treme theme song into the ending.

A couple of months later, a friend who works with the extras asked with genuine concern about how my experience was, and said that sometimes extras get treated like shit on other TV and film shoots. In this case, I was pleasantly surprised at how civilized it was. It’s not that I expected to be treated like dirt, but if we had to stand around, someone came by to let us know what was happening. When people worked around us, they didn’t act like we were in the way, even when we were. When Julie was cold, someone found her a wrap. If being an extra was always like this, you can see why people would try to do as many shoots as possible.

–Alex Rawls

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June 6th 2011

Treme: Fake Beer

When you see bar scenes on Treme, the patrons have bottles with near-beer, no matter what the label. A beer wrangler opens a few cases of real beer from a number of brands and dumps the good stuff, then refills the empty bottles to differing levels of fullness with a NA beer. It’s a heartbreaking process. Why do all this? Steve Earle learned the hard way when some of the extras for the Cajun Mardi Gras scene got a hold of a case or two of the real stuff and started playing with the whip. Let’s just say they weren’t as precise or careful as they otherwise might have been.

–Alex Rawls

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June 6th 2011

Treme Wrap-Up: Coconuts and Shoes

[SPOILER ALERT] Jazz Fest may display the city’s finest talents, but Mardi Gras puts an essential characteristic of the city on display. David Simon and Eric Overmyer’s script for this week’s episode illustrates how ritual gives events meaning, and how it provides a starting point for improvisation. Nothing highlighted this like the montage of the characters getting ready for Fat Tuesday set to Professor Longhair’s “Go to the Mardi Gras,” where they did what millions of people have done a million times to a song that’s been heard a million times in similar contexts.

The episode begins with the parade by the Krewe of Muses, a relatively new krewe (started in 2000) that riffs on Mardi Gras krewes and parading traditions. Just to show how meta- New Orleans can get, Muses’ shoe throws put a female-centric spin on Zulu’s coconut throws, and Zulu’s whole parade including its throws began as a burlesque of Rex. Appropriately, with Davis at Muses we see a reversal of the tradition of women flashing for beads and coconuts as Davis lifts his shirt for Muses. Typical of Davis, he gets shut down.

Ritual shapes the episode for good and ill. Nelson joins it with Oliver Thomas when he rides in Zulu and discovers one of the secrets New Orleans likes to overlook – how much business takes place inside krewes. Jeanette finds a way to enjoy Fat Tuesday in NYC, and Davis can’t imagine celebrating it any way but the way he always does. Neither can Antoine, whose plans to tomcat his way around are scuttled when he ends up playing pappy to his kids and his students. On the other hand, Sonny and Annie will both remember it for the way the variations they found for this year’s Mardi Gras. Toni and Sofia’s Mardi Gras plans are a reminder of how each iteration of the ritual brings to mind the versions before it, and how celebrating the old rituals is a way of remembering those who’re not around to participate this year. Ritual sparks invention and it shapes the landscape. When the poor tourist flashes Muses, Lt. Colson doesn’t bust her; he simply points her to the place and time where that tradition’s more acceptable.

As Nelson (rapidly becoming my favorite character) makes love to the woman he met on the route while still in his Zulu garb, he tells her, “Go easy on the skirt. I may need it again next year.” And so another ritual begins.

Other Notes:

- It was nice to see Terry’s toughness and rage. At a point when the show has largely cast him as the conscience of the police force, it was important to see that he’s not entirely immune to the violence associated with the NOPD. He’s not a saint, even if his anger is motivated by outrage.

- On the other hand, it’s heartbreaking to see LaDonna look like she’s sliding into a drinking problem. Addictions were all the rage around this time, and not everybody who developed one had LaDonna’s experience to hasten it. I don’t know if it was true or a common saw that sounded true enough that people believed it, but I remember hearing that the city was a quarter of its old size but drank as much as it ever did around that time.

- It was great to see Al “Carnival Time” Johnson finally get air time. Here’s the story of Johnson’s Mardi Gras classic.

-  I think I saw Bo Dollis, Jr. of the Wild Magnolias leading Lambreaux’s Guardians of the Flame.

- I definitely saw Steve Riley of the Mamou Playboys in his Saints costume on the Savoys’ Mardi Gras ride. Joel Savoy – Wilson’s brother and one of the owners of Valcour Records played at Dennis McGee’s grave. If anyone can tell me who played the duet with him, write in so I can update this. Valcour recently released a CD of McGee playing solo and talking about the music.

- Tim Green’s sax solo during Cyril Neville’s performance at the Mother-in-Law Lounge was killer and worth rewinding to hear a second time. Miss Jeannie, Baby Doll and friend of the K-Does, was seen talking to one of the objects of Antoine’s affection at the Mother-in-Law.

- There was some harrumphing and consternation about Treme getting cameras on Muses, but I don’t remember seeing them when the parade passed this year, and they caught Mardi Gras in a way that looked like Mardi Gras. Last year’s Mardi Gras episode wasn’t one of my favorites as it seemed to have a lot of expository dialogue, and it didn’t look much like Mardi Gras. This year was a giant step forward and one of my favorite episodes of the season.

- The Radiators’ “Long Hard Journey Home” is this week’s music video. Download it here from iTunes.

Lots of love to the Starbucks on Queen St. East in the Beaches in Toronto for the non-stop loop of ’70s reggae (including Linton Kwesi Johnson’s “Bass Culture” and the late Gregory Isaacs’ “Night Nurse”!) for a fine soundtrack for this morning’s writing.

–Alex Rawls

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June 2nd 2011

When You Assume …

David Simon sometimes seems a little defensive to me when writing or talking about how people consume television, but then I read some things people say about Treme and I sympathize.

I suppose we’re so used to television dramas being crime shows that it’s hard not to see things through lens of heroes/villians as WWOZ’s GM David Freedman does here:

It is refreshing that another arch villain, Sonny, the wanna-be musician who has steadily acted so lowdown and mean, has another, more noble side to him. In several episodes, he is identified as one of those early responders out in boats rescuing folk from the rooftops. Small detail, but one that adds texture, makes Sonny more complex and interesting–and his character a lot more real.

There seems to be a basketful of such one-dimensional villains throughout Treme—Nelson Hidalgo from Dallas looks as if he’s gonna be one.

The piece is written to defend New York City, but I don’t see NYC, Nelson or Sonny portrayed as villainous, and in the case of Sonny and Nelson, I don’t see how they’re one-dimensional. I buy Sonny’s affection for New Orleans music and Nelson’s full-body embrace of the city’s pleasures, and I don’t see either as plotting ill for anybody. Their priorities can be odds with many of us watching, but no one on the show is innocent. Antoine has screwed around on Desiree and this week blew off his own band’s gig so he could go play with Henry Butler. Lambreaux hospitalized a man by beating the hell out of him, and you get the impression that he was hard father to please.

That sort of simplistic reading would certainly make me crazy, but not as crazy as people hanging on to discredited ideas. In a recent blog post at Huffington Post, Karen Dalton-Beninato addresses the complicated relationship between the truth and Treme, and while that remains a ripe topic for discussion, the way she approaches it is less productive. She returns to last season’s obsession (in New Orleans, anyway) with the real life figures that inspired the characters, even though Simon and Eric Overmyer and pretty much everybody involved in the show has pointed out that these characters were often composites, and that they developed their own independent lives and characteristics.

John Goodman’s character is appearing as the ghost of Mardi Gras past, inspiring the character Toni.
Real Ashley Morris, may he rest in peace, inspires the writers at Rising Tide, Back of Town and Treme.

In our April issue, Simon said:

[Creighton Bernette's dialogue is] influenced by a variety of voices—the work of Chris Rose, Ashley Morris, and some things that were as mainstream as The Times-Picayune editorial stance—which, to other ears, might sound a little radical but was indicative of what people in New Orleans were saying on a routine basis.”

Later in the same interview, he talked about Stevenson Palfi being a part of the conception of Creighton from the start. Last spring, Overmyer told OffBeat that Susan Spicer and other consultants

“were starting points for some of the characters, but we tried to move them away from that as quickly as possible,” Eric Overmyer says. The stories help move the characters away from the starting point, but casting makes a bigger difference. “As soon as you cast an actor, that’s when characters really start to evolve, when you hear a specific voice and see a specific person.”

Having watched the filming of needlessly inauthentic Mardi Gras scenes for a Nicholas Cage movie just as Dalton-Beninato did, I sympathize with her outrage and concern for veracity, but I don’t think hanging on to the muses/models gets us closer to it, particularly in season two. As David Simon wrote in a thread at the Back of Town blog:

The fictional characters have agency. They can think that Joe Strummer is a flawed vehicle when it comes to songwriting, even though someone else, say, David Simon, has every Clash album on vinyl from the year of release and has worn them all down to near nothing. And even though someone else, say, Davis Rogan, burned every Clash album when he was at my house. Fuck Simon. Fuck Rogan. Davis McAlary gets to be Davis McAlary.

He concludes:

Seriously, guys. You’ll do better by yourselves and the work if you stay with the film and the idea that the characters are on their own journey.

–Alex Rawls

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May 30th 2011

Treme Wrap-Up: Musician, Know Thyself

[Spoiler Alert] After the first episode of Treme, someone on Twitter referred to Davis McAlary as the Jar Jar Binks of the show. The assessment’s brilliantly cold but wrong. Davis is a far more interesting character than Binks, but his stories are uncomfortable to watch because the wreck seems obvious before the train leaves the station. His self-absorption blinds him to who Lil Calliope (Ace B.) is and to the differences in what hip-hop means to the two of them. For Lil Calliope, it’s an expression of who he is; for Davis, it’s not the expression of who he’d like to be as much as a way to rebel against his safe, unthreatened upbringing. That distance can’t end well, nor can his relationship to the musicians in his group. For them, his band’s another gig; for him, it’s a ceremony and a way to further his vision of himself as a cultural menace to society.

Davis is part of an intriguing irony in Treme. As fascinated as the show is with music, it spends a lot of time with average or sub-par talents. Davis and Sonny are the weakest links in whatever they do, and Annie can play but struggles to find a voice as a songwriter. Antoine seems talented enough, but his band is up and down, and this week we see the return of small-time hustler in him. His desire to front a band came from a vision of money and attention, but as soon as another vision of money and attention comes along in the form of Henry Butler’s offer, he bails on his own band.

Notes on the episode:

- The episode’s story is by Tom Piazza and Eric Overmyer, with the teleplay by Piazza.

- The Dream Creighton notices that Toni took down his Les Blank poster. Blank is a documentary filmmaker who did a number of films on Louisiana music including Always For Pleasure, someone Creighton would admire.

- One positive byproduct of the addition of Nelson Hidalgo to the show has been that it has given the show an excuse to dig up some great Latin tracks from New Orleans for the soundtrack. Nelson danced in Gigi’s to a tune by Wardell Quezergue, and this week is driving while Cubanismo’s “Mardi Gras Mambo” is on the radio.

- The man directing the marching band while Desiree pleads her cousin’s case is Wilbert Rawlins, Jr., the band director at O. Perry Walker. Rawlins has made Walker one of the city’s leading high school marching bands, and he helped students who would become the TBC Brass Band get started as a group. He is one of New Orleanians focused on in Dan Baum’s book, Nine Lives, and his father was a long-time drummer for Irma Thomas.

- When Antoine’s class grumbles about not parading during Mardi Gras, one refers to the MAX Band, a melding of three incomplete high school bands for Mardi Gras 2006. Members of St. Mary’s Academy, St. Aug, and Xavier Prep marched together wearing windbreakers as uniforms.

- Harley tells Annie that “Bobby Z” got to her song first. Bob Dylan’s real last name is Zimmerman.

- Onstage, Henry Butler tells Antoine and the audience that it’s good to be home. After Katrina, he moved to Colorado.

- After finishing a plate, Janette says, “I’ll take a wallet-size of that,” echoing a line from early in season one when she admired one of her dishes and proclaimed, “Take a picture of that shit, my friend.”

- Does anybody know the significance of 726 N. White St.? I thought it looked like Nelson was checking out the closed Robert’s on Annunciation in the Lower Garden District, but 726 N. White St. is a house at the corner of N. White and Orleans between Broad and Bayou St. John. Did I hear the address wrong? 726 S. White St. is Central Lockup.

–Alex Rawls

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May 24th 2011

Rob Brown: Learning to Love his Trumpet

Rob Brown playing trumpet as Delmond Lambreaux on HBO Treme

Like Wendell Pierce, Rob Brown is forced to act with a horn on Treme. Delmond Lambreaux is a jazz trumpeter; Brown isn’t. Like Pierce, he’s forced to look convincing as a musician which means learning some basics, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t appreciate the experience.

 

Were you into jazz before you started Treme?

Not at all. And I don’t play, I just fake it. I’m at an eighth-grade level, so I just delved into it, and it’s been very rewarding. At first, it was terrible because the trumpet is impossible. Basic stuff like G is difficult, but now I’m getting more comfortable with the instrument, so it allows me to enjoy the music for what it is. It’s like, “What are they playing? Oh I kinda know what that means now.” I appreciate virtuosity a lot more.

Is it cool when you have musicians like Christian Scott playing right next to you?

Yeah. We shot our Jazz Fest scenes yesterday. (This interview was taped during Jazz Fest.) I’ve had a bunch of scenes with Dr. John. Playing alongside them, that’ll be [with me] forever.

The question Delmond’s dealing with—how do you hang on to the past but still be contemporary?—is one of the most basic ones that New Orleans musicians face.

You can’t move the music forward unless you pay homage to the past. Kid Chocolate (Leon “Kid Chocolate” Brown), who’s been playing most of my horn work this year, he’s like an encyclopedia. He knows all them old songs. I guess he’s in his late twenties, early thirties maybe, and he still plays “Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans.”

I don’t think people really have a say in the matter because you guys are so conscious of preservation. I don’t think you guys would ever let the future come without holding on to the past. It’s just not your style. You guys don’t change that much; you like your stuff!

Is acting with musicians a challenge?

Yeah. Sometimes they’re trying to figure out their way (with the acting), I’m trying to figure out my way with the music, and we meet in the middle. And it’s worked out. But the same way I look at them, they look at me. It’s been cool.

I don’t play, so all my solos have to be prearranged. Whoever’s playing, that’s so foreign to them because jazz is all about improvisation. They’re getting used to doing something over and over and over again, which is something they’re completely not used to. That’s what I am used to. But it’s worked.

So are you working on becoming a player?

I’ve tried to nail the fingering, so I play as much as I can. And I’m getting a little better. I can hold a tune now, depending on what it is. If I have it for long enough, then I’ll end up playing it. It’s tough, man. Now at least I don’t hate it. Before I did. I used to think, “This is impossible.” And then something clicked and it’s like, “Oh! Now I can move forward!”

–Alex Rawls

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May 23rd 2011

Treme Wrap-Up: Dealing with Death

Davis, Aunt Mimi, and Don B in HBO TremeLast week, I wondered if Dinneral Shavers had been sufficiently set up as a presence to make his death carry the weight in the show that it did in life, but there’s no doubting his sister Nakita’s sobbing, incapacitating breakdown during eulogy. Musicians I could spot at the service: Glen David Andrews, Paul Sanchez, John Boutte, Martin Krusche, Kermit Ruffins (late) and J. the Savage/Jamie Bernstein (outside).

The start of this episode explores how people deal with death—wrecked emotional breakdown and symbolic gestures at Shavers’ funeral; detachment and distance, though not as much as it seems (Sofia) and smug indifference (the detective at the second crime scene).

Speaking of, I wonder if the first visit to the Helen Hill crime scene played as chillingly outside of New Orleans as it did for me and—I assume—anyone who realized the crime that the cops were investigating. It was made worse by one of the themes of this season: the sad shape of the NOPD, which is depicted as stubbornly wrongheaded and bogged down in petty, internal squabbles when not engaged in illegal activity.

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Davis, Aunt Mimi and Don B are listening to Ballzack’s “Wine Candy” when Don B points out that nothing on Davis’ sampler has national appeal. Despite Davis’ big talk, it’s clear that his idea of thinking big is including the West Bank, and that for all of his bravado, the big fish/small pond model is sunk more deeply in his psyche than he realizes. It’s to the credit of the show that everybody’s not musically great. Conventional television would have Davis’ collection be a hit and make a star of somebody (which might still happen) and confirm his vision (which is unlikely to happen). Similarly, Sonny has proved to be a perfectly adequate guitar player for Antoine’s band, but he hasn’t blossomed in the gig into June Yamagishi. Annie similarly craps out on her first try at songwriting, rewriting Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright” by accident.

Two last Davis/Mimi thoughts: I found it hard to follow the exchange between Mannie Fresh and Don B about Aunt Mimi, but if I got the gist of it accurately, it’s nice to know that there’s more to Aunt Mimi than it has seemed so far. Also, the heavily tattooed rapper who followed spoken word artist Gian Smith onstage is Ace B. (also identified in different places online as Ace Boogie and Ace Boggy) a member of Don Bartholomew’s Bang’ N Records crew with Don’s brother, Ron.

Media watch: Times-Picayune writer and former OffBeat contributor Katy Reckdahl got TV time this week, getting a few lines with Oliver Thomas and a little screen time in court with the T-P‘s Ramon Antonio Vargas. Reckdahl’s covering the NOPD’s attempt to raise second line fees – a story she covered for us in November 2006.

When C.J. Liguori marks off the boundary on a map, it’s the footprint for the still-yet-to-be-built Charity Hospital.

It’s great to see sax player Tim Green in Antoine’s band, but Antoine gets the line of the show. As he wrestles with the New Orleans problem of getting the same band on the show that so many local bands genuinely face: “We’re a nine-piece band with 54 fuckin’ pieces.”

It looks like Delmond may face the social consequences of his growing desire to find a contemporary expression of his musical roots, though that version of “Milenberg Joys” would be a good place to start. It looks like his relationship to his New York girlfriend is going to be tested not by Janette but by the class issues associated with the trad jazz/contemporary jazz divide.

–Alex Rawls

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