Life after death: A New Orleans resurrection story

Jason Berry was just 24. In November 1973, the Jesuit High School and Georgetown University graduate was then an aspiring writer and jazz aficionado, transfixed by a New Orleans cultural phenomenon he had experienced tangentially but really knew little about.

As he stationed himself outside Corpus Christi Church on St. Bernard Avenue, the Polaroid in Berry’s imagination snapped images as fresh today as they were nearly 50 years ago. A cohort of white-gloved pallbearers ushered from the church the casket of Joseph De Lacroix “De De” Pierce, the heralded jazz trumpeter and cornetist at Preservation Hall.

Berry stood at attention on the sidewalk.

“I watched the casket come out of the church and the musicians putting their instruments up almost like a gantlet with swords at those military events,” Berry recalls. “And I watched the sun streaming down, glinting off the trumpets and the reeds, the clarinets. And it was just one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen. I had no idea where it came from, but it moved me.”

From that seed came an epic documentary – a quarter-century in the birthing process – called “City of a Million Dreams: The Untold Story of Funerals in New Orleans,” which will make its local premiere later this week.

It is an 89-minute masterpiece whose authenticity resonates in stories told through the eyes of the main characters, clarinetist Dr. Michael White and trumpeter Gregg Stafford, who, as younger men in the 1990s, share the film’s musical and narrative timeline with their older selves.

In 1997, White, a Spanish professor at Xavier University of Louisiana as well as a jazz composer, and Stafford were there outside of Corpus Christi Church, playing at the post-funeral celebration for drummer Louis Barbarin.

“You can see the coffin coming out and the musicians, Michael and Gregg, are much younger than they are now,” Berry says. “I really had no idea at the time, but I kept going back to filming Michael and Gregg, doing interviews with them over the next 25 years. And so you see them as young men and then as older men, as they are today.”

Berry’s fascination with New Orleans jazz funerals – the term of art used in the early 1900s was “funerals with music” – takes the viewer back to Congo Square in the early 18th century, where the enslaved were allowed to gather on Sundays outside the city in mass numbers so that, as Fred Johnson, president of the Black Men of Labor, explains, they could “meet, sing, dance and cry.”

“They didn’t have psychiatrists, so these folks had to figure out how to be happy in an insane environment,” Johnson says.

“In the early 1800s, Congo Square was a vast, grassy field, long before Treme, as we know it, took form,” Berry said. “From much of the reading I did, it became clear to me that a lot of the original dances by the enslaved Africans were burial choreographies. These were dances of the mother culture that had been transplanted to New Orleans. In the various West African traditions, these were ring dances, and they paid homage to the ancestors.”

  The more Berry filmed jazz funerals over the years, the more he was convinced that the story had to include the “taproot” of the custom – Congo Square – “to make history come alive in a different way.” 

The documentary includes a stirring re-enactment, filmed in a grassy field in Plaquemines Parish, of the music, drumming and ring dancing performed in part by African musicians and dancers. The late Divine Word Father Jerome LeDoux, who in the late 1990s was pastor of St. Augustine Church, offers a prayer to the ancestors as the film opens.

The documentary also draws heavily on vintage footage shot by Jules Cahn, made available by the Historic New Orleans Collection.

“The jazz funeral, of course, is a merger of the European and African tradition,” Berry said. “I liken it to the coming together of the ring and the line – the ring of the African dancers and the line or linear procession of your brass bands of the Spanish, the French, the Irish and the Italian.”

The blur of Katrina

One of the reasons the film took so long to complete, in addition to Berry’s busy writing schedule, was Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Among the most poignant realities is captured when White re-enters his home on Pratt Drive, close to a breach in the London Avenue Canal, which was submerged in 6 1/2 feet of water.

Sitting in his car outside the house, White pauses for a second.

“I don’t know if I should pray before or after I go in,” he says.

When he opens the front door, the reality of death is everywhere: 4,000 CDs, many of them rare, hymnals, sheet music and research have been washed away.

“Thirty years of my life,” White says wistfully.

But then again, White, who played at jazz funerals almost from the time he graduated from St. Augustine High School, says that moment was “the enduring lesson of the jazz funeral. Return again in another life, and it will be better and jubilant. I have to keep remembering that to go on.”

Today, White remembers Katrina “as a blur,” but he said Berry captured the reality of a time “when I was very vulnerable.” In the last few years, White says he has felt an unbridled “burst of creativity.”

“I’m writing several songs a week, and I never could have done that in a month,” says White, who still plays at jazz funerals. “To be honest, this is a blessing and a calling for me. If anyone has any doubts about God or religion interacting in your life, I see it every day. It’s a great honor to carry on that heritage and language and share it with the world.”

Berry also weaves into the film the passionate reporting of Deborah “Big Red” Cotton, a New Orleans transplant who blogged for Gambit about the musicians who kept the jazz funeral tradition so vibrant.

“She pioneered covering the second lines in the way some people cover the Saints or City Hall,” Berry said.

The film doesn’t shrink, however, from hitting the rough notes. Cotton was seriously wounded during a Mother’s Day second-line shooting in 2013 when gang members seeking to settle a score fired indiscriminately into the crowd. Three brothers and a cousin were convicted in the shootings, but Cotton asked federal Judge Ivan Lemelle for leniency in sentencing.

“She was not asking him to let them go free, but she wanted them to have a chance at rehabilitation, getting out after serving time,” Berry said. “To me, all that is radical mercy. That is exactly the agenda that Pope Francis has been putting forth. I mean, it’s the idea that we must forgive and embrace. Deb was forgiving the man who shot her, and I just found that a profound message of mercy.”

For information on screening the film at churches or schools, go to www.cityofamilliondreams.com.

[email protected]