Clad in gray track suits with bursts of royal blue and gold, the band that calls itself the “jukebox of Uptown” marched a quick 10 blocks behind Sophie B. Wright High School.
It was early February. In four short weeks, they would be walking miles along the St. Charles Avenue parade route. But tonight, it was a short jaunt through neighborhood streets – Prytania Avenue to Cadiz, then around a block, with a turn on Jena, back to Prytania.
Neighbors on porches waved and danced a little as the band ran through the A7S single Jumpstart and the old NFL theme song with all the horns.
Seven months into the school year — and exactly one month before Mardi Gras — band director Desmian Barnes was fine-tuning his 65-piece band. Whistle around his neck, Barnes supervised from the back and alongside, sprinting on the sidewalk to catch his students after stopping to tie his shoe, correcting students along the outside corner of a turn. He worked from all sides, while an assistant led students through the streets.
“Discipline, marching – picking up the laces and the horn swings, and commitment,” Barnes said. “Those attributes that stand out — not every band has that.”
Barnes also pays special attention to the band’s sound as a whole, instantly hearing if an instrument comes in late or with a wrong note. Of all the tunes the band is playing this year, he likes Drake’s “Passionfruit” — it has a certain drive to it that just feels right when they’re marching, he said.
His band looks to be parade-ready.
His high-school students are raising their knees high, marching in unison, blowing hard on their favorite songs. Behind those successes are months and years of work – and fundraising.
While New Orleans students soak up music, self-regulation, and camaraderie from marching in a school band, New Orleans band directors like Barnes must see it as a small business, if they want to provide students — especially students in this high-poverty city — with instruments, uniforms, daily bus rides home from practice, food after parades, and all the tools they need to boost musicianship.
Barnes’ students will march in eight parades this Carnival season. In the two-week span, the band will really breathe and march as one, showing growth with every parade.
Financially, they will make enough to cover most band supplies. “We can get all of our instruments repaired, get all of our uniforms dry-cleaned and start purchasing supplies, first – drum heads, mouthpieces. Then we go to whatever instruments we can purchase,” Barnes said.
It’s part of his annual budgeting cycle.
Marching with krewes brings solid money through the door. But it’s not quite enough to cover all expenses. So local band directors make ends meet with shorter, smaller convention gigs, for audiences of tourists, who want “to get that Mardi Gras feel.” As a band leader and trumpeter for the Soul Heirs Brass Band, Barnes knows that short money-gigs are a crucial part of paying bills.
In 30 minutes, the band’s musicians can make the same money that they’d make marching a six-hour parade, Barnes said.
Other bands raise money in other ways, selling products and washing cars. But for Barnes, these gigs are the best type of fundraising, “It beats selling candy, going on the corner shaking cans, or selling raffle tickets.”
“Jukebox of Uptown”
The band room in the second floor of Wright’s building echoed as musicians picking up horns and drums. With snare drums rolling softly in the background, Barnes gets the attention of his musicians, who are packed into rows of chairs. Though Mardi Gras is still a month away, they only have two weeks before the St. Charles Avenue parades start rolling in New Orleans.
“We’re going to tune everybody up, then we’ll start the warm-up.” Barnes announced, his words echoing.
Students queue up in single file, snaking a line through plastic black chairs and music stands, heading toward an instructor sitting in the front next to a black box with digital red numbers on it, like an old-school alarm clock
It’s a tuning box, which meters the students’ tuning as they play a high note and a low note. Are they on pitch, flat or sharp? Their instructor tells each student how to adjust.
Barnes does not do his work alone. Derrick Jones, a longtime music educator, leads the drum section. The two have worked together for two decades. Musicians Herbert McCarver, John Darby and Jerome Jones round out the Sophie Wright band team.
While waiting for the rest of the band to tune up, Kidran Hollins, 18, a cymbal player, stands in the drum section, holding the large metal plates at his side. His dad played the snare drum at Walter L. Cohen Senior High School, so he grew up knowing that he wanted to be in the band, “to do something for myself,” he said.
He started on the trombone, then moved to the drum line. “The groove of it actually got me into wanting to play drums,” he said. He played tenor drum first, then picked up the cymbals.
Wright is a special spot, he said. “I love that my school is literally on the parade route. We get the chance to actually experience the parades and be in the parades at the same time.”
Business of Band, thousands ‘before you play a note’
After creating a band from scratch at Alfred Lawless in the Lower 9th Ward then leading the St. Augustine Marching 100, veteran band director Virgil Tiller knows band budgets better than most.
Instruments and uniforms are the largest line-items for high school bands, and most are reused each year. Sousaphones cost between $2,000 to $6,000, while a student trumpet runs between $150 to $300, Tiller said. Annual costs include instrument repairs, new reeds and mouthpieces, sheet music, and other uniform items like socks and gloves.
Transportation also adds up quickly. While krewes pay high school bands a pretty penny to march in their parades, standing up a band for a parade performance isn’t cheap.
“To move the band for one parade, that’s six buses at $1,300,” Tiller said. “This is before you play a note.”
Then there’s food. On parade nights, band directors might have 100-plus teenagers for six to seven hours, walking four to five miles. You have to fuel them, says Tiller, who estimates feeding students after a parade adds an additional $400 to $500.
And if it rains, that money disappears. Regardless of the price, bands don’t get paid if a parade is rained out, Barnes said.
This year, all parades on the first Sunday of Carnival were rescheduled due to rain — putting a pinch in dozens of bands’ budgets. The krewes rolled on Tuesday without marching groups, just rows of floats.
Sophie B. Wright was lucky, Barnes said — the band was slated on that rainy Sunday to lead the Krewe of Barkus dog parade in the French Quarter. But instead of rolling on Tuesday, Barkus was pushed back to Sunday, March 9, after Mardi Gras — making it the only Sunday parade to be rescheduled with music
New Orleans marching-band students get an early taste of the business side of music, said Tiller, who’s also a professional musician who has played sax with the Stooges Brass Band for 20 years.
His marching-band students learn that they are helping the band program balance its books by marching in parades or playing conventions. That’s an experience students in other cities don’t have, as part of marching bands that play maybe one parade a year, spending the rest of their time in high school auditoriums or on their own football fields.
The intensity of marching bands in this city cannot be overstated. Tiller is a self-described “band-head,” who loves the art of marching bands to the point where he can hear a song on the radio and immediately imagine it in a parade-marching arrangement.
Right now, he’s an assistant principal at Leah Chase School, the direct-run elementary that launched last fall in the Lafayette Academy building with kindergarten through fifth grade. The school doesn’t yet have a marching band; the district dropped the key marching grades — sixth through eighth — when the school opened. But Tiller hopes they can figure out how to start a band soon, for the sake of his students and the growth they can achieve when they play in a band.
“My most proudest moments were when I had good bands and when my kids knew they were top tier when they competed,” said Tiller, who re-started the defunct band program at Lawless in 2003, a few years before Hurricane Katrina hit. He spent a school year in Baton Rouge after Katrina. Then in 2006, he became the band director at St. Augustine High School.
Top-tier bands receive more money to march. And here was Tiller, leading the Marching 100. “I had the premier band in the city,” he said. Krewes paid as much as $5,000 to $6,000 for St. Aug’s band, he said, but it varied by krewe, with some paying a little over $2,000.
As a new start-up band in 2003, Lawless was not in the same universe, but Tiller did see pay increases, as krewes took notice of the band’s pristine robin-egg blue uniforms and big sound. But it took time to be invited to parades. “If you’re just beginning or not really known, krewes only have a set amount of bands they can have — and you may not be in that number,” Tiller said.
“Lower-tier bands, you don’t get paid as much,” he said. “A smaller-tier school will get anywhere from like $1,800 maxing out at $2,500.”
Building a program
Sophie B. Wright’s 65-piece band falls in the middle. It’s not a small-tier band. Barnes preferred not to disclose specific krewe rates. But despite the talent he sees when the Warriors band takes the streets, it’s not yet considered a top-tier group.
And while Barnes needs to balance his books each year, it’s clear that many experiences within his bandroom cannot be expressed in terms of money.
Freshman Jakeel White, a trombonist, heard the Wright band’s horn section and decided that’s where he would go to school. Music helps him self-regulate. “It helps me stay calm and collected,” he said. ““If I’m frustrated, I can let it out on the horn.”
Band allows students “to be kids” while learning commitment, said Barnes, who is focused on providing a safe space and activity for teens during after school hours, a time when kids who are not involved can get caught up in gun violence and petty crime, as he’s observed first-hand through students he’s lost.
The Sophie B. Wright band program provides instruments to all band students, many of whom may not be able to afford them. Barnes is particularly proud of that. He also keeps band-participation fees low.
The school has flexible student transportation, Barnes said, because Wright owns its own buses, thanks to a decision made years ago by charter director Sharon Clark. That means that the school is able to provide activity buses, which give kids a ride home after they participate in sports, band or other after school programs.
“The only thing the kids have to do is stay committed,” Barnes said.