Students streamed in steadily, carrying bags of chips, cold drinks, and chicken plates from afterschool-runs to two corner stores on St. Claude Avenue.
They threw open the big door and headed downstairs to a room with black walls lined with blue sound baffles. As the drummers hit the bottom step, they moved to the right. In a split second, the school’s only snare drummer was tapping on his drum. Off to his left, brass section players were flipping open their cases and tapping their horn keys. On the front row, woodwind players were warming up their reeds, twisting mouthpieces into place.
Students moving around the bandroom were lit by soft afternoon light flowing in from overhead windows, which turned the black walls into a muted gray. As the sun came in, it carried history with it—throwing the shadows of past band trophies from the window sills onto the wall, alongside a growing number of recent awards nabbed under past band directors Jordan Harper and the current director, Todrick Carmouche. The newest honor came just a few days ago, a first place earned in the Krewe of Symphony parade in Metairie.
Then the movement slowed down. The room quieted. In its bandroom off Alvar Street, the Frederick A. Douglass High School band sat in metal chairs forming a semicircle. Every eye looked up toward the director’s podium.
There, the assistant band director, Frederick Richardson, sits ready to start practice, with a baton in one hand and his cell phone in the other. They warm up to the B Flat Concert Scale, adjusting their valves, mouthpieces, and embouchures until they’re in tune with each other.
“Stop. Play it again,” Richardson said.
They give it a second try. Not quite good enough, in the eyes of Richardson, who taps his baton on the stand and starts them again.
Music as safe haven.
For Richardson, the repetition that he demands in rehearsal is about more than tightening a measure.
“I love my city,” Richardson said, “but we all know how easy it is for our youth to get pulled into dangerous streets. Music becomes more than sound. It becomes a safe haven, an advocate and a pathway to something greater.”
Inside the band room, that philosophy plays out.
The transformation is visible. A hesitant freshman becomes a section leader. A scattered drum section comes together, playing steady with sticks that move together.
As Carnival crept closer, the room full of individual sounds had become one voice that was ready for the street beyond the school walls.
Keeping kids together, working through hard times
As the city’s marching bands stepped onto Carnival parade routes this week, they carried more than instruments.
They carried newfound musical expertise, forged over months of repetition, and high expectations brought to them by band directors who, in this high-poverty, violent city, often make sure their neediest kids have instruments, rides home from practice, food within their refrigerators at home—and support if death hits too close, as it did in December, over Christmas holidays, with the death of Abramson Sci Academy majorette Laurianna “Laurie” Ward in a car crash.
Less than two months later, the loss is still fresh. But Abe band director Johnnie Van Buren II sees his musicians working through the pain.
“Music is therapy,” said Van Buren. “With the band and the kids, it helps keep them together. It helps them be there together, through the pain and suffering they’re going through.”
Within each band’s ranks, the students learn to carry one another. They band together.
In February, as the Abramson band marched along Read Boulevard, they came to a full stop, where the car hit a tree in December, injuring all three teenagers, including Laurie, whose injuries were fatal.
Some majorettes twirled but then stopped and formed a huddle, hugging. The loss felt so close, so painful.
“They still taking it real real real real bad,” said Katey Red, the bounce artist, a coach for Abe’s dance team, who described Laurie as having a certain star effect, despite her young age. “You could have met her one time. You would’ve remembered her. That’s the effect she had on people.” At practices, she kept the mood light. “If she wasn’t cracking jokes or smiling, I would think, ‘Something’s wrong.’”
The only light hitting the group came from a dim streetlight. But then came a different light, from inside the band.
To raise the spirits of the majorettes, the brass section struck the opening notes of an upbeat song. “We didn’t want to play anything sad, because she wasn’t that kind of young lady,” Van Buren said. At first, the majorettes danced and made Ls in the air with their hands. They were grieving. “We throwing up Ls for Laurie,” majorette Reyona Johnson said, tears on her face.
Majorette captain Haiti Jackson, a petite young woman, was around the same size as Laurie. They bonded. “She was a small girl. I’m a small girl,” she said.
The two also drilled intensely, side by side. As the team’s captain, Haiti calls counts and leads formations, but she also performs the same routines as the rest of her team. “Everything I do, they do. Everything they do, I do,” she said.
Now, a piece is missing.
Haiti was in Biloxi on a senior field trip when she first learned of her teammate’s death. First she saw it on social media. But she could not believe it. Then fellow majorette Reyona Johnson got a call from Laurianna’s phone. But it wasn’t her. It was someone asking if they could reach Laurie’s mom, that Laurie had been in a car accident.
Reyona and Haiti were confused and in denial. Then Haiti got the same news by phone from a teacher she trusted. “All I remember is me dropping to the floor,” she said
As Carnival approached earlier this month, the majorette team acutely felt Laurie’s absence, as they practiced drills so that they could be competitive in the face of other schools. “You have to be aggressive to put fear in the other teams,” Haiti said. “And Laurie was always ready to battle. Even when she dropped her baton, she’d pick it up and get even more aggressive.”
Haiti says she has taken that spirit and pushed forward academically in her teammate’s honor. “I want to work for her,” said Haiti, who has been accepted to Tulane, Xavier and LSU and is weighing her final decision. As she looks back over the past few months, she knows that her team would not have been able to weather this tragedy without their teachers and coaches, she says. “They don’t just come here and say this is my job,” she said. “They say this is my home.”
To Coach Katey Red, sometimes that means that she is alternately Katey the ATM, Katey the listening ear, Katey the shoulder to cry on, Katey the disciplinarian or Katey the public-service bus, she said. One thing she knows, when they are on the streets, she is protective of their every move. “I feel as if I gave birth to them,” she said.
Spilling into the community
Like marching bands across the city, Douglass first tested out its parade-readiness on neighbors, starting in January. Each weekday, as daylight began to fade, rehearsal spilled into the narrow Bywater streets behind the school.
Cadence echoed against houses and storefronts. Motorists slowed down to watch. Neighbors stepped onto their porches. Some waved as if an actual parade were passing. Others recorded videos with cellphones, posting them with captions like “Outside my door! Only in New Orleans.”
There have been some gentrifier hiccups. New neighbors once drafted a petition to stop Douglass students from practicing outside. Bricolage Academy neighbors tried a similar effort a few years ago, only to be opposed by a crowd of supportive residents.
In Bywater, the idea also didn’t go far, according to one of Douglass School’s longest-running neighbors. “I said, you should not have bought a house across the street from the school,” said Charmaine Neville, who told them, “No, I’m not going to sign your thing.” Other neighbors too, stepped up, calling Councilmember Freddie King in large numbers to voice opposition to the anti-band petition.
Neville, who hails from one of the city’s best-known musician families, has lived across from the school for decades. She remembers when it was known as Francis T. Nicholls, an all-white school that was integrated in 1967. She’s been in and out of its hallways as a parent and a grandparent, as her children and grandchildren attended classes here. But for years, it was a failing school.
Because Neville saw those struggles, she is incredibly proud of this year’s band and the current iteration of Douglass, led by standout principal Towana Pierre-Floyd. Over the past decade, she has watched graduation numbers rise and the school’s reputation grow. She can sense that achievement within the students passing by her house. “They’re absolutely wonderful,” she said. “They deserve everything that they’re getting. They should have been getting it.”
Their achievement grade puts the A into Frederick A
Douglass is now an A-rated school, giving new depth to its full name, Frederick A. Douglass, Pierre-Floyd told her students.
That sharp academic focus was made clear on a recent day, when band members who’d skipped school earlier in the day were forbidden from marching that night. “Whether it’s a scholar-athlete or a scholar-musician, scholar comes first,” Pierre-Floyd said.
Carmouche, the band director, carries the same principles, he said, following three pillars: “Looking good, sounding good and being disciplined.” That discipline goes beyond the ranks of the band, to home and to the school day, he said.
“Students might ask, ‘What does band have to do with you achieving in English 1 or English IV?’” Carmouche said. “I tell them that they are connected because I want you to be prepared, not only for secondary band opportunities but also for life.”
As a female musician who broke gender barriers in her own field, Neville is thrilled to see that tradition defied, with more girls playing brass instruments, in marching-band roles historically dominated by boys.
Twenty years ago, after Hurricane Katrina, when floodwaters destroyed instruments stored in the lower-level band room, Neville called musicians she knew across the country to ask for help. She got it, in the form of instruments sent from across the country.
So, as soon as the band heads out of the bandroom in January, Neville celebrates. “I come out on my porch and I dance,” she said. “I make them know me,” she said.
The Beast From the East
On the other end of the 9th Ward, in New Orleans East, Abramson Sci Academy has been studying all year for what they will display on St. Charles Avenue during Carnival.
Abramson has a huge, state-of-the-art campus on Read Avenue on the footprint of what once was Marion Abramson High School, which was ruined in the 2005 Katrina floodwaters. In 2015, the rebuilt campus was given to a Collegiate Academy charter, Sci Academy, which added Abramson to its name.
Every day, after school, band musicians head to the bandroom while auxiliary units like the majorettes, cheerleaders, flag twirlers and color guard practice separately, in the halls, cafeteria or outside, in the school’s parking lot.
To create one band with one sound, the band and its auxiliary units practice together for a few months before Carnival. But that’s not easy, because of the school’s location, within a box of busy, poorly lit streets.
They tried to practice in the parking lot. But it wasn’t quite enough. So they figured out a way to hit the streets anyway, with parents driving behind the band, lighting up band members as they march—and blocking both lanes, to put a buffer between the band and surrounding traffic.
After 5 p.m., traffic thickens in this part of the city as residents head home from work. But just as headlights start to shine through the dusk, it’s time for Abramson to hit the streets.
Marching units are not always a common sight in this part of the city, and sometimes, impatient drivers occasionally attempt to cut through practice lines.
To neighbor Darrell Joseph, the band marching past gives the East a better sense of community. He often walks outside to watch as the Abramson band, sometimes known as “the Beast from the East,” passes Joseph’s home just off Read.
“It’s just beautiful,” said Joseph, who said that whenever the band passed, a calm passed over him. He went inside feeling different, he said: “Peaceful.”
Band is ‘all I ever want to do in life’
Tuba player Willie Adams, a ninth grader, has only been with the Abramson band since this fall. But after he fell into a brief period of depression this fall, his band helped him get past it. “This band is family,” he said. “Everybody is connected.”
To prepare for the marching season, bands must not only prepare musically. They need physical stamina for the long parade routes – along with they only eat ice, to avoid bathroom breaks. They also need the strength to carry sometimes-heavy instruments and uniforms.
Willie has been in band since fourth grade, when he began playing music at Mildred Osborne elementary. So he has marched before. He’s been preparing for the last few weeks by fasting, so that he can march the long routes without problem.
All year, he has been juggling. Some days he is up at 6 a.m., so that he can keep up with his schoolwork along with band practices.
But in his mind, his world revolves around Abramson’s band.
“I just love it. It is all I ever want to do in life,” he said. “I love music.”
As the parade begins, the band ‘shows out’
Before boarding buses for their first parade, the Douglass band gathers on the rear steps of the school to “show out” shoulder to shoulder.
Before they got dressed for the night in their blue and white uniforms, the band members played scales and other musical selections to warm up. Drum sticks and mallets click in unison. Horns rise and sway in the air. Batons and flags twirl.
The show-out routine signals showtime, said senior Logan Grant, a bass drummer.
The energy starts with the drum section, as it kicks into the street beat that will continue throughout the three-hour parade, even when the band is in between songs. “The drum section plays that beat. Then when the songs come in, that’s when it just pops off.”
On parade nights, it’s a must. They show out on the school’s steps. Then, and only then, are they ready to step onto the school bus that will take them to the parade route.
They are hyped, Logan says, and the city is waiting for them.
