Jazz funerals: Cultural practicie or criminal activity? You know the right answer

Salon reports on something I find truly baffling: Police busting up jazz funeral processions in Tremé. You have to click through an ad to read the piece, but it’s worth it. Apparently a funeral involving a couple dozen musicians and “roughly a hundred” paraders, for the recently deceased tuba player for the New Birth Brass Band was interrupted by police who — saying they were acting on a neighbor’s complaint — told the musicians to stop playing their instruments. At which point they simply sang “I’ll Fly Away.” Trombonist Glen David Andrews says:

We were singing, lifting our voices to God. You gonna tell me that’s wrong too?” Drummer Ellis Joseph of the Free Agents Brass band, who was also in the procession, said, “They came in a swarm, like we had AK-47s. But we only had instruments.

Two were arrested. Evidently (and not surprisingly) this has kicked up quite a fuss in N.O., which I had missed but that Salon writer Larry Blumenfeld recounts in his piece. He notes that an underlying factor seems to be changes in Tremé:

It’s unclear who called the police that night. But it’s easy to sense the difference, longtime residents say, between North Robertson Street before and after the storm. With its proximity to the French Quarter and historic architecture, Tremé, which was not flooded, is newly attractive to home buyers within the city’s shrunken post-Hurricane Katrina housing stock.

Well. I wrote in LfNO about wondering jazz funerals were real or just something from the moments, and being delighted to learn that, yes, on the most authentic possible level, they were part of the fabric of the place — part of what made New Orleans truly different from other cities. Honestly, what’s the point of turning New Orleans into a city where jazz funerals don’t really happen? Yeah, there are ways New Orleans can benefit from being modernized or however you want to put it. But this? It just doesn’t make sense. If you hear a jazz funeral and it sounds like “noise,” why be in New Orleans at all?