He's comin' through - funeral for jazz trumpeter

National Catholic Reporter, May 18, 2001 by Jason Berry

Jazz funeral for trumpeter Milton Batiste showcases New Orleans' black Catholic spirit

Dirges are the songs of sorrow a brass band plays in ushering a coffin to the cemetery. The tolling of the dirges has a solemn dignity, shaping the image most people have of a jazz funeral. Trailed by limousines and a crowd of mourners, the musicians in dark pants, white shirts, dark ties and caps, their instruments glinting silver and gold in the sun, move in a slow procession. They follow the grand marshal in tuxedo or tails who sets the pace with sculpted steps, one foot out, another pulling behind in a slow drag, a hand holding the top hat across the sash on his chest.

Like the chorus in a Greek drama, the musicians articulate the consciousness of a community when someone is laid to rest.

So has it been in the century since jazz arose from working-class neighborhoods at the bottom of America, a melding of the sacred and profane, of Catholicism and jazz, as music moves between streets and sacred spaces. So it was in early April, when Catholic bandleader Milton Batiste was laid to rest after a jazz sendoff that, more than most, held a mirror to the epic of the music and the spiritual sensibility out of which it arose.

As the procession moves on, the trumpeter lays out the melody, playing a slow tempo, tunes like "Old Rugged Cross," a song carried out of slavery, or "Just A Closer Walk With Thee," now the most popular dirge, a hymn that found its way into the New Orleans street repertoire in the 1930s.

   Just a closer walk with thee
   Grant it, Jesus, is my plea ...

With the trumpeter advancing the melodic line, the clarinet sings back an embroidered countermelody with the high pealing "widow's wail," a voice of lamentation and female woe. The bass drummer hits the hard, deep thuds of grief that anchor the backbeat; the trombone's pulsations strengthen the rhythm; the tuba and other instruments fill in a melding of cross-rhythms.

The wailing of the dirges quickens excitement in the second line, the spontaneous street dancers (many of whom never knew the deceased) who shuffle alongside the band. Their numbers grow in anticipation of that sharp shift when burial is done and the band breaks into an up-tempo song like "Didn't He Ramble?" that signals the "cutting loose" of the soul from earthly ties. When the band hits that up-tempo shift, hundreds of second liners explode into gyrations and a wave of high kicking prances, giving the dead a joyous sendoff. Bravura rhythms and irreverent dancing signal the soul's release, no longer a time to mourn, rather to celebrate -- what Jelly Roll Morton called "the end of a perfect death."

Milton Batiste played a river of dirges and second line anthems during his 66 years. As lead trumpet in the Olympia Brass Band for 39 years, the amiable Batiste, a dark, hefty, bearded man with an easy drawl and winning grin, was a beloved figure in the jazz community. From the mid-1970s into the 1990s, Olympia made 30 concert tours of Europe and a tour of Africa under State Department auspices. Olympia played for three presidents and Pope John Paul II on his 1987 visit to New Orleans.

Next door to Milton Batiste's home in the leafy Gentilly Woods neighborhood, he turned a shotgun house into a ramshackle studio. There he produced a line of CDs on Olympia and a stream of gospel singers and younger musicians just starting out.

His funeral on April 6, with a requiem Mass at Corpus Christi Church and a rollicking burial parade, brought an illustrious career into high relief, his career, like that of many New Orleans musicians, ending where it began -- at a crossroads of jazz and the Catholic church.

New Orleans, now 62 percent African-American, has been a heavily Catholic city since its founding by the French in 1718, In recent years a quilt of black Protestant churches has drawn many worshipers. However, there is still a substantial black Catholic community, including many politicians. Corpus Christi was once .the largest black parish in America. In the 1930s it had 18,000 members; today it's closer to 5,000. The church is in the Seventh Ward, on the downtown or downriver side of the French Quarter. The three black men who have been elected mayor since the civil rights era -- Ernest "Dutch" Morial, Sidney Bartholomey and Marc Morial (Dutch's son) -- grew up in the Seventh Ward, the hearth of Creole culture. The younger Morial is a graduate of Jesuit High School; Bartholomey was a seminarian in his youth.

The downtown Creole culture has its origins in the French-speaking free persons of color, many of them mulattoes or fair-skinned blacks, who came to New Orleans in the early 180Os following the war of liberation on the island of Haiti. In 1809, the city's population of 10,000 nearly doubled with the arrival of some 10,000 emigres from Haiti who came via Cuba. A third were French, a third free persons of color, a third slaves belonging to both groups.

New Orleans was a crossroads of humanity, a melting pot before the term was coined. The Spanish acquired the colony from the French in the late 1700s, only to return it in time for Napoleon to sell it as part of the 1803 Louisiana Purchase. Waves of Irish immigrants came in the 1820s and '30s, followed by a surge of Sicilians in the latter decades of the 19th century. As the Creole poet Marcus Christian wrote in 1968: