He's comin' through - funeral for jazz trumpeter

National Catholic Reporter, May 18, 2001 by Jason Berry

Sorrowful hymns, sung in pews of Catholic as well as Protestant churches, worked their way into the repertoire of brass bands at the funerals. This gave the early jazz idiom a pronounced religious coloring. "When the Saints Go Marching In" was one of the most popular hymns, sung in slow tempo in the churches. In 1938 Louis Armstrong recorded the song at a parade beat, anchoring it forever as an anthem of the second liners.

Armstrong, though raised a Protestant, was baptized a Catholic. Paul Barbarin, a drummer from one of the most illustrious musical families (his sister was Danny Barker's mother) grew up on the edges of Storyville. So did the boisterous bandleader Louis Prima, whose family home lay just outside a Sicilian enclave in the rear of the French Quarter. George Lewis, the clarinetist whose tours of Japan in the 1960s exposed a vast new audience to traditional jazz, was a Catholic who imbued his reed with the beauty of the spirituals.

Aaron Neville, the Grammy-winning vocalist with huge biceps and a dagger tattooed on his cheek, is a gentle soul behind that menacing facade. He has publicly credited St. Jude, the patron of hopeless cases, for helping him overcome a heroin addiction. Jazz educator Ellis Marsalis is a lifelong Catholic whose sons Wynton, Branford, Delfeayo and Jason have national careers. The singer and film star Harry Connick Jr. graduated from Jesuit High School. The list goes on.

Milton Batiste was a driving force in the rise of Olympia, the oldest of the city's marching bands. The group formed in the 1880s to perform for the Young Men Olympian, TK a black benevolent society that assured each member of a proper burial. The Olympia band underwent many changes, becoming an orchestra and a brass band again until World War II, when the group faded from the scene. In 1958 the saxophonist Harold "Duke" Dejan resurrected Olympia as a brass band.

Dejan, one of 10 children from a Creole family, took lessons as a child from Lorenzo Tio Jr., a legendary clarinetist with the Onward Brass Band. Dejan's first exposure to brass bands came as a teenager in the. 1920s in a group affiliated with Holy Ghost Catholic Church, which is located in a central city ward. "We played up there where the organ sits, played the hymns for religions concerts," Dejan has recalled.

There is no written account of the church's role in the development of jazz. However, oral traditions suggest ambivalence if not downright opposition by church officials to the burial parades, which often turned flamboyant.

"At one time the Catholics didn't want no band for jazz funerals," Harold Dejan explained. "Then they thought of letting the band play, and changed it [for the] better."

The dramatic orations of pulpit preachers and surging choral singing of black Protestant churches were similar to the call-and-response pattern of early jazz ensembles. Although the early brass band funerals shared such dynamics, there was a spiritual idea as central to Catholicism as the African vision of many deities -- the idea of a soul sent into the afterlife.