New Orleans' Free Agents Brass Band bring their second-line parade style to Wellington for this weekend's CubaDupa carnival. Nick Bollinger checks out their workshop and learns about the band's stormy origins.
Free Agents Brass Band at Wellington workshop Photo: Katherine McRae
“This is a military hall, right?” asks sousaphone player John Cannon IV, looking out from the stage of Wellington’s Air Force Band rooms. “I bet it’s never seen a second-line parade before!”
As he blows the bassline of an an old New Orleans tune, Cannon and the other five members of the New Orleans-based Free Agents Brass Band begin a joyful circuit of the room, encouraging all onlookers – mostly local musicians attending their workshop – to join in. Those without instruments sing, clap, dance or shout. The micro-parade does several laps of the rehearsal room, the music becoming more raucous and celebratory with each chorus.
Free Agents' John Cannon (sousaphone) and Floyd Green (snare drum) with Wellington tuba player Dan Yeabsley at workshop Photo: supplied
The Free Agents are in Wellington for this weekend’s CubaDupa festival, and their presence is likely to make it more like a New Orleans mardi gras than anything this city has ever seen.
Though all still in the twenties and thirties, the Free Agents are in a tradition that is more than a century old.
“We play what we call second line music,” Cannon explains to me. “Turn of the century blacks [in New Orleans] didn’t really have the capabilities of burying loved ones. They couldn’t afford it. So the Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs started to pop up. The clubs would hire a band to celebrate the life of the person they were burying. And the first line would be all of the mourners, all of the family that knew this person, that really felt and loved this person they were burying. The second line would be everybody else in the neighbourhood.
“So you would have a funeral procession – either from a church or wherever the memorial service was held to the graveyard – the musicians playing a slow dirge, traditional African hymns, everybody crying, everybody’s upset.
“But because New Orleans is a place that celebrates every aspect of life – even in death we celebrate life – coming out of the graveyard everybody you picked up would still be out waiting … so the music would change. It would go to up-tempo music now. You would parade around the neighbourhood and that’s where the traditional second line came from.”
Cannon, the historian of the group, goes on to explain the tangled origins of the music the brass bands play.
“New Orleans is a peculiar place. There was slavery there at one time but the French [colonists] were peculiar people. They would love you and enslave you all in one go.
“There’s a part of New Orleans called Congo Square. At one point it was about eight acres of lands where the slaves could go on Sunday. And they would practice traditional African attire, practice African drumming, they would dance and have a good time.
“And people were from every region of Africa. So you might have had someone from South Africa and someone from North Africa. All of these cultures mashed and mixed together. And then the influx of Haitians that came to America after the Haitian revolution, the Creole and the French, it all goes together.
“The beat that most of the brass bands play is called the bamboula, it comes out of Haiti. It’s just a mix of cultures and over the years it just transitioned to what we know as New Orleans brass band now.”
The members of the Free Agents – Cannon, bass drum player and leader Ellis Joseph, snare drummer Floyd Green, trumpeter Chad Brown and trombone player Mark Francis - all joined their first bands while still at school. Cannon says: “Every school, when I was at school, had a music programme. In grade school they put the focus on the arts. Then when you got to middle school and high school was when you could either choose to play sports but I was always in love with music.
“My band director picked the tuba up, it was the smallest, raggediest instrument in the school, and said, ‘I need somebody to play this’. At the time I think they had about 25 or 30 drummers in the band, everybody wanted to play drum, and he said ‘Somebody play this – you’ll stand out. You’re gonna be the only person playing it’ and I was like, fine. So I always tell people my instrument chose me, I didn’t choose it.”
The Free Agents didn’t form until after New Orleans was devastated in 2005 by Hurricane Katrina. “Staying in the city wasn’t an option,” explains drummer Ellis Joseph. “We all had to disperse. We went to different parts of the US, mainly in the southern region – Atlanta, Jackson, Houston, Lafayette… I had my own vehicle so I hit the road, went to Atlanta.”
Joseph had his own car, but had to choose between taking his bass drum or his clothes. He chose the latter, eventually finding a new instrument in Atlanta. During his time as a refugee in the city, the Free Agents began to take shape.
“We considered ourselves free agents, meaning that just like a sports player - you’re part of a unit but you can’t be part of that unit at the time so we wound up linking, every time people started calling me for gigs. We weren’t in New Orleans full-time, but sometimes we could get there. But we still had to survive and take care of our families, so we wound up calling the band Free Agents because we were part of a band but at the time we were, like, free.”
Eventually the musicians returned home, and the core of the Free Agents has remained constant ever since. A week rarely goes by without the band playing several times. Almost every Sunday there’s a second line going on, somewhere in the city.
“We’re on demand at all times when we’re at home,” says Cannon. “It could be a wedding, a baby shower, birthday party, marriage proposal…”
“Dog funeral”, trumpeter Mark Francis drolly suggests.
Cannon nods and grins. “Anything. It doesn’t matter. If you want to bury your goldfish – oh yeah!”
This weekend the Free Agents will be playing two stage performances as well as several street parades as part of CubaDupa.
Free Agents CubaDupa appearances:
Saturday 24 March 11:50 AM - Te Aro Park; 12:00 PM - Swan Stage; 02:30 PM Swan Ground; 09:45 PM - Upper Cuba Stage.
Sunday 25 March 12:00 PM - Upper Cuba St Stage Ground; 12:30 PM Upper Cuba St.; 05:15 PM - Glover Stage.
