Community Spotlight: The Roots of Music
Spotlight by Tami Fairweather
The day after the stay-at-home mandate was issued in response to the spread of COVID-19 in New Orleans last March, one of the young tuba players in The Roots of Music Marching Crusaders band called the organization’s headquarters to ask if he could get his horn.
“He said he couldn’t get through this without it,” recalls The Roots of Music executive director Suzanne Raether. At that moment, she couldn’t think of a better testament to their mission. “We’ve trained these youth to rely upon music and their instrument as a positive alternative and it worked, you know?” she said. “It’s real. It really does work.” When she shared the student’s request with her team of mostly part-time instructors, music directors, and program managers, many got teary-eyed.
After taking some time to adjust to this new no-horn-blowing-in-a-group reality, they decided what was best for the kids was to find a way to keep going. They got to work sanitizing the horns and coordinating home deliveries of nearly 150 brass instruments and drumsticks to band members throughout the city and getting the regular after-school programming online to continue their mission to empower the youth of New Orleans the best way they know how: through the discipline and joy of making music.
The Roots of Music itself is cultivated from resilience, founded in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The vast majority of musicians and culture bearers had left the city to survive elsewhere, and limited resources to rebuild were largely focused on infrastructure. The population of people that were making a go of it during the rebuild was without neighborhoods or community programs, and kids were hanging out in the streets with nothing better to do. Rebirth Brass Band snare drummer, organization co-founder, and current artistic director Derrick Tabb personally knew a couple of dozen kids who were starting to get into the kind of trouble that could keep growing without an alternative outlet.
He saw music as a way to break the cycle and protect them from harm and street violence, and an investment in the preservation of the city by nurturing its very roots: the next generation of musicians and culture bearers.
The design of the after-school program centers on developing the Marching Crusaders band through the discipline of learning, practicing, and performing music. Raether says it’s also about “giving an equal amount of love and care to make sure that excellence can happen so that they are comfortable and feel like they’re home.” That support takes the form of a hot meal, free transportation back and forth to Roots headquarters, and academic tutoring for children aged nine to fourteen. There’s no audition to be in the band. It’s simple, she says. “If you want to play the trumpet, you come learn to play the trumpet.”
Though the program trains the kids as professional musicians (many by the time they are eleven years old), music education develops the brain and sharpens cognitive ability, which can be applied to any of life’s pursuits or professions. So can courage, which is what it takes to suit up, grab a horn, and perform in the biggest show in the city: Mardi Gras parade season, where they march and play their hearts out for miles and miles in parades both day and night. “I mean, one of our trombonist’s horn is as tall as he is, and the tuba often weighs as much as the player does,” says Raether.
Roots is also an extended family. One of the very first graduates of the program is currently the lower brass instructor. Another alum is an upper brass instructor, and another is the assistant drum instructor. The Roots gig is part-time for nearly all the instructors, who are otherwise professional performing musicians, directors, or teachers, including the percussion master himself, Mr. Shoan Ruffin. “I don’t think there is a marching band drummer in the Gulf South who has not gone through Ruffin’s hands,” Raether says. The instructors are all here because they love the kids and they love the music and “they want to see the kids come up through these ranks trained right.”
Their Preservation Hall Foundation Community Engagement Grant was directed to the mission-critical purpose of retaining the staff during a time when the instructor’s other sources of income dried up due to the pandemic. Raether reflects on what a beautiful thing it is to receive a donation without restrictions.
“It says ‘I believe in you and what you’re doing’ which is especially welcome from an organization like Preservation Hall that is also working to preserve and promote New Orlean’s musical culture – because it’s going to take all of us to do it.”
“If we're going to be serious about being New Orleans and preserving and promoting our culture, then we have to be the anchor for it,” says Raether. She talks about Tabb’s stories of how culture used to be passed down through musicians going into the neighborhoods and hanging out with people they knew on the front stoops of houses, teaching the young ones how to play music. As the city has changed post-Katrina with the gentrification of neighborhoods like the Treme and the overall downsizing of music education in the charter school system, that organic communal learning is no longer there. She worries that the kids could grow up not knowing who they are, or what New Orleans culture is: that magic thing that makes people fall in love with the city.
“We feel a genuine responsibility to our city, to our people, and to the musicians who couldn’t come back to keep that culture going,” says Raether. “We want to make sure that our residents and our culture bearers have their place and that tapestry is woven back.”
In the pandemic, that weaving process consists of bringing sections of the Marching Crusaders back to practice safely in the large parking lot. The absence of Mardi Gras parades this year was a heartbreaker, especially for the parade crowds who count the band among the very best. But Roots rallied with a drive-in movie screening of Pixar’s Soul and The Whole Gritty City (a 2013 documentary that follows the Marching Crusaders and some of their members) for the kids, and a limited edition Mardi Gras 2021 t-shirt designed by students as a fundraiser. Roots has also formed an as-yet-to-be-named brass band made up of staff and alumni musicians who can perform private five to eight-piece sets outdoors--an interesting combination of musicians that would be hard to find anywhere else in town.
This time has also given Roots a chance to put some work into a new studio production and recording engineering pilot program called “The Roots of Music Academy'' for alumni aged fifteen to twenty. Together with local recording studio partners, the program is intended to help them forge a career path in the music industry that is aligned to interests other than performance.
When asked what community means in New Orleans, Raether says it’s defined by “how much we share, how much we give, and how much we love each other.” The Roots of Music remains thriving from them all. Whether a follow or share on social media, a five or five hundred dollar donation, it all counts.
The whole of what the Roots of Music does with the city’s youth is what the community culture needs to survive, says Raether. “Music is just the hook. Music is what gets the kids in the door and what keeps them there, but the fact that they are in the door is what matters.”
Any time they are playing their instrument could be a moment that they didn’t walk down that street, or didn’t go to that spot where something could have happened. This kind of impact is immeasurable in terms of reported metrics, because how do you measure something that didn’t happen?
What can happen is devastating, like the tragic loss of fourteen-year-old Marching Crusaders drummer Ja’mere Alfred to gun violence on Christmas night last year. “That baby didn’t do anything wrong,” says Raether. He was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time that night. In a public statement, Roots said that Ja’mere “loved playing music and loved playing with his friends in the band. He was joyful and smart and dedicated. He was a good kid, a truly good child. We are incredibly proud of all he was able to accomplish as a musician in his brief life and we are heartbroken that he is gone.”
We all need to work to keep the children of New Orleans safe from gun violence, Raether says. “No matter who you are, whatever position you’re in, or whatever avenue you take, as long as you’re trying to make sure our kids are safe, New Orleans has a future, and we’re all gonna win.”