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| Profile |
Soulful Serenade
Catherine Curan
11/01/2007
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Musical Roots
Congo Square takes its name
from a section of a New Orleans park, known in the 18th and early 19th centuries
as the one place in America where slaves could gather on Sunday afternoons to
make music. The songs they created still echo through American music and are
widely credited as the basis of jazz, an art form born in New Orleans.
Initially, Marsalis and Addy collaborated to explore the
question of what kind of music slaves actually heard in Congo Square. There are
no scores providing information on how performers combined African and European
instruments. No one choreographed the dancers’ steps. There are no recordings of
the African drumming that left some white locals so unsettled that they shut
down the concerts in the 1800s.
After Hurricane Katrina hit, Marsalis and Addy briefly
considered abandoning the project. Instead, they adapted their composition to
reflect this new suffering inflicted on the city’s residents—and reaffirm the
city’s heritage and spirit. "It was our gift to the Crescent City," writes Addy
in the liner notes of the CD.
The donors had their own connections to New Orleans. For
Kansler, backing Congo
Square was a chance to publicly support
Entergy’s hometown. After Katrina, the Riggios developed Project Home Again to
provide housing for displaced residents; Riggio hopes to start construction this
fall. He says he has always been interested in the unequal administration of
justice in America and "the unfinished business of the civil rights movement."
Allegations of racism in Katrina’s immediate aftermath have
been widespread, including those made by survivors who testified before a
special House of Representatives committee on Katrina. Riggio, however, stops
short of making a direct connection between unequal justice for blacks in New
Orleans and the government’s ineptitude after Katrina. "I don’t even want to
pile onto Katrina," he says. "We can lament about the government or we can do
something on our own."
Riggio felt passionate enough about the project to attend the
Congo Square premiere on a sweltering Sunday afternoon in April 2006.
Before the concert, he and his wife marched in the second-line parade, a New
Orleans tradition of both grieving and celebration that has roots in Africa.
Riggio has been a fan of jazz greats such as Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie for
decades, but found this new melding of African music and swing jazz
transcendent. "Most people would tend to look at giving in terms of bricks and
mortar—something that has a name or something that will last forever," he says.
"It’s kind of refreshing to give to something that basically created a moment,
and you savor the moment in your own spirit. And the pleasure of that can’t be
described."
Five-thousand people attended the free premiere in Congo
Square. Jazz at Lincoln Center also held a weeklong educational residency,
hosting 1,200 students at a performance at the Convention Center. Since then,
the piece has toured about a dozen cities; its premiere in New York was recorded
for the CD. All profits from the CD will go to Jazz at Lincoln Center.
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