'City of a Million Dreams': Exploring the history and the meaning of jazz funerals

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Lamar White, Jr.
@LamarWhiteJr
In exploring the history & meaning of jazz funerals, the uniquely New Orleans ritual that transforms a cortège into a celebratory parade, Jason Berry’s documentary reveals a powerful allegory about the spiritual core of America’s most fascinating city.

‘City of a Million Dreams’ Chronicles the Dangers and Mystic Pleasures of Living on the Threshold
In exploring the history and the meaning of jazz funerals, the uniquely New Orleans ritual that transforms a cortège into a celebratory parade, Jason Berry’s documentary reveals a powerful allegory…
bayoubrief.com
3:42 PM · Oct 18, 2021

https://www.bayoubrief.com/2021/10/18/city-of-a-million-dreams-chronicles-the-dangers-and-mystic-pleasures-of-living-on-the-threshold/

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City of a Million Dreams, a new documentary directed and produced by the acclaimed writer Jason Berry, surveys the spiritual terrain of New Orleans through the lens of the jazz funeral, a term that refers to a Creole tradition combining the Catholic ritual of the burial procession with the performance of brass band music and celebratory dance.

The term “jazz funeral’ is sometimes used interchangeably with the term “second line,” a New Orleans colloquialism that distinguishes between a funeral procession’s contingent of mourners—that is, the family and close friends of the deceased who comprise the “mainline” of the cortège—and the revelers who follow in binary, symbolic opposition (hence, the “second line”). But recently, the two terms have acquired slightly different meanings. As Dr. Mark T. Gaspard Bolin, an ethnomusicologist who studied New Orleans musical traditions and culture as a graduate student at UCLA, pointed out in his 2021 dissertation “The Second Line: A (Re)Conceptualization of the New Orleans Brass Band Tradition,” the term “second line” is now used more broadly and is “often disembodied from the funeral rites ritual from which [it] originate[s].”

As the film quickly makes clear, the jazz funeral is much more than a quirky local tradition. Indeed, there is perhaps no better illustration of the dialectical tension between the sacred and the profane that has remained at the core of New Orleans identity for more than 300 years.

Increasingly, second lines have become both an instrument for political protest and a way for people to publicly grieve the deaths of famous actors and musicians, regardless of how tenuous their actual connection to New Orleans may be. When the iconic British musician David Bowie died in January of 2016, for example, a second line in the heart of the French Quarter was quickly organized in his honor by members of the band Arcade Fire. Three months later, thousands turned out in the Treme for a second line celebrating the life of the musical superstar Prince. At the tail end of December, a group of Star Wars fans in the Bywater organized a second line for the actress Carrie Fisher, better known for her role as Luke Skywalker’s sister Princess Leia.

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