One of the great things about living and working in Minneapolis/St. Paul is the staggering popularity of the live music scene. I tell people that a lot, and I’ve found that lifelong Minnesotans are often surprised to hear me mention it. They’re aware, of course, of the rich history of the local scene that spawned Prince, Dylan, The Jayhawks, and countless other legendary performers, but they’re often unaware of just how rare this is in 21st century America. I’ve lived in and around five good-sized metro areas in my life, and MSP is the only one of them to have a seemingly ingrained tradition of thousands of ordinary folks going out to see live music, regardless of genre, on a very regular basis.

That kind of thing doesn’t just happen, either. Someone had to lay an awful lot of groundwork for a populace the size of ours to be willing and happy to support as many live venues as we do. And while we’re not alone among American cities in maintaining such a commitment, the club is getting smaller, as the Internet and other homebound hobbies take their ever-increasing toll on industries that depend on getting people out of the house.

And that brings us to New Orleans. When you think of authentic American Music Towns, New Orleans would have to come in pretty near the top of everyone’s list. Not just for its incredible proliferation of musicians in what is actually a very small city; and not just for the immediately identifiable jazz sound that has served as the backdrop for every Louisiana-based film or TV show for decades. What makes New Orleans a music destination is the pure joy that so many of the city’s performers seem to take in their craft, and their willingness to break into song, or bebop riff, or brassy fanfare at the slightest provocation, indoors or out, at any hour of day or night.

And that exuberance, sadly, seems to be running afoul of the post-Katrina reality, in which overworked and understaffed officials are trying desperately to keep New Orleans functioning, sometimes at the expense of the city’s legendary freewheeling style…

“Effective immediately, the New Orleans Police Department will be enforcing the below-listed ordinance”—Section 66-205, which says, “It shall be unlawful for any person to play musical instruments on public rights-of-way between the hours of 8:00 p.m. and 9:00 a.m.”

Yup, that means just what it looks like – musicians who have been plying their trade on the famously lively streets of the Big Easy for years, sometimes decades, are now being arrested for it. Jazz writer Larry Blumenfeld, who’s working on a book about the city’s attempts to recover culturally from the hurricane, has been following the story:

None of this is new stuff: There’s a rich history of musicians being arrested while making music in New Orleans. When I first began interviewing musicians, I was shocked to learn that just as surely as the horn players I spoke with had soaked up musical tradition from authoritative sources like Anthony “Tuba Fats” Lacen, a beloved musician and bandleader who died in 2004, so too had they been introduced to this other legacy—arrest while playing—by badge-wearing authorities. Even Tuba Fats got arrested. More often than not, the way musicians tell it, the police tasked with enforcement knew him. They’d take him in to the station, show him a bit of hospitality, send him off 30 minutes later. It was as much a game as a show of force. But it served a purpose.

Now, being the champions of decorum that Minnesotans are, I’m sure many of you are thinking that there couldn’t possibly be anything wrong with enforcing a noise ordinance after a certain hour of the evening. Minneapolis has such an ordinance, and I’m pretty sure St. Paul does as well. And I’m not really suggesting that anyone living in New Orleans should have to lose much-needed sleep just because I like the image of New Orleans as a town where the music never stops.

But it does seem a shame that some of a city’s defining character might fall victim to an overabundance of law enforcement twitchiness. I mean, if I chose to live in Minneapolis’s Warehouse District, I’d have a hard time claiming that the noise and congestion associated with Twins games was an unfair burden to my quality of life. Likewise, if I set up with my viola and an amplifier on a deserted street corner in Eden Prairie at 11pm, I wouldn’t really have a leg to stand on when the cops came along wondering just exactly what I thought I was doing. (Amplified viola, of course, is considered at all times a disturbance of the peace in at least 39 states.)

Larry Blumenfeld sums up the tricky dance between New Orleans as a place people live and New Orleans as a place people love with an important warning…

Beyond practicality and promotion, there’s a deeper read to all this. Michael White, a clarinetist who began his career in brass bands and is now a Xavier University professor, told me: “There’s a feeling among many that some of our older cultural institutions are in the way of progress and don’t fit in the new vision of New Orleans. That they should only be used in a limited way to boost the image of New Orleans, as opposed to being real, viable aspects of our lives.”

Decorum aside, that would be an awful shame.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 5th, 2010 at 9:51 am and is filed under all music is local, contemporary culture, state of the art. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.