Listening to Loss

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The bass player seemed determined to prove the point. He launched into a flurry of notes that were both too rapid and dissonant for New Orleans vintage jazz, playing more like Charles Mingus than Pops Foster. He scurried up the instrument's neck from the bridge to the scroll, shattering the tune. The other players grunted encouragement. Together they were demonstrating how music (and culture) argues, blends, dissolves, mutates, and then takes the next step. The odd bird who hears something different plucks his strings too quickly or queerly or flat out plunks the wrong note, but he does it over and over until it sounds right and the people around him begin to listen. He finds his own groove and fashions new music from the old.

And that's exactly what American music -- American culture -- has always managed to do. Our nation's truest anthem contains the funeral dirge of the New Orleans street band combined with the whorehouse piano and the last slave's work song and the bickering melodies of two hundred disparate points of origin, from Marseilles to Dakar, from Manaus to Guangzhou, now stretched out over the American plains like the hide of some mythical beast. Perhaps this is the irreplaceable loss in New Orleans: the erasure of proximity that allows for the accretion of influence over time. Perhaps this is what many of us hope may somehow rise again: New Orleans as simultaneously past and prologue, the foundation for all things opposed and American.

Of course, when the city's great music was just being born, it was then a fashionable complaint to jeer that America had 'no culture,' a notion that still raises its silly head even among sophisticated people who today may confuse vox populi with a loathsome noise. In truth, we have more culture than one people will ever be able to digest. And that helps explain why the melting pot sometimes bubbles up -- and, when we least expect it, explodes.

Fred Setterberg won the 2004 essay prize from the Pirate's Alley Faulkner Society in New Orleans. In 2006 Heyday Books will publish Under the Dragon, an account of multicultural California, co-written with Lonny Shavelson.

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