“Jason Berry’s film includes wonderful historical footage and profoundly personal interviews. With a lens on jazz funerals, he is capturing the soul of New Orleans in a film that will become a classic.” --
Walter Isaacson, former CEO of CNN News, author of Leonardo da Vinci and Steve Jobs
Jazz funerals are famous the world over. How did they arise? What do the changes behind these soul-rocking burial pageants tell us about New Orleans?
In City of a Million Dreams, we explore rituals of death and rebirth in New Orleans, from slave dances, floods, and epidemics to military parades, wars, and séances. The marching musicians -- and the spontaneous choreographies of "second liners" who follow the band -- take us on a gripping journey through time.
Two tradition-bearers guide us: Jazzman Michael White and Deb "Big Red" Cotton, a blogger and videographer at second lines.
White's clarinet raises "the widow's wail," a cry of lamentation in the slow dirges, shifting into peals of joy in the "cutting loose" parade for the soul's release. A composer and Xavier University professor, White transports us back to the dawn of jazz, and his plantation-born ancestor who helped shape "funerals with music." We follow White, ushered into the funeral marches by older musicians, unto a tearing change in 2005: losing his house, sheet music, 4000 books and 5000 records in the flood, a haunting sequence filmed after Hurricane Katrina. White is an Everyman in the city’s aching rebirth.
As we shift to historical episodes, our narrator is Maryse DeJean of WWOZ radio. Born in Haiti, her mellifluous accent captures a Caribbean essence of the city. We focus on Congo Square, the field of antebellum slave dances, today contained in Louis Armstrong Park. The large ring dances to drums and strings burgeoned from a makeshift market, Africans and Indians trading tomatoes, okra, shellfish, woven baskets. The early dances were burial choreographies, ring dances honoring the ancestors. As time passed Congo Square dancers wore shells, bells, turbans, Indian outfits. We follow the long reach of memory in a segue to the 1998 funeral of Mardi Gras Indian Big Chief Donald Harrison Sr., a tradition of blacks paying homage to Indians who helped Africans escape.
The film juxtaposes beauty and sorrow in the aesthetics of burial traditions over time. Composer Jay Weigel orchestrates music sequences as we spotlight 19th century burial customs of French, Spanish, Sicilian and Irish benevolent societies. Archival images of departed players show the elegant bearing of people in church parades, 1950s Masonic lodges and burial societies, men in admiral’s hats, women in white with sabers. We follow the ebbing of benevolent societies caused by the rise of burial insurance. Thus emerge Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs, neighborhood parade groups and second liners advancing danced-memory.
Deb Cotton had just arrived in New Orleans when Katrina hit. An African-American raised in Oklahoma and California, she was an observant Jew with a wide lens on life. Deb chronicled the post-Katrina recovery with grit and wit in Gambit Weekly blogs. (“Foot-and-mouth syndrome aside, our biggest issue with Mayor Nagin is his lack of leadership”); her video posts captured the beauty of a life force in parades that evolved from funerals of yesteryear.
Deb was shot through the stomach at the 2013 Big Seven club Mother's Day parade; seventeen other people were hit in the crossfire. Miraculously, no one died that day. After months in hospital, and 36 surgeries, she walked into federal court and manifested a Shakespearean grace, forgiving her shooters, asking the judge for lenient prison terms. Praising her, the judge gave the brothers life terms. Deb visited her shooter in prison, and began crusading for a policy to help youth on the jagged edge. “What’s better – to hate him? Our society turns its back on these boys. What’s wrong with us that we can’t help them?”
We were planning the sequences on Deb when she was hospitalized in April, with residual issues, and quite suddenly died.
Filming the funeral of a member of this production was a weight on everyone involved, and altered the story-line of the documentary. We filmed women in brilliant shades of red and white at Deb's cathartic memorial service. The second line wound through the streets of her beloved Tremé neighborhood, the glints of sunlight off the singing horns, the horse-drawn funeral carriage, and dancers cutting loose her soul in the blue summer sky. Giving Deb Cotton's the breadth it deserves is the challenge of this film. This episode comes just before our final scene, the majestic funeral for attorney and civil rights pioneer Lolis Elie.
We have been filming off and on for many years, with 80% of footage shot and a post-production period through spring 2019 in order to submit City of a Million Dreams for film festivals later that year. Director Jason Berry is finishing a book of the same title for University of North Carolina Press for a fall 2018 release. We have film proposals to various funders ongoing, and ask your support to get this film across the finish line. Few people know that these kaleidoscopic burials are caravans of memory, carrying a story of the city writ large. This epic narrative has never been told. We ask your help as we move forward, bringing this film to the big screen.
In City of a Million Dreams, we explore rituals of death and rebirth in New Orleans, from slave dances, floods, and epidemics to military parades, wars, and séances. The marching musicians -- and the spontaneous choreographies of "second liners" who follow the band -- take us on a gripping journey through time.
Two tradition-bearers guide us: Jazzman Michael White and Deb "Big Red" Cotton, a blogger and videographer at second lines.
White's clarinet raises "the widow's wail," a cry of lamentation in the slow dirges, shifting into peals of joy in the "cutting loose" parade for the soul's release. A composer and Xavier University professor, White transports us back to the dawn of jazz, and his plantation-born ancestor who helped shape "funerals with music." We follow White, ushered into the funeral marches by older musicians, unto a tearing change in 2005: losing his house, sheet music, 4000 books and 5000 records in the flood, a haunting sequence filmed after Hurricane Katrina. White is an Everyman in the city’s aching rebirth.
As we shift to historical episodes, our narrator is Maryse DeJean of WWOZ radio. Born in Haiti, her mellifluous accent captures a Caribbean essence of the city. We focus on Congo Square, the field of antebellum slave dances, today contained in Louis Armstrong Park. The large ring dances to drums and strings burgeoned from a makeshift market, Africans and Indians trading tomatoes, okra, shellfish, woven baskets. The early dances were burial choreographies, ring dances honoring the ancestors. As time passed Congo Square dancers wore shells, bells, turbans, Indian outfits. We follow the long reach of memory in a segue to the 1998 funeral of Mardi Gras Indian Big Chief Donald Harrison Sr., a tradition of blacks paying homage to Indians who helped Africans escape.
The film juxtaposes beauty and sorrow in the aesthetics of burial traditions over time. Composer Jay Weigel orchestrates music sequences as we spotlight 19th century burial customs of French, Spanish, Sicilian and Irish benevolent societies. Archival images of departed players show the elegant bearing of people in church parades, 1950s Masonic lodges and burial societies, men in admiral’s hats, women in white with sabers. We follow the ebbing of benevolent societies caused by the rise of burial insurance. Thus emerge Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs, neighborhood parade groups and second liners advancing danced-memory.
Deb Cotton had just arrived in New Orleans when Katrina hit. An African-American raised in Oklahoma and California, she was an observant Jew with a wide lens on life. Deb chronicled the post-Katrina recovery with grit and wit in Gambit Weekly blogs. (“Foot-and-mouth syndrome aside, our biggest issue with Mayor Nagin is his lack of leadership”); her video posts captured the beauty of a life force in parades that evolved from funerals of yesteryear.
Deb was shot through the stomach at the 2013 Big Seven club Mother's Day parade; seventeen other people were hit in the crossfire. Miraculously, no one died that day. After months in hospital, and 36 surgeries, she walked into federal court and manifested a Shakespearean grace, forgiving her shooters, asking the judge for lenient prison terms. Praising her, the judge gave the brothers life terms. Deb visited her shooter in prison, and began crusading for a policy to help youth on the jagged edge. “What’s better – to hate him? Our society turns its back on these boys. What’s wrong with us that we can’t help them?”
We were planning the sequences on Deb when she was hospitalized in April, with residual issues, and quite suddenly died.
Filming the funeral of a member of this production was a weight on everyone involved, and altered the story-line of the documentary. We filmed women in brilliant shades of red and white at Deb's cathartic memorial service. The second line wound through the streets of her beloved Tremé neighborhood, the glints of sunlight off the singing horns, the horse-drawn funeral carriage, and dancers cutting loose her soul in the blue summer sky. Giving Deb Cotton's the breadth it deserves is the challenge of this film. This episode comes just before our final scene, the majestic funeral for attorney and civil rights pioneer Lolis Elie.
We have been filming off and on for many years, with 80% of footage shot and a post-production period through spring 2019 in order to submit City of a Million Dreams for film festivals later that year. Director Jason Berry is finishing a book of the same title for University of North Carolina Press for a fall 2018 release. We have film proposals to various funders ongoing, and ask your support to get this film across the finish line. Few people know that these kaleidoscopic burials are caravans of memory, carrying a story of the city writ large. This epic narrative has never been told. We ask your help as we move forward, bringing this film to the big screen.