This Friday in McNeir Auditorium, Jason Berry (COL ’71), will return to Georgetown to discuss his newly reissued Up from the Cradle of Jazz: New Orleans Music Since World War II, which provides a comprehensive look at the evolution of jazz, rhythm and blues, and soul music in the Crescent City. Originally published in 1984 and co-written by Jonathan Foose and Tad Jones, the 2009 edition has been updated to present the cultural resurgence of New Orleans since the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. The event will include a screening of a nine-minute short film on jazz funerals which Berry produced.
According to Berry, jazz funerals, in which a somber death march gradually progresses into a joyous street parade, “hold a mirror to what society is like.” Nowhere is this more true than in New Orleans, where tragedy and celebration have been inextricably intertwined since the catastrophe of the hurricane. The jazz funeral’s combination of grave respect for death and exuberant celebration of life seems fitting for a city whose cultural scene is flourishing just a few years after the hurricane killed 30 percent of its population and flooded 80 percent of its area.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina “politics failed, while culture prevailed,” Berry said. While the political history of the city since the disaster has been marred by ineptitude and corruption, New Orleans’s musicians have been a driving force in its recovery. In February 2006, New Orleans native Wynton Marsalis, a famed jazz trumpeter, oversaw the distribution of nearly $3 million toward restoring cultural centers and other projects—a great example of what Berry sees as “a jazz musician doing what politicians should be doing—helping people.”
Although the club scene is smaller and fewer recording studios are open, the city’s musicians aren’t leaving—and many who were driven away by the hurricane are coming back. Famed clarinetist Michael White lost his house and all of his possessions—over 75 instruments and thousands of books and CDs—in Katrina’s floods, but he has since returned to the city and released an album. Berry sees his resilience and refusal to work outside the city as “emblematic of what a lot of musicians went through” after the hurricane.
After graduating with a degree in English from the College, Berry began work on his first book, Amazing Grace: With Charles Evers in Mississippi. His real breakthrough came in 1992 with the publication of Lead Us Not Into Temptation: Catholic Priests and the Sexual Abuse of Children, which received widespread national media attention. He has also produced several documentaries, including Vows of Silence: The Abuse of Power in the Papacy of John Paul II.
