Since the 1990s, New Orleans has been experiencing its greatest musical renaissance since Louis Armstrong. Brass band, funk, hip hop, Mardi Gras Indian, zydeco, and other styles are rocking the city in new neighborhood bars far from the Bourbon Street tourist scene. Even "neotraditional" jazz players have emerged in startling numbers, making the old sound new for a younger generation. In this book, Jack Sullivan shines the light on superb artists little known to the general public--Leroy Jones, Shamarr Allen, Kermit Ruffins, Topsy Chapman, Aurora Nealand, the Brass-A-Holics. He introduces as well a surge of female, Asian, and other previously marginalized groups that are making the vibe more inclusive than ever. New Orleans Remix covers artists who have broken into the national spotlight--the Rebirth Brass Band, Trombone Shorty, Jon Batiste--and many creators who are still little known. Based on dozens of interviews and archival documents, this book delivers their perspectives on how they view their present in relation to a vital past. The city of New Orleans has always held fiercely to the old even as it invented the new, a secret of its dynamic success. Marching tunes mingled with jazz, traditional jazz with bebop, Mardi Gras Indian percussion with funk, all producing wonderfully bewildering yet viable fusions. This book identifies the unique catalytic power of the city itself. Why did New Orleans spawn America's greatest vernacular music, and why does its musical fire still burn so fiercely, long after the great jazz eruptions in Chicago, Kansas City, and others declined? How does a tradition remain intensely creative for generations? How has the huge influx of immigrants to New Orleans, especially since Hurricane Katrina, contributed to the city's current musical harmony? This book seeks answers through the ideas of working musicians who represent very different sensibilities in voices often as eloquent as their music.

New Orleans: The Underground Guide shows visitors how to experience the Big Easy like a local, looking past staples like beignets and Bourbon Street to reveal a city bursting with contemporary and experimental art, genre-busting DJs, international cuisines, and even kid-friendly activities. This fully updated edition offers an expansive collection of alternative recommendations for exploring the city of Mardi Gras, brass bands, and weekly festivals. Featuring over two hundred new entries on local bands, rappers, restaurants with live music, galleries, and more, this guidebook takes readers on a one-of-a-kind journey through New Orleans, giving advice on everything from what thrift stores and bookshops to visit to what bands to catch in concert and what parades to attend. Lead author Michael Patrick Welch provides a detailed guide of the less traditional, more adventurous side of New Orleans, from bars that hold readings of poetry and erotic literature to costume shops that sell handmade masks, party supplies, and all the parade throws you can carry. Drawing on the wisdom of New Orleans celebrities, journalists, artists, and musicians from throughout the Crescent City, the fourth edition of New Orleans: The Underground Guide is an authentic and reliable resource for where locals listen to music, art hop, shop, eat, drink, and let loose.

After Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and the surrounding region in 2005, the city debated whether to press on with Mardi Gras or cancel the parades. Ultimately, they decided to proceed. New Orleans’s recovery certainly has resulted from a complex of factors, but the city’s unique cultural life—perhaps its greatest capital—has been instrumental in bringing the city back from the brink of extinction. Voicing a civic fervor, local writer Chris Rose spoke for the importance of Carnival when he argued to carry on with the celebration of Mardi Gras following Katrina: “We are still New Orleans. We are the soul of America. We embody the triumph of the human spirit. Hell, we ARE Mardi Gras." Since 2006, a number of new Mardi Gras practices have gained prominence. The new parade organizations or krewes, as they are called, interpret and revise the city’s Carnival traditions but bring innovative practices to Mardi Gras. The history of each parade reveals the convergence of race, class, age, and gender dynamics in these new Carnival organizations. Downtown Mardi Gras: New Carnival Practices in Post-Katrina New Orleans examines six unique, offbeat, Downtown celebrations. Using ethnography, folklore, cultural studies, and performance studies, the authors analyze new Mardi Gras’s connection to traditional Mardi Gras. The narrative of each krewe’s development is fascinating and unique, illustrating participants’ shared desire to contribute to New Orleans’s rich and vibrant culture.

The moving story of a New Orleans woman who fought for justice and her community even amidst one of the city's darkest moments. Mark Hertsgaard and Deborah Cotton were strangers to one another, united only by a love of jazz and New Orlean’s distinctive Second Line tradition. And then, during a Mother’s Day parade, they were thrown together when two gunmen fired into the crowd… Deborah Cotton—known to all as Big Red—was among the most grievously injured. She is the driving force of this deeply reported parable of two of America’s most deeply rooted issues. A racial justice activist in her forties who was born to a Black father and a white mother, Cotton was one of twenty people—including the author—shot in the biggest mass shooting in the modern history of New Orleans. Once one of the largest slave ports, the city has long been a vortex of violence and racism. From her apparent deathbed, Big Red shocked observers by urging mercy for two young Black men accused of the attack. “Racism can kill Black people even when a Black finger pulls the trigger,” she tells Hertsgaard, who, she later said, is “called” to investigate what actually happened, and why. Charismatic, complicated, and struck down in her prime, Big Red and her heroic life will captivate readers. In the wake of the shooting, she never stopped fighting as she sought to get to the core of this uniquely American maelstrom. Big Red's Mercy is an illuminating narrative that provides a human and unflinching look at modern America.

Ten years after Hurricane Katrina, outsiders will have two versions of the Katrina experience. One version will be the images they recall from news coverage of the aftermath. The other will be the intimate portrayal of the determination of New Orleans residents to rebuild and recover their lives. HBO’s Treme offers outsiders an inside look into why New Orleanians refused to abandon a place that many questioned should not be rebuilt after the levees failed. This critically acclaimed series expanded the boundaries of television making in its format, plot, casting, use of music, and realism-in-fictionalized-TV. However, Treme is not just a story for the outside gaze on New Orleans. It was a very local, collaborative experience where the show’s creators sought to enlist the city in a commemorative project. Treme allowed many in the city who worked as principals, extras, and who tuned in as avid viewers to heal from the devastation of the disaster as they experimented with art, imitating life, imitating art. This book examines the impact of HBOs Treme not just as television making, but in the sense in which television provides a window to our worlds. The book pulls together scholarship in media, communications, gender, area studies, political economy, critical studies, African American studies and music to explain why Treme was not just about television.

Celebrating the diversity of institutions in the United States, Latin America, and Canada, Remix aims to change the discourse about museums from the inside out, proposing a new, “panarchic”—nonhierarchical and adaptive—vision for museum practice. Selma Holo and Mari-Tere Álvarez offer an unconventional approach, one premised on breaching conventional systems of communication and challenging the dialogues that drive the field. Featuring more than forty authors in and around the museum world, Remix frames a series of vital case studies demonstrating how specific museums, large and small, have profoundly advanced or creatively redefined their goals to meet their ever-changing worlds. Contributors: Piedade Grinberg (Brazil), Nichole Anderson (Canada), Dr. James D. Fleck O.C. (Canada), Vanda Vitali (Canada), Lydia Bendersky (Chile), Andres Navia (Colombia), Manuel Araya-Incera (Costa Rica), Oscar Arias (Costa Rica), Alejandro de Avila Blomberg (Mexico), Marco Barerra Bassols (Mexico), Cuauhtémoc Camarena Ocampo (Mexico), Miguel Fernández Félix (Mexico), Demian Flores (Mexico), Teresa Morales (Mexico), Nelly Robles (Mexico), Hector Feliciano (Puerto Rico), Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru), Santiago Palomero Plaza (Spain), Maxwell L. Anderson (United States), Susana Bautista (United States), Graham W. J. Beal (United States), Jane Burrell (United States), Thomas P. Campbell (United States), Erica Clark (United States), Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh (United States), Kristina van Dyke (United States), William Fox (United States), Ben Garcia (United States), Ivan Gaskell (United States), Tomas W Hanchett (United States), Richard Koshalek (United States), Clare Kunny (United States), Stephen E. Nash (United States), Joanne Northrup (United States), Jane G. Pisano (United States), Edward Rothstein (United States), Karen Satzman (United States), Lori Starr (United States), Carlos Tortolero (United States), David Wilson (United States), Fred Wilson (United States), Guillermo Barrios (Venezuela), Patricia Phelps de Cisneros (Venezuela)

In this comprehensive and highly interdisciplinary companion, contributors reflect on remix across the broad spectrum of media and culture, with each chapter offering in-depth reflections on the relationship between remix studies and the digital humanities. The anthology is organized into sections that explore remix studies and digital humanities in relation to topics such as archives, artificial intelligence, cinema, epistemology, gaming, generative art, hacking, pedagogy, sound, and VR, among other subjects of study. Selected chapters focus on practice-based projects produced by artists, designers, remix studies scholars, and digital humanists. With this mix of practical and theoretical chapters, editors Navas, Gallagher, and burrough offer a tapestry of critical reflection on the contemporary cultural and political implications of remix studies and the digital humanities, functioning as an ideal reference manual to these evolving areas of study across the arts, humanities, and social sciences. This book will be of particular interest to students and scholars of digital humanities, remix studies, media arts, information studies, interactive arts and technology, and digital media studies.