Chris Bickford

“Uncle” Lionel Batiste, AKA Mister New Orleans Himself, turned 78 a few days ago. In his honor, family and friends gathered last night at Sweet Lorraine’s jazz club for a birthday celebration. Lionel, a longtime bass drummer and singer for the Tremé Brass Band, was in fine form, sporting his legendary dapper duds and old-school bling, flirting with all the ladies, and getting up on stage to perform with the band and lead the crowd in rousing versions of “When the Saints go Marching in” and “Who Dat” chants….

Lionel has been a fixture for years on the New Orleans scene. Wherever he goes he is known, and if he is not known, he is noticed. He is always decked out in shiny duds and jewelry, carries a walking cane that looks like an old Druid’s wand, and never fails to give a smile. A couple of years ago I spotted him on Easter Sunday wandering the Marigny, and followed him into the Spotted Cat to see if I could take a picture of him. At the time I didn’t know who he was, just thought he was an interesting-looking character spiffed up for Easter. Only much, much later did I realize that he was the legendary “Uncle Lionel”.

As luck would have it, my assistant Federica Valabrega was out with a friend last week at another bar in the neighborhood where the Tremé Band has a standing weekly gig. Lionel, of course, flirted with her and invited her to his big birthday bash at Sweet Lorraine’s. She came back with the news, and then pulled out my copy of Annie Leibovitz’s “American Music” to find a photo of the Tremé boys in there. She’s been talking about going to Lionel’s birthday party all week.

So despite the “winter storm warning”, which in New Orleans means that it’s cold and rainy, we ventured out the 4 or 5 blocks to Sweet Lorraine’s, an unassuming looking place on a rough-looking street in the Tremé. Inside the vibe was warm, friendly, laid-back, and sophisticated. Lorraine’s is the kind of place you could easily set yourself down at, order a whiskey, and while away the afternoon and evening listening to jazz. New Orleans has a lot of places like that.

New Orleans is a small town, and its local celebrities are really just all members of a big family. After Federica and I had been shooting for a bit, one of Lionel’s daughters asked if I could take some pictures of the whole family. I happily obliged, and got some nice photos for them. Annie Leibovitz they ain’t, but it really felt special to be able to take those photos. The longer I work as a photographer, the more I realize the value of pictures like these. Nothing innovative or imaginative about the composition, and “serious” photographers may not be impressed, but for what the true personal value of a photograph is all about, you can’t get anything more valuable than family photos. These are the pictures that hang on walls, on office desks, and on the refrigerator; these are the photos that bring back memories and form a history of who we are, whether we are celebrities or regular people. These are the photos that matter.

My life is long from over, but I wish I had more photos like these of friends and family. Certain chapters of my life are completely without photographs; certain friends I have made along the road of life and never seen again, I have no photographs of them or the time we spent together. Though I still remember those times and those friends vividly, I wish I had had the presence of mind to record just a few simple moments to aid my memories.

Anyway, my great thanks to the Batiste family for asking me to photograph them and for inviting me and Federica to be part of their celebration. Also check out Federica’s site, http://federicavalabrega.wordpress.com/ for more photos. Enjoy.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/10/us/10orleans.html?hpw

Doing an assignment for a daily national, especially one in a different time zone, is no walk in the park. Especially when the event you’re supposed to be covering starts at 5 PM and your first deadline is at 3:30 PM. Do the math on that one…

So the assignment from the New York Times was to cover the “Dat Tuesday” victory parade for the Saints, starting at the Superdome and ending at the Convention Center, both sites of national tragedy five years ago, now reclaimed by the hometown sports heroes…We thought we’d be smart and get an Air Card so that we could hunker down in the parking garage by the Superdome and upload from the car as pics came in from the beginning of the parade. What we didn’t count on is that during events of this magnitude, the cell towers in the area get overloaded and phone service just shuts down. Every now and then my phone would work, and I’d have voice messages from my assistant Federica saying “where are you”, and voice messages from the Times editor saying, “Where are the pictures?” The stress hormones were raging through my body as I tried to hunt down Federica, who had gone walkabout from the car trying to find a better signal, while trying to capture a photo that would be worthy of National’s faith in me to “get the shot”…I got plenty of good ones, but mostly of parade-watchers waiting for the parade to start. I finally had to settle for a shot of a Marine waving a huge Saints flag at the beginning of the parade. Then I had to high-tail it back to the car, 4-wheel it through the back streets of New Orleans from the Superdome to my apartment in the Tremé, and upload the six pictures we’d deemed good enough for publication. Once done, I called the editors, informed them of my status, and hopped on the bike to try to catch the rest of the parade as it headed down Canal street and then took a right at Convention Center Boulevard.

I sped down Rampart, in the damp, below-40, windy New Orleans night, cut through the quarter, locked my bike up somewhere around Bourbon Street, and tried to push my way through the crowds to cross the barricade, where my press pass would grant me free and easy access. But no dice. The folks in the crowd didn’t give a rat’s ass who I was or what newspaper I was shooting for. “Shoulda gotten here earlier here, bro, like we did” was the general response I got. My retort of “Dude, I’ve been working on this thing since noon” fell on deaf ears…There was just no getting through. It was like that Who concert where people got trampled…or was that a Stones concert…

I got back on the bike and headed down to the riverfront, thinking I might be able to catch Drew and the boys at the corner of Canal and Convention Center Avenue, but had the same problem there. New Orleaneans are the sweetest people in the world until you try to butt in front of them along a parade route…This one pretty woman offered to help me get through, grabbed my hand and started pulling me to the front, saying that I was a photographer with the New York Times and I had to get through. We got about four or five rows deep, and then no dice. “Go back to New York” one smartass cracked. “Dude, I live here too”, I said, which is only half true, but I thought it would help. “Yeah, everybody’s got a line, buddy, and yours ain’t workin’ “….

In the end I had to settle for a few rungs up on a fire truck, where they let me hang precariously from a metal handle as I waited for the MVP float to come through….with my free hand I had to get my telephoto lens out of my backpack, switch lenses, and hold the camera up with a 7-pound lens on the end of it, trying to hold it steady enough to get a clear shot in the near darkness…all the blood had drained out of both of my arms, the one holding on to the fire truck, the other trying to hold my camera to my eye….finally the Bacchus float with Drew Brees, Reggie Bush, and the rest of the “big boys” turned the corner and I managed to fire off a few AP-style telephoto shots of the guys throwing beads off the float. I thanked the firemen and headed back to my bike.

It was approaching the final deadline for the second edtiton, and I thought maybe I should just head back, but then I thought better of it and figured I should give it one last shot. So I rode further down Convention Center Boulevard, locked my bike up against the fence of the Hilton parking lot, and tried again to muscle my way through the crowds. The crowd was a little thinner here and much more polite, and I easily made my way onto the parade route. From there it was just a matter of keeping my badge prominent and squatting down into the crowd every time a marching band passed with their huge banners that spanned the width of the road. I kept sneaking down towards the Bacchus float, finally getting alongside it. I followed and circled around it as the boys threw beads and high-fived fans…until finally I found myself in the right place and the right time to get the shot above. Unfortunately I was shooting jpeg to get the shot in quicker and make sure my buffer didn’t seize up on me, so the color is not as good as I would like. But it’s a “moment” for sure…f/8 and be there right? Well, more like f/2.8 at 1600 with an off-camera flash AND be there..

Though it was great to get an assignment with the Times for the parade, I can’t help thinking how many REALLY great shots I could have gotten if I had just been able to follow the parade on my own from beginning to end. I already had a place on St. Charles Circle where the light was going to be long and golden around 5:30 or so, just before sunset, with a backdrop of flags hanging from a building and, I’m sure, confetti…and then at twilight, my favorite time to shoot…Man, the photos I could have gotten. At that moment I was, of course, frantically uploading round one of the photos from my apartment.

Racing back home in the freezing night (there were lots of comments that day about “hell froze over” since nobody thought the Saints would EVER make it to the super bowl, much less win), I came down with a chill that has taken me 48 hours to shake. But I finally got the photos uploaded, and then I took Federica out for a burger for being a trooper and being such a good support team, even though mostly what she did was experience frustration at the Air Card not working. I couldn’t have done it without her help.

Yesterday and today have been pretty quiet here in New Orleans. All of tonight’s parades have been canceled due to a “winter storm watch” which in New Orleans just means that it’s cold and rainy, and nobody wants to stand outside in the cold and wet watching the gorgeous Muses parade by catching pneumonia in their scanty outfits. Tomorrow doesn’t look much better, but come Saturday it will probably be balls to the wall until Mardi Gras. I’m not completely over my cold, but I’ll have plenty of time to recover after Tuesday. I’ll try to send a few updates over the weekend, but it may all have to wait until after. It’s going to be hard enough just keeping pace with it all.

Please check out writer Campbell Robertson’s great article, and my, well, passable photos–click on the “multimedia” window to check out the slideshow:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/10/us/10orleans.html?hpw

Last night it was bedlam in New Orleans. I was hanging out at a Super Bowl party at an apartment on Frenchmen Street when the late-game interception pretty much clinched the game for the Saints. I decided to go down on to the streets to see what the action was like. I wandered into the Maison Bar, where a packed house full of college-age kids and twenty-somethings was going wild with hysteria, while the Young Fellas Brass Band played New Orleans fight songs and the game was being projected against the wall. As the clock ran out, the band stepped off the stage and stepped on to the street, and the whole bar emptied out to join them in a spontaneous street parade. We marched down Frenchmen Street, up Royal and into the Quarter, up to Bourbon Street, where the crowd was so thick at times it was impossible to move….we headed south somewhere around St Peter, then wended our way back down to Decatur and back into the Marigny, singing, dancing, shouting “Who Dat!”, high-fiving passers-by from the other direction. Cars on the street were honking their horns and drivers and passengers alike were extending their arms out for high-fives…There were umbrella dancers and flag wavers, people tossing beads off of balconies, confetti in the air…a few folks were even dancing on the tops of cars…

It was a little piece of history, and one of the coolest parties I’ve ever attended–made all the more special because up until the fourth quarter we were all biting our nails wondering whether it was even going to happen. Had the Saints lost, I imagine things would have been a wee bit more quiet on the streets. But it definitely has to go down in history as one of the largest–and definitely one of the most significant–spontaneous street parades in the history of New Orleans. And the Young Fellas parade was only one of, no doubt, dozens of second-lines crawling through the city last night.

On Tuesday the city will hold its victory parade to welcome the team home. I’ll be covering the event for the Times, so I’ll have to wait a day or so to post those pics. In the meantime, enjoy these…I’m already behind, with posts from gay balls and hippie masquerade parties to post, as well as a little bit of Bourbon Street “culture”…Good thing there’s no TV in this apartment to distract me from this relentless party schedule…

History is in the making today. The town of New Orleans, having risen from the tragedy of Katrina, is on a comeback roll, and tonight it will celebrate as its home team makes its first ever appearance defending the NFC championship. Having hosted 7 Super Bowls in its home stadium, New Orleans has never played in one. Until tonight.

Last Wednesday I was sitting in Buzzard’s Hall, the collective man-cave of New Orleans’ oldest Mardi Gras marching society, drinking beer and eating fried flounder with some of the Buzzards. One of the guys, decked out in a Saints T-shirt, a Saints Jacket, and a Saints medallion, was saying to me, “Do you feel what’s going on here? Do you get how huge this is?” I told him, yeah, there’s a huge buzz in the air, everybody’s running around yelling “who dat!”…But he kept going, he was on a roll. “This isn’t just about football, my friend. And it’s not just about Katrina either. This is about this town. This is about this town coming together like never before. The whites, the blacks, the gays, everybody’s together on this one. This is about all of us, man, the pride we’ve always had, but now the whole world can see what we can do!”

Later he added, “Man, I wish the Colts would just give us this one, you know? Because it means so much to us.”

And it’s true. The Town that Care forgot is having its moment in the sun, and everybody–EVERYBODY–is waving the black and gold and greeting each other with the Saints’ battle cry. “Who Dat!”

Even people who don’t give a rat’s ass about football are joining in the spirit. The Mistick Krewe of Satyricon, a gay carnival society, moved the date of its annual Mardi Gras ball back from Sunday to Friday, because, as the emcee, in drag, said, “If we held it on Super Bowl Sunday, I don’t think anybody would show up. Hell, I wouldn’t even be here…and, well, you know I don’t exactly follow football…”

Well, today is the day, my friends. In the entire history of the New Orleans Saints’ franchise, the team has never even had a winning season. And today, after rampaging nearly undefeated through the NFC lineup, they are gearing up for their first Super Bowl ever. And they’ve got the Pride of New Orleans squarely behind them…many are making the trek to Miami to spook the Colts with their infamous stadium-shaking “Who Dat” chant, which, the more you hear it, sounds like some ancient African battle cry…the rest will be watching all over town at Super Bowl parties, or downtown where a large outdoor screen will be set up for public viewing, or at their favorite bar with all their neighborhood friends. Make no mistake, the soft swampy ground of New Orleans will be trembling tonight, and if the Saints win, there will be mayhem in the streets.

Win or lose, the Saints will return home as heroes, and on Tuesday there will be a victory parade, win or lose, through the streets. For a town that loves a parade, its’ only natural.

Following are a few snapshots from around town of Saints’ pride…I’m trying to get them up as fast as I can so I can go out and enjoy the festivities myself…and find a good spot to watch the game.

‘Cause it’s not just about football, right? It’s about history being made. GO SAINTS!!!!

Oh, and please don’t tell the NFL about the title of this post…I can’t afford to get sued:)

New Orleans holds a particular place in the history and legacy of marching bands. When the Spanish took control of Lousiana from the French in the eighteenth century, marching bands were a strictly military affair, and the primitiveness of instrument technology at the time limited the bands to the old-time fife-and-drum corps, which we all know too well from one too many re-enactments of the Revolutionary War. The Spanish, with a much more progressive attitude towards slaves and Free People of Color than the French, conscripted all free blacks to join in the militia, and put the fife and drum in their hands. In short order the free blacks were moonlighting at balls and dances as well, in addition to generally keeping up morale within the ranks with their tunes.

In those days, being a musician was no great honor to a white man, but to a black man it was both a source of extra income and a means of expression, as well as a deep part of his cultural heritage. People of color took to European instruments–be it the fiddle, the piano, or the new reed instruments–like white on rice, and in that swampy stew of cultural influences, the seeds of dixieland and jazz were born and grew like kudzu.

In New Orleans, the link between marching bands and jazz is still as strong as ever, as the city’s hundreds of brass bands perform in local clubs and on the national circuit, and front the Carnival Parades and Second Line processions that fill the city with the sounds of tubas, trombones, trumpets, saxophones, and of course, drums. Nearly every day of the year, there is a brass band marching somewhere in the streets of New Orleans.

For this reason, no other town in the country takes its high school marching bands more seriously. Playing in “band” here is serious business, and the competition between bands is just as ferocious as it is between the sports teams they represent. Many of these kids will go on to be the jazz greats of tomorrow, as have their predecessors.

Around Carnival time, the ante is upped a notch as high school bands are asked to march with the dozens of krewes and sub-krewes in their Mardi Gras parades. We were lucky to catch a couple of them in action as they ratchet up their rigorous practice schedules for the Mardi Gras season. Thanks to the members of the St Augustine High School and McDonogh 35 bands for letting us follow them through the streets.

You can check out more photos from my assistant Federica Valabrega on her blog. She got some good ones.