CURATION
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from this page:
by Augmented Matrix
Network Node
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Name:
Monk Boudreaux
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City/Place:
New Orleans, Louisiana
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Country:
United States
Life & Work
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Bio:
The New Orleans Mardi Gras Indian phenomenon is part music, part heritage, part ancestry, part revelry, part fashion, and oft misunderstood. Chief Monk Boudreaux is one of the most famous and enduring leaders of that culture and head of the Golden Eagle Mardi Gras Indian tribe. He admitted that he shared those feelings of confusion related to those traditions that he embraced long before he fully grasped them.
“My dad used to mask as an Indian,” he recalled. “We would get up at 4 o’clock in the morning, help him make his dress, watch him when he’d leave, stay out there, and wait for him to come back. As I got older, I started wondering why he was doing that. I never asked, but I knew there had to be a reason.
“Then I started building up my own Indian suit. I was 12 years old. My dad had stopped, so I went with another tribe. I was chief scout the first year. The second year I was spyboy. It’s a feeling you can’t explain, because it’s something deep inside of you.”
Boudreaux noted that his elders never spoke of the history of their traditions. “The older people didn’t talk about it. They were scared that if someone found out they were Indians, they would send them off to the reservations. Mardi Gras day was the only day that you could come out and be who you really were. My grandmother—my mother’s mom—she was on her dying bed. She called mom and said, ‘Tell Joseph not to leave until I get there.’ That’s when she told me we were Choctaw Indians. I was 27 or 28 years old at that time. Then I knew why I was doing it.”
Indeed, the history of the Mardi Gras Indian culture in New Orleans is complex, and accounts of its origins are sometimes inconsistent. An affinity shared between Native American and African American people, both of whom were enslaved and persecuted at various times in the city’s history, was clearly a driving force in those origins and the mixing of their cultures. Both ethnic groups also share an appreciation of tradition, and the unique New Orleans Mardi Gras Indian music, costumes, and rituals are a melding of influences from both cultures.
The costumes provide a spectacular visual backdrop that comes from the detailed and devoted efforts of the participants. Boudreaux explained the effort involved in preparing those costumes.
“You start off with a piece of canvas,” he explained. “You find a picture that you really like or you can draw something out of your imagination. You draw it on the canvas, and then you start beading. Just as if you were coloring something, you outline it. After you outline it you start filling in the colors. Then you go around it with rhinestones and start filling it out.
“You cut a jacket out of canvas, then you cover it with velvet. You line it with satin. You start putting your patches on. Then you make ruffles out of velvet, and start going around your patches with velvet ruffles. And that’s it!”
Boudreaux confided that the costumes take about eight or nine months to complete. One of the greatest concerns regarding the continuity of the Mardi Gras Indian tradition is whether subsequent generations will have the patience and devotion required to preserve it.
As for the music, Boudreaux was at first influenced by his elders in the neighborhood.
“All lot of the older men in the neighborhood used to sing every day,” said Boudreaux. “Ernie Benson, the blues singer, used to live in the neighborhood. His dad used to sing every day. I would come home from school, sit on the step, and listen to him sing. Another old man would sing everywhere he went. I would just walk behind him and listen.”
In terms of celebrities, one memorable star sparked his interest in pursuing music in a more dedicated manner. “When I was a kid, the first person that I heard that really inspired me about music was Al Jolson. I was real young then—about seven or eight years old. I used to just love to hear that man sing.”
As he became involved with the Indians, one of his mentors taught him a number of songs with the realization that he would one day be the chief. Soon thereafter, Boudreaux realized that he had a gift in terms of both performance and creativity.
“I started off singing Indian songs,” he said. “Later on I realized that I could sing just about anything that I wanted to. I could create my own music, and lyrics just come to me. If something stays on my mind, I can make a song out of it.”
Boudreaux is known for his long-time collaboration with Big Chief Bo Dollis and the Wild Magnolia group, though he left the group nearly a decade ago to form the Golden Eagle Mardi Gras Indians. His latest album Rising Sun is a collaboration with Reverend Goat Carson, a professed “Renegade Cherokee.”
As one might expect, the musical influences are diverse. “It’s like a gumbo,” said Boudreaux. “There’s a little bit of everything in it.”
Like so much of New Orleans music, an essential element is the appropriate rhythm that evokes participation from the audience.
“I have them hoppin’ and jumpin’ and havin’ a good time,” Boudreaux laughed. “Because they love the music and they love what I do. You can tell how they’re feeling by their reaction.”
He has found that great music can induce such emotions even with reluctant participants. “If you sit down and listen to Indian music and it’s got the right beat, it does something to you,” he added. “One time I was performing at a club in New York. A guy told me, ‘Monk, do you realize what you’ve done? You’ve got people dancing that don’t dance.’”
The New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival has increased the visibility of the music of the Mardi Gras Indians, a fitting reward, given their integral role in the festival during its infancy.
“We started Jazz Fest from day one,” said Boudreaux. “Quint (Davis, the Director of Jazz Fest) had us going out in the French Quarter to get people to come back to Jazz Fest. There are a lot of people at Jazz Fest looking for talent, and I’ve gotten a lot of gigs from that. It’s been happening for a long time.”
Like many artists, Boudreaux finds music to be a cathartic tool and a vehicle of expression in post-Katrina New Orleans. “The music now is more powerful. A lot of guys came back to be here where they were born into this music. And they’re putting everything they have into it. You can play your music somewhere else, but you won’t have that feeling that you have in New Orleans. Because this is where the music was born.”
Music has also become a vehicle for raising awareness of the plight of coastal erosion, a dynamic that contributed to the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina, accelerated in its aftermath. Boudreaux joined forces with blues guitarist and singer/songwriter Tab Benoit and an all-star band of musicians in the project “Voice of the Wetlands.” The group recorded and performed songs aimed at raising awareness of this issue that is central to the viability of the region.
“Reuben Williams, my manager, is Tab’s manager also. When I start singing, Tab gets up there and starts playing guitar like he’s been doing this music all of his life. We did two albums for Voice of the Wetlands to let people know what’s happening down here.”
Boudreaux closed by passing on a message to Jazz Fest visitors regarding the never-ending access to music and celebration during the festival period.
“If you’re looking for a good time, then New Orleans is the place to be. And Jazz Fest is really the place to be. When Jazz Fest is over, you can go to any club and they’ll be getting’ down. There’s no ending.”
Contact Information
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Management/Booking:
MANAGEMENT
Reuben Williams
Thunderbird Management Group
[email protected]
Clips (more may be added)
For all roads here lead to Black Rome, and everywhere, but all pathways lead to Bahia.
I created this matrix so the world might discover elemental cultural genius here in Bahia, Brazil: João do Boi (rest in power), Roberto Mendes, Raymundo Sodré and magisterial others... But following the dictates of logic, in order to make these artists discoverable worldwide, the matrix must, to the greatest extent possible, do likewise for all creators on the planet...
Pardal/Sparrow
The Integrated Global Creative Economy: uncoiling from this sprawling Indigenous, African, Sephardic and then Ashkenazic, Arabic, European, Asian cultural matrix.
The mathematics of the small world phenomenon transforming the creative universe into a creative village wherein all are connected by short pathways to all.
Tap the grey crosses on somebody's Matrix Page to recommend that person for the categories next to those crosses.
(Crosses visible when you are logged in)
The crosses will turn green.
That person/category will appear in your My Curation & Recommendations.
You will appear in that person's Incoming Curation and Recommendations.
You and the person you are recommending will be pulled by mathematical gravity to within discoverable distance of everybody else inside the Matrix...
In a small world great things are possible.
"Thanks, this is a brilliant idea!!"
—Alicia Svigals (NEW YORK CITY): Apotheosis of klezmer violinists
"Dear Sparrow: I am thrilled to receive your email! Thank you for including me in this wonderful matrix."
—Susan Rogers (BOSTON): Director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory ... Former personal recording engineer for Prince; "Purple Rain", "Sign o' the Times", "Around the World in a Day"
"Dear Sparrow, Many thanks for this – I am touched!"
—Julian Lloyd Webber (LONDON): Premier cellist in UK; brother of Andrew (Evita, Jesus Christ Superstar, Cats, Phantom of the Opera...)
"This is super impressive work ! Congratulations ! Thanks for including me :)))"
—Clarice Assad (RIO DE JANEIRO/CHICAGO): Pianist and composer with works performed by Yo Yo Ma and orchestras around the world
"We appreciate you including Kamasi in the matrix, Sparrow."
—Banch Abegaze (LOS ANGELES): manager, Kamasi Washington
"Thanks! It looks great!....I didn't write 'Cantaloupe Island' though...Herbie Hancock did! Great Page though, well done! best, Randy"
This Matrix was conceived under a Spiritus Mundi ranging from the quilombos and senzalas of Cachoeira and Santo Amaro to Havana and the provinces of Cuba to the wards of New Orleans to the South Side of Chicago to the sidewalks of Harlem to the townships of South Africa to the villages of Ireland to the Roma camps of France and Belgium to the Vienna of Beethoven to the shtetls of Eastern Europe...*
Sodré
*...in conversation with Raymundo Sodré, who summed up the irony in this sequence by opining for the ages: "Where there's misery, there's music!" Hence A Massa, anthem for the trod-upon folk of Brazil, which blasted from every radio between the Amazon and Brazil's industrial south until...
And hence a platform whereupon all creators tend to accessible proximity to all other creators, irrespective of degree of fame, location, or the censor.
Matrix Ground Zero is the Recôncavo, bewitching and bewitched, contouring the resplendent Bay of All Saints (end of clip below, before credits), absolute center of terrestrial gravity for the disembarkation of enslaved human beings (and for the sublimity these people created), the bay presided over by Brazil's ineffable Black Rome (where Bule Bule is seated below, around the corner from where we built this matrix as an extension of our record shop).
Assis Valente's (of Santo Amaro, Bahia) "Brasil Pandeiro" filmed by Betão Aguiar
Betão Aguiar
("Black Rome" is an appellation per Caetano, via Mãe Aninha of Ilê Axé Opô Afonjá.)
Replete with Brazilian greatness, but we listened to Miles Davis and Jimmy Cliff in there too; visitors are David Dye & Kim Junod for NPR/WXPN
I opened the shop in Salvador, Bahia in 2005 in order to create an outlet to the wider world for magnificent Brazilian musicians.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar found us (he's a huge jazz fan), David Byrne, Oscar Castro-Neves... Spike Lee walked past the place while I was sitting on the stoop across the street drinking beer and listening to samba from the speaker in the window...
But we weren't exactly easy for the world-at-large to get to. So in order to extend the place's ethos I transformed the site associated with it into a network wherein Brazilian musicians I knew would recommend other Brazilian musicians, who would recommend others...
And as I anticipated, the chalky hand of God-as-mathematician intervened: In human society — per the small-world phenomenon — most of the billions of us on earth are within some 6 or fewer degrees of each other. Likewise, within a network of interlinked artists as I've described above, most of these artists will in the same manner be at most a handful of steps away from each other.
So then, all that's necessary to put the Brazilians within possible purview of the wide wide world is to include them among a wide wide range of artists around that world.
If, for example, Quincy Jones is inside the matrix, then anybody on his page — whether they be accessing from a campus in L.A., a pub in Dublin, a shebeen in Cape Town, a tent in Mongolia — will be close, transitable steps away from Raymundo Sodré, even if they know nothing of Brazil and are unaware that Sodré sings/dances upon this planet. Sodré, having been knocked from the perch of fame and ground into anonymity by Brazil's dictatorship, has now the alternative of access to the world-at-large via recourse to the vast potential of network theory.
...to the degree that other artists et al — writers, researchers, filmmakers, painters, choreographers...everywhere — do also. Artificial intelligence not required. Real intelligence, yes.
The deep roots of this project are in Manhattan, where Allen Klein (managed the Beatles and The Rolling Stones) called me about royalties for the estate of Sam Cooke... where Jerry Ragovoy (co-wrote Time is On My Side, sung by the Stones; Piece of My Heart, Janis Joplin of course; and Pata Pata, sung by the great Miriam Makeba) called me looking for unpaid royalties... where I did contract and licensing for Carlinhos Brown's participation on Bahia Black with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock...
...where I rescued unpaid royalties for Aretha Franklin (from Atlantic Records), Barbra Streisand (from CBS Records), Led Zeppelin, Mongo Santamaria, Gilberto Gil, Astrud Gilberto, Airto Moreira, Jim Hall, Wah Wah Watson (Melvin Ragin), Ray Barretto, Philip Glass, Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd for his interest in Bob Marley compositions, Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam and others...
...where I worked with Earl "Speedo" Carroll of the Cadillacs (who went from doo-wopping as a kid on Harlem streetcorners to top of the charts to working as a janitor at P.S. 87 in Manhattan without ever losing what it was that made him special in the first place), and with Jake and Zeke Carey of The Flamingos (I Only Have Eyes for You)... stuff like that.
Yeah this is Bob's first record contract, made with Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd of Studio One and co-signed by his aunt because he was under 21. I took it to Black Rock to argue with CBS' lawyers about the royalties they didn't want to pay (they paid).
Matrix founding creators are behind "one of 10 of the best (radios) around the world", per The Guardian.
Salvador is our base. If you plan to visit Bahia, there are some things you should probably know and you should first visit:
www.salvadorbahiabrazil.comAcross the creative universe... For another list, reload page.
This list is random, and incomplete. Reload the page for another list.
Ex Terra Brasilis
Wolfram MathWorld
UNIVERSAL
Alicia Svigals
Susan Rogers
Julian Lloyd Webber
Clarice Assad
Kamasi Washington
Randy Brecker
Roberto Mendes
Luciano Calazans
Gustavo Caribé
J Velloso
Lázaro Ramos
Fernando Guerreiro
Maria Marighella
Russell Okung
Bule Bule
Caetano Veloso
RÁDIO MATRIX