New Orleans' music and culture always helped it endure hard times. For most people, funerals are always the worst of times, but the city’s unique jazz funeral tradition gave mourners a feeling of uplift. Drawing from his nonfiction book, Jason Berry explores the history of jazz funerals and the challenges to their continued practice in City of a Million Dreams, which screens virtually as part of the 2022 Ashland Independent Film Festival.
New Orleans is famous for its brass bands and the “second-liners,” the revelers who follow parading bands, literally dancing in the streets (as documented by photographer William Claxton, amongst others). Berry fully explains the connection between brass bands, the Mardi Gras Indians, and the benevolent societies, which originally supplied de facto funeral insurance policies to black New Orleanians. For those who need the context, Berry and his on-camera experts also explain how New Orleans jazz grew out of the roots of slavery and Congo Square, the gathering place, where slaves were allowed to congregate on Sundays.
To keep things real, Berry had the on-screen participation and consultation of “advisory producers” Dr. Michael White (of the Young Tuxedo Brass Band and Original Liberty Jazz Band) and Deb “Big Red” Cotton, an online journalist, who chronicled the city’s brass band/second line scene. However, Berry’s documentary takes on unexpected tragic dimensions when Cotton is hit by a stray bullet while documenting a second line.
Indeed, there is considerable sorrow in Million Dreams, despite the joyfulness of the music (which is terrific). Berry revisits the city’s darkest days, in the early 1980s and mid-1990s, when rampant crime threatened to derail the jazz funeral tradition. Of course, the film reflects on the disruption of Katrina, from White’s perspective (on the positive side, we hear some of the music he composed during the aftermath, recorded on his Blue Crescent album). Berry also necessarily ends on an uncertain note, with the practice of jazz funerals and second lining suspended due to Covid shut-downs and social distancing.
