**This post is part of our series, Mediating the Past, which focuses on how history is produced, constructed, distributed, branded and received through various media.

HBO’s Treme, now well into its third season, continues to occupy a borderland where lines of fiction, performance, art and journalism converge. Some characters are based on prominent figures in New Orleans such as civil rights lawyer Mary Howell, the inspiration for Toni Burnette (Melissa Leo). Other musicians, singers, chefs, and Mardi Gras Indians slide in and out of the series playing themselves. Real, composite, or invented (including the more problematic roles of cops or developers) they weave through the battered fragments that constitute the story of Hurricane Katrina, a humanitarian disaster that continues the destruction of New Orleans even as the city recovers. The hurricane remains catastrophic, but is now understood as part of an equally forceful historical flow, one defined by the legacy of power, corruption and racism. Mining the details of the hurricane embedded in the city, the producers have created a hybrid genre as they seek both accuracy and entertainment. Truth is often found in the artful, liminal spaces that dance onto the screen, propelled by the musical forces that drive the city. But the center of this narrative is always located deep in the heart of its characters, real or constructed.

Treme does not simply revisit a post-Katrina sequence of events. It tracks the mediated versions of them, underlining, commenting and critiquing previous formulations, re-inventing the story and becoming part it. Such mediations began from the start, best illustrated in a contentious exchange, after which Creighton Burnette (John Goodman) throws a newscaster’s microphone into the river. It was a strong redress to initial “disaster myth” coverage, which further victimized residents in the flooded city that Maureen Dowd characterized as “a snake pit of anarchy, death, looting, raping, marauding thugs.”

A main thread in season 3 also traces existing media footprints, this time augmenting an investigative expose. When freelance reporter L. P. Everett (Chris Coy) arrives in town he begins to unravel the enigma of human bone fragments strewn across the back seat of a burned-out sedan left about a block from the Fourth District Police Station. This on-going plot sequence refers to A. C. Thompson’s investigation into the police murder of Henry Glover, published in 2008 as “Body of Evidence” by ProPublica. Exposing Glover’s murder became part of a larger investigation that aired in 2010 as a Frontline Documentary “Law and Disorder.”

On Treme, the dogged Everett pores over files, connects a name to a number, cold calls potential witnesses, and gets a break on episode 4 when a law-enforcement source meets him in a café and shows him grisly pictures of the scene taken by police. Everett eventually locates the out-of-state forensic pathologist who first believed the charred remains pointed to murder. During Everett’s interview the words of the medical examiner are virtually identical to the quote in Thompson’s initial reporting, which are also spoken by the real doctor on Frontline: “When I heard he was found in a burned car I thought that was a classic homicide scenario: you kill someone and burn the body to get rid of the evidence.” A.C. Thompson’s description of meeting the source in the café reads like the set directions from Treme.

Glover was only one of the victims after Katrina, when police were told they could shoot looters. Mary Howell explains on Frontline, that the long-history of NOPD corruption and brutality resulted in the breakdown of professionalism during the hurricane. On March 31, 2011, a federal judge sentenced ex-officer David Warren to 25 years for shooting Henry Glover with an assault rifle.

When I ask Mary Howell about criminal justice depictions on Treme, she usually concludes with, “remember the program is fiction.” It is true that unlike Tony Burnette, Mary Howell did not have a husband who killed himself, and we don’t know if A. C. Thompson is really a fan of heavy metal. But when L.P. Everett jumps into the mosh pit it makes sense for the character. In these emotional and expressive spaces, fiction meets journalism.

Treme’s mediation of the past through the lens of past media can be temporally disconcerting. Episode 7, Promised Land, aired November 4^th, and depicted the third Mardi Gras after the storm, yet it is presently 7 years after Katrina. In Promised Land, Delmond Lambreaux (Rob Brown) meets Kimberly Rivers Roberts who hands him a DVD of Trouble the Water. The documentary features Roberts’ video footage of Katrina flooding her home in the Lower 9th Ward. Some viewers surely remember the film, which was widely reviewed and won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize in 2008. Watching Delmond watch it might have been little more than intertextual nostalgia, but amid the unfinished interior of his father’s damaged home, we see it steel his commitment as he returns to sewing his Indian suit.

This season Chief Albert Lambreaux (Clarke Peters) is sick. Though diagnosed with lymphoma, he refuses to start chemotherapy until after Mardi Gras. He, Delmond and the gang continue sewing the suits for what may be his last walk. In Episode 4, Delmond takes him to the Musicians’ Clinic, an actual non-profit facility. (The cast and producers of Treme have been involved in fundraising for the clinic.) As they prepare for Mardi Gras, Guardians of the Flame practice their chants at LaDonna’s bar, and dance with Big Chief Howard Miller of Creole Wild West. The sequence of the Indians on Mardi Gras in episode 7 features Lambreaux meeting another Big Chief, Wallace Pardo of Golden Comanche, some of which can be seen in this video with the Neville Bros. It is a stunning visual and musical mix, true to what Chief Howard told me when I asked him about the history of the Indians last March, “You see an Indian coming, you see honor and respect. It is about bringing dignity to the people and the neighborhoods. Slavery itself was a physical and biological war. [Slaves] used Mardi Gras to celebrate joy and love of themselves.”

Photo by Guy Robinson

One of the highlights of Sunday’s episode “Can I Change My Mind,” was the appearance of Donald Harrison Jr with Delmond, first at the bar at Domenica, and later at Dr. John’s studio. The musicians are dreaming up a collaboration that would mix traditional Mardi Gras Indian chants with modern jazz. They will try to persuade Delmond’s father Chief Lambreaux, to do the chanting when they record. I say “dreaming up” because there is an element of the surreal about this musical rapport. Donald Harrison has done just that for quite a while. Indeed, he has been called a one-man jazz festival because he slides so effortlessly into different musical styles – from modern jazz to traditional.

To hear an mp3 of his contemporary arrangement of a traditional New Orleans Indian chant go to http://www.donaldharrison.com/ and click on the song Shallow Water. At the end Harrison dedicates the recording to his dad, Donald Harrison Sr., Big Chief of the Guardians of the Flame. For a real thrill watch the YouTube video of The Big Chief Donald Harrison Quintet at Jazzascona, where they transition from modern jazz riffs to Indian chants while strutting in feathered suits no doubt weighing over 100 pounds.

Photo by Robin Andersen

I met Harrison last March when he played for a small but enthusiastic group of locals at the Prime Example, a jazz club on N. Broad Street in New Orleans. The cover charge for the weekly Thursday night jazz session is ten dollars, and that includes a plate of local food. On the “Carnival Time” episode, Antoine Batiste and the Soul Apostles gig at the club the Sunday before Mardi Gras. I talked to a club regular Kim, who signed up to be an extra, and a glancing shot of her behind the bar can be seen on the episode.

That night Donald told me that music was a character on Treme. That made some sense to me, having argued in the past that product plugging turned commodities into characters on sitcoms. But that was a criticism. How did it work for the culture of jazz on TV exactly? Watching Sunday’s episode, what had seemed an ephemeral concept now made sense. The music is evolving, developing. We see it transform, shaped into something different, responding to context.

Harrison has been a consultant for Treme from the start, meeting with David Simon when he was still working on The Wire. In fact, the characters of Delmond and Albert Lambreaux are based on the Harrisons. But when Delmond is shown struggling with his competing allegiances to New York and NOLA, that is where Donald parts company with his fictional counterpart. Donald has moved back and forth between the New Orleans and New York music scenes for years. In the city to record another album, I saw him again at the premier of season 2 of Treme at MOMA. We talked about the appearance of the Hot 8 Brass Band in the new season, performing their post-storm anthem, New Orleans, and how the band had sustained the loss of trombonist Joe Williams, shot by police in 2004, and then the shooting death of snare drummer Dinerral Shavers in 2006, whose funeral would be depicted in episode 5 “Slip Away.”

Photo by Robin Andersen

In addition to jazz consultant, as the Big Chief of Congo Nation, Harrison has also coached Clarke Peters on chanting and moving in his heavy suit as Chief Lambreaux. In the last episode of season 1, Lambreaux emerges in full regalia on Super Sunday 2006, and encounters Big Chief Donald Harrison on the street. The scene references one of the most important events in New Orleans in 2006, when Donald Harrison strolled out of St Augustine’s into the Treme in his stunning Congo Nation suit, and offered hope to all assembled that the culture of New Orleans would survive. Indians are now known in New Orleans as spiritual first responders.

Not surprisingly, as a Big Chief, Donald Harrison speaks in a language that can only be described as spiritual. With his hand on his chest, he said music comes from the heart – it is sent out from there, from New Orleans and has spread and influenced the music of America.

Though Harrison has been on-screen since the fist episode when he played in the New York City nightclub with Delmond, it was great to see yet another New Orleans local taking a bit more of a national spotlight in Sunday’s episode, playing alongside characters who are at least partially, reflections of himself.