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.

Not so in Treme. David Simon is finally giving musicians their due. Certainly there is a degree of celebration going on here (note the enumerable appearances by famous and not-so-famous New Orleans musicians). Indeed, Simon has noted in interviews his desire to demonstrate how the culture embodied by New Orleans residents was irrepressible after the flood—that is, people had to participate in the cultural expressions that are central to who they are as members of this community. [Side note: an irrepressible spirit was also central to the characters on The Wire, but it certainly had a darker, less joyous dimension than this one].

But here Simon is giving us more than just a feel-good, touristy celebration of New Orleans’ musical heritage a la Bourbon Street and Dixieland jazz. He is treating musicians and musical performances with respect (perhaps too much so for viewers who don’t enjoy jazz and may feel burdened by the resulting narrative “rupture”). Sunday night’s episode (“Shallow Water, Oh Mama”) is a case in point. Across four storylines and sets of characters—as well as at least four musical styles—each musician is seen fighting for respect on his or her own terms as musicians and artists, while maintaining respect for “the tradition” (as jazz musicians are wont to say). Big Chief Lambreaux is determined to put his tribe back together, including rehearsing by candlelight in his decimated bar sans FEMA trailer. Both Annie and Sonny yearn for more than whoring themselves to tourists for coins with yet another rendition of “Saints.” Antoine Batiste needs a gig desperately, but refuses to succumb to the soul-crushing imperative of high-society Mardis Gras gigs and their placid and safe versions of “Take the ‘A’ Train.” And Lambreaux’s son, New York trumpeter Delmond, keeps pushing back against the need for all New Orleans musicians to “kick it old school,” demanding instead that his favored brand of post-bop jazz be given the respect it deserves as a serious art form (not to serve as just another form of booty shakin’, beer swilling music). [Side note two: Simon simultaneously offers up real life versions of these tensions between jazz styles, including traditional N.O. trumpeter Kermit Ruffins and post-bop alto saxophonist Donald Harrison as actors in this drama].

With perhaps the exception of the Indian tribe, these are experiences that all professional jazz musicians can relate to—the imperative of economic survival and what that means for the production of “music;” the reality of performing before the masses and their need for little more than a soundtrack to go about their primary concerns of jabbering incessantly or attempting to get laid; playing music that has become so cliché it is incapable of stirring the soul; and feeling the desire to say “fuck this shit” and stand up and play the tune the way it is supposed to be played. With little interest here in entering the discussions of “authenticity” and “realism” in Simon’s work, let me simply say that finally, dramatic narrative television is giving music, musical performance, and musicians their (long over)due respect.  And its been a long time coming.