New Orleans celebrates Juneteenth
June 21, 2021 - Vol. 1 Issue 3
I’m Dalton Spangler and welcome to Perfect Sound Whatever, a newsletter about music. I write updates on the latest music news in New Orleans, feature stories, album reviews, and more. Whether you are from New Orleans or not, my goal is to help you discover new music; provide coverage to local artists, venues, and others creating the music scene in NOLA; and start discussions about music trends and the latest releases. For questions, comments, or concerns, please feel free to email me at daltonspangler25@gmail.com.
Today in the newsletter: Drum Circle celebrates Juneteenth and the life of Portia Pollock, Interview with Emerging Hip-Hop artist Alfred Banks, and an album review of the new Wolf Alice record, “Blue Weekend.”
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The Latest
Drum Circle celebrates Juneteenth and the life of Portia Pollock
Juneteenth “means a hell of a lot more than Fourth of July” to Jamilah Peters-Muhammad otherwise known as Mama Jamilah. She prefers to call it “fourth of a lie” because the independence day for black people wasn’t until emancipation.
“Even Juneteenth as a holiday is still a slap because my brothers and sisters had to wait 2 years after emancipation to be told, ‘Oh, y’all free,’” Mama Jamilah explained, “But for today’s Juneteenth, it’s a celebration of the release of my sisters’ soul.”
Mama Jamilah led The Long Walk to Liberation drum circle outside Ashé Cultural Arts Center on June 19th. A tropical storm set to hit New Orleans blew over quickly before many of the day’s events.
They celebrated not only Juneteenth but the life of Portia Pollock, a 60-year old woman killed in an alleged carjacking outside her home. Mama Jamilah is one of many people who called Pollock friend.
“Today we held her service and we said we’d come here on freedom day to release her spirit,” Mama Jamilah said. “She was a drummer. She was a healer. She was a teacher. She was a creative genius.”
Mama Jamilah emphasized the fact that Pollock had a passion for life. From drums to harmonica to martial arts, Pollock mastered many skills.
“If she touched it, she was going to perfect it,” she said.
According to Mama Jamilah, Pollock regularly organized drum circles in Congo Square and was a member of the Congo Square Preservation Society since its formation in 1988. She taught drums at Ashé’s Kuumba Institute, a program educating children on the arts of African diaspora. Students she taught performed in the drum circle that evening.
Although the evening was dedicated to Portia Pollock, they also celebrated freedom day for slaves in America and the official recognition of Juneteenth as a federal holiday.
At the heart of the event was the music. People of all ages performed playing a variety of instruments. They performed specific rhythms and danced in the center of the circle.
One rhythm they performed is called Bamboula. Originating from the Congo, Bamboula became a common rhythm performed in New Orleans’ Congo Square and eventually became the rhythm of the Second Line, the Jazz Funeral Procession celebrating the life of the dead.
“You saw all happy faces out here,” Mama Jamilah said, “I don’t care what hurt, it didn’t hurt in that circle. And so the drums are healing. These circles are healing.”
At the end of the evening, the drum circle slowed down their rhythm and chanted the words “Freedom” as their beats faded into the New Orleans night’s sky.
Feature of the Week
Interview with Emerging Hip-Hop artist Alfred Banks
It’s been a good month for Alfred Banks.
He performed and headlined his first live performance since the COVID-19 lockdown began. He was featured on the cover of Gambit, a popular alt-weekly in New Orleans. And he released a new album titled “One Guy Standing By Himself,” which debuted at #3 on the iTunes Hip-Hop charts.
Banks has been rapping in New Orleans for over 10 years and despite the pandemic, his hustling has made him an important artist to watch in 2021. I spoke with him before his performances last weekend at Tipitina’s, The Broadside and a mental health awareness event at a local art studio.
The following interview is edited for clarity.
Let me just start by saying thank you and can you tell me a little bit about the performance tomorrow at The Broadside?
Originally it was a SaxKixAve set, which is a group I made with my man Albert, but he can't do it. So they gave me the show. And so I'm rocking with Waterseed, a great band here in New Orleans, real good energy, real funky. So yeah, it's gonna be really dope. Broadside is a dope venue. It was one of the first big venues that kind of opened up during COVID to give musicians a chance to get on stage and earn their keep and entertain the fans and stuff. So Broadside has a super special place in my heart. Plus it's a bigger space, good energy, it's safe. So, that always creates this kind of festival atmosphere. So it should be dope pending weather. It’ll be a good time either way. I’m rocking my man, DJ NOVI. He's my tour DJ, whenever I'm rocking— If I'm doing solo, Alfred Banks stuff, he's my DJ. And, we tour the world together. So that's my man.
So why do you want to perform for a Juneteenth event?
I mean, it's important for me as a black person, black artist, to just celebrate a very important day in African-American history, you know, and to have the opportunity to do so on a bigger stage and open for a great band, that was kind of the icing on the cake, you know what I mean? I think every day, but especially tomorrow Juneteenth, it should be a day that black voices are celebrated and lifted up as much as possible. It should be every day. Right? But you know, Juneteenth for sure being that day. For me to rock to that degree, I mean on a date that important to my history it's kinda, it's necessary, it's needed. And so we want to celebrate as best we can by rocking out and entertaining the people.
Yeah. That's cool! So, why do you think Juneteenth, uh, how does music play a role in it?
Celebration. So we're celebrating something very important and near to the soul. So I think the main way that we celebrate, especially talking black people, is music, because a lot of the music that people used to celebrate stems from black people. So music is very important in celebration of Juneteenth, uh, and just black people in general. I've got history, Congo Square here in New Orleans and stuff like that. So, jazz music, African drums, rock, whatever genre you pick stems from black people. So, taking into consideration the full day of Juneteenth, because there's only one main way to celebrate and that is to hear music from black voices and to celebrate accordingly.
Alright, awesome. So kind of moving more towards you now. How do you feel your music, or like creating music, how does it empower you as an artist?
A lot of stuff has happened to me in the past two years. So like, just out of that example alone, I get to create from a self-explanation kind of angle. I get the superpower of being very candid and honest, and I think people take honesty for granted. Being real in the genre I’m in, we’re kinda being— it's more like wrestling nowadays, like WWE. So it's just, it doesn't matter if you're genuinely real or whatever, if you fake whatever, just entertain us. So it's like a soap opera to a degree. So I feel like it’s a real superpower, somebody to be honest, to portray a message. So I feel like that's kind of why people gravitate to my stuff because I'm real and very honest in a lot of instances, I can be very raw, or I could be very polished or I can be very experimental, you know, to get whatever message across that I want to get. And I just think the ability to get messages across is very underappreciated nowadays.
That's a good answer. Yeah. I definitely can see that on stage. And I feel like that really comes out a lot in your music, especially when you talk about the hustle of it all. And you even see it, this is sort of what I wanted to mention earlier, like how many bills you're on. Like you just played a show Wednesday. You got a show tonight too, right? You have some more stuff probably going on too. Can you tell me a little bit about the hustle right now?
Well honestly, if I'm being completely candid, I'm just playing catch up from COVID. I wouldn't normally do this many gigs in my hometown, but the calendar is filling up because people are reaching out because they know what kind of time it is for musicians. And I've been blessed enough to have a track record where they know if I'm there, people will show up. It's a two-way street. That's very beneficial, mutually beneficial. And they know that someone as talented as I am and as established as I am and am becoming, you know, I am one of the, at least in hip hop, I'm one of the mainstays in the city. So I need to be on stage. People want to see me. And so that's kind of like a blessing in itself, you know what I mean? And it also, from a financial standpoint, the more gigs we get the- that pesky rent that keeps coming around every month gets paid and stuff. And so kind of the frequency reflects that just catching up with COVID also just, you know, most importantly of all of that, being able to express myself and do something I truly love to do. Cause for me performing is, I wouldn't say it's therapy, but it's just a fun thing to do. As many stages as I'm blessed to be on, I'll take none of that for granted.
That's awesome. Have you been doing a lot of stuff off of your new record? What's going on with that?
Yeah, we just put that out and the kind of buzz around that has kind of got me booked for sure. We debuted at number three, actually on the iTunes Hip-Hop charts, 31 overall but number three on the Hip-Hop charts, which is amazing as an independent artist. I think the buzz of that has kind of been going around and people have been kind of wanting to see what the hype is about and I'm totally here to provide that experience.
I saw you also got onto the Buku Planet B festival, right?
Yeah. As a part of SaxKixAve and the GLBL WRMNG Collective, shout out to my man Pell. He just dropped like a documentary today too, but GLBL WRMNG is a bunch of just amazing artists, engineers, producers, creative, visual creators, whatever, it's everyone. It is amazing. And so they got booked for Buku Fest, and so SaxKixAve has a song on that project. And so because of that, we'll be performing that book. So very exciting. I did Buku Fest in 2016 on a smaller stage. It was my first time doing it on a bigger stage and rocking with my man, Albert Allenback.
Any final things you want to say?
“One Guy Standing By Himself,” my album just dropped. Go check that out. We got a bunch of new music coming up before the end of the year, bunch of cool things to come on the horizon. I just can't wait to see everything and hear everything. I just finished shooting a video this morning. So that new video for the outro to that project, will be dropping very soon. So we got a lot of things going on. Just, you know, twitter.com/underdogcentral, instagram.com/underdogcentral, underdogcentral.com is the website. Check out the stuff, hopefully, you’ll enjoy.
Album Review
Wolf Alice - “Blue Weekend”
British Alt-rock band, Wolf Alice return with their most solid record to date on “Blue Weekend.” I began listening to Wolf Alice with the release of their EP, “Blush” in 2013 and the band has grown immensely over the years, especially the lead singer Ellie Roswell.
Wolf Alice’s sound always had a shoegaze quality lined within their esoteric mix of grunge, folk and pop. The potent recipe has created consistently strong releases across the 2010s. But their shoegaze influences and Roswell’s impressive vocals have reached a peak on “Blue Weekend.”
The album follows a loose narrative where Roswell moves to Los Angeles shortly following a major breakup. But it departs from most break-up albums by questioning things like happiness, ego, our perception of time and self-realization. It’s less about the fallout of a relationship and more about the processes we go through in any major life change like learning to embrace yourself and finding new stability.
Although pieces of these processes are sprinkled throughout the album, “How Can I Make It Okay?” illustrates the album as a whole well. It starts out as with rolling synths building up until Roswell’s yearning vocals rise and lead into an infectious chorus. The question of the song appears directed towards another person but in the scheme of the album, it makes more sense as a question for Roswell for herself as she learns to “embrace and uncurl” herself to new people and sell herself to the world.
Immediately following is a fast, riot-grrl track juxtaposing the progress of opening up to the world to the hedonism of loud music and hook-ups. “It isn’t loud enough,” Roswell screams. It’s the ups and downs of the album that make it feel believable and vulnerable.
The standout tracks include “Smile,” “Safe From Heartbreak” and “The Last Man on Earth.” This is a great entry album for people new to Wolf Alice and an excellent cap to an already solid discography.
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