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| New Orleans Music Box: the shantytown you can play | |
| (35 minutes later) | |
| Celebrated jazzman William Parker plucks his bass in a grove on an abandoned golf course in New Orleans’s City Park. The 11-strong ensemble he leads makes a strange kind of music. | Celebrated jazzman William Parker plucks his bass in a grove on an abandoned golf course in New Orleans’s City Park. The 11-strong ensemble he leads makes a strange kind of music. |
| Pulled ropes create the sound of whistling wind, while an amplified flute plays through steel sheet speakers. Windows and doors slide and slam, triggering musical samples. Two rotating loudspeakers on top of the phone booth spin out singer Tarriona “Tank” Ball’s oscillating voice. At one point dogs start howling. | Pulled ropes create the sound of whistling wind, while an amplified flute plays through steel sheet speakers. Windows and doors slide and slam, triggering musical samples. Two rotating loudspeakers on top of the phone booth spin out singer Tarriona “Tank” Ball’s oscillating voice. At one point dogs start howling. |
| Parker, a free jazz pioneer, takes it all in stride and works to guide the ensemble through the first rehearsal of the loose score he’s written for the debut concert of New Orleans Airlift’s first Music Box Roving Village residency. | Parker, a free jazz pioneer, takes it all in stride and works to guide the ensemble through the first rehearsal of the loose score he’s written for the debut concert of New Orleans Airlift’s first Music Box Roving Village residency. |
| It’s the first time these 11 musicians have performed together, and most of them have never previously played these invented instruments that are embedded in seven structures, in a cross between a music performance and an art installation described as a “musical shantytown”. | |
| What’s uniquely challenging from a musical perspective, says Parker, is the distance between the musician and the instrument. “Everything they built is sort of outside the human body” – rather than being blown or strummed. “So these people are trying to adapt their musicality to their instruments. We just have to rely on the moment and try to make something happen.” | What’s uniquely challenging from a musical perspective, says Parker, is the distance between the musician and the instrument. “Everything they built is sort of outside the human body” – rather than being blown or strummed. “So these people are trying to adapt their musicality to their instruments. We just have to rely on the moment and try to make something happen.” |
| New Orleans art producers Airlift call it musical architecture, and these kinetic playable structures are a mashup of New Orleans’s two great cultural traditions – music and art. Fuelled by the city’s subset of experimental DIY culture, it’s an ambitious project that seeks to cultivate community interaction in a city that is notoriously territorial, while adding a new venue to New Orleans’s music scene. | New Orleans art producers Airlift call it musical architecture, and these kinetic playable structures are a mashup of New Orleans’s two great cultural traditions – music and art. Fuelled by the city’s subset of experimental DIY culture, it’s an ambitious project that seeks to cultivate community interaction in a city that is notoriously territorial, while adding a new venue to New Orleans’s music scene. |
| The idea began with a derelict 250-year-old Creole cottage acquired by musician and Airlift co-founder Jay Pennington. Somehow it had survived Hurricane Katrina but one day collapsed while Pennington was still trying to figure out a creative use for it. Street artist Swoon, visiting from New York City, saw in the rubble materials for a new kind of house, one that was an interactive public sculpture and a musical instrument. | The idea began with a derelict 250-year-old Creole cottage acquired by musician and Airlift co-founder Jay Pennington. Somehow it had survived Hurricane Katrina but one day collapsed while Pennington was still trying to figure out a creative use for it. Street artist Swoon, visiting from New York City, saw in the rubble materials for a new kind of house, one that was an interactive public sculpture and a musical instrument. |
| In 2011, as a proof-of-concept, they built the Music Box shantytown out of the ruins in the Bywater neighbourhood. The piece attracted 15,000 visitors and was played by a range of international musicians. Since then Airlift has erected music box outposts in Kiev, Brussels, Detroit and Los Angeles, and taught a multi-disciplinary graduate course on musical architecture at Georgia Tech. | |
| The project, says Delaney Martin, executive director of Airlift, is strongly focused on place. She chose the bucolic setting, edged by a bayou and shaded by large oak trees, after regularly walking her dog there. “We’re highlighting parts of the city that don’t normally get highlighted.” | The project, says Delaney Martin, executive director of Airlift, is strongly focused on place. She chose the bucolic setting, edged by a bayou and shaded by large oak trees, after regularly walking her dog there. “We’re highlighting parts of the city that don’t normally get highlighted.” |
| In the autumn, the instruments move to OC Haley Boulevard in Central City and then will take over abandoned lots on the bayou side of the Lower Ninth Ward: “Each site we go, to we’re going to try to play up what’s special about it,” says Martin. As part of the educational component, visitors can play the instruments and the 700 schoolchildren scheduled to visit the installation will learn about the natural setting, too. | In the autumn, the instruments move to OC Haley Boulevard in Central City and then will take over abandoned lots on the bayou side of the Lower Ninth Ward: “Each site we go, to we’re going to try to play up what’s special about it,” says Martin. As part of the educational component, visitors can play the instruments and the 700 schoolchildren scheduled to visit the installation will learn about the natural setting, too. |
| The structures were created through collaborations between carpenters, music technologists, blacksmiths, architects, musicians, sound artists and “wing nut” tinkerers. New Orleans master blacksmith Darryl Reeves worked with Swoon to build a metal pergola with conch shell whistles played by levers that control pressurized air, the sound evoking the calliope steam organs on Mississippi riverboats. The wrought-iron design of the handrail uses Adinkra symbols, a west African language used by the early African Americans and slaves. “The one I put on this particular house is four scrolls back to back and it actually means humility and strength.” | |
| Architect Michael Glenboski explains the simple technology of acoustics that he and Rick Snow, a professor of music technology at Tulane, used in their piece titled Psychic Frequencies. Large plates of steel hang around the site, each with an attached magnetic transducer that can vibrate the material through endless possibilities. “Imagine a piano. You’re fixed with the notes and chords you have. This is sort of an infinite piano.” Calculating the metal’s perfect resonant frequency with software, they turn the sheet into a speaker for jazz musician Cooper-Moore’s flute or voice or the programmed patches he activates by various hand gestures in front of a motion camera. | Architect Michael Glenboski explains the simple technology of acoustics that he and Rick Snow, a professor of music technology at Tulane, used in their piece titled Psychic Frequencies. Large plates of steel hang around the site, each with an attached magnetic transducer that can vibrate the material through endless possibilities. “Imagine a piano. You’re fixed with the notes and chords you have. This is sort of an infinite piano.” Calculating the metal’s perfect resonant frequency with software, they turn the sheet into a speaker for jazz musician Cooper-Moore’s flute or voice or the programmed patches he activates by various hand gestures in front of a motion camera. |
| Looming largest, the Chateau Poulet utilizes spinning tubes to play the wind while three musicians play the percussive possibilities of the resonant memory’s digitally enabled doors and windows. Local swamp-pop musician Quintron thunders bass notes from the subfloor “rattlewoofer” in the Shake House. | Looming largest, the Chateau Poulet utilizes spinning tubes to play the wind while three musicians play the percussive possibilities of the resonant memory’s digitally enabled doors and windows. Local swamp-pop musician Quintron thunders bass notes from the subfloor “rattlewoofer” in the Shake House. |
| The result can be either cacophonous or subtle. Pennington recalls Cooper-Moore’s answer when asked by an interviewer about the difference between noise and sound. He said that when Duke Ellington started playing advanced compositions, he’d have to tell a story to lead people into it so that once they heard the sounds they didn’t sound so foreign. This is the same thing, said Moore, except when you walk in, the story is all around you. It works to erase the abstract quality of the sound. | The result can be either cacophonous or subtle. Pennington recalls Cooper-Moore’s answer when asked by an interviewer about the difference between noise and sound. He said that when Duke Ellington started playing advanced compositions, he’d have to tell a story to lead people into it so that once they heard the sounds they didn’t sound so foreign. This is the same thing, said Moore, except when you walk in, the story is all around you. It works to erase the abstract quality of the sound. |
| How that sound fits into the New Orleans tradition is less clear, says Parker. “They asked a lot of local, traditional musicians to play and nobody wanted to. These [Airlift] people live in New Orleans and this is what they’re doing and it’s part of the city. I don’t think it’s part of the New Orleans tradition, that’s a black tradition, that’s jazz. But this could certainly fit into what [traditional musicians] do.” | How that sound fits into the New Orleans tradition is less clear, says Parker. “They asked a lot of local, traditional musicians to play and nobody wanted to. These [Airlift] people live in New Orleans and this is what they’re doing and it’s part of the city. I don’t think it’s part of the New Orleans tradition, that’s a black tradition, that’s jazz. But this could certainly fit into what [traditional musicians] do.” |
| Airlift’s mandate has always been to bridge the gaps, whether geographical or artistic, of collaboration. Originally starting with a more internationalist focus, the intent has changed, says Martin. “More and more we realise there’s so much connecting to do within the city.” | Airlift’s mandate has always been to bridge the gaps, whether geographical or artistic, of collaboration. Originally starting with a more internationalist focus, the intent has changed, says Martin. “More and more we realise there’s so much connecting to do within the city.” |
| For Taylor Lee Shepherd, the technical director and one of the project’s leaders, it’s about facilitating moments between insiders and outsiders. How else would you get Rob Cambre, a force in the local experimental scene, playing with Parker? “Cambre’s family has been here generations and Parker is now coming down here from New York and those two are joyfully collaborating: that’s what we’re trying to foster.” | For Taylor Lee Shepherd, the technical director and one of the project’s leaders, it’s about facilitating moments between insiders and outsiders. How else would you get Rob Cambre, a force in the local experimental scene, playing with Parker? “Cambre’s family has been here generations and Parker is now coming down here from New York and those two are joyfully collaborating: that’s what we’re trying to foster.” |
| The city is eager to see and hear the result, a uniquely New Orleans experience. | The city is eager to see and hear the result, a uniquely New Orleans experience. |