A Jazz Funeral for Keith aka "Fred Flames"
Steve Beisner. Photos by Melinda Palacio -- November 4, 2006
What does a New Orleans Jazz Funeral have to do with writing? As it turns out, everything and nothing. Everything because peak experiences provide both the energy to write and the subjects to write about. Nothing, because nothing is "about" anything unless we make it so. Steve Beisner uses his license as an Ink Byte editor to digress on life, death, and doing the work.
(You can see all the photos of Keith's Jazz Funeral here.)
I didn't really know Keith "Fred Flames" Keller -- not the way I know people I normally consider my close friends. I'd met him through his brother and my Santa Barbara friend Barry Keller, himself one of the eclectically talented people I love to have in my life, and it was easy to be impressed by him, to think that spending time with him would be a Good Idea. When Melinda and I decided to sell my place in Pointe Coupee Parish and change our Louisiana address to post-Katrina New Orleans, Keith was one of the people I talked to for advice on moving to the city. He was, among all his flashier talents, a builder, the kind who could look at a run down building and see past grandeur and future beauty. He was the kind of man New Orleans needs now.
Keith died in mid-life, seemingly healthy one day and then, unexpectedly, dead, gone. When Barry told us there was a jazz funeral being planned for his brother and invited me, as a part-time New Orleanean, to attend, it took me only a breath or two to say yes.
Everyone in South Louisiana knows about jazz funerals. If you ask, most people will say something like, "Man, that's the way I want to go. No moping around. Jus' play me a slow march to the graveyard, then pick up the tempo and get my friends marching and dancing all the way home. Throw me a party."
Keith had been cremated after his death weeks before, so his jazz funeral did not feature the traditional march to the graveyard. Instead, the procession began at the Backstreet Cultural Museum on St. Claude in the Treme, the oldest black neighborhood in America. The Treme Brass Band led the march, followed by a wagon drawn by two horses and bearing a huge portrait of Keith at his smiling best. The mourners, following the band and surrounding the wagon, stepped out around three in the afternoon on a cool, blue-skied, New Orleans Autumn afternoon that makes you know how good life can be and makes you want to live forever.
From the Treme over to Rampart, past the Louis Armstrong Park, we marched. Through the quarter we strode and danced, across Bourbon, across Royal, up along Decatur, headed to the Mississippi River levee. Police on Vespas stopped traffic, which probably would have come to a halt anyway. A jazz funeral is a important event. It trumps anything else a New Orleanean might be doing. A schoolteacher tells of facing a class of empty desks one afternoon after the kids ran first to the windows and then out the door to follow a funeral procession that was passing the school.
Hey, you only die once, and that realization, coming in the midst of a life that you're only going to live once, is a reminder: a good life deserves a good celebration at its end.
The Treme Brass Band, swinging from slow hymns like Old Rugged Cross to more upbeat tunes like I'll Fly Away and traditional marches led the wagon and a swelling crowd. The effect of the shifting moods of traditional tunes surprised me. I found myself responding the way I once responded, as a small boy, to a particularly effective preacher, with emotions wavering between joy and somber contemplation.
Halfway through the parade, somewhere in the middle of the quarter, the entire procession tuned into the same cosmic thread. The crowd, over a hundred by then, of family, friends, and admirers, were united in a slow two-step down the street, synchronized as if they'd rehearsed for weeks, animated by the high sound of a clarinet soaring and sliding, brass crawling in rough polyphonic harmony up and down the scale, held together by drums in a non-verbal moan from deep within everyone on the street. It felt like a collective cry for the loss of a man far better than most, and a reminder to the living that life is too precious to waste in grief.
You've got to love it. New Orleans may have a long way to go with its problems, but there are some things this town figured out a hundred years ago that puts it light years ahead of the rest of us.
By the time we arrived on the banks of the Mississippi the marchers, dancers, laughers and criers had grown from fifty or sixty to several hundred. From the levee I looked back to the city. Modern skyscrapers now tower above the old Quarter, which seems to squat in the mud, stubbornly digging in, resisting the slick and packaged culture that some peddle even from within it's walls.
As the band played In the Sweet Bye and Bye, people closest to Keith, one at a time, dipped a hand into a clear glass urn, waded into the big muddy and with words for only Keith to hear threw ashes into the water and the air. The strong breeze coming off the water created little clouds of ash. By the time the celebrants were done a bit on Keith clung to everyone.
Afterwards, at the reception, over jambalaya and red beans and rice, I overheard someone telling the story of another parade. Keith had been one of a large group that had arranged to march for some event or cause... I didn't catch the purpose. At the last minute something happened that left Keith as the only member of the original group. But he didn't cancel. A parade is a parade, and Keith, complete with police escort, marched down the street by himself, a one man parade.
Today we all marched in Keith's parade.
Tommorrow I'll start my morning writing with a palette made richer by Keith "Fred Flames" Keller.