79rs Gang Update Mardi Gras Indian Sound at Jazz Fest

Big Chiefs Jermaine Bossier and Romeo Bougere of 79rs Gang

The musical union of two Mardi Gras Indian gangs mixed electronic and acoustic sounds on 2020’s “Expect the Unexpected.”

In this encore presentation from 2020, Big Chiefs Jermaine Bossier and Romeo Bougere with producer Eric Heigle talk about finding a more contemporary expression of Mardi Gras Indian music on their Expect the Unexpected album. 79rs Gang will play Jazz Fest on Friday, April 29, at 3 p.m. on the Jazz & Heritage Stage.

“At the end of the day, this is a warrior culture,” Jermaine Bossier says. Bossier is Big Chief of 7th Ward Creole Hunters and one-half of 79rs Gang, along with Romeo Bougere, Big Chief of 9th Ward Hunters. Their gangs remain separate, though in the spirit of mutual respect they meet on Mardi Gras. Not all meetings with Mardi Gras Indians go smoothly though, as “War Cry (Way Downtown Mix)” from 79rs Gang’s recent album, Expect the Unexpected, suggests. In it, Bossier sings, “Sat down and I talked, motivated my gang / They say jealousy kills but we do the same.” 

Nicholas Payton’s trumpet ratchets up the drama and the danger as Bougere picks up the narrative, moving from his his house to the battlefield. “I got dressed and I went outside / But I knew in my heart that somebody might die.”

Bossier gets cagey when asked about how much of the song’s lyric is myth-making and how much is reportage, starting sentences with phrases like “Let me put it this way ….” In a 2016 interview with Aquarium Drunkard, he remembered the 79rs Gang itself being born in conflict. “When Romeo came along, he was making a name for himself and I was making a name for myself,” Bossier recalled. “We just always seemed to bump heads. Like I said, man, sometimes things can get kind of physical. There have been situations where we had weapons drawn. People were swinging hatchets and machetes and all this kind of stuff, man. But at the end, like I said, we just sat down and decided to make some music and just stop all of the foolishness with each other.”

The song and the violence it threatens stands out because the modern Mardi Gras Indians narrative is one wherein ritualized conflict replaced actual violence decades ago, and battles that were once physical had become more aesthetic with conflicts are resolved through simulated means. Not all of them, Bossier says. 

“ I don’t think it will ever be two Indians shooting each other,” he says. “But physical confrontations—yes. There’s always physical confrontations. Always.”

“War Cry” feels dangerous, and the sound of the song underlines it with the low throb of a synth bass, rolling bass drums, and Payton’s mournful trumpet. On Expect the Unexpected, 79rs Gang aren’t Clarke Peters’ Albert Lambreaux on HBO’s Treme—all stoic dignity—and the music isn’t simply psychedelic funk or second line rhythms pounded out on percussion instruments found in bars and churches. The album and the story behind it are a reminder that 79rs Gang aren’t yesterday’s Mardi Gras Indians.

The Wild Magnolias’ They Call Us Wild and The Wild Tchoupitoulas’ self-titled album have served as the blueprints for Mardi Gras Indians’ music since 1975 and 1976 respectively. Those who wanted to augment the sing/chant vocals and second line rhythms pursued either the psychedelic funk of the former or The Meters’ funk of the latter. The 79rs Gang ’s first album, 2015’s Fire on the Bayou, initially marked them as different from the previous generations of Mardi Gras Indians, but not in obvious ways. It featured only their voices and percussion, but the percussion was denser and tightly meshed, and Bossier and Bougere’s voices were cool. They boasted and threatened like Indians before them, but they didn’t shout because they didn’t have to. Their strength came through naturally, as it did in their models. 

Unlike the Big Chiefs that loom large in the public imagination, they’re products of hip-hop, and while Bossier listens to R&B and zydeco as well, hip-hop plays a large role in the way he thinks about music. “I write it as if I was rapping,” he says. He doesn’t see what they do as a rejection of New Orleans funk and the Mardi Gras Indian music that came before 79rs Gang—he loves that music—but “everything evolves,” he says. “And the way Romeo and me were looking at it, the worst thing we could be is the same as everybody else. We wanted to tell our story our way and talk about things that are going on today, and not sing about those same stories that previous chiefs were singing.”

Fire on the Bayou earned 79rs Gang buzz among people who trafficked in music that lived in the intersection of heritage music and dance music, and independent of each other, a number asked producer Eric Heigle what he knew about them. He’d heard of The 79rs Gang but that was about it, and each additional tip—many from England and Europe, where there’s more of a market for that sound—made him curious. 

When their name came up as a possible group to record for a documentary project that he was engineering called Take Me to the River, he thought that was a great idea. The documentary captured culture-based music live, so Heigle was surprised when Bossier and Bougere showed up at the studio and introduced themselves. Where’s the gang, Heigle asked. We’re the gang, they answered. The band name shouts out the wards and gangs they represent, but The 79rs Gang is just the two of them, not a merger of their gangs. They explained that they overdub additional voices and percussion later for recordings. Heigle expected the usual entourage and had to think fast about how to represent them well in a way that was true to the documentary’s concept. Since Heigle has played drums with The Big Easy Bounce Band and marched with Big Chief Monk Boudreaux and The Golden Eagles, he stepped in to play bass drum for a live recording of “Ooh Nah Nay.” Bossier and Bougere fleshed out the vocals when they overdubbed additional voices later. 

That performance of “Ooh Nah Nay” stayed with Heigle. Many of his projects have dealt with the tension he heard in The 79rs Gang as they worked to make heritage-based music make sense today. He’s a member of The Lost Bayou Ramblers, and that same idea is their overarching project too, but in the field of Cajun and Creole music. It’s not a love/hate relationship because he loves the heritage music and the artists who made it, but he also rejects the idea that we’re all living in the long, slow sundown that comes with the passing of Louisiana’s legends. 

“I want to be a part of my generation’s imprint on New Orleans and Louisiana music at large,” Heigle says.

While in New York visiting his cousin Korey Richey, who produced The Lost Bayou Ramblers’ Grammy-winning Kalenda, Heigle played that recording of “Oooh Na Na.” At the time, they were in the home studio of LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy, where Richey now works. The two started tinkering with the track, adding a sub-bass and synths to end up with something that would sound at home on DFA Records as it merges live and electronic rhythms. That combination gave the song a fresh motor, and the more electronic arrangement made the song sound contemporary. He didn’t go so far as to lock The 79rs Gang into house or techno lineages, though; in fact, the specific synth sounds could have come as easily from the 1980s or ‘90s. With their voices, Heigle’s “Oooh Na Na” wasn’t timeless, but it wasn’t pinned to one time period either. He figured he was on to something, but he had other projects on his plate so he shelved the track at the time. 

When his plate cleared, he asked producer Zack Fawcett, who had worked with him on Take Me to the River, to set up a meeting with Bossier and Bougere. He wanted to play them his remix of “Oooh Na Na” and talk about making music together, but he was nervous. He didn’t know them well enough to know how they would respond, and he knew it was possible that they would be pissed off at the liberties he had taken with their song. 

“I thought it sounded amazing,” Bougere says. “It was such a new sound, I knew I wanted to go with it immediately.”

“It was a no-brainer,” Bossier agrees. 

“We’d decided that day, Let’s do it,” Heigle recalls. “Let’s do a whole album with that concept in mind.”

Many artists and producers have collaborated on projects like this one to find a contemporary expression for something classic, and often the artist bails on the concept almost as soon as it is done. Soul legend Bobby Womack agreed to record The Bravest Man in the Universe in 2012 with Damon Albarn and XL Records’ Richard Russell, who envisioned a spare, electronic background to showcase his voice. Womack played little of that material in concerts once the European tour following the album’s release ended, instead sticking instead to the hits from the 1970s that made his name. Even while recording the album, Womack hesitated. 

“I went to London, and worked with Damon,” Womack said in 2014. “It was different. He said, The less music, the better. I think your voice and your deliverance carry everything else. So I say, Yeah, but you know, just a few instruments. After awhile you get tired of hearing it. I’m a producer too. I’m into producing, and I hear things in my head.”

Heigle didn’t get that resistance from Bossier and Bougere. “They were there every step of the way, ready.” 

For him, that was important because he knew there would be some experimentation, testing different tempos and different arrangements, in some cases layering on parts before stripping them off. If they didn’t buy in to the concept and the method, the sessions weren’t going to work. Fortunately, he says, “They trusted me to go about my process and I trusted them to go about their process.”

In fact, The 79rs Gang had already taken steps in this direction—not adding electronic textures but moving past traditional Mardi Gras Indian musical choices. Live, they emphasized their hip-hop roots with a band that played, in effect, live samples. Before Heigle reached out to them, they had started working on an album in a studio where New Orleans rappers Choppa, DJ Jubilee, 5th Ward Weebie, Na’ Tee, Big Freedia, and Katie Red had recorded. Unfortunately, the studio owner moved to Atlanta, so Bossier had to quickly back up their files to a hard drive to keep from losing them. They used some of those tracks as starting points for songs, but others began with Bossier and Bougere playing, defining the bones of the songs. Heigle prefers in general to start his productions with a performance, and It helped that he loved Bougere’s drumming. 

“Romeo is a fire drummer,” Heigle says. “He makes the drums sing. He makes the tambourine sing. Having rhythm at the core of music is super strong because I think that’s an often-neglected tool in music production, the idea of rhythm hooks. A rhythm can be as catchy as a melody.”

“Me and Jermaine would go in the studio and lay down as much new material and ideas as we could in order to find out what songs matched up best with these new sounds,” Bougere says. “For us, it was important to do something that sounded new but was still part of the traditions that we grew up in.” Heigle was on the same conceptual page, and once they had recorded their parts, he built the sound around them. When he had something in a good place, he played it for Bossier and Bougere for notes, then incorporated those into the mix.

The challenge of working in that way is that it’s easy to stack tracks until the heart of the song is completely obscured. “Sometimes we had to catch ourselves,” Bossier says. “Sometimes we were getting a little lost in the music.” Heigle remembers that specifically happened on “Trouble,” one of the older tracks on Expect the Unexpected. Bougere remembers that it was one of the songs they brought from the earlier sessions, but they kept adding parts until what they had would no longer pass what Heigle calls the Two Fader Test. 

“You should be able to push up any two faders and have it sound like music,” he says, and when “Trouble” didn’t, they stripped it back down. Heigle ended up recording ambient sounds by following Bougere’s 9th Ward Hunters on St. Joseph’s Night, then laying those ambient sounds over the track. When he heard Bossier and Bougere sing, “Trouble, let it come” with dogs, street sounds, and someone calling Bougere out in the background, Heigle thought, “This is special.”

Throughout the sessions, Heigle took his cues from Bossier and Bougere, focusing on their rhythms and voices. He couldn’t believe how quickly Bossier could write lyrics, and he was careful to make their voices the stars. “To me, their vocals are so unique that anything that shrouds that or makes them sound weird is eliminated from the equation,” Heigle says. Bossier recognized that and appreciated it. “Eric really had a listening ear when it came to making this music,” he says. “He didn’t want to do something too outside the box either.”

Bossier looks back at Expect the Unexpected with pride. “The path that we’re taking, we’ve been on that path,” he says. It’s one that Mardi Gras Indians before him chose too, of course. When The Wild Magnolias recorded “Handa Wanda” in 1970, they were embracing and breaking with tradition at the same time too. Mardi Gras Indian culture was an underground culture then, and taking it into the musical marketplace while making it a visible part of New Orleans’ culture was a radical move as well. The details change with each new iteration and reinvention, but the questions remain the same. How do you honor a tradition while finding a place for yourself in it? How do you make it relevant to the life you lead? 

For Bossier, it has given him a way to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic. He drives a school bus, but since he hasn’t been able to do that, he has spent his time sewing. But while he embraces the through -lines that connect him and Bougere to previous generations of Mardi Gras Indians, he can’t help but focus on the differences specific to them. They’re Downtown Indians, for example, not Uptown Indians like The Wild Magnolias and The Wild Tchoupitoulas. 

“We have different stories to tell,” he says. “When Quint Davis found Bo Dollis, I don’t think I was born yet.”