The LPO Bets on New Orleans' Indie Music Community

Tank and the Bangas with the LPO, courtesy of the LPO

In the first of a two-part story, The Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra tries to solve a problem orchestras face by turning to Tank and the Bangas, Lost Bayou Ramblers, and more.

[Updated] In honor of the occasion, ÌFÉ wore bowties.

Afro-Cuban percussionist Otura Mun looked impeccable if unshaved in a white dinner jacket, black dress shirt and dress pants as his ensemble ÌFÉ joined a pared-down version of Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra (LPO) onstage at the New Orleans Jazz Market. The collaboration between the two groups not only connected musical traditions usually kept separate, but musical concepts as well. The LPO presents acoustic instruments as they sound in the room, while Mun electronically manipulates the voices of his singers and the sounds of his drummers. They played traditional drums with their hands, but as they demonstrated at one point in the performance, the drums had triggers so that each made modern, shaped, tuned sounds that helped connect ÌFÉ’s Yoruban-inspired songs to the electronic music world.

Far from being the musical voices of moderation that you might expect, the LPO became active participants in ÌFÉ’s adventure. They supplied timbres not usually found in ÌFÉ’s musical palate, with strings and horns adding surprising sonic muscle by finding the spaces between the drums and voices and infusing them with energy. We don’t typically associate the LPO with dance music, but the intensely physical nature of ÌFÉ’s sound remained powerful, so much so that you could see some animated chair dancing throughout the hall.

The LPO’s collaboration with ÌFÉ was part of a series it has staged with artists who have performed or will perform around town during Jazz Fest this year—ÌFÉ (May 1, Music Box Village) certainly, but also Tank and the Bangas (May 2, 3 and 4 at Toulouse Theatre), Sweet Crude, and Big Freedia, who they’ll collaborate again on May 2 at the Orpheum. The LPO won a Grammy for the recording of their performance with Cajun band the Lost Bayou Ramblers, and on May 8 they’ll work with rapper Alfred Banks (May 4, 11:20 a.m., Congo Square Stage) at Ashé Cultural Arts Center.

Otura Mun of ÌFÉ, by Greg Miles

The series started as an answer to a problem every city orchestra faces. How do you broaden your audience? In a culture that marginalizes symphonic works not by John Williams, the answer has often been classic rock, frequently in the form of traveling show that features the music of David Bowie, The Beatles, and the like, complete with a singer, conductor, and charts. These shows can be a little boring for orchestras because they ask little of the musicians beyond playing “footballs”—whole notes, composer Jay Weigel explains. Those deliver a show that’s enjoyable but not entirely satisfactory as a pop or classical music experience.

In New Orleans, they also didn’t sell tickets. Amanda Bohren, the LPO’s Director of Education & Strategic Initiatives theorized that those classic rock shows didn’t connect with audiences that could get better versions and more satisfying music in the clubs. “They’re more used to the real thing,” she says. “They’re used to something more genuine.”

The LPO decided to go in a way that makes sense in New Orleans and bet on a series of collaborations with local musicians, and in particular emerging artists, or at least those who had yet to become regular festival headliners. The LPO would like to work with New Orleans’ musical royalty at some point, but there were philosophical forces urging them toward indie artists. In 2000, the LPO named composer, pianist, and MacArthur Genius grant recipient Courtney Bryan as its first “Creative Partner.” Bryan crosses disciplines and musical worlds in her work, and it was at her suggestion that the LPO made an effort to focus on living composers. The gesture helped to foster new creative works and gave exposure to living composers. Collaborations with indie artists echoed those impulses.

The first was scheduled to take place in May 2020 with Tank and the Bangas. That show would eventually face COVID-related challenges, but the first thing they had to figure out was how 67 members of the orchestra and Tank and the Bangas would interact as equals. Everybody liked the concept, but how they would actually collaborate hadn’t been fully worked out. The LPO turned to Jay Weigel to do the orchestrations, and it had worked with the band on a string arrangement before. He agreed, even though he didn’t approach the project with a clear idea of what to do.

“The challenge at first was how to break through the code of that music,” Weigel says. “Tank is not simple, so coloring that music—finding my way in—was difficult for me.” He started to think about ‘70s prog rock, and Yes’s Chris Squire playing a gnarly, driving bassline shortly before Rick Wakeman would come in with a Bach-inspired organ solo. He heard those juxtapositions in Tank and the Bangas expressed with a similarly high level of musicianship. With that in mind and songs to work with that reference the last 40 or so years of Black music, Weigel had his way in.

Fortunately, the band was open to his ideas and and even suggested that he could be bolder when it first heard what he had in mind. Central to his approach was Tank herself. The different registers, voices and moods she employs offered him elements he needed to respect and could look to for inspiration. He let her voice and approach suggest coloring elements to add an additional layer to the pieces. Her spoken word pieces set the tone for the show with Weigel’s orchestrations taking cues from their melancholy undercurrents, fleshing them out and giving them additional nuances. Weigel elaborated on emotions that the Bangas could only gesture toward on record.

In concert, Tank and the Bangas are usually a dense knot of signifiers, starting with Tank’s extreme fashion sense and the multiplicity of voices that externalize her inner dialogues. In black tie finery and wrapped in an orchestra, Tank and the Bangas were a more linear artistic entity, but the show succeeded at almost every level. The LPO were equal partners in the night’s music, they made contemporary music, and Tank and the Bangas sounded like New Orleans musical royalty. And unlike the classic rock cover shows, the night had musical stakes. The LPO and Tank and the Bangas presented a night of music that hadn’t been heard before in a pairing nobody saw coming or was sure would work. Both organizations risked their reputation and made music no one imagined from either in the process.

Unfortunately, COVID made it hard for people to hear. Putting the band onstage with LPO couldn’t happen in 2020, nor could they play to an audience in the Orpheum. The LPO worked with the Orpheum to raise the floor of the lower level until it was even with the stage. That made it possible for the members of the orchestra and band to spread out and get six feet between them, and on January 15, 2021 they live-streamed the show. Since then, the LPO performed a more normal concert with Tank and the Bangas in 2022, but at the time the LPO branded these shows as “Orpheum Sessions” and collaborated with Sweet Crude, Nicholas Payton, and Terence Blanchard.

“It felt like a time to lean into our local folks,” Bohren says, and the results were so positive that artists and people connected with the project started telling other artists about it. Soon, the LPO had no shortage of collaborators.

The experience with Tank and the Bangas made Weigel braver when he was asked to do orchestrations for their collaboration with Cajun band The Lost Bayou Ramblers. His concern with them was how to strike the right balance, respecting music deeply rooted in tradition without being too respectful. Fortunately, the Ramblers have walked the same tightrope for much of their career, moving drones that were once played on fiddle or accordion to an electric guitar, or finding other contemporary ways to mimic classic musical elements. “Not many groups, move it forward generations, don’t lose the old crowd and pick up a new crowd,” Weigel says.

Some of Weigel’s work was done for him because the band had collaborated before with the Acadiana Orchestra in Lafayette, and the Ramblers were familiar with those charts. There were also charts from the soundtrack to the film Beasts of the Southern Wild that the band played on. Since Weigel does soundtrack work, he understood that the musical ideas were tied to the film, and he didn’t see a reason to play them as they were without the film to support. “I blew them out any way I wanted to,” Weigel says, though he tried to be respectful of the original composer and not go anywhere at odds with the original impulses of Dan Romer and Benh Zeitlin.

The show opened with “The Bathtub,” which in the soundtrack foregrounded the rigid violin strokes on the quarter notes while Louis Michot’s fiddle, voice, and the band churned away in the background. It made the community feel provisional in the film and hinted that things weren’t going to go well. Weigel didn’t have a narrative to support, so he changed the focus, moving the dance band elements to the foreground and let the insistent strings be a slightly ominous undercurrent. But there were things the LPO couldn’t do. The show included “Sabine Turnaround,” a dance that presents Cajun music at its most cyclonic, with everybody seemingly chasing everybody else in a circle. The hypnotic energy is a crucial part of the song when the band performs it, and the LPO was simply too big to dance in circles. Instead, Weigel’s orchestration telescoped dancing through time, helping us hear it not as the moment in front of us but as what dances have meant and how important they’ve been to Cajun communities as long as they’ve been in Louisiana.

“Louis made it an easy process and a good one,” Weigel says of Michot, who only had a few notes when he heard Weigel’s ideas. They did a rehearsal a month before the show so that the groups could see what it was like to play with each other, and Weigel walked out of it buzzing. He saw Michot on the way out and suggested they record the show. In his head, Weigel started game-planning out to raise money to fund the recording and release, but when he took it to ANWAR, he believed in the idea and made it happen. This year, Lost Bayou Ramblers & Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra (Live) won the Grammy for Best Regional Roots Music Album —the first and only release from the LPO.

Tomorrow: The LPO collaborates with Big Freedia and Alfred Banks.

Updated 4:57 p.m.

Alfred Banks will play with the LPO on May 8, not May 6 as initially written.