EXCLUSIVE TELEVISION REVIEW:
New Orleans Music: The Secret Story Behind HBO's 'Treme'
Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Joel Selvin

Who cares about the dumb soap opera plot points? What keeps me coming back week after week to the HBO series 'Treme' is the insider's look at the New Orleans music scene. In 'What Is New Orleans,' the latest episode, the young jazz musician son of the cranky old Mardi Indian winces while his father shows New York jazz great Ron Carter how the bass part should go, right in the middle of Dr. Rudy Van Gelder's hallowed Hackensack, N.J. recording studios, as one of the musicians carefully notes. Dr. John scowls.

That reference to Dr. Rudy Van Gelder may have been lost on most of the TV viewing public, but I sat up. I always wondered what the famed studio looked like. Visitors were never encouraged. You heard stories and, indeed, as seen on 'Treme,' the place looked like someone's Danish modern mid-century living room with expensive microphones. No inside dope on Dr. Van Gelder's secret microphone placement technique though.

How many HBO subscribers read the small print on the back of '50s and '60s jazz albums by John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins and anybody who was anybody in the world of jazz and would even recognize the reference? Even fewer would know what a glimpse inside a hidden garden 'Treme' was serving up.

Screenwriter George Pelicanos ' also a key figure in 'Treme' producer David Simon's previous HBO phenomenon, 'The Wire' ' brilliantly threads music through his own crime fiction; taut, gritty novels such as 'King Suckerman' or 'Hell To Pay,' largely set in the Washington D.C. ghetto in the 80s and knowledgably larded with soul music and punk rock of the era. His hand can be seen in the toughening crime angles in this season's criss-crossing narratives. The series is also trying hard to give a sweaty close-up to the kitchens of New York restaurants. A developer from Texas is also scooping up properties in the wake of Katrina and local politics are flickering through plotlines.

But, for me, it's the music wrinkle that keeps me coming back. It started early in the first season, when the lead musician character in the show's soap opera merry-go-round, trombone player Antoine Batiste (borrowing the last name of a very distinguished line of New Orleans musicians), was having problems with taking a job playing for drunken tourists on Bourbon Street and he runs into Trombone Shorty on the street who assures him it was cool for him to play Bourbon Street.

By the end of the season, the producers of 'Treme' had wrought nothing less than the impossible, what no other force could have managed on the New Orleans music scene, and forged a reunion of Allen Toussaint and Art Neville, who appeared together in a recording session at the end of the first season recording a new version of Neville's '50s regional hit, 'Cha Dooky-Do.'

Those two pillars of New Orleans rhythm and blues went to the musicians' union office together as kids to register and worked together for decades on some of the greatest records ever made in that city, before falling out in the stony estrangement of two men who were once brothers. Their reunion was not a plot point. In fact, it may not have been much of a reunion ' they do not acknowledge one another on camera ' but they were in the same room at the same time for the first time in years. 'Treme' did that. Some of us noticed, but couldn't be many.

New Orleans music has always been a cult favorite ' a few people like it a lot ' long a small, provincial music scene, steeped in its own mysterious practices, where only the strong survive and few ever reach national audiences. The town's history is littered with musicians such as the late James Booker, possibly the greatest r&b pianist of them all, or the Meters, the long defunct rhythm band that every new band over the past 20 years in town has tried to sound like, who went largely unheard outside of New Orleans.

In a town full of ghosts, 'Treme' seems to know where the bodies are buried.

The show gives an ecumenical tour of the city's varied nightlife establishments ' catching 'big names' such as Shawn Colvin or John Hiatt at the House of Blues, but getting around town to places like the Howlin' Wolf or Blue Nile ' an armchair tour of New Orleans niteries, three or four different spots per episode.

Local musicians are prominently featured in the soundtrack, often performing original compositions, and thus participating in the show's revenues. The producers use the music like glue, a symbol of the communality of the culture and the colorful backdrop that locates the action inside a set of triplets played behind the beat. It's good to see them spreading it around.

But what are the apparently hapless musical fusions 'Treme' characters are pursuing this season supposed to tell us? The young jazz Turk wants to bring his father's Mardi Gras Indian tradition into his own rarified New York jazz world ' there was a big, phony 'aha' moment when he heard a transistor radio playing bebop while he was marching behind his father in a Mardi Gras parade. Davis McAlary, a nasty little twerp who is the political firebrand son of privileged New Orleaneans, is putting out a record that features his blend of New Orleans parade music and hip-hop. What are these inventions intended to mean? So far the music we're hearing from these 'fusions' sounds like sludge ' both the Mardi Gras jazz piece and DJ Davis' rap-cum-marching band. I'd hate to think this was some heavy-handed way of the producers invoking their viewpoint about messing with New Orleans culture, but this is television.

Me? I'm surprised it's as hip as it is and can't wait to see if they can get Fats Domino to make a cameo.

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