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Matt Sakakeeny tells the story of a vibrant, living culture in prose so vivid and moving, it is matched only by the music about which he writes. His illuminating examination of the contemporary New Orleans brass band culture reveals what it means to create great art, to continually mold and revise a tradition, and to try to make a living under an often dehumanizing racial regime--a complex urban world where making music can be a matter of life and death. Roll With It not only opens our ears to the music and its urban echoes, but it opens our eyes, enabling us to finally see the people who make the second line move. --Robin Kelley, author of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original

"""Many New Orleanians and tourists justifiably identify second-lines as the quintessential local experience. Second-lines are sharply defined by the participation of brass bands, musical icons in a city that relies on - and sometimes exploits - culture to support its economy. In Roll With It, ethnomusicologist Matt Sakakeeny explores the development and dynamics of brass band culture, but also highlights the obstacles musicians encounter despite their status as ""culture-bearers."" The book's content is skillfully sequenced into narrative episodes used to contextualize Sakakeeny's research and conclusions [...] Roll With It is informative on many levels, detailing song structures, jazz history, neighborhood developments, and weaving information together through anecdote and research. It also poses a bigger question: If our city has economically benefitted from selling culture as a post-Katrina resource, are musicians getting what they deserve?""- Samuel Nelson, whereyat.com ""In his fascinating book Roll With It: Brass Bands in the Streets of New Orleans, ethnomusicologist and journalist Matt Sakakeeny delves deep into one of the great institutions of American music. In this searingly honest portrait of 21st-century brass bands, Sakakeeny shares the stories of musicians in three contemporary brass bands: Rebirth, Soul Rebels, and Hot 8. The musicians' personal stories are interwoven with historical information, academic reflection, and personal experience, combining to form a highly original work that creates a vivid portrait both of this musical format and the noble but beleaguered city of New Orleans.""-Florence Wetzel, All About Jazz ""In addition to chronicling groups including the Rebirth Brass Brand, Sakakeeny provides a revealing look at the daily lives of musicians. Many of the issues addressed in ""Roll With It"" concern the fact that brass band music is uniquely embedded in neighborhoods. In addition to literally being performed on the streets, the audience actively participates via joining in on the ""second line."" [...] Detailed profiles of individual musicians make for a captivating narrative, and the book is beautifully illustrated with artwork by New Orleans native Willie Birch."" - Clarion Ledger ""Roll With It ... benefits from both Sakakeeny's deeply embedded documentation of the lives and times of brass band musicians (from the Rebirth, Hot 8, and others bands) and Birch's uniquely evocative art. Together, Sakakeeny and Birch reveal the political and social contexts of brass band music, which, while always entertaining, forms both in-the-moment activism and commentary. The book is an artful telling of cultural history illustrated by important artifacts of that cultural history. Sakakeeny's book benefits from the rich scholarly perspective of a seasoned ethnomusicologist but its greatest resonance is the truth in the streets, unfiltered. Birch's work, like the music of the brass bands documented here, erases lines between folk and high art by sheer power of expression and seriousness of purpose."" - BluNotes ""Roll With It searches past academic theories, tapping many interviews and [Sakakeeny's] own experiences"" - New Orleans Magazine"

Roll With It, which includes striking black-and-white illustrations by New Orleans artist Willie Birch, is at once celebratory and saddening: a book of personal stories and a highly researched academic work. -- Geraldine Wyckoff Offbeat Fascinating... The musicians' personal stories are interwoven with historical information, academic reflection, and personal experience, combining to form a highly original work that creates a vivid portrait both of this musical format and the noble but beleaguered city of New Orleans. -- Florence Wetzel All About Jazz As Sakakeeny makes clear, the story of the city's brass bands is far more complex than music alone. Beyond its entertainment value, music serves as the 'site where competing social, political, and economic vectors intersect.' In many ways, these vectors serve as a microcosm for the problems within the city at large. Kirkus Reviews A notable work in that it's the first critical project to chronicle New Orleans' bombastic contemporary brass-band scene, the generation of musicians that grew up with century-old hymns in one ear and hip-hop in the other; also, and importantly, it's a keen, social-justice-minded examination of the turbulent mix of race, economics, culture and tradition in which brass band culture is located. -- Alison Fensterstock Times-Picayune Sakakeeny offers detailed accounts of parades and the inner workings of the bands. The book offers a full picture of their lives and how the city's cultural economy works on the factory end. Sakakeeny observes the way the city celebrates its culture and especially its musicians, but the book also exposes the way many of them survive on the same earnings as low-rung service industry workers. It's an engaging look street-level look at the bands that so often are used to represent and symbolize the city. -- Will Coviello Gambit Roll With It is informative on many levels, detailing song structures, jazz history, neighborhood developments, and weaving information together through anecdote and research. It also poses a bigger question: If our city has economically benefitted from selling culture as a post-Katrina resource, are musicians getting what they deserve? Roll With It explores the answer. -- Samuel Nelson Where Y'at? Damn, now that's musicology... Among the book's other accomplishments, it's a model of how to write an academic text that can engage a real-world reader. -- Ned Sublett A new essential in the post-Katrina history of New Orleans, Roll With It is, perhaps, the most astute and clear-headed assessment of how the musical essence of New Orleans is ingrained in the personal and political lives of those who live in that extraordinary city. The brass-band culture detailed lovingly here by Matt Sakakeeny is no mere entertainment to those who understand it, nor is it there as tourist-bait or as a museum piece of quaint tradition. This is New Orleans itself, arguing for itself, and using culture as language and currency. To the extent thus far possible, what has saved New Orleans-more than government fiat, or grand economic imperatives, or any hint of functional leaderships-is in the street, damn near every Sunday afternoon. -- David Simon, creator of the television series The Wire and Treme Matt Sakakeeny tells the story of a vibrant, living culture in prose so vivid and moving, it is matched only by the music about which he writes. His illuminating examination of the contemporary New Orleans brass band culture reveals what it means to create great art, to continually mold and revise a tradition, and to try to make a living under an often dehumanizing racial regime-a complex urban world where making music can be a matter of life and death. Roll With It not only opens our ears to the music and its urban echoes, but it opens our eyes, enabling us to finally see the people who make the second line move. -- Robin Kelley, author of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original Sakakeeny's approach to the tensions between continuity in change in Roll With It: Brass Bands in the Streets of New Orleans, searches past academic theories, tapping many interviews and his own experiences with musicians... Roll With It deserves a wide readership in the post-Katrina boom. -- Jason Berry New Orleans Magazine In addition to chronicling groups including the Rebirth Brass Brand, Sakakeeny provides a revealing look at the daily lives of musicians... Detailed profiles of individual musicians make for a captivating narrative, and the book is beautifully illustrated with artwork by New Orleans native Willie Birch. -- Scott Barretta Clarion-Ledger Fascinating... The musicians' personal stories are interwoven with historical information, academic reflection, and personal experience, combining to form a highly original work that creates a vivid portrait both of this musical format and the noble but beleaguered city of New Orleans. -- Florence Wetzel All About Jazz Roll With It adds a contemporary perspective to studies of New Orleans culture and music. What emerges from Sakakeeny's book is a portrait of a city that, with all its challenges, still manages to support a vibrant musical culture. -- John Paul Meyers Jazz Perspectives Roll with It is an edifying, enjoyable, enlightening read and refreshing musical study. It conveys and embodies a vivaciousness, both the author's and that of the musical people portrayed throughout the book, a movement through time and place that refuses to slow down or be diverted or silenced. -- Ron Emoff American Anthropologist This is a volume in which rich ethnographic detail fails to obscure the broader framework of academic theory and personal concern for both the musicians and the music. Roll With It belongs on the reading lists of all those teaching ethnomusicology or ethnography in the modern world, those whose teaching engages with popular music, race, performance, tourism and economy, and those who are concerned about the relationship between their research (or the academic world in general) and the sociopolitical (and economic and racial) realities of the worlds in which we all live. -- Gregory Booth Journal of Popular Music Studies

Author Information

Matt Sakakeeny is an ethnomusicologist and journalist, New Orleans resident and musician. An Assistant Professor of Music at Tulane University, he initially moved to New Orleans to work as a co-producer of the public radio program American Routes. Sakakeeny has written for publications including The Oxford American, Mojo, and Wax Poetics. He plays guitar in the band Los Po-Boy-Citos. Willie Birch is an international artist who lives in New Orleans, where he was born in 1942. Birch received his BA from Southern University New Orleans in 1969 and his MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in 1973. He is the recipient of many awards and honors, including the State of Louisiana Governor's award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. His works are part of the permanent collections of the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

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