The St. Augustine High School Marching 100 wrapped up its propulsive set along Napoleon Avenue and made way for the band from O. Perry Walker High School.
It was a sweltering August evening—exactly two years after Hurricane Katrina—in the city’s Uptown neighborhood. A crowd had gathered outside Tipitina’s, a storied music club, to witness a promising sign that New Orleans’ long tradition of marching bands and music education would survive the tumult that the storm brought to the city’s schools.
Katrina’s floodwaters left nearly every school’s band room and contents in ruins. In most of the public schools, repairing buildings and hiring teachers have been the overwhelming priority, so individual donors and outside organizations have stepped in to help.
Tipitina’s Foundation, already a patron of music education in the schools, has raised close to $1 million since the storm to outfit hundreds of school musicians with new instruments. The St. Augustine and O. Perry Walker bands had to come to play outside Tipitina’s in a special event arranged to show off their new instruments.
“We would have had nothing to play without their help,” said Wilbert J. Rawlins, the band director for O. Perry Walker, a former district-run public school that reopened as a charter after the storm. “Without music in our schools here, it wouldn’t be New Orleans, and the city wouldn’t have its next generation of musicians.”
Pleasing the Crowd
Putting back together the St. Augustine Marching 100—one of the most celebrated high school bands in New Orleans—has heartened people across the city, said Rev. Joseph M. Doyle, the president of the school.
The historically African-American, all-boys Roman Catholic school has had many of its prestorm students come back. Last year, the band reunited its musicians with donated instruments and its signature purple and gold uniforms in time to march in more than 10 Mardi Gras parades.
As the O. Perry Walker musicians tuned up, Mr. Rawlins explained that they were still getting used to playing together.
Like everything else Hurricane Katrina changed, most of the Walker musicians had gone to other high schools before the storm, and had played in other bands. Some of the freshmen were playing an instrument for the first time, and the full band had only been rehearsing together for about three weeks.
If Walker’s playing wasn’t quite as polished as St. Augustine’s, their medley of pop songs and high-stepping routine brought cheers and whistles from the crowd.
The Marching 100 stood in formation nearby, listening respectfully—that is, until Walker ended its set, and “St. Aug,” as locals refer to the school, issued a brassy challenge. Walker’s musicians answered noisily, and with that, a “battle of the bands” erupted at the corner of Napoleon Avenue and Tchoupitoulas Street. Traffic stopped. The crowd spilled into the space between the two bands.
And in this still-wounded city, where playing in the high school marching band brings more acclaim than playing on the football team, it didn’t matter which band won the battle.
