THE WHOLE GRITTY CITY

Short Synopsis

In The Whole Gritty City New Orleans marching bands push to compete and perform, as the bands' directors wage a battle for their students’ lives and souls.

Description/Treatment

Pallbearers slowly carry a casket through a crowd. A few feet away band director Wilbert Rawlins, standing above a sea of faces, conducts three hundred kids playing a somber song on horns and drums. As the music slowly builds to a powerful crescendo, hand-drawn images of high school marching bands and street shootings fill the screen. What is the significance of this performance, this death, and these images?

The Whole Gritty City takes us back 2 ½ years, into the after-school rehearsals of three marching bands.

Leading the O. Perry Walker High School Marching Band, Wilbert Rawlins is obsessed with maintaining his band’s reputation as the best in the city. With equal intensity, Lonzie Jackson leads a beginners’ band at L.E. Rabouin High School at the start of its second season. Meanwhile the city’s newest marching band is still waiting for drums: At The Roots of Music kids 9-14 beat on tables, and beginning horn players barely coax sounds from their instruments. Rebirth Brass Band drummer Derrick Tabb is putting everything he’s got into this non-profit music and tutoring program.

The film shows these three band directors preparing these kids for the rigors and excitement of the Mardi Gras Parades a few months away. They insist on total respect and all-out effort, and they’re working harder than they ever have. The disappearance of music in the middle schools has threatened the future of the high school bands and the continuity of the city’s musical culture. Even worse, thousands of kids are unable to grab the lifeline bands could offer them. Tabb’s “Roots of Music” is an effort to restore what was lost.

Marching band has significance in New Orleans it has nowhere else. Being a band member earns you respect from everyone from the pastor of your church to the drug dealer on the corner. For some kids the band is the only reason to come to school, the only place they feel truly safe, and the band directors are the most important adults in their lives. The film follows Rawlins, Jackson and Tabb as they teach, lecture, check report cards and bring in college recruiters.

The film shifts focus to the young band members. Under a streetlight in front of his house, 11-year old Bear practices playing his new trumpet. Intent on being the best trumpet player in The Roots of Music, Bear says music “is one quarter of my brain”. But the realities of the streets loom large in Bear’s life: in the blocks he avoids, the corners he flees at the sound of gunshots, in the photo of his brother, shot dead in his car a year and a half ago at age 19.

16-year-old Kirk is determined to be “the best tuba player in the Rabouin Band, and in the state of Louisiana”. In his struggle with his temper and the need to act tough, he’s sustained by the band and by the impassioned mime dancing to gospel music he performs at his church.

18-year-old drum major Skully videos himself giving a shout-out to friends, then to loved ones who have been killed. At the mention of “Mr. Shavers, the man who made me a drum major”, Skully’s swagger is arrested by an expression of pain. The moment launches a sequence of images which, combined with Skully’s voice, tell the short, poignant story of the first year of Rabouin High School’s Band. The popular young musician Dinerral Shavers started the band a year earlier in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Then a week before the instruments arrived, Shavers was murdered. In the band members’ final weeks of preparation for parades, it’s clear that while much of this band’s intensity and drive comes from new band director Lonzie Jackson, it has another source as well.

The band members at Rabouin and Roots of Music put on their new uniforms for the first time, and see themselves transformed. We follow all three bands to the parade route. Surrounded by outlandish floats and masked figures, they march for mile after mile past family, friends, and thousands of raucous spectators. As prepared and disciplined as they are, night after night of marching takes its toll on the exhausted band members. In one parade Kirk loses control and lashes out at a drunken reveler who pushes past a chaperone. Kirk is kicked out of the band.

Two band members have been set adrift:  Kirk is full of regret, anxious to find ways to fill the void and stay away from trouble. Bear has been kicked out of The Roots of Music Band for messing up in school, and he now finds himself perilously exposed to the street life that surrounds him. Both hope to find their way back to the place where they’re accepted, valued and held to account.

Closely following band directors Rawlins and Tabb, the film shows the superhuman demands of the roles they take on: teacher, coach, disciplinarian, counselor, strategist, and fundraiser. Derrick Tabb runs his new program on top of his fulltime gig as a snare drummer for the Rebirth Brass Band, and he now uncomfortably endures a brush with celebrity, appearing in events as finalist for CNN Hero of the Year. Tabb reflects on what drives his commitment to this non-stop, sleep-deprived existence. As a kid he was angry at the world and always in trouble, until his middle school band director saved his life. Wilbert Rawlins tells a similar story of his own redemption. Along the way he saw his seven best childhood friends lost to murder and drugs.

Building to a season of celebration, the film shows Bear taken back into The Roots of Music, and Kirk now playing for Wilbert Rawlins’ band, in time to march in the Saints Superbowl parade past the largest crowd in the city’s history. That same week band director Wilbert Rawlins steps onstage to play trumpet at his 40th birthday celebration with a band of former students he once steered away from street crime. Rawlins has hired Brandon, one of these former students, to be his assistant band director, with hopes he will carry on his legacy one day.

Months later Brandon is shot dead. Rawlins leads three hundred band members from all over the city at his funeral in an emotional musical expression of mourning, respect and love. Rawlins again comes face to face with both the limits and the urgency of “this thing I call band”.

Notes on Style
The film combines verite footage of rehearsals, parades, meetings, and scenes in band members’ homes and neighborhoods with music-driven sequences, video that band members have recorded themselves, and informal interviews. Amid the voices of the young musicians and band directors is that of the artist Bruce Davenport. Growing up with musicians like Derrick Tabb and seeing their lives transformed by band, Davenport has also seen many of his friends and family members end up murdered and in prison. Starting in childhood he has created artworks that depict the marching bands, and scenes of crime and its consequences, the two poles of his experience.