Celebrating New Orleans' iconic sound with 'Gumbo Stories'

Hundreds of thousands of revelers celebrated Mardi Gras in New Orleans this week. In Boston, faculty at the Berklee College of Music are channeling its iconic sound tonight for a Black History Month celebration concert called "Gumbo Stories," hosted by Dr. Emmet G. Price III, dean of Berklee's Africana studies division. Price, also one of the reverends who appears every Monday on Boston Public Radio and co-host of the All Revved Up podcast at GBH, joined Morning Edition co-hosts Paris Alston and Jeremy Siegel to talk about the concert and its message. This transcript has been edited lightly.

“Gumbo Stories: A Black History Celebration Concert” will be held Thursday, Feb. 23 at 8 p.m. at the Berklee Performance Center, 136 Massachusetts Ave. in Boston. Tickets are $20-25.

Paris Alston: Dr. Price, there really is a wide vast of music in the Black American lexicon. And we acknowledge that every Black History Month and all throughout the year. So why choose New Orleans specifically?

Emmet Price: I think our group was trying to figure out how to inspire a peek under the hood of music of the African diaspora. And when we come to the United States of America, New Orleans becomes one of these catalytic places where it all comes together with the African sensibilities, with the Caribbean rhythms, where even some of the European influences, during colonialism, have inspired some unique opportunities to express culture and create art. So our big-picture theme is about: Tomorrow is the question, and we are the answer. But this notion about gumbo stories helps us to really focus in on narratives and to talk about how the narratives of the past create and inspire narratives of the present.

Jeremy Siegel: How would you describe the music of New Orleans, the music that you're going to be highlighting in this concert?

Price: The music of New Orleans is varied, is diverse. You have a whole lot of percussive pieces. Drumming is huge — drumming rhythms and patterns — but dance is huge, too. And so where we are right now with Mardi Gras, the celebration of all kinds of different things that are moving from Carnival in the Caribbean all the way through kind of Afro-futuristic ideas. And so you have R&B, you have jazz, you have blues, you have sacred steel, you have rock and roll. You have all kinds of Cajun zydeco. You have all of these different flavors that are like a gumbo, right? There's just multiple ways of cooking gumbo. You start with a roux, but from that roux, you decorated with all kinds of protein — or not — veggies — or not — you know, you do what you want to do. And that's part of the characteristic and the cultural apparatus that we're looking at.

Alston: Well, along with this music, we're going to have to get a big pot of gumbo. I've got to tell you, I am a huge fan specifically of New Orleans bounce music. And I know you're a reverend, but I know you enjoy some bounce music, too, right? And for those who don't know, it derives from this huge mélange of music. All these sounds — you have like the 808s going and you have the call-and-response that happens, all of which are rooted in African culture, as well as the dance, the gyrating or the twerking, as some would call it. But talk to me a little bit about how we see the all of the influences of New Orleans music show up in wider mainstream music culture.

Price: You talk about bounce, you know, I'm a huge fan of Big Freedia. Big Freedia grew up in the church and started directing choirs. And then as Big Freedia began to express identity formation, or what not, came up with this notion. New Orleans is a unique place because of its history. Whether you're talking about the Louisiana Purchase, when you talk about the various wars, the wars with France there, and the Spanish influence. And from all of that comes this really unique sense of culture.

So many people don't even know about the Mardi Gras Indians. Within different neighborhoods, Black neighborhoods within New Orleans, you have chiefs. And these chiefs, whether it is Big Chief Bo or Big Chief Donald Harrison of the Congo Square, they become community elders in the way that they make sure that the young people are taken care of. They make sure that the cultural traditions are taken care of. And then when it comes to the parading and the massing during Mardi Gras, they're the leaders. They come with these elaborate, ornamented costumes. And when they come out, they bring on a persona that is characteristic of their neighborhood. Live music lives in New Orleans like no other place on the planet.

Siegel: So this morning we've been hearing some of the live music sounds of rehearsals for tonight's event. How did this evening's program come together, and what exactly can people expect to see?

Price: Berklee, particularly the college side of the house, was founded on jazz and African-American cultural expression. So we have a committee that over the last couple of years has been coming together and really thinking through how do we bring our phenomenal faculty, our phenomenal students together and do something that will mean something to not only the Berklee community, but also to the Greater Boston-Greater Cambridge community. Because it's a public event and we invite every and anybody to come hang out with us tonight to hear some of the best music on the planet — I'm biased, of course — but also to show a very a diverse representation of the variety of not only music forms within the Black tradition, but that are emanating and that are coming from the New Orleans sound. And what you'll experience tonight would be something that is so unique that you'll never hear it again.