New Orleans is a city of neighborhoods. It is within these neighborhoods where New Orleans’ cultural seeds are sown and community identity is established. The neighborhoods are where cultural traditions have been invented and preserved: cuisine, architecture, second-line parades, and jazz funerals. The cultural constituency of New Orleans’ neighborhoods have been instrumental in shaping the city’s old and new histories, social interactions, and the international affair the world has with the “Big Easy”. No stranger to death, destruction, and tragedy, New Orleans mixes it all up in a funky stew that makes magic out of everyday life, where every day there is a jazz funeral somewhere, every day is a second-line, and skeletons don’t hang out in …show more content…
The soundscape of the jazz funeral is where the community surrounding the dead write the dead into social memory as an extension of the dead’s life. Joyce writes that, “burials can be viewed as particularly charged sites where living survivors inscribed the dead into social memory” . The funeral practice of the jazz funeral is an active attempt to produce the dead as a living person before the casket is placed into the ground and death is solidified. The jazz funeral can also be seen as a mediator between the living and the dead within New Orleans society and therefore as Fabian writes, “the dead is given a seminal role in the construction of [this] system” . What makes a jazz funeral such a beautiful experience is what is being celebrated is not the loss of life, but the life that was lived. That sentiment is a representation of everyday life and how many make it through the toils of living in New Orleans. In this way, celebrating life everyday with the soundscape of music and cultural performance allows New Orleans’ locals to practice who they are as a way to reify a sense of identity and place within society in memory of the