In January 2025 I went to a jazz club in Durham, North Carolina, to see New Orleans–born artist Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah. Born Christian Scott, Adjuah is a Grammy-nominated singer, trumpet player, and creator of the Adjuah bow—a harp-like instrument based on three different stringed instruments used by tribes in West Africa. He’s also a big chief of the Xodokan tribe of New Orleans, having grown up as the grandson and nephew of former big chiefs. The Xodokan are one of dozens of tribal nations in the New Orleans area that have existed since the early days of colonialism, having evolved from the union of freed African slaves and Indigenous tribes surrounding the city. They are often referred to as “Black Masking Indians” or, most commonly, as “Mardi Gras Indians,” a pejorative term that reflects their most visible public appearances: processional dances and songs during Carnival season. But their history is far more nuanced, and their role in the musical and cultural heritage of New Orleans is vast.
From the stage that night, Adjuah talked about why he and his fellow musicians were there. Specifically, he said, it was to address the word jazz. He said that, in his community growing up, you would get your mouth washed out with soap for uttering the term. It was short for jackass, he explained, and is rooted in racism that has persisted to this day. I studied jazz as part of my music degree from Duke University, just a few miles down the road from the club we were sitting in, and I’d never heard this explanation. Neither, it seemed, had much of the audience. A similar discussion occurs on Adjuah’s live album Axiom , from 2020. The audience response there is silence.
Adjuah’s uncle, Big Chief Donald Harrison Jr., was a renowned saxophone player from New Orleans, and Adjuah was raised in a musical household. He attended the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts as a teenager and then went to Berklee College of Music in Boston. His early career involved playing with some legendary musicians. (While we were talking, I mentioned having had the privilege of seeing the great pianist McCoy Tyner before he died, and Adjuah casually replied that he had been in Tyner’s band for years.) Adjuah’s first album was released in 2002, and he has released seventeen more, including live albums and collaborations, since then. Many of his records incorporate multiple instrumental approaches, from drum machines to flute melodies to rock guitar riffs. The most recent, Bark Out Thunder Roar Out Lightning, from 2023, features the Adjuah bow and more-traditional song forms from New Orleans history—and the history of the people brought there hundreds of years ago from Africa.
After the performance in Durham, Adjuah’s words from the stage stuck with me. I wanted to know more about the history he’d spoken of and how the city he’d grown up in was connected. We met in the fall of last year, after he performed again in Durham. When I brought up the J-word, he was unequivocal about its provenance, citing the Original Dixieland Jass Band—a group formed by European immigrants in the early twentieth century—as the ultimate irony. “A group of European Americans pantomiming how the Black players played, and then it being labeled Jackass music,” he said. “But those guys couldn’t play, so from the musician standpoint, it’s really laughable that we mark that as the first instance of jazz.”
Not all conversations are as linear and succinct as they appear. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.—Ed.
Cohen: To call the word jazz out as a racist term on-stage seems a bold thing to do in a club and in front of an audience built around the term.
Adjuah: People think they’re being indicted, but it has nothing to do with them. I’m talking about a context that predates their birth, unless there’s a fucking 110-year-old in the building, and even they would have been an infant when that word was first being said. I think part of the larger issue we have in this country is that sometimes when you speak truth about our actual histories, people get uptight about things that have nothing to do with them. The point is to take the information and try to do better. But it seems like we’re invested in a reality that has doubled down on a particular type of sensitivity that doesn’t allow for progress because it’s caught up in its subjective interpretation of truth. It doesn’t matter what kind of audience it is. I could be playing in Latvia, and they’re going to respond that way. I could be playing in Chicago at a juke joint in the hood with an all-Black audience, and their reaction would be the same. Everyone kind of recoils a little bit. That part has always been curious to me, because it’s just a clarification so that you know what you’re saying. Just stop being so fucking lazy; expend the extra syllables.
Cohen: You prefer “creative, improvised music”?
Adjuah: I prefer “stretch music,” because that’s what we’re doing to the sounds. Some people say “Black American music”; [New Orleans trumpet player] Nicholas Payton waged that. I think that’s accurate as well, because of where the music is seated. But that also covers so many different forms. You can say the same thing about disco. We try to root our expression in what we call stretch music, because it’s not something that someone has to leap to understand.
Cohen: How would people refer to it in your community, if it wasn’t referred to as jazz?
Adjuah: Blues. I never heard anyone levying exceptions with it being called that. My teachers would say that jazz is blues that endeavored to speak all languages. So if you have somebody that can play a guaguancó [a Cuban song form within the rumba genre—Ed.], or someone that can play takamba [a style of music that originated in the Mali Empire in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries—Ed.], and they’re putting it in a blues context, then that would be what most people would refer to as jazz.
Cohen: When you say your teachers, do you mean in the academy or when you were growing up?
Adjuah: There are many teachers, right? They might be somebody that’s standing outside of a ballroom and has barely any teeth in their mouth. That could be a teacher. Or it could be the principal trumpeter for the Philharmonic in Louisiana. I had a myriad of teachers, but most of them had this knowing. If you asked them about the music, they’d call it blues, because you wouldn’t get in any trouble that way. In some corridors, you tell the wrong person you play “jazz,” and they will knock you out. Because that’s a term—if you haven’t had the experience, you don’t know what it’s like—that could make someone murderous.
I think most people in the twenty-first century don’t enjoy looking at the vestiges of colonial and Confederate energies still imposing themselves on certain groups. This is why it’s important for me to illuminate why I don’t use the term. To be honest with you, I don’t know of any New Orleanian musicians that use the term when they are in initiated spaces or spaces that are really trained in the music. They’ll say “spasm music” before they’ll say “jazz.”
Cohen: Is that unique to the city?
Adjuah: Some corridors in Chicago are like that. Kansas City and St. Louis also. All of the spaces that are points off the Mississippi River have that knowing, if you deal with the elder musicians. The farther west or east you get, they don’t have the same relationship to the term. And that’s not to say they should. That’s not their history. But if the people who created the shit say, “Don’t call it that,” then you should probably respect that—or you don’t respect them.
Cohen: How has the definition of this musical form evolved over the last fifty years?
Adjuah: I think the nominative definition for the music is equal parts African rhythm and European harmony. That definition seemed to become more popular during the neoclassical period in this music, when the Marsalis contribution [Wynton Marsalis is a trumpeter and artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center—Ed.] kind of tethered classical music to jazz, so that it could enjoy a certain type of acceptance in performing arts spaces and halls. The closer proximity it has to classical music, the more valid it’s supposed to be, for some reason. This definition seems to say that a continent with the most genetic diversity, which probably equals the most cultural diversity, has no harmonic traditions, which is ridiculous. In Mali alone there may be forty different tribes, from Bambara to Mande to Songhai to Fula to Wolof, and they all have different harmonic styles and different instruments. Even as a kid, I could see that. But I understand why they say it: If I can say that you have no harmony and no song traditions, I’m saying that you have no history, right? Because songs are histories and narratives. Given what America has done in terms of its erasure of certain groups, I have to levy my nonacceptance of that. Some African harmonic traditions and histories may have been redacted, but they’re not lost. In New Orleans, specifically among the tribes, they made sure to hold on to those histories and the skeleton keys of those expressions. So when I was a little boy, it wasn’t lost to me; I know what the fables and parables of Sundiata Keita [the founder of the Mali Empire in the thirteenth century—Ed.] or Mansa Musa [a ruler of the Mali Empire in the fourteenth century—Ed.] sound like because certain people did everything possible to make sure that they held on to that information. The redacted versions of these expressions, which walk away from that knowing, are always going to be problematic, because these histories don’t come out of nowhere. They’re real.
Cohen: I don’t need to tell you about the orientalization or sexualization of Black performers in this genre. I remember reading that Charles Mingus said he might as well be playing naked, because that’s what white audiences wanted to see. Have you felt that way performing in other parts of the world?
Adjuah: No. What Mingus and others were dealing with at the time was different. I think that conversation was in reference to slave auction blocks. I don’t feel naked at all. But if it’s not vibrating right at a show, we will have to deal with it before everybody leaves. We will have consensus. I’ve heard from my peers that you can’t create consensus, but that doesn’t make sense to me: You have the microphone. You can set the record straight. Yes, you can’t just jump in someone’s head, but you do have the ability, if you feel those energies, to keep it clear about what the music is and what it isn’t, and who you are and who you aren’t.
Cohen: There’s a tradition of Scandinavian jazz—I mean, there’s jazz all over Europe. Do you feel there’s a dissonance in someone performing music that comes from a different cultural history?
Adjuah: Those are not the same threads. I would hope that those musicians have made the investment in where the sound is coming from. But the point is that everybody has the ability to contribute beautiful things. I don’t expect somebody from Denmark to play the blues like someone from Tupelo, Mississippi. That’s a regional sound. And this music is about you being your sincere self. It’s always been weird to me, this idea that whoever’s on guitar needs to be able to play that line like Charlie Christian [the American swing guitarist who helped establish the guitar as a solo instrument in a band—Ed.]. You certainly need to be curious enough to be able to apply these different techniques and approaches, but once it’s time for you to speak your song, you don’t have to play like Charlie Christian. That’s ridiculous. Charlie Christian already played. We have recordings; we can hear him. You’re certainly not doing him any favors by messing up his lines, right? [Laughs.] Just do your thing.
I think we spend too much time trying to figure out what divides us, rather than what connects us. There is someone in Denmark right now that has the blues. That’s not up for debate. Someone is suffering. So now I’m supposed to fucking create a metric by which to judge this person’s way of trying to express that?
Cohen: I was in the Afro-Cuban percussion ensemble at Duke as part of my music degree. The instructor was a guy from Harlem who had been taught by Chief Bey [an American-born Yoruba priest who played percussion with Art Blakey, Cab Calloway, Count Basie, and John Coltrane, among others—Ed.]. He taught me how to play guanguancó. And he hated drum circles, because he felt like it was disrespectful to the music. He didn’t think it was OK to just hop in and beat on something.
Adjuah: I disagree. That space is designed for that. A drum circle is not the same as, like, an initiated circle, a cadre of folks in New Orleans, or Cuba, or Salvador. That’s different. You have initiated spaces where master-level practitioners work on what they work on, right? That’s not the same as a drum circle, which is a fucking free-for-all, open for people to share vibration together and learn. It’s like a pickup game.
Cohen: I think my instructor’s feeling was that he was raised in this practice, and it was sacred. If you treat it this way, that’s disrespectful to its history. So I’m not asking, “Can you play like Charlie Christian?” but more, if you’re living in Denmark, “What do you know about this particular experience?”
Adjuah: It might not be your experience, but there are still synergies. I think we spend too much time trying to figure out what divides us, rather than what connects us. There is someone in Denmark right now that has the blues. That’s not up for debate. Someone is suffering. So now I’m supposed to fucking create a metric by which to judge this person’s way of trying to express that? I’m sure people look at our way, and it might seem like we’re carving things up by definition, but actually it’s the opposite of that. For us, it’s more about understanding that everyone’s perspective is valid, but we also have to respect each other. It’s not difficult. We make it more difficult by not listening to each other. Someone in Denmark has the blues. What are they supposed to do with the blues? Eat it? We have coping mechanisms. The music is a tool.
My point is that if you’re interested in it and you want to learn how to effectively communicate with the tools and the vernacular that existed before you, then you make the investment. But the investment also doesn’t have to be made. We don’t have unlimited time here on earth. I think it’s silly that we try and browbeat people with our priorities. Go ahead and do your thing, as long as you’re not disrespecting people. If you want to approach the blues from a space where you’re incorporating some Scandinavian scales and rhythms, then more fucking power to you. I can’t wait to hear that. Maybe we can do better together if we actually look out for each other.
You never know the amount of suffering people go through. The old men when I was growing up used to say, “If you think you’re going through some shit, just go into a room full of people and drop your problems and walk around; when you come back, see if your problems are there. Someone will gladly take your problems.” You don’t know what people are going through. If Scandinavians are nonviolently expressing themselves, that’s even better, because historically there’s been some pretty rough shit going on in these countries. It’s better than somebody raping and pillaging because they don’t have a fucking outlet. If a guy wants to sing the blues, man, by all means, please sing the blues. If you want to do it like Muddy Waters, then at least go to Mississippi and spend some time on the farms, so that your composite is stronger. But it’s not something that you have to do to touch those things.
If I can say that you have no harmony and no song traditions, I’m saying that you have no history, right? Because songs are histories and narratives. Given what America has done in terms of its erasure of certain groups, I have to levy my non-acceptance of that. Some African harmonic traditions and histories may have been redacted, but they’re not lost.
Cohen: Well, we often hear the phrase “cultural appropriation” in these conversations. A white rapper would probably be the easiest example—someone borrowing part of a culture that they may not have come from. I’m not saying it’s always bad, because it’s case by case. The context of things matters.
Adjuah: Look, when I see Eminem in a cipher [a type of rap competition—Ed.], I don’t see any deficit. I see someone that made the investment. It’s different when you’re pantomiming and the audience can hear you didn’t do any of the work. You’re just copying something. But you don’t want to go thirty-two bars toe-to-toe with Eminem! Where do we draw the line, right? It is a case-by-case thing. Be curious, take the time to actually make the investment, and a lot of those conversations go away.
I think when our community has reservations about these things, it’s usually because, as soon as we invent or come up with something, another culture almost immediately has to find a corollary to it. Little Richard said the reason we had all of those popular records from Jerry Lee Lewis was because there was not going to be a fucking poster of Little Richard on the wall in a white American home. We understand the history of it, right? Given that context, yeah, it’s a little fucked up. I would imagine that our group would also kind of be like, “Yo, well, if you’re going to steal shit, then we should at least be able to say you stealing some shit.” I think that’s fair.
But in the interest of moving forward, I think if you want to touch things that come from other cultural groups, just go and be a part of the group and make the investment. Like you said about your teacher who taught you about guanguancó: If you go to fucking Puerto Rico or Cuba, it don’t matter what the fuck you look like. If you go and you hang out with the people long enough, and get in and drink with them and be with them, they’re going to show you the moves, and you’ll become part of that larger family. These communities are not closed. Historically a lot of them didn’t have the ability to close themselves off, if we’re being 100 percent honest about it. The conversation we’re having today is about the investment. If you don’t make the investment, and you want to say that you’re fucking revolutionizing guanguancó music, then the masters of guanguancó get to say that’s bullshit, right? But if you do make the investment, they’re going to say, “Yeah, we know him. He’s with us all the time. He’s a bad motherfucker.” I didn’t see Miles Davis kicking Bill Evans out of the band. He was with them. Dave Liebman: with them. John Scofield: with them. No one’s saying John Scofield’s not a master. He’s a fucking master. You’re going to label him outside of that tradition because he’s white? That’s ridiculous. If Miles Davis could fucking hear the shit, then I don’t want to hear what someone else that’s not a master has to say about it.
Cohen: Let’s talk more about the New Orleans tradition. What’s the best way to refer to the masking community?
Adjuah: I say “Maroon.” Because they’re Maroons, right? [A Maroon is a Black person who escaped slavery and became part of a free community in the Americas.—Ed.] It’s like the blues-versus-jazz thing. The further you go toward the root, no one is going to get upset. When you start to use the twentieth-century marketing terms for Carnival fodder and Mardi Gras things, then you run into trouble. If I go to the Gathering of Nations, which is the largest powwow in the western hemisphere, I can’t call a Lakota person an “Indian.” They may call each other that, like Black people call each other names, just for endearment or whatever. But as someone outside of that world, I have to refer to them as Lakota.
It’s the same with the tribes in Louisiana. We’ve created a narrative that is connected to Mardi Gras, but even that part of the Carnival is complicated. Black people weren’t allowed to participate in Mardi Gras. The reason that I know this is because I was there the day they desegregated the krewes in 1992. [Krewes are private social clubs that host balls and participate in Mardi Gras parades.—Ed.] I was standing there with my grandfather, who was the chief, and other chieftains. They weren’t allowed to participate, yet you label them “Mardi Gras Indians.” That’s marketing.
We just say Maroon. You can say the Black tribes, and some people still do use the term Black Indian, but to label them Mardi Gras Indian is incredibly disrespectful. I’ve always kind of held an ire about the New Orleanian reality of labeling and branding that group. How dare you? Some of these tribes have existed since the 1710s. They fought the Spanish and won, they fought the French and won, they fought the British and won, they fought Americans and won, and now they get to be “Mardi Gras Indians”? People in New Orleans know that’s not just Carnival shit. They know they’re looking at warriors and braves. They may not know which tribes, because the Maroons veil their identities; they may not say that they’re Wolof or Fula or Atika or Choctaw. They may say they’re Creole Wild West, because the veneer has become a part of the cultural expression. But the names, I think that’s really easy to get caught up in because of the marketing power and strength of “Mardi Gras Indian.” We’re fighting a marketing engine for a municipality whose resources are based on the tourism industry, so it has to have exotic shit to bring people into the city.
Cohen: Can you explain some of the history of how these tribes came to be?
Adjuah: There are many histories. And it’s an initiated and secretive kind of space. But for your readers, the history they should know is that this is a group of African and First Nation people in Louisiana. When the French got there, they were very clear that many of the Indigenous nations looked like Ethiopians. The dominant narrative about the American Indian has a lot to do with Hollywood imagery, so we have a linear read on what an Indigenous American looks like. Well, if you have Indigenous Americans that are closer to the equator, chances are they will be melanated. [Laughs.] It’s just common sense, but in America, that bell doesn’t ring.
When Africans were brought into the region, some of them liberated themselves and went into the bush areas and made pacts with some of the First Nations there, redesigning and rebuilding the tribal banners from the old world in Africa. And so this culture in New Orleans is an extension of that, and the component of it that most people are familiar with is a moment during Carnival season where they’re expressing themselves and meeting the other nations. It’s essentially a powwow where they don ceremonial regalia, and there are processionals or war games, and the chieftains meet each other.
Cohen: What is the role of the chief in the community?
Adjuah: The roles can be varied—everything from civil rights leaders to the justice system in those communities. One chief might maintain the skeleton keys of the songs and the expressions and the religious component of it. There may be another chief that, if you came into his neighborhood and raped a little Black girl, would cut your fucking throat and tell your whole family to get the fuck out of there. It could resemble anything from a Mafia don to a civil servant. It’s had to exist in the American composite for more than three hundred years, so the roles have had to update themselves.
Cohen: And this is unique to New Orleans?
Adjuah: They have synergy with the Gullahs [a group of Black Americans on the Southeastern coast of the US who have kept alive many African traditions—Ed.] in terms of retaining the African component, but in terms of the Africanity meeting First Nation energy, it is singular. Places like Suriname or Santiago in the African Caribbean all have vestiges of it. You could look at the carnivals in Trinidad and say they look frighteningly similar to the Maroons in Louisiana. It’s because it’s the same traditions: These people liberated themselves, and when they got to the areas where they could be freer, they combined forces and cultures with the natives there.
Cohen: Your uncle and your grandfather were chiefs. How was the history explained to you as a child?
Adjuah: Well, each banner has a different history.
Cohen: So how was their banner explained to you?
Adjuah: No, that’s no one’s business. That’s initiated information. You’d have to bleed a little bit to get that. You’d have to put in some time to get that information.
Cohen: So that’s only shared within the community?
Adjuah: Only shared with the initiated. There may be people in Louisiana that self-identify as being Xodokan or Songhai but who don’t know the fuller histories. They don’t know the same history as an initiated person.
Cohen: Why are the histories protected like that?
Adjuah: Because of what this experiment in America has been. If you know the person you’re looking at is Songhai and Wolof, then you can go and find a fucking book and research “How did we deal with the Songhai?” or “What happened with the Wolof?”
Cohen: In what context do you mean “How do we deal with them?”
Adjuah: I’m going to let you sit with that.
Cohen: “How do we get along with them?”
Adjuah: I don’t think that’s usually what was happening. The more information you give about where those tribes were actually rooted, the more context you offer to groups that don’t have an eye for these people’s humanity. You enable them to say, “We know we better not fuck with the Songhai, because those motherfuckers killed everybody. But the Igbo are less violent and seem to be more malleable and more open to assimilation.” So the tribes are not going to tell you any of that.
These traditions start with wars; they don’t start with drum circles. They start with “The Spanish are coming, and if they cross this line, they’re going to kill everyone and put their heads on spikes and fucking line the roads of New Orleans with them.” So the Maroons are not going to tell you what group they’re from.
Cohen: Essentially like a legacy of protection.
Adjuah: It has to be that way, because that’s the only way the culture could survive.
Cohen: So when you’re in New Orleans, do you know that someone is part of a different tribe, even if you don’t know that person?
Adjuah: Yes. We have different greetings. It’s the same as accents and dialects. It’s like if you walk up to someone and they say something people don’t normally say where you’re from. That’s common, right? But in New Orleans there are other tells. How we greet each other can tell you which district and which area someone is from. There are basically different languages.
Cohen: So we don’t have to talk about the histories themselves—
Adjuah: No, no. There are some histories that we all know that are just general histories, but the specific histories, those are initiated things. The general history is more of an overall narrative for maybe forty different groups, and it starts with: In the early 1700s they self-liberated, burned the city to the ground, went into the swamp areas, and made new tribes rooted in the old chieftain system from West Africa. As you get closer to the emancipation moment in America, the history changes and starts to relate more to the Carnival expression that you see. But those aren’t the root histories of these peoples. There are no Plains Native Americans in Louisiana; the Atika don’t wear big war bonnets and things like that. Some of these men have gone to other parts of the country and made communion with other tribes and intermarried, and they brought something new back to New Orleans. And after that, the other groups started to adopt it because it looked a certain way and it was cool. So their histories are always evolving and flowing. But, again, there are over forty tribal nations within New Orleans proper. The origin story for the Congo Square nation is different than the origin story for the Guardians of the Flame, which is different than the origin story of the Creole Wild West, which is different than the origin story of the Cherokee Braves.
Cohen: So after emancipation, as these groups started moving back into New Orleans, did certain neighborhoods or regions become known as settlements of particular tribes?
Adjuah: Yes, until Katrina, when the whole city shattered. That didn’t affect just one group—everybody got booted, unless you lived in a very specific patch of Uptown, which is the highest ground. But everywhere else got disrupted. Before the hurricane, neighborhoods were really neighborhoods. They had a look. And the accents were different. On one side of the city someone would say, “N’AW-lins.” On the other side they’d say, “New OR-le-ans.” And that’s less than three miles apart. Now it’s really more of a gumbo—everybody is just kind of thrown in together.
When I was a kid, when you went into one big chief’s area, it was really his area. He would have fucking two thousand braves out there ready to face whatever came along at the drop of a hat. Now the tribes, at least in terms of their walking braves, are much smaller than they used to be. Back then, my grandfather might have three hundred people in full ceremonial regalia, weapons, all those things. Now most of the tribes might have five or seven walking braves.
Cohen: Is a walking brave a sort of sentry?
Adjuah: It’s like a lieutenant of the chief, or a knight.
Cohen: Can you tell me what the general hierarchy of the tribe is?
Adjuah: You start with, obviously, the big chief. Then there’s somebody called a trail or a second chief—usually during the second line of the processional, they’re behind the chief, protecting the rear. Then you would have the queen and the big chief’s children. If it’s a very small group, there’s a shamanic figure, or what’s called a “wild”: You can usually identify them because their crowns have big horns. They are very specific enforcers that clear the way with their horns. Then you would have someone called a “gang flag” or “flag boy.” That’s the tribe’s diplomat. He carries the standard and has to be able to speak different tribal dialects, because he has to communicate either for the chief or between chieftains. And then there’s a reconnaissance person, a “gang spy” or “spy boy”; during war games, this person is hunting the other tribes and sending signals down the line. In between these could be another twenty dressed-out braves that may not have the same rank but are in line to fill one of those positions.
Cohen: Outside of this type of ceremony or procession, does everyone have a specific role in their community the same way you said a chief would?
Adjuah: It’s just like any other community. When those tribes are meeting each other, it’s pointing back to an older way, but you wouldn’t look at the lady who runs a day care as a brave. All of the things that communities need, these communities have people that fill those roles who have nothing to do with the Carnival experience.
Cohen: How does the music that we’ve talked about in the first half of this conversation intersect with this community?
Adjuah: All the stuff we’ve talked about—blues, jazz, rock and roll—the people that maintain those rhythms are these community people. That always gets left out of the narrative: “We freed Black people, and once they were free, they started to sing.” [Laughs.] How many times have you heard that story? “They were downtrodden, and they had the blues, and they were doing field modes and all of that.” That’s not where that music comes from, man. Whoever said that were the same motherfuckers who said that these people have no histories and no stories and no harmony. You can’t develop that kind of mastery with somebody hitting you with a whip. That music didn’t sound like the byproduct of somebody that had been beaten down. It was a byproduct of people that were fully living and had liberated themselves. That’s what you hear.
Cohen: Does each tribe or nation have its own set of songs?
Adjuah: There are songs that are sacred to specific tribes, but there are also ones that cross all the tribes. Having similar songs is one of the ways different nations create communion. If I go into this district and sing “Shallow Water,” and their chief also knows that song, we can create a bond. And if you actually listen to those chiefs sing, you’ll hear everything that you hear in rock and roll and blues. If you hear it on the ground in New Orleans, it doesn’t require an explanation: “I can see where James Brown got that. I can see where Little Richard got that. I can see where Lightnin’ Hopkins got that—because I’m sitting here in the twenty-first century listening to a seventeen-year-old sing the blues like that.” It’s not like that kid is turning on the radio and hearing the blues. He’s hearing Future and Drake and that kind of thing. He knows that older music because the points of connection were never severed. If I put you in a room with these kids singing those traditional songs, you’ll be like, “Wait, that song is four hundred years old? Because it sounds frighteningly similar to R & B from the 1950s.” Many of those records were made in the Tremé neighborhood in New Orleans, and the musicians were part of that tribe, that denomination, that church, that social club. These cultural expressions are actually connected.
Cohen: So we might know blues songs as twelve-bar progressions now, because someone was able to quantify it, but—
Adjuah: Blues is not that. That’s an academic thing. If you listen to the early blues, some of it is thirteen bars. Other songs might have a seven-bar turnaround. It was framed in that way so that we could teach it within the academic structures that already existed, but it doesn’t exist like that for the people creating it. They’re not saying, “This blues has to be twelve bars.” If the song is more about the twelve bars, then what the fuck are you singing about?
Cohen: Given the threats New Orleans faces, essentially from the ocean, is there a concern that these traditions have an end date? That these histories, which are kept internally, could be lost?
Adjuah: There’s always been a concerted effort to fight all types of erasure in this particular community. But for Maroons in general, their approach to life is different. They’re embracing new things. Yeah, the traditions are beautiful, but we also have the ability to create something new right now, and it’ll be beautiful too. They have a knowing that’s maybe different than the Western way of knowing. The city is not this fucking land. It’s the people. They could go anywhere. They were once all trapped on another continent. They didn’t stop and say, “Oh no, our culture is lost forever.” We wouldn’t be having this conversation if they hadn’t said to themselves, “My ability to create something beautiful today, starting right now, is just as great as whoever made up the traditions I had before.” Everything is made up: that word, that book over there. So what gives someone in the past a greater capacity to be able to create a tradition than you? Things change. Shit gets destroyed. You’ll waste a lifetime trying to fight that. I really appreciate that about growing up in this context, because when things went wrong, everyone was focused on solutions.
The larger issue we have in this country is that sometimes when you speak truth about our actual histories, people get uptight about things that have nothing to do with them. The point is to take the information and try to do better. But it seems like we’re invested in a reality that has doubled down on a particular type of sensitivity that doesn’t allow for progress because it’s caught up in its subjective interpretation of truth.
Cohen: Given how much New Orleans has provided the world—and the United States in particular—culturally, what do you think the city says about our country?
Adjuah: I think it says that this country will do anything to keep certain communities down. It says that this country hasn’t evolved much. It takes you eight days to drop fresh water into New Orleans after a hurricane in modern times, with fucking military bases all over the place? This country is still in its adolescence, and the way it interacts with the Black community puts us in a position where we’re constantly jockeying and vying to build, because the larger environment has proven time and time and time again that it doesn’t view us as human beings.
New Orleans is a very interesting space if you look at the energies there: the battles over the Confederate statues, the food insecurity. But the resources of the city, the money it actually brings in, and the way the state legislature deals with it, taking resources from the city but never making an investment—it’s always more of the same. Black bodies and Black minds and Black genius are just wood for the fucking fire. So when I look at the New Orleanian reality, I see the country in a nutshell. When I think about New Orleans in this moment, I don’t know that it’s such a terrible thing if some of this shit goes away. Maybe New Orleanians might get upset at me for saying this, but if what’s being preserved is some fucking hyper-racist, xenophobic, super old-world, sexist space that belittles and spews vitriol at people who have done nothing but try and show everyone how to love each other through their artistic expressions and the nourishment of the food and all their ways of interacting? Maybe some of that shit does need to go. Sometimes it feels like the country continues to come and visit the old Black granny that cooks for them. You keep coming to the well, but you don’t give a fuck about this lady; you’re coming to take from her because she helps nourish you, because your spirit is empty. To me, New Orleans is like that.
Cohen: You’re talking about tourists?
Adjuah: No, I’m talking about Americans. All of them. If you from Connecticut and you to go to New Orleans, you still in the same country. Those are your compatriots. Yeah, we broke this shit up into the fifty states, but an American is an American. If you’re coming into that space and you do that, you know you’re not getting that behavior from nowhere. You’re also being taught that by New Orleanians. [Gets up, very animated, acting out the actions he’s describing.] “Here, let me tell you what you can come take from me. Check this out. Look—they over here dancing. Here’s some of their things too. Oh, are you hungry? Let me get you something. Check this out—they make red beans, and you can have some. But don’t get too close. Don’t invest too much. You’ll realize they’re human, and that may cause some disruptions in your heart. We’re going to let you touch this much, and the rest of it we’re just going to sweep under some raggedy-ass rug.” So, yeah, New Orleans is a complicated place, but the energies that exist there, that persist there, are problematic. I think on a macro level they are indicative of the larger issues we have in this country.
If you go to a place that has a history, respect the history. Be curious. Be openhearted and open-minded and less willing to accept those narratives that portray certain groups as being nemeses when reality shows that’s clearly not the case.
Cohen: Look beyond Bourbon Street, basically.
Adjuah: Not just look beyond Bourbon Street—actually fucking look! Bourbon Street is a part of it; you can’t separate that. That’s like if you love the woman you’re married to, but you don’t like some part of her. Well, you got all of it. New Orleans is the same. You deal with very specific stuff you want to touch, but the other parts that you don’t want to touch? That’s going to be a problem at some point, because eventually New Orleanians glean that, and then they realize all you’re doing is feeding on them like a fucking succubus. They look at it with clear eyes. They are not confused about what the fuck America is. They’ve seen a bunch of different types of America, and they have a very specific cultural memory, because certain groups have held on to certain traditions. They saw the Spanish, they saw the French, they saw the British, they saw the Americans. They saw some colonial winners and colonial losers. And they saw the byproduct of that. They saw who came in and how they treated the people. Those stories and those narratives, those songs, which are histories—we still have them.
In an earlier version of this article, we mistakenly described Big Chief Donald Harrison Jr. as a trumpet player. He is a saxophonist. The Sun regrets this error; our thanks to the reader who alerted us to it.—Ed.
