Treme Community Center

The Treme Community Center, a City-run facility, is the longtime home of the Tambourine and Fan youth organization, which was integral to the brass band revival of the late 1900s and to the greater cultural fabric of Treme.

Civil rights leaders Jerome Smith and Rudy Lombard created Tambourine and Fan in 1968, and Smith still runs it. In Talk That Music Talk, an essential volume about the city’s brass band community, Bruce “Sunpie” Barnes writes that Smith “created a curriculum for understanding how music, street culture, and social justice are connected in New Orleans, and then taught it by example.” 

While Smith earned a national profile as an activist—he was a Freedom Rider who dealt directly with Robert F. Kennedy—he stayed rooted in Treme, where he grew up. With Tambourine and Fan, he crafted after-school and summer programs to cultivate social awareness among children in the neighborhood. “The tambourine symbolizes Mardi Gras Indians,” Smith explained, “and the fan is that artifact popularized in the street parade. But both connect to the church, and spirituality.” He earned the nickname Big Duck, since kids followed him like ducklings.

Smith was a drum major at Joseph S. Clark High School under band director Yvonne Busch in the 1950s, and played in Southern University’s renowned marching band. He considered music, and New Orleans’ brass band tradition in particular, as a sacred practice grounded in community rituals. Through Tambourine and Fan, he put instruments in children’s hands, played jazz records for them, and taught them to listen. “The saying of ‘good morning’ and ‘good evening’ is New Orleans music,” he often noted. 

Supporting the Brass Band Renaissance

In the 1980s and 90s, a new generation of brass bands energized New Orleans’ music scene, and Tambourine and Fan helped cultivate some of its leaders. The core of the New Birth Brass Band, for example–bass drummer Cayetano “Tanio” Hingle, snare drummer Kerry “Fatman” Hunter, and the group’s front man for many years, trumpeter Kenny Terr–all came out of the program.

Murals on the Treme Center, as the facility is commonly called, linked these modern brass band musicians to a deep historical lineage: one image reproduced a photograph of the band at the Colored Waifs Home for Boys, where, as an 11-year-old in 1912, Louis Armstrong took cornet lessons that ultimately helped him change American music.

It’s a poignant connection to make on this particular plot of land, which was once home to the Batistes, a musical family that embodied Jerome Smith’s ideal of community-oriented art—they paraded as Baby Dolls for Carnival and formed the Dirty Dozen Kazoo Band, the precursor to the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, which inspired the new crop of brass bands in the 80s.One member of the Batiste family, “Uncle” Lionel Batiste, became an iconic bass drummer and grand marshal.

The Batiste’s house was one of more than 100 adjacent structures bulldozed by the City in the late 1960s and early 70s to make way for a “Cultural Center” that was never completed (the land eventually became Louis Armstrong Park). Organizers who’d opposed that project compelled the city to build the Treme Center as a concession to the neighborhood. 

An early venue for hip-hop

While programming at the facility sustained connections to the past, it also looked forward: in the early 1990s, the Treme Center hosted concerts that were on the vanguard of the city’s hip-hop scene. The DJ and producer Leroy “Precise” Edwards told ethnomusicologist Dr. Holly Hobbs that he first saw Mystikal perform here when he opened for Run-DMC. Precise went on to produce Mystikal’s debut album for Bad Boy Records, which included the hit “Here I Go.”

DJ Jubilee, “the King of Bounce,” told Hobbs that the term “bounce music” took off thanks to an interview he gave at a Treme Center concert to Q93 radio music director and music journalist Karen Cortello. The genre’s originator, MC TT Tucker, recalled playing the venue on Christmas in 1994, when bounce had taken over the city: “We used to be cutting up in there,” he told Hobbs.

The latest threat to the cultural continuity of Treme came after Hurricane Katrina, when the city’s uneven recovery contributed to a wave of gentrification here. Along with structural changes across the street at Craig Elementary, the social networks that Tambourine and Fan grew from and reinforced have frayed since 2005. Amid the changes, Smith still teaches young people here “that the music is of them, and from them.” 

The truth of that lesson is still in evidence on second line Sundays, when several social aid and pleasure clubs from the area use the Treme Center as the starting or ending point of their second lines.

Read more about music education in New Orleans.

Read more about the Treme neighborhood.