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SXSW review: HBO ‘Treme’ day party at Ghost Room
The party celebrating the impeding premiere of the second season of HBO’s acclaimed “Treme,” set in post-Katrina New Orleans, turned into nothing less than a five-hour mini-Mardi Gras, commencing with a noontime Second Line parade that rolled down Congress Avenue and then down Sixth Street. The movable party was spearheaded by Dancing Man 504, a white-suited drum major figure who strutted, cajoled and revved up the handkerchief-waving throng of revelers.
Members of the Dirty Dozen Brass Band provided the rolling-thunder parade soundtrack (much to the delight of green-clad St. Paddy’s Day revelers on Sixth Street), but the centerpiece of the revelry was Monk Boudreaux, the Big Chief of the Golden Eagles tribe of Mardi Gras Indians. Resplendent in a head-to-toe suit of feathers, spangles and embroidery, Boudreaux was a one-man Mardi Gras float. Spectators got in on the action; you haven’t spent St. Patrick’s Day in Austin until you’ve seen a parade marcher dancing with a guy (Or gal, who knows?) dressed as a giant pint of Guinness.
Back at the party home base of the Ghost Room, celebrants noshed on jambalaya, crawfish Mardi Gras, red beans and rice and boudin, provided by the Evangeline Cafe.
What followed was a smorgasbord of South Louisiana music that featured blind pianist and singer Henry Butler (one of the heirs to the “piano professors” keyboard tradition of James Booker and Professor Longhair); Grammy-nominated Cajun band the Pine Leaf Boys, playing the spicy, accordion-fueled waltzes and two-steps they call “chanky-chank music” down in bayou country; and climaxing with the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, the standard-bearers of the New Orleans marching brass band tradition.
By the time Dirty Dozen took the stage around 4 p.m., the crowd at the Ghost Room had devolved into a cauldron of beer-drinking, hoo-rawing, handkerchief-waving, dirty-bop belly-rubbing, hoarse, sweaty humanity. And, by the time things started to wind up, Henry Butler and Austin jazzman Jeff Lofton were sitting in with DDBB, followed by Big Chief Boudreaux exhorting the crowd with the Longhair anthem “Go To the Mardi Gras” and the Dirty Dozen’s trumpet player blowing two horns at once.
504 in the house, indeed.
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