Cutting Unfastened: Edward Newman’s Photographs of New Orleans Jazz Parades and Funerals

The following visitor put up by Adam M. Silvia, Curator of Photography within the Prints & Photographs Division, relies on his interview with Edward Newman on January sixteenth, 2026 and contains pictures donated to the Library by Newman in 2025.

“I was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1964,” says photographer, lawyer, and jazz fanatic Edward Newman. “My dad was a lawyer,” and “my mother was a teacher.” They “always had a lot of New Orleans music in the house.” Newman grew up on Louis Armstrong and noticed the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, a New Orleans ensemble, carry out on stage on the Village Gate. He discovered trumpet in grade college and performed each symphonic music and jazz.

“Photography was also a hobby,” he explains. “Some of my earliest memories are my grandfather and his Rolleiflex.” A dentist by commerce, “he loved cameras and gadgets.” Newman loved his grandfather’s pictures. “The first photos I ever took were probably with a Polaroid Land Camera,” he remembers. “When I was twelve or thirteen [my parents] gave me a Pentax 35mm camera.”

Newman’s hobbies, images and music, converged in school. While finding out journalism at New York University, he frequented venues like Tramps, the Lone Star Cafe, and Sound of Brazil, often known as S.O.B. “I would bring my camera,” he explains, “really just for my own pleasure, and to preserve the memory of a great night of music.” Even although “I couldn’t preserve the sound, I could preserve the mood.” Newman developed his abilities by taking a darkroom class on the International Center of Photography. Meanwhile, he disc-jockeyed for WNYU and browse Offbeat and Wavelength, magazines that publicized music from New Orleans. He additionally studied the e book Spirit World: Pattern within the Expressive Folk Cultures of African-American New Orleans by photographer Michael P. Smith.

Upon graduating, Newman labored briefly in promoting earlier than making use of to Tulane University Law School in New Orleans. “They very kindly invited me down for a weekend to visit the school,” says Newman. “It was the weekend of the Irish Channel St. Patrick’s Day Parade” in March, 1989. “I stumbled into the Rebirth Brass Band playing in the street and was just amazed!” He fondly remembers “seeing [music] in the streets, with hundreds of people, thousands of people, dancing and reacting.”

Newman fortunately enrolled at Tulane. “I would stay up late to study in my dorm,” he remembers, “and listen to DJ Brown Sugar [Belle Moore]” on WWOZ 90.7 FM. He admits to skipping class, a minimum of as soon as, to affix a second line. A jazz parade is led by a grand marshal, the honoree or honorees, and a brass band. The second line “is really just the people who come,” says Newman, the individuals who enthusiastically be part of the procession, and the individuals who watch from the aspect.

Some of the parades are annual celebrations organized by social help and pleasure golf equipment, such because the Young Men Olympian Junior Benevolent Association, the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club, and the Jolly Bunch Social Aid and Pleasure Club. Many of those organizations date again to the late nineteenth and early-to-mid twentieth centuries, when African Americans in New Orleans relied totally on mutual help in occasions of want. The membership selects the band and appoints the grand marshal, explains Newman. “It’s really a great honor to be made grand marshal.”

One photograph by Newman depicts Grand Marshal Nat Gray main the Pinstripe Brass Band within the Young Men Olympian Anniversary Parade. Gray was sweating. “It is brutally hot,” Newman attests. “It’s the hottest part of the day,” between 1:00pm and 5:00pm, as a result of that’s “when most people [are] around.” Newman wearing a t-shirt and shorts. “These guys [had to] dress in a shirt, tie and black pants, because, you know, they want to look good.” Also, it’s “very bright” exterior. “When I started shooting in New Orleans, my [photos] were overexposed.”

Another photograph by Newman reveals New Orleans icon Lionel Batiste, a co-founder of the Treme Brass Band, carrying his bass drum with a cymbal perched on high. Newman factors to the watch on Batiste’s wrist. “He’s got a [second] watch [wrapped] around his fingers,” says Newman. Batiste all the time joked, “I’ve got time on my hands.” Newman additionally factors to the bearded man behind the cymbal sporting a baseball cap. “I kept running into this guy with a camera,” Newman remembers, not realizing, “that’s Michael Smith!” When they lastly spoke, Newman exclaimed, “I know your photos! I saw your book in New York. You’re one of the reasons I’m here!”

Smith turned Newman’s mentor. His home was primarily a “museum of New Orleans memorabilia,” marveled Newman. “I ended up working out of his darkroom.” When “you walked in, there were clotheslines to hang prints, chemicals, boxes of paper, negative holders, the enlarger, and a couple of tanks for chemicals.” The partitions had been lined in images, or slightly, items of images. “He [cut out] the parts of the prints that he liked and stuck them up on the walls.”

“I just learned so much from him,” states Newsman. Smith maintained, “You’re taking something from the community when you take a picture,” so “always give something back.” Newman noticed “dozens of envelopes in his pockets” containing images, or slightly, items of images. “If I have a good picture of somebody I know, I trim it,” Smith instructed Newman, “and I put it in an envelope, and I know I’m going to run into them sooner or later, so I give it to them.” Newman thought, “that’s really wonderful,” so “I started carrying a pad and paper,” and “I would go up to people and say, I think I got a good picture of you. Can I have your name, your phone number and your address, and if it comes out, I’m going to send it to you, and people would just be so happy.” Newman says, “This was hugely important to me… growing as a person.”

Newman grew to understand everybody locally. “This is a really important guy,” he asserts, pointing to his photograph of Allison “Tootie” Montana, chief of a bunch of well-liked revelers who name themselves the “Yellow Pocahontas Mardi Gras Indians.” The “Mardi Gras Indians,” or “Black Masking Indians,” gown elaborately in costumes impressed by Native American and West African cultures. Tootie was the vanguard. That day, “the Sudan Social Aid and Pleasure Club honored him by making him the grand marshal,” explains Newman. “How do I look?” requested Tootie. “You look beautiful!” Newman replied. “My gosh, look at that diamond [ring], the sign says [Black] Diamond and [Tootie] is a Black diamond.” Pure serendipity.

Newman additionally photographed jazz funerals. The first was a public funeral for Arthur ‘Double A’ Washington,” the “Hubcap King,” marketed by the Zulu membership within the Times-Picayune. Double A offered hubcaps on Washington Avenue. Led by the household of the deceased and a brass band, a jazz funeral additionally generally entails a social help and pleasure membership, the staff of a funeral house, and a second line. “You start out slow,” says Newman, and proceed mournfully from a household house, a funeral house, or a church, to a cemetery. Once the deceased is laid to relaxation, “they will have cut [the person] loose” from “the world of toil and trouble.” At that time, “the parade will separate,” and “there will be joyful music to celebrate [the person’s] life.”

Newman was deeply moved by these occasions. “I started… putting the camera down, so that I could just experience it viscerally through my eyes and ears and chest and feet [and] legs… without the camera.” The neighborhood was “putting together this beautiful [event],” he states. Even in laborious occasions, they “could still present a face of beauty and grace and dignity and joy, despite the rest of the world trying to, you know, mash it into the ground.” It was pricey, however “this is what you did to celebrate life.”

As taught by Smith, Newman offered the Zulus with images of Double A’s funeral. “They got so much pleasure out of seeing the pictures,” he remembers. “I got invited to Zulu Hall [for] cold beer and some great red beans and rice. I even got a [Mardi Gras] coconut.” Newman was acknowledged once more in 1998 when he and anthropologist Helen Regis had been named honorary members of the Scene Boosters throughout their Annual Second Line Parade. “We got sashes with birds on them,” says Newman. “It was just the honor of a lifetime!”

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