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IKO, IKO

By Alison Fensterstock It was in the late ’60s that Quint Davis first heard Theodore Emile “Bo” Dollis singing. Both men were in their early 20s. Davis, the future New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival producer, was a Tulane undergraduate with a voracious interest in New Orleans music and street culture; Dollis, just a couple of years older, was already Big Chief of the Wild Magnolias Mardi Gras Indians. According to Jason Berry’s New Orleans music history, Up from the Cradle of Jazz , it was the photographer Jules Cahn, who had been shooting second-line parades and jazz funerals since the ’50s, who invited young Davis to a White Eagles Indian practice at a small Central City lounge. Davis brought a reel-to-reel tape recorder, and as he later listened to the chants and clattering percussion he’d captured, he found himself drawn in again and again by one element in particular: Dollis’ raspy, powerful, soulful voice. He sought the young chief out again with a request: Dollis should write a new Indian song, something original, and they’d make a record.

PHOTO BY GOLDEN G. RICHARD III

Davis was also a fan of keyboardist Willie Tee, who’d had several R&B hits — notably “Teasin’ You” — in the mid-’60s. Davis booked Tee, who would soon form the seminal New Orleans funk band the Gaturs, to play a show alongside Bo Dollis and the Wild Magnolias on Tulane’s campus. Onstage, the traditional sound of Indian chants, drums and tambourines met electric soul music, likely for the first time. “It was probably the first time that Mardi Gras Indian music had been done outside the culture,” Davis told OffBeat magazine’s David Kunian in a 2011 interview. “And Willie created the whole thing right there. He got up on piano and started playing with them and he went in and out and way in and way out, and it just happened.” Dollis went and wrote that new Indian song, and Davis put together a band led by Willie Tee, which included Snooks Eaglin on guitar, Alfred “Uganda” Roberts on congas, Joseph “Zigaboo” Modeliste on drums and a murderers’ row of New Orleans sidemen rounding it out. “Handa Wanda,” the first single by the Wild Magnolias, came out in

1970. Its follow-up, the first full-length Mardi Gras Indian funk album — with drumming, backing vocals and beadwork for the cover art by Big Chief Monk Boudreaux — was released in 1974 on the Polydor label. The Village Voice music critic Robert Christgau rated it among his top albums of the year in the newspaper’s annual Pazz & Jop poll, calling it “the most boisterous recorded party I know.” The Wild Magnolias weren’t the only group marrying electric New Orleans funk to the city’s older traditions in the ’70s. Along with their uncle, piano player George Landry — also known as Wild Tchoupitoulas Mardi Gras Indians founder Big Chief Jolly — the Neville Brothers participated in the recording of a masterful platter of Indian funk with The Wild Tchoupitoulas in 1976. Zigaboo Modeliste, who also played with Art Neville in the Meters, drummed on the Tchoupitoulas release as well. In the early ’70s, the success of the Wild Magnolias’ and Wild Tchoupitoulas’ funky amalgamations drew eyes and ears from aroundtheworld,sparkingnewdocumentary

interest in what had been a relatively secret, highly localized African-American tradition. Journalists, photographers and filmmakers began chasing the story behind the wild men and women in their elaborately beaded and feathered suits who took to the streets on Carnival Day, banging drums and shouting chants in a hybrid language. But the original roots of the largely unwritten tradition remain mysterious still, as Berry writes in Up from the Cradle of Jazz : “Where does it all begin?” he asks. “Written sources offer small assistance: no letters culled from dusty trunks. Timeworn memories, lodged in the minds of aging men, guide us down the path.” Some historians note that the plumed and beaded suits of New Orleans Mardi Gras Indians, or Black Indians, bear resemblance to costumes seen in the carnival celebrations of Latin America and the Caribbean, regions whose cultural influence is strong in New Orleans. Another long-held piece of the tale points to Native Americans who took in and sheltered enslaved Africans in Louisiana when they had escaped their captors. The particular language of the chants, familiar

12 ROUSES JANUARY FEBRUARY 2021