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Tisch Library Undergraduate Research Award Winner, 2018. Since the late 1800s, many in the black community of New Orleans have honored their dead with a brass band processional commonly referred to as a jazz funeral. A large cohort of musicians and a “second line” of dancers lead family and friends, as well as unrelated community members, in a musical journey to and from the burial site. Traditionally, ... read morethe music transitions from a slow dirge to spirituals to upbeat jazz numbers as the parade moves throughout the city to visit important sites of the deceased. The practice is rooted in Yoruba funerary traditions, the annual Haitian Vodou festival Rara, and the burial practices of slaves in America. While funerary rituals commemorate the deceased, they transmit important messages about what it means to lead an ethical life through their approach to death. This paper examines both the historical and the musico-performative aspects of jazz funerals within the framework of normative ethics. It argues that the jazz funeral tradition of New Orleans promotes an ethics of communal obligation and humanitarianism, as well as virtues of survival and resistance for an oppressed people.read less
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