The LPO Goes Indie
City orchestras across America share a problem.
People think classical music is a good thing, but that doesn’t mean they’ll pay to see it in the numbers orchestras need. They hope to find new audiences by booking broadly accessible performances including free shows in parks where a lovely night is the real star, or some kind of pop show.
The Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra (LPO) has played its share of those, including symphonic treatments of the music of Led Zeppelin and Queen. Those shows had conceptual limits because orchestras can be powerful, but they can’t rock. Fans of bands like those were always going to walk away pleased enough but a little let down, as were fans of classical music who found even the most inventive orchestrations a little simple since there’s a limit to how much anyone can dress up even the most florid classic rock.
The LPO has addressed the outreach problem with variations on those strategies. On October 3, they’ll perform the score to accompany a screening of James Whale’s 1931 film Frankenstein; and on October 30 they’ll play symphonic versions of Joe Hisaishi’s music from Studio Ghibli Japanese animated classics including Spirited Away and Howl’s Moving Castle (without scenes from films).
Instead of revisiting classic rock favorites, the LPO has embraced New Orleans’ indie music community. This fall they’ll collaborate with rapper Alfred Banks (October 29) and the genre-agnostic Lilli Lewis (November 19), pairing each of them with scaled down versions of the LPO in shows at the New Orleans Jazz Market billed as “Market Nights.” On November 21, DJ Mannie Fresh will play the Orpheum Theater with the full LPO.
Amanda Bohren, the LPO’s Director of Education & Strategic Initiatives, says they made this choice because New Orleans’ music fans could sniff out the bait-and-switch at the heart of the classic rock shows. “They’re used to something more genuine,” she says.
The series started with Tank and the Bangas collaborating with the LPO at a show scheduled for 2020, though COVID pushed it back into 2022. The series also led to a Grammy for the LPO when it released Live: Orpheum Theater NOLA, a recording of its performance with the Lost Bayou Ramblers that won the 2023 award for Best Regional Roots Music Album. Those pairings made sense. Both bands had proven track records, and their music could logically be paired with the LPO. The Lost Bayou Ramblers’ fiddle-led sound has been enhanced by orchestras in the past, and Tank and the Bangas’ elaborate art-R&B can be extrapolated in a number of musical directions.
Hip-hop, on the other hand, would seem like a test of the concept. Can the music and cultures coexist in mutually supportive ways? Can an orchestra be rhythmically nimble enough for hip-hop? Can the LPO play dance music?
Big Freedia’s version of “Gin in My System” with the full orchestra said yes. The groove was not as extreme and propulsive as it is on record when they played it in 2023 at the Orpheum, but Freedia’s dancer had no problem soloing to it. That’s in part due to Big Freedia, whose percussive, intensely rhythmic delivery makes her voice another instrument.
The hip-hop shows rely on the people involved to make the collaboration work. Khris Royal served as Big Freedia’s band leader, and his experience playing funk in New Orleans after being trained at the Berklee College of Music made it possible for him to bridge the cultures and create music that represented the bars that gave birth to Big Freedia as effectively as the formal presentation they inhabited.
When Alfred Banks first played a Market Night in 2024, he brought ANTWIGADEE!, the DJ he refers to as Twig, with him to trigger percussive sounds with his MPC. Banks wanted sounds associated with hip-hop as part of his show in addition to the sound of the orchestra. He felt it was important to keep the sound grounded in a DJ’s palette because “I’m a rapper, not the lead singer of a band,” Banks says. “A rapper goes with a DJ.”
Twig helped Banks sound like Banks—sweetened, musically more elaborate, but not at the expense of the groove. When Otura Mun’s electro-Yoruban group ÌFÉ played with 14 pieces of the LPO in 2024, the union made his song “Fireflies” so compelling that the chair dancing energy in the New Orleans Jazz Market was both palpable and visible. The hypnotic spiral that he created with live and looped instruments on 0000+0000 became richer and more propulsive in concert when he spread those parts across a broader musical spectrum.
The LPO’s Sixto Franco helped Mun arrange his music for the performance, and Mun appreciated the sensitivity with which Franco approached the song. “He took a repeating falsetto vocal line that I had looped and moved the melody from strings to oboe to trumpets, to trombone and back to cello with a gracefulness and elegance that just about brought me to tears.”
Mun played all the parts when he recorded the album, so the tracks were limited by where he was in his musical journey as well as the instruments at his disposal. “Sixto is an amazing arranger and was able to take my ideas and develop them into something with a richness and depth that surpasses my musical vocabulary, supporting and lifting my voice in ways that I never imagined possible,” he says.
The world of classical music has traditionally been held in higher esteem than popular music, and even though high art/low art divisions are more fluid than they once were, the classical world still carries a frisson of elevation. Mun dressed for ÍFÈ’s performance in a tux and bowtie to honor the moment.
Banks won’t say that the experience was validating, “because my music was pretty valid without the orchestra,” but he admits, “It felt really cool.”
Lilli Lewis is still trying to decide what she’ll wear, and she’s doing the show in part because, she says, “the more I got to know how collaborative music really works, I got addicted to that ride.”
She’s thought about what each party gets from the pairing and sees herself giving at least as much as she’s getting. “The truth is, the classical arena is dying, and probably needs out-of-the-box collaborations more than the collaborating artists need the box,” Lewis says. “There may not be as much room for canon or new works as there used to be, but what idiom survives if it’s not ‘for the people’? Where the musicians can offer aesthetic elevation, these visiting artists can offer renewal, revival—perhaps even survival.”
For more info on the LPO and their full schedule, check out lpomusic.com.
For more Alex Rawls musings, check out myspiltmilk.com and @myspiltmilk on socials.
Photo by Steven Hatley: Lost Bayou Ramblers perform with the LPO at the Orpheum Theater, November 2024
