“Ten years have gone, it’s a better day.”
— David Montana, Big Chief, Washitaw Mardi Gras Nation
The living room in Big Chief David Montana‘s house in Mid-City is crowded but peaceful. Friends and family members roam in and out, gathering to talk about memories, current events and everyday life. Montana’s blue suit, from last year’s Mardi Gras, towers over everyone, while bits and pieces of a new one in the making are spread over a nearby table.
Montana is talking with Joe Lastie. The Preservation Hall Jazz Band drummer is a member of a family with a long tradition of music that starts with his grandfather Frank Lastie who introduced the drums to the church in New Orleans in the 1930s, and also counts uncles Melvin, Walter and David Lastie, Jesse Hill and cousins Herlin Riley, James Andrews and Troy “Trombone Shorty” Hill.
Lastie is interested in the origin of the lyrics of his newly released song “New Orleans in Me,” which were adapted from Montana’s poem “The Change of Heart Man.”
“I am the change of heart man. See, I had a hard heart when I left here. It was like steel, because I was looking at stuff that was going down, so I was overprotective of myself, and not opening up to people.” said Montana, remembering fleeing the storm for New York in 2005. “By the time I got through the journey, it changed my heart to see how people opened their arms to us.”
“That was a poem that touched a lot of people, from all walks of life,” says Darrell Davis, who helped adapt the poem for Lastie’s song, and added tambourine and chants to the final recording.
Montana, like a lot of people who were displaced by Katrina, took a long journey to New York on a Greyhound bus, stopping in Texarkana, Arkansas, where he experienced a form of generosity and hospitality that left a mark.
“When I got to New York, I got a strange feeling about me. I said ‘I gotta write something about this journey I had.” When Montana got to the house where he stayed, in Jamaica, Queens, he found good conditions and a good set up for looking back, pondering and writing. “I wrote that poem in about two hours,” he says.
Ten years later, Lastie was trying to find a way to express similar feelings, get them off of his chest. Piece by piece, he wrote this song, basing it off of what he calls “Joe’s beat,” then adding a tuba line, a bridge, and so on.
Through the Tremé Brass Band’s Benny Jones, Lastie, who was looking for a Mardi Gras Indian to chant on his project, got a chance to meet Montana and hear the “Change of Heart Man.”
Joe Lastie remembers hearing the poem for the first time. “I said ‘that’s it.’ It hit my heart, I said ‘I don’t have to hear no more.’ I told him that. ‘I don’t have to hear no more. That’s what I want.'”
