What better way to celebrate the new year than attending a funeral.
Morbid? Perhaps.
But saying good bye to the year just passed can be just the ticket to a rolicking good time in New Orleans where burying the dead is another excuse to throw a party, said Kevin Yeates of the Creole Jazz Band.
His quartet will be bringing its Dixieland dirge to the King of Life Lutheran Church in Coquitlam on Jan. 1 for an authentic New Orleans jazz funeral.
Yeates said it’s an appropriate way to clear the deck for the year ahead by washing away the troubles and regrets of the old year with music.
“2017 is dead, it’s behind us,” Yeates said.
This will be the third New Year’s New Orleans jazz funeral for the quartet — they’re actually a quintet in search of a new banjo player — that’s been together for more than 15 years. Yeates discovered the ceremony through a jazz message board on the internet when he had a discussion with another musician who’d led such a concert in Germantown, Penn., for 15 years. He sent along an outline as well as videos, and from there the group just had to find a host.
Enter pastors Kathy Martin, Eric Krushel and Marlys Moen of King of Life and Good Shepherd Lutheran churches in Coquitlam, and Mount Zion Lutheran Church in New Westminster; they saw an opportunity to bring their congregations together for reflection on the year passed and anticipation for the year ahead.
“It’s a way for us to come together as a community, sing some great music to help us mark the end of the old year and the beginning of the new one,” Martin said.
The concert is patterned just as a real live New Orleans’ death march; when mourners walk the casket from the church to the cemetry an accompanying jazz band plays traditional hyms like Just a Closer Walk With Thee and Swing Low, Sweet Chariot at a slow, solemn tempo. But once the deceased is laid to rest, the music livens and the celebration of life begins. Sometimes it will even veer into a bar or two.
Yeates said instead of burying an unfortunate parishioner, “mourners” at King of Life will be able to write their laments and regrets on a slip of paper which they can place in a box. At the concert’s midpoint, the symbolic coffin is marched outside and the messages burned. And that’s when the party hits full swing.
“It’s amazing how taking this one hour event can be so cathartic,” Yeates said. “You get your new year started in the right direction.”
Pastor Krushel said the funeral becomes a celebration of “hope, freedom and promise.”
• The New Orleans Jazz Funeral will be held 2 to 3 p.m., Jan. 1, at King of Life Lutheran Church, 1198 Falcon Dr., Coquitlam. It will be followed by a light “funeral” tea. Admission is free.
