“All of your cares, all of your worries, I don’t care if you just had something very tragic that happened to you in your life, once that band gives you that downbeat, whomp, and that music is right and it’s powerful and it’s strong, just for that brief two or three minutes you forget every problem that you had, you have no cares in the world,” says one of the people interviewed in “The Whole Gritty City.” “It must be nice to actually live like that, with no cares in the world.”
The 90-minute documentary by directors Richard Barber and Andre Lumberton, which will be screened on June 2 at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans, focuses on three school marching bands from New Orleans trying to transcend the struggles of that city. “The film follows kids growing up in America’s most musical city,” the filmmakers write, “and one of its most dangerous, as their band directors get them ready to perform in the Mardi Gras parades.”