November 11, 2005

Thanksgiving on the Gulf Coast will be especially poignant this year coming as it does near the official end of a disastrous hurricane season.

"The Episcopal Church Presents: Gulf Coast Thanksgivings," documenting the challenges and joys of rebuilding the Gulf Coast, will be broadcast on the Time Warner Cable network on Thanksgiving Day, November 24.

The 30-minute program, produced by the church's Office of Communication, will air on nearly every Time Warner cable system in the United States. Channels are still being determined. All channel and time information is posted and will be updated at the church's online visitors' center, http://www.comeandgrow.org/.

The program will also be available at http://www.comeandgrow.org/ as a webcast. It will be available in Windows Media and Real Media versions, in both high and low speeds.

A Thanksgiving commercial advertising the broadcast is available at http://www.comeandgrow.org/tvspots.htm. For local listings and schedule chart visit: http://www.comeandgrow.org/tgservicechart.htm.

"It's incredibly important that we continue to inform the public about the ongoing situation in that region," said Michael Collins, director of broadcast and multimedia for the communications office. "The problem isn't fixed because the story isn't in the headlines every day anymore. The humanitarian crisis is going to continue for a long time and we all need to be aware of that."

Plans call for the program to include footage and interviews from Mississippi and Louisiana, as well as Newark, New Jersey, where a large extended family displaced from New Orleans is now living.

The program will feature excerpts from a November 17 concert at New Orleans' Christ Church Cathedral which will debut "All the Saints," performed by a 16-member big band from the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra. The concert is part of four days of celebrations marking the cathedral congregation's bicentennial. The program will include clips from other parts of the celebrations.

The bicentennial recalls the day when the Rev. Philander Chase – later the first Episcopal bishop of both Ohio and Illinois – conducted the first service of Christ Church, the first non-Roman Catholic Church in the Louisiana Purchase territories, at a public building on Jackson Square called the Cabildo, on November 17, 1805.

After the city was devastated by Hurricane Katrina on August 29, the staff of the cathedral was determined to continue with the celebration while remembering all that had happened during the hurricane and its aftermath.

"All the Saints," commissioned by the cathedral through its concert fund with contributions from Anglicans around the world, "is a gift from the Episcopal Church to the people of the City of New Orleans who have suffered so much. It's a way of laying to rest all that has happened while remembering to move forward in God's grace as we begin the process of rebuilding," cathedral dean the Very Rev. David duPlantier writes on the cathedral's website, http://www.cccnola.org.

"The piece will essentially embody a New Orleans jazz funeral," composer Irvin Mayfield, Grammy-nominated trumpet artist and founding artistic director of the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra, says on the cathedral's website.

"It will consist of three major movements: first there will be a jazz funeral – here the music will resemble a slow funeral march proceeding down the streets of New Orleans in which the corpse of the former New Orleans will be carried; second there will be a memorial service – after we have marched the deceased city down the streets, there will be a memorial service and the music will reflect this by memorializing the tragedy that occurred in the aftermath of Katrina; and third there will be a celebratory procession – as naturally occurred in the streets of New Orleans, the music will celebrate life and glory, and a processional, a second line, will take us out of death and into the next phase, which is rebirth."

Mayfield says that the historic music will be a blues piece that will include Negro spirituals, chain gang chants, call-and-response, and field hollers rolled into a big jazz funeral event. Using jazz, with its blues roots, is appropriate, Mayfield adds.

"Through the blues, you take the pain and suffering and turn it on its head, look at it, celebrate its passing through as a part of life, and move on," he says.

Episcopal News Service