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Rise Up is the fourth album by the twice Grammy-nominated, New Orleans-based Afro-Indigenous funk collective Cha Wa. The title refers to the progression of the band from acclaimed regional performers to an accomplished band coming into its own to make its most mature and accessible album yet. 

Featuring an ensemble of singers — including guest appearances by The Soul Queen of New Orleans Irma Thomas, John Boutte’ (HBO’s Treme’), and guest keyboards by Roger Joseph Manning (Beck, Jay-Z)—as well as stellar songwriting led by founding musical director and drummer Joe Gelini, the album is a tour de force of original R&B funk anthems poised to export Cha Wa to the world’s stage. 

Produced, mixed and mastered by Dave Trumfio (Wilco, Jesus and Mary Chain, My Morning Jacket, Built to Spill, etc.), Rise Up’s crowning achievement is how compellingly its 11 tracks draw on Cha Wa’s foundation as New Orleans musical royalty, especially the band’s enigmatic Mardi Gras Indian frontman, “Spyboy” Irving “Honey” Banister Jr. of the Golden Sioux Tribe. Through its range of original songs, the album elevates its singers to frontmen and its musicians to compelling songwriters in their own right.

A Big Chief’s got a golden crown
They sew all year/They won't bow down Drummers marching all around/Singing spy boy take me down

Healing, revealing/Nothing can beat that feeling and all my pain goes away…

That’s why I’m singing to you

—“Music is my Medicine”

Trumfio’s own introduction to the band came during Mardi Gras 2023, where the producer, a newcomer to Cha Wa’s rich cultural background, promptly joined the members on their renowned annual march as a part of the holiday’s festivities. “What struck me was the potential for the traditional chants they were doing to be turned into anthems,” he recalls. Trumfio says he and the band took inspiration from Paul Simon’s Graceland and the ensemble of Buena Vista Social Club to record an album that honored its roots but also created a broader platform for the band and its members, many of them already Crescent City icons, to tell their stories, musically and culturally, to the rest of the world.

As such, Rise Up features the booming and gospel-infused lead vocals from Josh Kagler along with a wide array of Cha Wa members. On any given track, horn players Cameron Clark and Tajh Derosier, female back-up singers led by Jay Sutton and sisters Whitney and Jessica Mixon, as well as the heart and soul of Cha Wa, Mardi Gras Indian royalty “Spyboy Honey” Banister, trade poignant verses over horn- and hook-driven arrangements. With the added melodies of keyboardist Rik Fletcher and lead guitarist TJ Nathan, the result is an album that Trumfio says, “plays like a mixtape of the very best elements of Mardi Gras Indian Funk in these incredible pop songs.”

Spyboy walking down the street

Knows which way to go

Shows which way the tribe can creep

Spyboy 

Gonna Stay up all night 

Til we see the sunshine 

Gonna set my soul free 

And Feel the spirit hit me 

—“Freedom of the City” 

From the album’s opening piano roll, the album’s title track is a stomp-and-clap, take-you-to-church introduction to the “hiding in plain sight” Mardi Gras Indian phenomena — and also a testament to Cha Wa’s and New Orleans’ perseverance. As “Spyboy Honey” Banister, son of famed New Orleans’ guitarist Irving Banister (James Brown, etc.), proclaims, “We’re the last pure culture in New Orleans, but this is the first time we’re telling our story, how we paid our dues, talking about what we go through, as people and a community, how we keep going. The lyric, ‘Today we shout our truth out loud/It should be every day’—that’s us saying, it’s not just us in New Orleans on Mardi Gras. Anyone, anywhere can relate to it. It’s universal.”

Which explains songs like “Music is My Medicine,” a feel-good funk cousin of Sly and the Family Stone with a message as universal as its sound is uplifting. Likewise, “Freedom of the City” combines the soul drawl of Edwin Starr and punch of Kool and the Gang horns to deliver a deep message of pride, yes, but also humility. The song is especially resonant for singer/saxophonist Tajh Derosier, who himself was inducted into the Golden Sioux Tribe since joining Cha Wa two years ago. “My family is Haitian and Native American, so I naturally related to Honey on a deeper level,” he explains. Joining the Golden Sioux, he says, profoundly deepened his understanding of the lyrics and how he sang them. “The song is about St. Joseph’s Night, an annual New Orleans tradition where the Mardi Gras Indian tribes take over, but not in an organized parade march,” Derosier explains. “‘‘Freedom of the city’ doesn’t mean freedom of the streets— You’ve got your ‘Spyboy’ ahead of you as a lookout to see if another tribe is coming, so you give each other the right of way. So the song is really about the respect we share that’s a big part of that freedom.”

“Revival” is the stunning ballad at the heart of the album, with John Boutte’ (HBO’s Treme’) leading a stirring call-and-response that mixes an inner-city blues with the charisma worthy of Seal. It’s a song, Derosier explains, inspired by tragedy but driven by hope. “I taught a student in an afterschool program that passed away, and a lot of other musicians had lost loved ones,” he says. “Really the song’s about the hustle taking its toll and the grind that’s always there, but we keep coming together as a community to keep going.”

These standouts are bookended with meticulously melodic funk workouts with escalating vocal exchanges and dizzyingly catchy horn arrangements. “Why You Wanna Do Me Like That?” features soul legend Irma Thomas on a classic, New Orleans-style blues stomp. At the same time, tracks like “Hear the Sound” and “Heavy is the Head” give Spyboy Honey his own, mood-heavy throne from which to share his most unique of histories. As the melodic chorus says, “Big Chief coming from way uptown/Heavy is the head that wears the crown.”

“The song is literally about how heavy my headdress is, but it’s also about everything I’ve had to go through and the responsibility I have to our culture when I wear it,” Honey says. Derosier says the arrangement of the track reflects its gravity. “We made it more spacious with vibraphone, so it’s got this sort of mystical mood, like, ‘The King is about to speak.’”

It should be no surprise that Cha Wa also has its own most unique history. The story begins in 1996 when Joe Gelini, a kid from Connecticut studying drumming at Berklee College of Music in Boston, attends a show by New Orleans drummer Idris Muhammad. Intrigued, Gelini approached the legend for a lesson. “He said come by my hotel about noon,” Gelini remembers. “I booked a rehearsal space at school and he spent the afternoon teaching me.”

Gelini then moved to New Orleans after graduation, immersing himself in its music culture. “I’d grown up going to shows where people responded to bands with a polite golf-clap,” he recalls. “In New Orleans, it was the total opposite—the audience interacted with the band the whole time; they were a huge part of the show.” From humble beginnings on a bass drum in a second line march, Gelini graduated to playing with and becoming the musical director for Monk Boudreaux, Big Chief of the Golden Eagles tribe of Mardi Gras Indians.

Hear the sound/The Big Chief, he gonna break it down/Yeah, the Big Chief he gonna take it down/Mardi Gras Indian/Cowbells Caribbean

Bass drum oblivion/Chanting Olympian

Flagboy honey running down

Wild Magnolias with golden crowns

Creole Wild West the first the best

Only the prettiest pass the test

—“Hear the Sound”

The Mardi Gras Indian phenomena is itself a fascinating fusion of America’s two original sins: the marginalization of the Native American and slavery. Evolving from runaway slaves who were welcomed and assimilated into local Indian tribes, the Mardi Gras Indian was so named for tribal members who would create elaborate ceremonial suits and headdresses made of velvet and thousands of beads to wear as bright disguises to march in Mardi Gras parades (“hiding in plain sight”). 

Their music, Gelini recognized, was especially enigmatic, and, frankly, important. “It’s some of the oldest American folk music, especially in the call-and-response style,” he offers, “it just seemed natural to put it to funk music, following in the footsteps of groups like the Wild Magnolias and the Wild Tchoupitoulas in the mid 20th century.” By 2014, Cha Wa (Mardi Gras Indian slang for “here we come” in many contexts) had become a proper band centered around its Mardi Gras Indians. Three albums followed: Funk n Feathers in 2016, Spyboy in 2018, and My People in 2021. The latter two were Grammy-nominated for Best Regional Roots Album. The band also delivered a rapturous NPR Tiny Desk performance during the pandemic at Preservation Hall in full Mardi Gras Indian regalia, wearing their hand-woven technicolor suits.

But where Cha Wa’s previous records were indeed roots records—mixing traditional songs with reverent nods to New Orlean legends like The Meters, Neville Brothers and Dr. John— Rise Up is the sound of a band that’s paid its dues coming into its own to make an album as compelling as the culture it represents. It’s an album full of crossover potential with a sound as universal as it is unifying. Rise Up’s songwriting matches its musicianship to deliver a timeless and timely message of perseverance, survival, triumph, celebration, and, most of all, freedom. Says Gelini, “We attempted to make a record that would be as enthralling and inspiring as the rich musical culture I experienced when I first learned of it 25 years ago.”