At the beginning of Katrina Ballads, Ted Hearne’s remarkable, omnivorous musical masterpiece, a finger slides along the strings on the inside of a piano. A woman’s voice hauntingly warns us: “Nawlins… Nawlins is sinking.” The full band gradually joins in, adding keening strings and an uptempo percussion line tapped out like morse code on a high hat. The woman’s voice continues:

And its main buffer from a hurricane
The protective Mississippi River Delta
Is quickly eroding away
Leaving the historic city
Perilously closer to disaster

Wait a moment, you might be asking yourself at this point. These are lyrics? Well, yes and no. This remarkable song cycle’s libretto is taken entirely from found text surrounding the events that shook our nation three years ago.

The flooding of New Orleans is such a dense and complex moment in contemporary American history that completely unpacking it may take decades. On one level, we have the disaster itself, the raw human drama, and epic tragedy of a city underwater. On the next, you have the unspeakable way our nation treats its poor — the disaster that the hurricane both revealed and exacerbated. Then you have the second disaster of those urban poor attempting to survive in the midst of flooding and bureaucratic incompetence. Woven throughout, you have the media reporting on and becoming the story: Anderson Cooper projecting his empathy in full HD, weathermen being knocked down by Katrina’s wrath, photographs of George W. Bush observing aloof on Airforce One, and the unforgettable heckuva job that Brownie did.

Katrina Ballads provides new space for us to investigate all of the above and our feelings surrounding it, by setting the events to music. The 11 songs utilize text of both famous moments and lesser-known first-person accounts of the storm. Most haunting of these is Hardy Jackson, who lost his wife in the storm and was unable to find her body. It is one thing to read someone discussing his wife’s death; it is quite another to experience Anthony Turner singing, “I held her hand tight as I could / And she told me / You can’t hold me / You can’t hold me / She said / Take care of our kids,” as the music gradually breaks apart, leaving just his rich Baritone climbing into its upper register, the melodic equivalent of a man breaking down into tears.

Lest you think that the entire album is nothing but difficult, off-kilter harmonies, arrhythmic string arrangements, and grief, there’s a wide variety of musical and emotional experiences within Katrina Ballads. Like the city of New Orleans itself, Hearne’s songs treat music expansively, breaking down the boundaries of genre with little regard for rules or trends of music. When a song needs to switch genres, it does. When pure beauty is called for, it happens. The wordless “When We Awoke, It Was To That Familiar Phrase - New Orleans Dodged a Bullet” uses electronic looping of a French Horn track to slowly build a beautiful, haunting jazz rendition of a giant storm that is both thrilling and terrific (in the literal sense) at once. The song “Barbara Bush - 9.5.05″ hilariously renders her out-of-touch assertion that things are “working out pretty well” for Katrina refugees as a light jazz softshoe number, heightening the irony.

Two tracks stand out for their formal ambition and balls-to-the-wall power. The first is “Brownie, You’re Doing a Heck of a Job,” in which Hearne himself sings different configurations of George Bush’s inept phrase over and over again. It changes from hilarious to outrageous to ugly to angry and back, as the band punctuates with horn and percussion stabs, while the piano (played, full disclosure, by an old friend of mine) launches us briefly into more straightforward jazz territory before the whole thing wrecks itself all over again. What seems at first to be barely controlled chaos is revealed in under three minutes to be a tightly controlled mini-masterpiece. Like Bush’s statement, the song is horrifying and outrageous while remaining shot throughout with gallows of humor.

The second standout is “Kanye West - 9.2.05″ in which West’s impromptu speech — you know, the one that ended with “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” — is rendered in a tour de force that must be heard to be believed (you can hear a live excerpt here). What starts with simple, lilting piano and a monotone voice builds gradually into a huge spectacle of echoing harmonies complete with hand claps, foot stomps, and complex spiraling horn arrangements that call to mind Quincy Jones’s score for In Cold Blood and 1970s Stevie Wonder. The song is held together and kept aloft by Isaiah Robinson’s crystal clear tenor vocals, and although we’ve heard West’s indictment before, the musical recontextualizing demands that we listen in a new way.

What follows is the album’s final track, “Ashley Nelson,” a first person account of (barely) surviving the storm amidst dehydration and delirium. Taken from an episode of This American Life, Ashley Nelson’s story functions as a kind of epilogue, as it looks back on the storm and her experience in the past tense. After the catharsis of Kanye West’s outrage rendered in jubilant vocals and full band, “Ashley Nelson” also functions as a corrective, deliberately frustrating our desire to wrap up the album with a tight little bow and dismiss it. The song never settles on a groove for very long. Hearne keeps the listener off balance, never knowing quite what’s around the corner — his music mimicking Nelson’s madness as she hallucinates “water bottles” and as she tells us, “I would sit and rock and think, `is the world going to turn to hell and we all gonna burn?’” Ending with the heartbreaking — and heartbroken — question for George Bush: “What do you mean by that? He’s doing a good job?” The reeds echo the keening melody written for Nelson for a minute and then, just as suddenly as the album begins, its over.

Hearne’s denial of closure for the listener is vital to the album’s success. Katrina Ballads finishes with an open-ended question that, to this day, has never been resolved, just as the disaster of Katrina has left our society with a number of questions it doesn’t want to face. How should we treat our poor? What role should the government play in the survival of its citizens? Who should be held accountable? As we move forward with the reconstruction of New Orleans, even more questions arise. Who will benefit from the rebuilt city? Why is the Government destroying public housing? Why will we spend $85 billion dollars without blinking to save AIG while New Orleans seeks foreign aid to rebuild? Have we no decency, at long last?

Katrina Ballads is available as a digital download here. Isaac Butler’s other writing is available here.

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