New Orleans has always been a town driven by music and now a new generation of brass bands playing both traditional and new material is blowing life back into neighborhood parties, jazz funerals, and jazz itself. Danny Barker, age 80 and still playing, is the father of this brass resurgence. Before he came on the scene, New Orleans' brass bands were dying out, victims of a tourist business that commercialized the music and musicians who failed to pass on the tradition. Barker began organizing young boys into marching bands at the Fairview Baptist Church in the late 1960s, teaching them the old music. Greg Davis and Dr. Michael White both started out with Barker and continued the tradition. Davis heads the high-powered and controversial Dirty Dozen Brass Band and Dr. White is a member of the old-line Young Tuxedo. Parades and jazz funerals are back, too, as part of the city's great parading tradition. Local clubs sponsor these lively processions that weave in and out of neighborhood streets--and in and out of local bars--in a festival of swirling color and sound. National Geographic joins Barker on the Creole Queen riverboat to hear his version of New Orleans' shining brass past, and takes part in a boisterous trek through town with two of the Big Easy's best known bands, the Dirty Dozen and the Young Tuxedo, for a picture of that tradition today.