With Treme, the creator of The Wire takes on life in post-Katrina New Orleans and serves up spring’s best new drama.

by Wayne Curtis

Wendell Pierce sways down a New Orleans street to a big tuba beat amid a happy crowd near the Claiborne Avenue underpass. He’s following the Rebirth Brass Band, which is ripping out a rough-edged version of “Do Whatcha Wanna” while a pair of cameramen shooting for Treme — the new HBO series created by David Simon — hustles alongside, catching Pierce’s every move. After a few minutes, the cameras lower and leave. Pierce doesn’t even seem to notice — he’s still bobbing down the street with a cigarette in one hand and a Budweiser in the other, nodding to the deep, brassy sound reverberating under the concrete span.

Pierce, known for his masterful portrayal of Bunk Moreland in Simon’s The Wire, really serves two roles in Treme, whose ensemble cast includes John Goodman, Steve Zahn, and a raft of New Orleans musicians. Pierce plays Antoine Batiste, a streetwise trombone player striving to reassemble his life in post- Katrina New Orleans. But as a native New Orleanian, Pierce is also an informal, behind-the-scenes translator of the city’s culture for the cast and crew. Simon has said that Pierce understands that in New Orleans, “the nuances have nuances.”

Capturing those nuances is what makes Treme. The series is, at heart, about how people save culture and are in turn saved by it. The scene opens three months after the flood, as cooks, musicians, DJs, lawyers, and others filter back in to town to salvage what’s left and rebuild what’s not. “It’s what the blues idiom is about,” Pierce says. “The blues is not, ‘I ain’t got no shoes,’ but ‘I ain’t got no shoes, and I’m still gonna walk to Chicago.’ It’s the triumph in spite of everything.”

For Pierce, the survival of the city is highly personal. He grew up five miles north of the French Quarter in the middle-class African- American enclave of Pontchartrain Park, which was badly flooded when the canal walls failed. His parents’ house had to be rebuilt from the inside out, with just a brick facade remaining. Dismayed by the slow progress citywide, Pierce rolled up his sleeves a few years ago, launching the Pontchartrain Park Community Development Corporation to aid in the city’s reconstruction and help make his old neighborhood whole again.

“I came back to start this project, and now I’m on my third year,” he says with a smile of disbelief. “I have houses in L.A. and Manhattan, and I’ve been living out of a suitcase at my momma’s house, with my daddy complaining that I didn’t put the toilet seat down. It’s joyful and scary all at the same time.

“But I’m still here,” he says, rolling into a rumbling laugh. “And that’s the thing that makes me shake my head. I’m still here.” (Treme premieres April 11 on HBO at 10 pm.)