As carnival season reaches its peak, the renegades of Julu meet TBC Brass Band for a Mardi Gras celebration in the streets.

Shot by Jessie Torrisi with the N95 8GB; edited by Anna Holtzman.

Mardi Gras is not just a day, it’s a grand finale. It’s the culmination of months of planning, three weeks of parades (watch my Krewe du Vieux and Endymion videos if you haven’t already) and a long weekend of citywide celebration.

For a city with just over 300,000 people - a third less than it had before Katrina - the creative outpouring is monumental. And it seems that as many characters as you meet here, there are just as many ways to celebrate.

For me, Mardi Gras was all about Julu this year. Because watching parades was cool, but being part of a parade was unforgettable.

Julu is what many might call a renegade parade. Basically, you round up your friends and acquaintances, you go all out with costumes, you get a band and you hit the streets.

The Krewe du Ju met noon Fat Tuesday at Bridge Lounge, a cavernous bar with photos full of dogs hanging everywhere. This meant waking up early enough to eat a real breakfast (carnival is about endurance, after all), put on my wig, apply four colors of eyeshadow and bike through the French Quarter and two parades just to get there.

When I arrived, I wandered the crowd, close to 100 people, in an ecstatic daze with camera in hand. So many creative costumes: zombies, debutantes, a man dressed as a jilted bride; a toddler playing a toy trumpet, pink bunnies, yellow bumblebees. It was like we’d been waiting to find each other forever. On Mardi Gras, your costume isn’t just a costume, it’s your identity for the day. Once you’ve shed your everyday clothes and are a million miles from your boring Tuesday routine, you’re emboldened.

An hour and a half later, though, the crowd was getting antsy. No one wanted to drink too much too early in the day. Why haven’t we started marching yet? Where was the band? Finally, TBC Brass Band - the band I’d met at Krewe du Vieux, my very first New Orleans parade - arrived on the scene. TBC consists mostly of great young musicians who have been playing together since high school. Although Katrina scattered its members from Philadelphia to Dallas, TBC was able to get enough of its members together for a big, booming sound that made for the perfect parade.

There’s a brilliant logic to Julu, and it’s this: If you start marching in the warehouse district, to get over to Frenchmen Street (where all parties collide sooner or later), you have to criss-cross under the highway several times. And you haven’t lived until you’ve heard a brass band under an overpass. Everything echoes - bigger, boomier, more hypnotic than any concert I’ve been to. It’s like singing in the shower while being bathed in afternoon sunlight, surrounded by 100 people having the time of their lives.

We stopped for a while, just marching and dancing and chanting in place. We’d hit the sweet spot - sonically and in every other way. It was five raucous minutes to remember.

As we hit St. Charles, we were almost swallowed by the official celebration - huge floats, masses of people. We nearly lost one another, then slowly reassembled on the other side, on a street narrow enough that the sound of the brass enveloped us once more.

Jessie Torrisi is a professional musician and journalist who has spent the last decade living in Brazil, Cameroon and Brooklyn, NY. On New Year’s Day 2008, she moved to New Orleans, where she spent five months writing music, learning second line drumbeats and shooting videos about Mardi Gras and life after Hurricane Katrina.

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