New Orleans jazz funerals are casualty of Katrina

Found this on Post-Gazette.com. Read the full article here.

Few cities bury their dead in the high style of New Orleans, where funerals can last a week, feature jazz bands as well as parades and draw bigger crowds than weddings do. But those traditions are, for the time being, yet another casualty of Hurricane Katrina. The same flood that ended so many lives in New Orleans shut down most of the city's institutions of death -- its funeral homes, churches and cemeteries. It also scattered the crowds that make New Orleans funerals so extraordinary.