You may have to check your calendar if you happen to stumble upon a New Orleans jazz funeral, because it’s easy to mistake it for Mardi Gras in the French Quarter, although there’s a casket with a real body inside. Jazz funerals in New Orleans are legendary events. Though a funeral is traditionally melancholy and a private family event in nature, jazz funerals in the Big Easy are intended to be public events, at the very least so that onlookers can contemplate their own mortality while enjoying the music and the spectacle.