Post by Guest In Black on Jul 1, 2007 18:06:14 GMT -5
www.preservationhall.com/video/index.htm
We are proud to debut the music video of Complicated Life a track from the upcoming release Made in New Orleans: The Hurricane Tapes. This song was originally performed by the Kinks and composed by Ray Davies. Benjamin Jaffe arranged the song in the vernacular of Preservation Hall and conceived this video which is a journey through New Orleans' French Quarter. It features guest vocalist Clint Maedgen of The New Orleans Bingo! Show delivering food from Fiorella's through the French Quarter and culminating at Preservation Hall where the story all began. Spread the word.
www.preservationhall.com/news/index-mino.htm
MADE IN NEW ORLEANS : THE HURRICANE SESSIONS!
PRESERVATION HALL BRIDGES THE PAST WITH THE PRESENT IN IT’S NEW RELEASE, MADE IN NEW ORLEANS: THE HURRICANE SESSIONS!
Collector’s box set includes treasure trove of rare unreleased recordings, original photographs, DVD and more from the Preservation Hall Jazz Band musical archives.
National Release Date - Tuesday July 24, 2007
Preservation Hall Recordings is proud to announce the upcoming national release of Made in New Orleans: The Hurricane Sessions featuring the Preservation Hall Jazz Band on Tuesday, July 24, 2007. The upcoming national release follows the May release of Five hundred and four (504) limited-edition, numbered and signed box sets that are only available in New Orleans at Preservation Hall and the Louisiana Music Factory.
More than just music, this unique box set is a musical, visual and historical exploration into the history of Preservation Hall. After Hurricane Katrina, Benjamin Jaffe salvaged master tracks of early Preservation Hall Jazz Band recordings, produced by his father Allan, from the legendary Sea-Saint studios, which had been flooded by 8 feet of water. Inspired, Jaffe created a musical and visual experience that bridges the past to the present. This new release represents a collaborative co-production between Allan Jaffe (1936-1987) and his son Benjamin Jaffe. In addition, The Hurricane Sessions is a collaboration between the classic lineup with the contemporary PHJB ensemble of John Brunious, Carl Leblanc, Rickie Monie, Joe Lastie Jr. Walter Payton, Frank Demond, Ralph Johnson and Darryl Adams. Made in New Orleans demonstrates the sustainability of New Orleans Jazz as a timeless cultural art form.
Made in New Orleans is a treasure trove of rare recordings, original photographs, a DVD and more! The box set includes peerless artifacts including candid unreleased tour snapshots, promotional photos from the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s, assorted memorabilia and a few surprises. Manufactured in New Orleans and hand assembled at Preservation Hall in the French Quarter, the retro-design was created by New Orleans-based graphic artist Casey McAllister. No two box sets are alike.
The CD spans decades of recordings by The Preservation Hall Jazz Band including the seminal track “Over in the Glory Land,” a lost track discovered post-Katrina originally recorded by Allan Jaffe in 1970 at Sea-Saint Studios. Ben Jaffe recorded the current Preservation Hall Jazz Band banjo player Carl LeBlanc singing with the original PHJB ensemble. “This version of “Over in the Glory Land”, bridges our past with our present” states Ben Jaffe. The CD also includes a prescient version of “Blow Wind Blow” by folk artist and street preacher, Sister Gertrude Morgan. Originally recorded in 1959, the song is augmented with accompaniment by current PHJB members John Brunious and Carl Leblanc with special guest Stanton Moore of Galactic on Drums. “Lord I Don’t Want to be Buried in the Storm” is an unreleased number by Sister Gertude Morgan which now seems prophetic. The playful “Eh Lah Bah” is a lost live recording performed by the iconic husband and wife team of Billie & De De Pierce at Stanford University in 1972. On “Precious Lord,” Sing Miller performs with an an all-star lineup of PHJB legends–Willie and Percy Humphrey, Narvin Kimball, Frank Demond, Josiah Cie Frazier and Allan Jaffe on tuba. Adding a modern twist to the proceedings, Ben Jaffe arranged and produced a remake of the Kinks classic “Complicated Life” featuring guest vocalist Clint Maedgen of the New Orleans Bingo! Show.
The DVD chronicles the band’s history and includes the first television appearance by the Preservation Hall Jazz Band on the Brinkley News Hour in 1961, rare concert footage from the Newport Jazz Festival and a video of Preservation Hall filmed in the early sixties. In a contemporary ode to New Orleans the DVD also includes a video for the song “Complicated Life”. Directed by New Orleans native Henry Griffin and shot in the French Quarter months before the floods of 2005, the video follows Clint Maedgen through pre-Katrina New Orleans as he cycles through the French Quarter with a cast of revelers in tow and ends at Preservation Hall where the journey of Made in New Orleans began. Purchasers can register their box set by calling Preservation Hall at (504) 522-2841.
Founded in 1961 by Allan and Sandra Jaffe, Preservation Hall was created to provide legendary musicians a no-frills environment to perform New Orleans Jazz to be appreciated by a new generation of music lovers. The Hall ushered in a jazz revival and gave birth to the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. Today, under the Creative Direction of their son, Benjamin Jaffe, Preservation Hall Recordings carries this tradition into the 21st Century.
“My parents kept everything, they protected the archives and never let the public see it, so instead of locking them up forever I decided to open them and show the breadth and extent of the artistic and cultural history of Preservation Hall.”
-Ben Jaffe
offbeat.com/artman/publish/article_2335.shtml
Preservation, Inc.By Alex Rawls
A film starts with a hipster walking into Preservation Hall. He wears horned-rim glasses, thin hair on top and has a postage stamp of a beard. His sweater is black and so is the one worn by his chic girlfriend, whose long, straight, blonde hair with straight-cut bangs betrays her bohemian tendencies.
“New Orleans people are of course aware their jazz heritage is disappearing,” a narrator says. “Some are trying somehow to save the only art form that is strictly, entirely American. One effort to save it is here at Preservation Hall.”
Since Katrina, it seems like there have been hundreds of documentaries about life in New Orleans after the hurricane, most worried about what will happen to jazz. This footage isn’t that recent, though; in fact, it’s from 1961, and it’s in black and white. The narrator is the late David Brinkley, but nothing he said sounds wrong today.
Now as then, Preservation Hall comes alive for jazz. The people surrounding the band in 1961 are into the music, rocking, clapping or nodding, and no one has the scrutinizing look of someone considering an archeological find. Today’s hipsters may have more tattoos, but the scene is substantially the same. As in 1961, all walks of life meet in the hall. It remains disarmingly small—maybe 20 paces from front wall to back and only a little wider—but that intimacy simply brings people closer to the music.
The black and white footage of Preservation Hall in 1961 is included on a DVD disc that is part of Made in New Orleans: the Hurricane Sessions, a box set by the Preservation Hall Jazz Band that celebrates everything Preservation Hall is and has been—a room, a business, a band and an institution. It comes with old publicity photos, vinyl discs, memorabilia, and a CD with tracks from the current and previous incarnations of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. “Over in the Gloryland” features current banjo player Carl LeBlanc singing a vocal that was added last year to an instrumental version cut in 1976, when Hall legends Percy and Willie Humphrey were in the band, along with Narvin Kimball, the banjo player LeBlanc would eventually replace.
Traditionalists might object to such touches, arguing that the recording no longer documents what the band did on a given day in a given room in a given moment, but that misses the bigger picture. The oldest track goes back to 1959 and features Sister Gertrude Morgan, who was an unofficial part of the Hall family, and taken as a whole, the box set argues that Preservation Hall is more than just a building, the band is more than just a collection of players, and that they stand for something significant. “Preservation Hall” isn’t just a name; it’s a mission.
Ben Jaffe grew up in Preservation Hall. It’s his father Allen that explains in the black and white news footage, “What we’re trying to do here is present the music the way the men want to play it.” His dad introduces the band after a performance of “Eh La Bas” in Stanford in 1972 found on Made in New Orleans, and he played tuba on the track. It’s his role that Ben Jaffe assumed in 1993, not only as director of Preservation Hall but as part of the band, though he plays the upright bass, not a tuba. These days, he has been so busy with Hall business that he performs less often, with Walter Payton taking his chair.
Jaffe wasn’t always conscious that there was something special about the Hall, the musicians and the culture they represented. Preservation Hall and the French Quarter were the world he grew up in, and he didn’t know anything different. The family lived in the Quarter and was so Quarter-centric that going to Claiborne or Frenchmen Street constituted a long trip. “It wasn’t until high school when I started going to school Uptown that I realized there were people living in Metairie, or that Metairie even existed,” he says.
Jaffe talks like a man with a purpose, someone who has often been interviewed about Preservation Hall and New Orleans, particularly since Katrina, and he can pin down the exact thoughts he wants to get across. When he talks about going to college in northern Ohio at Oberlin College, he can precisely articulate what he learned. “Being away from New Orleans gave me a new perspective on the city and the beauty of the natural culture we have here,” Jaffe says. “Music has a very strong social function in New Orleans. New Orleans is the last city in the world where you can go out and dance to jazz on a regular basis. It’s not going to happen in New York. It happens in Los Angeles occasionally in retro clubs where people go swing dancing, but it’s people dressing up and pretending to be from another era.”
Jaffe went to Oberlin in the late 1980s, but he felt guilty being away from Preservation Hall after his father died in 1987. He returned in 1993 after graduation, and came back with plans to exert more control over how the band was presented. The Preservation Hall Jazz Band had recorded for Sony Classical, but that presented the band as something formal belonging to another era, so Jaffe thought of starting a record company, something he did in 2004. He also had thoughts about expanding the band’s repertoire, though he didn’t introduce them until banjo player Narvin Kimball, the last link to the original band, retired in 1999. “After that, I felt more free to explore more creative ideas,” Jaffe says.
On the surface, though, it seems like “more creative ideas” runs counter to the notion of preservation. “Preservation” has a conservative connotation—hanging on to the way things were—and in 1961 with rock ’n’ roll and R&B dominating the market, the impulse to ensure that a venue existed for traditional New Orleans jazz was understandable. At the same time, Preservation Hall’s actions were fundamentally progressive. It recognized the value of a primarily African-American cultural expression, and the 1961 footage shows the predominantly white audience shoulder to shoulder with the black musicians. At a time when race mixing was still frowned on in much of New Orleans and the South, the band itself was racially mixed when Allen Jaffe played tuba.
When Ben Jaffe returned to Preservation Hall, the question he faced is one all preservationists face: Do you preserve the artifacts or the ideals they embody? Do you cling to the old ways or the values those ways represent?
For Jaffe, the answers were fairly obvious. “I had to take something changing naturally and say, ‘Hey, if we want to stay around for another 10, 20 years, we have to make ourselves relevant again.’” One decision that suggested Jaffe’s approach was the selection of Carl LeBlanc when Kimball left. LeBlanc played with avant-garde big band leader Sun Ra for eight years, but his selection wasn’t as unlikely as it might seem. LeBlanc grew up immersed in New Orleans music, albeit more oriented toward funk and contemporary jazz. Nor were the worlds of traditional and avant-garde jazz as different as you might suspect. The first song Sun Ra taught LeBlanc was “You Can Depend on Me,” and when LeBlanc first sat down with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band to play, he discovered the song was Narvin Kimball’s signature song. “He knew the words, he knew the changes. He played it in the same key that Kimball played it in,” Jaffe says.
Going to clubs and hearing a variety of music—not strictly traditional jazz—led Jaffe to LeBlanc and Liquidrone/the Bingo! Show leader Clint Maedgen, who now performs with the hall band as guest vocalist. “I brought a lot of musicians into our family who 30 years ago maybe wouldn’t have been considered to play Preservation Hall,” Jaffe says. “They may have been considered too modern, or from an R&B tradition or a brass band tradition. I brought musicians in who have progressed our sound quite a bit.”
Maedgen might wear the black suit and white shirt that the band wears in concert, but he still stands apart with his spiky black hair. Jaffe saw Maedgen’s Bingo! Show in the back room of Fiorella’s, the French Quarter restaurant and asked him if he’d like to be a guest singer with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. Maedgen was ready for a break from the musical/theatrical presentation he had built around playing games of bingo, and when Jaffe pitched him the idea of singing with the Hall band, he was open to it. Jaffe brought him the Kinks’ “Complicated Life” from 1973’s Muswell Hillbillies album and turned the song from a country blues tune to the rollicking jazz tune that appears on Made in New Orleans.
Trumpet player and band leader John Brunious wasn’t sure about Maedgen at first. “I did not know how well Clint would fit in with the band,” Brunious says, “but I’m this type of fellow: I think everyone deserves a chance.” Maedgen had a chance to really get to know the band when he evacuated with them as Hurricane Katrina approached.
“I’m the new kid on the block,” Maedgen says. “It took us 19 hours to get to Baton Rouge, so I sat down in the middle of all these guys and I’m asking these guys questions about Miles Davis, Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Johnny Griffin. Everybody’s got opinions and I’m not doing a lot of talking. I’m doing a whole lot of listening.” That continues. I’m listening a whole lot to what these gentlemen have to say.”
Jaffe says, “I introduced Clint into the band to show our musical versatility and our openness to embrace other musical traditions. I don’t see any reason why Preservation Hall shouldn’t have guest artists who have been influenced by what we do come into our family.” He was also confident that the band’s personality wouldn’t be lost in the collaboration. “Mick Jagger is always going to be Mick Jagger; Tom Waits is always going to be Tom Waits. The Preservation Hall band is always going to be the Preservation Hall band, whether we’re playing a Ray Davies song, a Professor Longhair song or a Jelly Roll Morton song or a Louis Armstrong song.”
Brunious, on the other hand, felt Maedgen would be a greater asset to the band if he knew more about the traditional repertoire. “Clint came in with songs he had written,” Brunious says. “We played them every night and the crowd appreciated it, but I thought he should become closer to the music. I taught him ‘When You’re Smiling’ and ‘St. James Infirmary Blues.’ I said, ‘What you’re doing is great, but learn these songs also in case someone in the audience would ask if you could play this. Get a little closer to what the band is playing.’ But Clint does a great job; he really does.” Maedgen further endeared himself to Brunious in his interest in older music venues such as the Dew Drop Inn, Club Tropicana, Perseverance Hall and other venues that served as incubators for New Orleans music.
When Maedgen performs with the band, he typically sings “You’re My Sunshine” and “When You’re Smiling.” He recently sang “St. James Infirmary” with DJ King Britt, the Philadelphia producer who remixed Sister Gertrude Morgan’s Let Us Make a Record. “You’re not going to get a more salt-of-the-earth traditional New Orleans song than that,” Maedgen says. It’s one of the songs Brunious encouraged him to learn, but that doesn’t mean he’s going to sing it with the hall band. “If someone’s going to sing ‘St. James,’ it’s going to be John Brunious,” Maedgen says respectfully. As a self-proclaimed “punk rock kid” significantly younger than much of the band, he’s conscious of his position as someone outside the tradition. “I’m waiting my turn.”
Maedgen is currently taking some time off from the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. “I’ve got my own flag to fly,” he says. “That said, I’d tour with them forever if they’d have me.”
When John Brunious speaks in carefully measured phrases, his baritone communicates earnestness, but he still ends sentences with “man” and sprinkles “really” and “very” in his speech to add further emphasis. “The music to me is very, very important,” he says. “The music is our treasure, and we travel all over the world to share that treasure with people of different countries, and I don’t want this music to become lost. It’s a very important music to the world. I really believe that.”
Brunious has been with the band for over 20 years, and as a second-generation jazz man, he has lived his life in the tradition the Hall band takes to the world. “As a kid, my father used to take me to hear the brass bands that participated in the parades or the funerals,” he says. “Even though we’re second generation, we try to emulate what the old timers did. We try to keep the spirit of the music in the music. We try to keep the spirit of the music going.”
That doesn’t mean that his playing is retro or bound by those who performed in the Preservation Hall Jazz Band before him. “I try to play the music the way I hear it to the best of my ability,” he says. “I’m playing the music in my own voice, and I hope it comes out the way the fellows before me played it.” Still, he says, “I don’t hear like DeDe Pierce (the original trumpet player with the Hall band). I don’t hear like Percy Humphrey. I hear it my way, and I hope that doesn’t mean the music will one day be lost.”
Jaffe shares Brunious’ sense of mission. “We have a legacy to uphold,” he says. “All the musicians in the band including myself come from very strong New Orleans musical traditions that we don’t want to compromise. We want to build on this incredible foundation and it’s a real challenge to be true to this cultural phenomenon and still build on it.”
Allen Jaffe’s tenure as director shaped Ben’s liberal notions about preservation. “He came into this world without a background in New Orleans jazz,” Jaffe says. “He didn’t enter this arena the way that a music historian would have, or a musician. He played tuba, but he wasn’t familiar with improvisation or the brass band tradition, and that benefited him. He never felt like he had to recreate something from the past. He was able to hear the music for the beauty that it was today. That’s something that I find very challenging: How do you keep your music relevant and entertaining and still true to its origins? I never want to be a repertory ensemble. I never want to be a group that’s reproducing something that happened 100 years ago. I look at the band today as a natural progression from the music that John Brunious’ father created.”
Maedgen, too, sees evolution as part of the hall band’s story. “Today, there’s a lot of different influences. You’ve got musicians who grew up playing gospel music, and you hear those changes coming off the piano that wouldn’t necessarily have happened before. You have musicians who have played in a lot of free jazz situations and you’ll hear solos coming off the stage that are stretching it a little further than you’d have heard before. Benji doesn’t want anything to stay exactly the same. He wants to honor what came before, but the musicians who came before, they pushed it along as well.”
After Katrina, what Preservation Hall had to preserve became less theoretical. Jaffe responded immediately by applying for 501(c)(3) status to start a non-profit organization to help musicians. That organization, New Orleans Musicians’ Hurricane Relief Fund, was based in Preservation Hall until earlier this year, when it moved to a building on the edge of Armstrong Park and, to reflect the distance from Katrina, renamed itself Renew Our Music. Its mission to help musicians wasn’t an abstract one, either. Brunious lost his home in the flood and lives outside of Orlando, Florida right now, but he’s looking forward to coming home.
At the same time, the Preservation Hall Jazz Band took New Orleans music to the world. In addition to playing performing arts centers and fine arts venues, Jaffe took New Orleans jazz to new audiences, including appearances at Bonnaroo and the Voodoo Music Experience last year. For John Brunious, the only concern was, “Can we play the music? When I play with this band, I try to play it the way I think it should be played, with that old-time flavor, even though I don’t play like Kid Thomas or Percy Humphrey. Wherever the venue may be and whoever is at the venue, we’re trying to play the music the way we think it should be played. And we try to get to a lot of kids before MTV does.”
Jaffe acknowledges the uncomfortable irony that the band has unintentionally done its part to create distance between traditional jazz and younger audiences. Preservation Hall Jazz Band plays the premier concert halls around the country, which reinforces the notion in some that the band and the music are an institution and not a living, breathing thing. “That scares the hell out of me,” Jaffe says. “On one side, I’m happy to see people exposed to jazz, but on the other side, I’m also seeing how far removed we’ve taken this music from its culture. New Orleans is the last place where jazz is still connected to the people, and New Orleans has to be the leader in this arena. This is our stuff and this is our music.”
Published July 2007, OffBeat Louisiana Music & Culture Magazine, Volume 20, No. 7.
We are proud to debut the music video of Complicated Life a track from the upcoming release Made in New Orleans: The Hurricane Tapes. This song was originally performed by the Kinks and composed by Ray Davies. Benjamin Jaffe arranged the song in the vernacular of Preservation Hall and conceived this video which is a journey through New Orleans' French Quarter. It features guest vocalist Clint Maedgen of The New Orleans Bingo! Show delivering food from Fiorella's through the French Quarter and culminating at Preservation Hall where the story all began. Spread the word.
www.preservationhall.com/news/index-mino.htm
MADE IN NEW ORLEANS : THE HURRICANE SESSIONS!
PRESERVATION HALL BRIDGES THE PAST WITH THE PRESENT IN IT’S NEW RELEASE, MADE IN NEW ORLEANS: THE HURRICANE SESSIONS!
Collector’s box set includes treasure trove of rare unreleased recordings, original photographs, DVD and more from the Preservation Hall Jazz Band musical archives.
National Release Date - Tuesday July 24, 2007
Preservation Hall Recordings is proud to announce the upcoming national release of Made in New Orleans: The Hurricane Sessions featuring the Preservation Hall Jazz Band on Tuesday, July 24, 2007. The upcoming national release follows the May release of Five hundred and four (504) limited-edition, numbered and signed box sets that are only available in New Orleans at Preservation Hall and the Louisiana Music Factory.
More than just music, this unique box set is a musical, visual and historical exploration into the history of Preservation Hall. After Hurricane Katrina, Benjamin Jaffe salvaged master tracks of early Preservation Hall Jazz Band recordings, produced by his father Allan, from the legendary Sea-Saint studios, which had been flooded by 8 feet of water. Inspired, Jaffe created a musical and visual experience that bridges the past to the present. This new release represents a collaborative co-production between Allan Jaffe (1936-1987) and his son Benjamin Jaffe. In addition, The Hurricane Sessions is a collaboration between the classic lineup with the contemporary PHJB ensemble of John Brunious, Carl Leblanc, Rickie Monie, Joe Lastie Jr. Walter Payton, Frank Demond, Ralph Johnson and Darryl Adams. Made in New Orleans demonstrates the sustainability of New Orleans Jazz as a timeless cultural art form.
Made in New Orleans is a treasure trove of rare recordings, original photographs, a DVD and more! The box set includes peerless artifacts including candid unreleased tour snapshots, promotional photos from the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s, assorted memorabilia and a few surprises. Manufactured in New Orleans and hand assembled at Preservation Hall in the French Quarter, the retro-design was created by New Orleans-based graphic artist Casey McAllister. No two box sets are alike.
The CD spans decades of recordings by The Preservation Hall Jazz Band including the seminal track “Over in the Glory Land,” a lost track discovered post-Katrina originally recorded by Allan Jaffe in 1970 at Sea-Saint Studios. Ben Jaffe recorded the current Preservation Hall Jazz Band banjo player Carl LeBlanc singing with the original PHJB ensemble. “This version of “Over in the Glory Land”, bridges our past with our present” states Ben Jaffe. The CD also includes a prescient version of “Blow Wind Blow” by folk artist and street preacher, Sister Gertrude Morgan. Originally recorded in 1959, the song is augmented with accompaniment by current PHJB members John Brunious and Carl Leblanc with special guest Stanton Moore of Galactic on Drums. “Lord I Don’t Want to be Buried in the Storm” is an unreleased number by Sister Gertude Morgan which now seems prophetic. The playful “Eh Lah Bah” is a lost live recording performed by the iconic husband and wife team of Billie & De De Pierce at Stanford University in 1972. On “Precious Lord,” Sing Miller performs with an an all-star lineup of PHJB legends–Willie and Percy Humphrey, Narvin Kimball, Frank Demond, Josiah Cie Frazier and Allan Jaffe on tuba. Adding a modern twist to the proceedings, Ben Jaffe arranged and produced a remake of the Kinks classic “Complicated Life” featuring guest vocalist Clint Maedgen of the New Orleans Bingo! Show.
The DVD chronicles the band’s history and includes the first television appearance by the Preservation Hall Jazz Band on the Brinkley News Hour in 1961, rare concert footage from the Newport Jazz Festival and a video of Preservation Hall filmed in the early sixties. In a contemporary ode to New Orleans the DVD also includes a video for the song “Complicated Life”. Directed by New Orleans native Henry Griffin and shot in the French Quarter months before the floods of 2005, the video follows Clint Maedgen through pre-Katrina New Orleans as he cycles through the French Quarter with a cast of revelers in tow and ends at Preservation Hall where the journey of Made in New Orleans began. Purchasers can register their box set by calling Preservation Hall at (504) 522-2841.
Founded in 1961 by Allan and Sandra Jaffe, Preservation Hall was created to provide legendary musicians a no-frills environment to perform New Orleans Jazz to be appreciated by a new generation of music lovers. The Hall ushered in a jazz revival and gave birth to the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. Today, under the Creative Direction of their son, Benjamin Jaffe, Preservation Hall Recordings carries this tradition into the 21st Century.
“My parents kept everything, they protected the archives and never let the public see it, so instead of locking them up forever I decided to open them and show the breadth and extent of the artistic and cultural history of Preservation Hall.”
-Ben Jaffe
offbeat.com/artman/publish/article_2335.shtml
Preservation, Inc.By Alex Rawls
A film starts with a hipster walking into Preservation Hall. He wears horned-rim glasses, thin hair on top and has a postage stamp of a beard. His sweater is black and so is the one worn by his chic girlfriend, whose long, straight, blonde hair with straight-cut bangs betrays her bohemian tendencies.
“New Orleans people are of course aware their jazz heritage is disappearing,” a narrator says. “Some are trying somehow to save the only art form that is strictly, entirely American. One effort to save it is here at Preservation Hall.”
Since Katrina, it seems like there have been hundreds of documentaries about life in New Orleans after the hurricane, most worried about what will happen to jazz. This footage isn’t that recent, though; in fact, it’s from 1961, and it’s in black and white. The narrator is the late David Brinkley, but nothing he said sounds wrong today.
Now as then, Preservation Hall comes alive for jazz. The people surrounding the band in 1961 are into the music, rocking, clapping or nodding, and no one has the scrutinizing look of someone considering an archeological find. Today’s hipsters may have more tattoos, but the scene is substantially the same. As in 1961, all walks of life meet in the hall. It remains disarmingly small—maybe 20 paces from front wall to back and only a little wider—but that intimacy simply brings people closer to the music.
The black and white footage of Preservation Hall in 1961 is included on a DVD disc that is part of Made in New Orleans: the Hurricane Sessions, a box set by the Preservation Hall Jazz Band that celebrates everything Preservation Hall is and has been—a room, a business, a band and an institution. It comes with old publicity photos, vinyl discs, memorabilia, and a CD with tracks from the current and previous incarnations of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. “Over in the Gloryland” features current banjo player Carl LeBlanc singing a vocal that was added last year to an instrumental version cut in 1976, when Hall legends Percy and Willie Humphrey were in the band, along with Narvin Kimball, the banjo player LeBlanc would eventually replace.
Traditionalists might object to such touches, arguing that the recording no longer documents what the band did on a given day in a given room in a given moment, but that misses the bigger picture. The oldest track goes back to 1959 and features Sister Gertrude Morgan, who was an unofficial part of the Hall family, and taken as a whole, the box set argues that Preservation Hall is more than just a building, the band is more than just a collection of players, and that they stand for something significant. “Preservation Hall” isn’t just a name; it’s a mission.
Ben Jaffe grew up in Preservation Hall. It’s his father Allen that explains in the black and white news footage, “What we’re trying to do here is present the music the way the men want to play it.” His dad introduces the band after a performance of “Eh La Bas” in Stanford in 1972 found on Made in New Orleans, and he played tuba on the track. It’s his role that Ben Jaffe assumed in 1993, not only as director of Preservation Hall but as part of the band, though he plays the upright bass, not a tuba. These days, he has been so busy with Hall business that he performs less often, with Walter Payton taking his chair.
Jaffe wasn’t always conscious that there was something special about the Hall, the musicians and the culture they represented. Preservation Hall and the French Quarter were the world he grew up in, and he didn’t know anything different. The family lived in the Quarter and was so Quarter-centric that going to Claiborne or Frenchmen Street constituted a long trip. “It wasn’t until high school when I started going to school Uptown that I realized there were people living in Metairie, or that Metairie even existed,” he says.
Jaffe talks like a man with a purpose, someone who has often been interviewed about Preservation Hall and New Orleans, particularly since Katrina, and he can pin down the exact thoughts he wants to get across. When he talks about going to college in northern Ohio at Oberlin College, he can precisely articulate what he learned. “Being away from New Orleans gave me a new perspective on the city and the beauty of the natural culture we have here,” Jaffe says. “Music has a very strong social function in New Orleans. New Orleans is the last city in the world where you can go out and dance to jazz on a regular basis. It’s not going to happen in New York. It happens in Los Angeles occasionally in retro clubs where people go swing dancing, but it’s people dressing up and pretending to be from another era.”
Jaffe went to Oberlin in the late 1980s, but he felt guilty being away from Preservation Hall after his father died in 1987. He returned in 1993 after graduation, and came back with plans to exert more control over how the band was presented. The Preservation Hall Jazz Band had recorded for Sony Classical, but that presented the band as something formal belonging to another era, so Jaffe thought of starting a record company, something he did in 2004. He also had thoughts about expanding the band’s repertoire, though he didn’t introduce them until banjo player Narvin Kimball, the last link to the original band, retired in 1999. “After that, I felt more free to explore more creative ideas,” Jaffe says.
On the surface, though, it seems like “more creative ideas” runs counter to the notion of preservation. “Preservation” has a conservative connotation—hanging on to the way things were—and in 1961 with rock ’n’ roll and R&B dominating the market, the impulse to ensure that a venue existed for traditional New Orleans jazz was understandable. At the same time, Preservation Hall’s actions were fundamentally progressive. It recognized the value of a primarily African-American cultural expression, and the 1961 footage shows the predominantly white audience shoulder to shoulder with the black musicians. At a time when race mixing was still frowned on in much of New Orleans and the South, the band itself was racially mixed when Allen Jaffe played tuba.
When Ben Jaffe returned to Preservation Hall, the question he faced is one all preservationists face: Do you preserve the artifacts or the ideals they embody? Do you cling to the old ways or the values those ways represent?
For Jaffe, the answers were fairly obvious. “I had to take something changing naturally and say, ‘Hey, if we want to stay around for another 10, 20 years, we have to make ourselves relevant again.’” One decision that suggested Jaffe’s approach was the selection of Carl LeBlanc when Kimball left. LeBlanc played with avant-garde big band leader Sun Ra for eight years, but his selection wasn’t as unlikely as it might seem. LeBlanc grew up immersed in New Orleans music, albeit more oriented toward funk and contemporary jazz. Nor were the worlds of traditional and avant-garde jazz as different as you might suspect. The first song Sun Ra taught LeBlanc was “You Can Depend on Me,” and when LeBlanc first sat down with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band to play, he discovered the song was Narvin Kimball’s signature song. “He knew the words, he knew the changes. He played it in the same key that Kimball played it in,” Jaffe says.
Going to clubs and hearing a variety of music—not strictly traditional jazz—led Jaffe to LeBlanc and Liquidrone/the Bingo! Show leader Clint Maedgen, who now performs with the hall band as guest vocalist. “I brought a lot of musicians into our family who 30 years ago maybe wouldn’t have been considered to play Preservation Hall,” Jaffe says. “They may have been considered too modern, or from an R&B tradition or a brass band tradition. I brought musicians in who have progressed our sound quite a bit.”
Maedgen might wear the black suit and white shirt that the band wears in concert, but he still stands apart with his spiky black hair. Jaffe saw Maedgen’s Bingo! Show in the back room of Fiorella’s, the French Quarter restaurant and asked him if he’d like to be a guest singer with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. Maedgen was ready for a break from the musical/theatrical presentation he had built around playing games of bingo, and when Jaffe pitched him the idea of singing with the Hall band, he was open to it. Jaffe brought him the Kinks’ “Complicated Life” from 1973’s Muswell Hillbillies album and turned the song from a country blues tune to the rollicking jazz tune that appears on Made in New Orleans.
Trumpet player and band leader John Brunious wasn’t sure about Maedgen at first. “I did not know how well Clint would fit in with the band,” Brunious says, “but I’m this type of fellow: I think everyone deserves a chance.” Maedgen had a chance to really get to know the band when he evacuated with them as Hurricane Katrina approached.
“I’m the new kid on the block,” Maedgen says. “It took us 19 hours to get to Baton Rouge, so I sat down in the middle of all these guys and I’m asking these guys questions about Miles Davis, Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Johnny Griffin. Everybody’s got opinions and I’m not doing a lot of talking. I’m doing a whole lot of listening.” That continues. I’m listening a whole lot to what these gentlemen have to say.”
Jaffe says, “I introduced Clint into the band to show our musical versatility and our openness to embrace other musical traditions. I don’t see any reason why Preservation Hall shouldn’t have guest artists who have been influenced by what we do come into our family.” He was also confident that the band’s personality wouldn’t be lost in the collaboration. “Mick Jagger is always going to be Mick Jagger; Tom Waits is always going to be Tom Waits. The Preservation Hall band is always going to be the Preservation Hall band, whether we’re playing a Ray Davies song, a Professor Longhair song or a Jelly Roll Morton song or a Louis Armstrong song.”
Brunious, on the other hand, felt Maedgen would be a greater asset to the band if he knew more about the traditional repertoire. “Clint came in with songs he had written,” Brunious says. “We played them every night and the crowd appreciated it, but I thought he should become closer to the music. I taught him ‘When You’re Smiling’ and ‘St. James Infirmary Blues.’ I said, ‘What you’re doing is great, but learn these songs also in case someone in the audience would ask if you could play this. Get a little closer to what the band is playing.’ But Clint does a great job; he really does.” Maedgen further endeared himself to Brunious in his interest in older music venues such as the Dew Drop Inn, Club Tropicana, Perseverance Hall and other venues that served as incubators for New Orleans music.
When Maedgen performs with the band, he typically sings “You’re My Sunshine” and “When You’re Smiling.” He recently sang “St. James Infirmary” with DJ King Britt, the Philadelphia producer who remixed Sister Gertrude Morgan’s Let Us Make a Record. “You’re not going to get a more salt-of-the-earth traditional New Orleans song than that,” Maedgen says. It’s one of the songs Brunious encouraged him to learn, but that doesn’t mean he’s going to sing it with the hall band. “If someone’s going to sing ‘St. James,’ it’s going to be John Brunious,” Maedgen says respectfully. As a self-proclaimed “punk rock kid” significantly younger than much of the band, he’s conscious of his position as someone outside the tradition. “I’m waiting my turn.”
Maedgen is currently taking some time off from the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. “I’ve got my own flag to fly,” he says. “That said, I’d tour with them forever if they’d have me.”
When John Brunious speaks in carefully measured phrases, his baritone communicates earnestness, but he still ends sentences with “man” and sprinkles “really” and “very” in his speech to add further emphasis. “The music to me is very, very important,” he says. “The music is our treasure, and we travel all over the world to share that treasure with people of different countries, and I don’t want this music to become lost. It’s a very important music to the world. I really believe that.”
Brunious has been with the band for over 20 years, and as a second-generation jazz man, he has lived his life in the tradition the Hall band takes to the world. “As a kid, my father used to take me to hear the brass bands that participated in the parades or the funerals,” he says. “Even though we’re second generation, we try to emulate what the old timers did. We try to keep the spirit of the music in the music. We try to keep the spirit of the music going.”
That doesn’t mean that his playing is retro or bound by those who performed in the Preservation Hall Jazz Band before him. “I try to play the music the way I hear it to the best of my ability,” he says. “I’m playing the music in my own voice, and I hope it comes out the way the fellows before me played it.” Still, he says, “I don’t hear like DeDe Pierce (the original trumpet player with the Hall band). I don’t hear like Percy Humphrey. I hear it my way, and I hope that doesn’t mean the music will one day be lost.”
Jaffe shares Brunious’ sense of mission. “We have a legacy to uphold,” he says. “All the musicians in the band including myself come from very strong New Orleans musical traditions that we don’t want to compromise. We want to build on this incredible foundation and it’s a real challenge to be true to this cultural phenomenon and still build on it.”
Allen Jaffe’s tenure as director shaped Ben’s liberal notions about preservation. “He came into this world without a background in New Orleans jazz,” Jaffe says. “He didn’t enter this arena the way that a music historian would have, or a musician. He played tuba, but he wasn’t familiar with improvisation or the brass band tradition, and that benefited him. He never felt like he had to recreate something from the past. He was able to hear the music for the beauty that it was today. That’s something that I find very challenging: How do you keep your music relevant and entertaining and still true to its origins? I never want to be a repertory ensemble. I never want to be a group that’s reproducing something that happened 100 years ago. I look at the band today as a natural progression from the music that John Brunious’ father created.”
Maedgen, too, sees evolution as part of the hall band’s story. “Today, there’s a lot of different influences. You’ve got musicians who grew up playing gospel music, and you hear those changes coming off the piano that wouldn’t necessarily have happened before. You have musicians who have played in a lot of free jazz situations and you’ll hear solos coming off the stage that are stretching it a little further than you’d have heard before. Benji doesn’t want anything to stay exactly the same. He wants to honor what came before, but the musicians who came before, they pushed it along as well.”
After Katrina, what Preservation Hall had to preserve became less theoretical. Jaffe responded immediately by applying for 501(c)(3) status to start a non-profit organization to help musicians. That organization, New Orleans Musicians’ Hurricane Relief Fund, was based in Preservation Hall until earlier this year, when it moved to a building on the edge of Armstrong Park and, to reflect the distance from Katrina, renamed itself Renew Our Music. Its mission to help musicians wasn’t an abstract one, either. Brunious lost his home in the flood and lives outside of Orlando, Florida right now, but he’s looking forward to coming home.
At the same time, the Preservation Hall Jazz Band took New Orleans music to the world. In addition to playing performing arts centers and fine arts venues, Jaffe took New Orleans jazz to new audiences, including appearances at Bonnaroo and the Voodoo Music Experience last year. For John Brunious, the only concern was, “Can we play the music? When I play with this band, I try to play it the way I think it should be played, with that old-time flavor, even though I don’t play like Kid Thomas or Percy Humphrey. Wherever the venue may be and whoever is at the venue, we’re trying to play the music the way we think it should be played. And we try to get to a lot of kids before MTV does.”
Jaffe acknowledges the uncomfortable irony that the band has unintentionally done its part to create distance between traditional jazz and younger audiences. Preservation Hall Jazz Band plays the premier concert halls around the country, which reinforces the notion in some that the band and the music are an institution and not a living, breathing thing. “That scares the hell out of me,” Jaffe says. “On one side, I’m happy to see people exposed to jazz, but on the other side, I’m also seeing how far removed we’ve taken this music from its culture. New Orleans is the last place where jazz is still connected to the people, and New Orleans has to be the leader in this arena. This is our stuff and this is our music.”
Published July 2007, OffBeat Louisiana Music & Culture Magazine, Volume 20, No. 7.