A Band Built on Tradition Fights Through Turmoil
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

It’s a somewhat different edition of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band that’s appearing this week at Jazz Standard. Preservation Hall without a clarinet player is like étouffée without crawfish, the Café du Monde without beignets, or, for that matter, the entire French Quarter without drunken sailors. Yet New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina is an entirely different world; Sandra Jaffe, who founded Preservation Hall and the band 45 years ago, explained to me before the late set Wednesday night that the best reed player left in the city was Darryl Adams, who happens to play alto saxophone rather than clarinet.
New Orleans traditional jazz bands have a long history of employing saxophonists, most famously the late and extravagantly named Harold “Duke” Dejan and “Captain” John Handy. Still, it’s unusual to hear the PHJB with a sax instead of (rather than in addition to) a clarinet, which remains the signature instrument of New Orleans jazz. No matter: It’s still the Preservation Hall Band, proving that even a musical institution that is the living embodiment of a legacy going back 100 years still has to keep up with changing times.
This edition of the band also differs from its four decades of predecessors in that, prior to 2005, all the members of the PHJB resided in New Orleans, whereas currently none of them do. Katrina set off the greatest diaspora from the mother city of jazz since the closing of Storyville in 1917; now the seven members of the band are scattered to the winds. Pianist Rickie Monie is residing in Mississippi, and banjoist Carl Le Blanc traveled all the way from California for this New Year’s gig on East 27th Street.
Yet the Preservationists, who are still for the most part veteran musicians who were in their 20s and 30s when the Hall was founded in 1961, remain the most entertaining band in town. They are led musically and vocally by John Brunious, whose family (including his father, John Sr., and brother, Wendell, both trumpeters) has been associated with the band from the beginning. Mr. Brunious is a convincing shpieler, arespectable vocalist, and, most important, a brassman with a driving attack who both pushes the band and holds it together.
As often happens when a band designed for dancing or marching goes into a setting designed for listening, like a night-club, it tends to play more features for individual musicians with a lot of what my late father used to refer to as “jolly vocalizing.” The
musicians kicked off the set with the most famous staple of all early jazz, “The St. Louis Blues,” streamlined down into a basic 12-bar major blues, rather than with all the various strains that W.C. Handy famously assembled for it, and with a vocal by Mr. Brunious. Mr. Le Blanc crooned Earl Hines’s “You Can Depend on Me,” which he said was taught to him by the pianist-bandleader Herman Blount (aka Sun Ra), although it was also a feature for the PHJB’s longrunning banjoist Narvin Kimball, who died earlier this year at 96. Clint Maedgen, announced as a “guest vocalist,” sang a rather contorted version of “You Are My Sunshine,” credited to the former Governor of Louisiana, Jimmy Davis.
But the best of all the band’s singers was the bassist Walter Payton; Handing his instrument to Mr. Le Blanc, he moved to center stage and exuberantly sang “I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate,” a song generally acknowledged as having been composed by Louis Armstrong. Displaying the same sense of playfulness as his famous son, the trumpeter Nicholas Payton, Mr. Payton, who looks like a sepia Santa Claus, animated the tale of Sister Kate with semaphore-like hand gestures and a demonstration of the shimmy in action.
There were only two instrumentals, a stride piano feature for Mr. Monie and a “Chinatown, My Chinatown,” in which Mr. Payton played Asian-style minor seconds. The trombonist Joseph Lastie and saxist Daryl Adams didn’t get to play much that set, although what was announced as a feature for Mr. Adams began with some dramatic blasts on his alto, which then became a “Liza Jane”-like “secondline” showpiece in which the three horns (joined by Mr. Maedgen on a white lacquer tenor sax) invited the crowd to join them in parading around the room. By the time the group returned to the bandstand, the tune had morphed into “When the Saints Go Marching In.”
That was a fitting climax, but Mr. Brunious followed it with a planned encore, in which he touchingly played and sang “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?” In light of recent events, and with a very hard year about to turn itself over, this largely minor tune sounded more melancholy than ever; the eyes of most of us in the house were as wet as the streets of the Crescent City last September.
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In addition to Preservation Hall’s Narvin Kimball, we lost two leading masters of Latin jazz in 2006 (Ray Barretto and Hilton Ruiz), and it was a particularly bad year for producers (Ahmet Ertegun, Bob Weinstock), photographers (William Gottlieb, Burt Goldblatt), and the few surviving female singers of the big band era: Anita O’- Day, Kay Finegan, Louanne Hogan, Martha Tilton, Georgia Gibbs, June Allyson, and Dolores O’Neill.
Also leaving us this year were Kenny Davern, Oscar Klein, Jay McShann, Arthur Shimkin, Don Butterfield, Betty Comden, Ruth Brown, Ed Bradley, Sheldon Meyer, Maynard Ferguson, Duke Jordan, Ed Thrasher, Malachi Thompson, Don Lusher, Ross Tompkins, Billy Preston, Katherine Dunham, Hans Fantel, Jack Fallon, Cy Feuer, Lew Anderson, Joan Diener, Jackie McLean, Gordon Parks, Charlie Hodge, Elton Dean, Sonny King, Wilson Pickett, Harriet Wasser, Lou Rawls, Walter Booker, James Brown, and Coretta Scott King.
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If the New Year’s celebrations are any indication of what 2007 will be like, then it’s easy to foresee a great year: Apart from the Preservation Hall Jazz Band at Jazz Standard, the following December 31st shows are also highly recommended:
• Master songster Michael Feinstein at the club that bears his name at the Regency Hotel.
• Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks at the Algonquin Hotel, partying like it’s 1929.
• The saxophonist Paul Shapiro and his multi-culti Ribs & Brisket Revue at the Caféé Cornelia, combining jazz, jump blues, and traditional Jewish music.
• The Chico O’Farrill Latin jazz orchestra, led by Arturo O’Farrill, with special guest, the Queen Of Birdland, Hilary Kole, at Birdland.
• Ironically, thought the Preservation Hall Jazz Band has no clarinetist this time around, two are headlining in New York this week: Havana’s Paquito D’Rivera at Dizzy’s and New Orleans’s Dr. Michael White at the Village Vanguard.