The Crescent City Rolls
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.

The great New Orleans venue Preservation Hall and I were born just a few months apart in 1961, and the two of us were first introduced to each other one night when we were still so young that our ages were counted in months rather than years. Among the stars of the new venture at the very beginning were the wonderful husband-and-wife team of trumpeter De De Pierce and pianist Billie Pierce. I couldn’t quite talk at that point, but I wanted to know the word for the happy noise that I was hearing, so my father told me it was “De De.” He was talking about the trumpeter, but for a while, “De De” was my word for music — whenever I heard music, I called it “De De.”
Billie and De De Pierce are prominently featured in a new release by the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, “Made in New Orleans.” And this week, two of the Pierces’ own spiritual progeny, among the finest “Made in New Orleans” is better described as a “package” than as a compact disc or an “album” in the pre-phonograph sense of the word. It’s actually a 10-by-13-inch cardboard box containing a jumble of memorabilia and tchotchkes: photographs of early headliners at the hall (such as Billie and De De, Punch Miller, and Sweet Emma Barrett), a business card from Kid Sheik Colar, an order sheet for a dozen oysters from Rampart Street, a union contract from a show at Preservation Hall, Mardi Gras party favors, and a backstage pass from a PHJB concert. It’s an amusing mess of material, to be sure, and highly representative of how New Orleans was an anarchic mess well before Katrina.
But the heart of the package is “The Hurricane Sessions,” a CD and DVD set. The former is a combination of old and new sessions going back to 1959 at the Borenstein Art Gallery, two years before it became Preservation Hall. These were unearthed in the aftermath of the 2005 disaster by the PHJB’s manager and bassist (and son of the hall’s founders), Benjamin Jaffe.
The DVD contains a fascinating hodgepodge of clips from the first decade of the hall and the band. Most feature the brilliant clarinetist George Lewis, whose soulful, expressive style is captured in several clips from German television and in a valuable archival film of the ancient march “Red Wing,” in which you can look through the window and see crowds on the street outside 726 St. Peter’s bopping along.
The Pierces take charge on a clip of “I Want a Little Girl,” from the 1970 Newport Jazz Festival, which spotlights De De’s crisp trumpet attack and engaging singing. This also serves as a rare clip of Cap’n John Handy, who was one of the few saxophone players in early New Orleans jazz and, not surprisingly, one of the funkiest saxists who ever saxed.
The only new clip on the DVD is an ingenious video of singer Clint Maedgen crooning the Kinks’ “Complicated Life” while bicycling through the French Quarter. I never quite saw the appeal of Mr. Maedgen with the band before, but this is a compelling mixture of singer, song, and band — a catchy tune with a memorable message. In another time and place, “Complicated Life” could be a hit single for the PHJB; the flip side would have to be “Over in the Gloryland,” an ancient spiritual that could be called, in this context, “Uncomplicated Death.”
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Crescent Boogaloo, appearing at Jazz Standard until Sunday, reminds us that the Crescent City continues to produce great modernists as well as traditionalists. It’s no coincidence that both of the most famous later editions of the Jazz Messengers were fronted entirely by New Orleanians (one of whom was Donald Harrison). These days, the turban-clad organist Dr. Lonnie Smith is calling the shots, and though it was obvious on the opening show Tuesday night that the five players (with Messrs. Payton and Harrison, plus the guitarist Peter Bernstein and drummer Bill Stewart) had never worked together as a quintet, it was an exciting set. Mr. Smith opened and closed with bop standards: “Good Bait” (Tadd Dameron) and “Oleo” (Sonny Rollins), and in between, the five stretched out on Frank Foster’s quasi-modal “Simone” and luxuriated on Billy Strayhorn’s rapturous ballad “Chelsea Bridge.”
The centerpiece of the set was a jazz elaboration on John Lennon’s “Come Together,” which is the only Beatles tune that I’ve always thought could have been written by Horace Silver and sung by Ray Charles. It’s a true boogaloo, a blues in a shuffle rhythm with heavy backbeat, suitable either for dancing or parading through what’s left of the Ninth Ward. Mr. Smith launched it not with Lennon’s lyrics, but by groaning and mumbling in a way that sounded like Clark Terry imitating Major Holley. Mr. Harrison improvised a solo that was increasingly fragmented, starting with full melodic lines that he gradually boiled down to pointillist dots of sound. Mr. Payton’s open-bell solo was built around growls and other vocalized effects. It made me think of a line shouted by the trumpeter John Brunious on the new Preservation Hall album: “Cut your toenails, you’re ripping the sheets!”
Both the “Made in New Orleans” album and Crescent Boogaloo’s performance illustrate that both the past and the future of New Orleans jazz are in good hands. It would be a comforting thought to my father and to De De Pierce, now that they’re over in the Gloryland.
wfriedwald@nysun.com