The world-renowned Preservation Hall Jazz Band, direct from Preservation
Hall in New Orleans, is touring the country, raising money for New Orleans
jazz musicians, displaced by Hurricane Katrina.
We loved having them in New Bern and were proud to say that the Jazz
Preservation Society of New Bern sponsored them. We showed our respect and
adulation with two sold-out performances, exuberant applause, and standing
ovations.
But in New Bern an unusual event occurred. One of our own was honored,
too. He was a young, long-haired jazz musician and sometime surfer, Dail Reed.
At first Dail was just delivering a set of drums and an upright bass to the
New Bern Civic Theatre, lending the instruments to the famous ones. Dail, a
member of the jazz band, The Hanging Chads, was delighted about that, happy to
oblige on late Sunday morning for the 1:30 performance.
Then the musicians told him that their bassist, Ben Jaffe, was tied up in
Europe and asked, "Would you play with us?"
We give Dail points for just showing up in a suit at the last minute, but
he did more than that He played, laughed, and declined any solos at the
afternoon performance. At the evening performance, he was more familiar with
the music( I reckon so!), and he credits the banjo player, Carl LeBlanc, with
giving him a solo.
We might have been proud and excited to help bring the group to town, but
we cannot match the joy Dail felt while playing with them. For him, it was
Christmas Day.
In his other life, Dail, sometimes called a workaholic, is my carrier's
technician for The Internet, and he's a guru there, as well as on the stage.
No wonder his web site is www.datgeek.net
The Preservation Band told us they had been in New Orleans the previous
week for the funeral of Narvin Kimball , the last remaining founding member of
the band, who had played banjo with Preservation Hall for 40 years. The current
banjo player, LeBlanc, a relative newcomer, showed us the banjo Kimball had
given him. The band played Just A Closer Walk With Thee in his memory.
The Preservation Band closed the concert with When The Saints Go Marching
In (yes!) and led many people from the audience down the theater aisles and
on to the stage.
Not too long after the afternoon performance, the biggest tour bus I've ever
seen drove the block and a half to the corner of South Front and Middle Streets
to the seafood restaurant on the corner, Capt. Ratty's, to hang out and eat.
Dail walked around the corner, but you better believe he was there, too.
*********
If you're from out of town and you're planning to come to Warrenton for the
Spring Homes Tour, April 29-30, The Ivy Bed and Breakfast on North Main Street
is offering a package for the weekend. Rates include a tour ticket, an optional
lunch, and a 3-course breakfast. And you might get to stay in the Edwina Rooker
room.
I didn’t know Ben Jaffe wasn’t in town. I should
have known. I should have known because there should have been a great
gapping gorge on the New Bern Civic Theatre stage Sunday. A yawning divide
precisely where the bass player — that was Jaffe — should have been
standing.
Instead, a concert featuring what Jazz Preservation Society of New Bern
Executive Director John Sprague rightly called “iconic jazz” and “jazz in
its purest form,” went on. With the last-minute addition of local jazz
bassist Dail Reed on acoustic bass, New Orleans’ Preservation Hall Jazz Band
transformed the New Bern theater into featured seating at the band’s home
venue — the drafty, dusty, delightful Preservation Hall on St. Peters
Street, New Orleans, parts of which are 256 years old, and all of which is
kin to the riff roots of seminal jazz music.
Those roots were well exposed Sunday.
Although Jaffe, current director and son of former Preservation Hall
managers Sandra and Allan Jaffe, wasn’t on-stage, the band was ably led by
trumpeter John Brunious. Born in the Crescent City in 1940, Brunious
doctored the stage with experience, his signature high-note solos and a
singing voice as wonderfully smooth as the gravel and sediment that form the
foundation of his hometown.
Complemented by equally proficient colleagues — Frank Demond on trombone,
Ralph Johnson on clarinet, Joe Lastie Jr. on drums, Rickie Monie on piano
and Carl LeBlanc on banjo — Brunious led the troupe through a two-hour romp
of original and classic jazz with the melding of take-a-turn vocalizations
from Brunious, Demond and LeBlanc and workmanlike instrumentation that
coagulated into a structured discordance that is the essence of this music.
Yet if any disparaging mark must fall on this stage, let it fall there:
that essential cacophony did hit, albeit briefly, shallow pockets of too
deep discordance.
That this band is well-versed in one another’s foibles and idiosyncrasies
there is no doubt. That they can play off one another — as all great jazz
bands must — with half an ear cocked and an eyebrow raised is obvious. That
is why those subtle and quick changes that fell just short of working
on-stage were the antithesis to a flawless performance.
And yet, this is jazz. For a performance to be minus such conventions, to
be flawless, would be antithetical to the art form. There is, after all, no
script.
There is only the band, this one band combed from the denizens of the
myriad musicians once found in New Orleans. This one band, making music the
way it was made a century ago. Making music the way it is rarely made today.
For two sold-out performances Sunday — roughly 900 seats — the
Preservation Hall Jazz Band cemented its international reputation in New
Bern through raw talent and solid styling.
The Jazz Preservation Society of New Bern, especially with proceeds
winding into Jaffe’s penchant for helping displaced New Orleans musicians
find their way home after Hurricane Katrina and more locally, into a
renovation fund for the New Bern Civic Theatre, cemented its local
reputation as a purveyor of the best this art form has to offer.
By Tom Mayer, features editor of the Sun Journal. He can be reached at
635-5662 or tmayer@freedomenc.com.
If you went
What: Preservation Hall Jazz Band
When: 1:30 p.m. March 26
Where: New Bern Civic Theatre
Contacts:
www.jazzpreservationsociety.com
