Keeping the Beat on the Street (13 page)

The identity of the area is not only threatened by the social malaise of the inner city. In the late sixties, fourteen blocks were demolished to make the space that became Armstrong Park, and the 1-10 expressway was extended over Claiborne Avenue, thus obliterating a tree-shaded meeting place and parade route and forcing a lot of people to move somewhere else. Whether the location of these projects was racially motivated (as many people believe) or merely the kind of ill-considered decision that seemed to characterize most urban planning at the time, the effect was not beneficial to the community. As Norman Smith observed,

I was living in Tremé when we happened to see the destruction of all of the families that were living where current-day Armstrong Park is. There was a number of very historic landmarks within the confines of that area that have been erased, and it's so unfortunate because many of the families go all the way back to the days of slavery. When those families were dispersed, their whole history was wiped out. It was tragic—these were proud people, they were very enlightened in the cultural aesthetics of living. When they were uprooted and placed in housing developments, it was a devastating blow.
²²

Drummer Benny Jones, who had married into the legendary Batiste family, belonged to a number of social and pleasure clubs, which were gaining strength in the late seventies. Many of the clubs approached Benny to supply bands for second line parades, and he looked around for musicians. Edgar Smith explains,

The Majestic Brass Band started in 1977 as an offshoot of Doc Paulin's band; before that we were taking jobs as the Doc Paulin Band Part Two. The Majestic had a number two band, called the Voodoo Band. They had Kirk and Charles Joseph, Greg Davis, Roger Lewis and Efrem Towns.

Then Benny Jones got our second band musicians and started to practice with them. He came to Flo [Floyd Anckle, the Majestic bandleader] and said, “I need some musicians.” Flo told him, “Take those boys. Take the Voodoo Band, call it what you want.”
²³

The name Benny chose was the Original Sixth Ward Dirty Dozen Brass Band.

BORN
: New Orleans, January 30, 1957
Played with the Hurricane Brass Band and briefly with the Majestic Brass Band; leader of the Dirty Dozen Brass Band
Interviewed at the offices of Festival Productions on Camp Street, October 2002

I've lived most of my life here in New Orleans. For a brief period in the sixties, the family moved out to Los Angeles, but that was only for about a year and a half. Fortunately, we came back to New Orleans
.

My family's not particularly large: I have three brothers and one sister. I have one brother who plays keyboards in the church, but I'm the only one who has made music my primary source of income. I had an older brother who went to summer music camp. He was more into the sports side of it, and when he would leave to go to camp, he wouldn't bring his instrument—he'd leave it at home. I'd sneak it out and play. It was a baritone horn
.

I was in the seventh grade, at the age of twelve, just fooling round with the horn, teaching myself. After that summer, when school opened, I enrolled in the music class. At that time, I went to Andrew J. Bell school. After three years there, I went on to St. Augustine. That's when I met Leroy Jones. My original intent was to play drums. There were maybe twenty other kids in the class that wanted to play drums, and maybe two drums. So I just didn't see a future in that. The instructor offered me a French horn, but I thought the case was kind of ugly; I didn't want to carry it on the bus. The next pretty-looking case that he had was the one for a cornet. So at thirteen, I ended up playing cornet in the junior high school band
.

My track went like this: in the beginning, I was in the school marching band. From that point, I started playing with some of the rhythm and blues and funk bands here in New Orleans. Friends would form a band, and we'd play. I didn't really have any influences; I was just playing the trumpet in the band. Just learning how to play some music, without any particular direction. I spent some time with Jean Knight, who had a hit record with “Mr. Big Stuff” in the seventies
.

Then I went on to high school, where I became friends with Leroj Jones. He had been under Danny Barker's tutelage with the Fairview Baptist Church band. Then he went on to form the Hurricane Brass Band, and he asked me to join it
.

As he progressed on his instrument, playing jazz and all, he got too busy to maintain the Hurricane band. He was playing on Bourbon Street and doing other things. Myself and some of the others started another brass band, which we called the Tornado. That lasted a couple of months. Money problems—stuff was just happening that shouldn't. So we moved on and started another unit, which ended up being the Dirty Dozen
.

That's where my association with Danny Barker really came about. It was through his teaching of Leroy and the others I could trace my musical line back to him. With the Dirty Dozen, we featured Danny on
The New Orleans Album.

When the group started, there was no work. Nobody was really hiring brass bands. In the mid to late seventies, there wasn't enough to keep the Hurricane band working, and that's what had caused Leroy to move on—there was more of an opportunity for him to play and earn money on Bourbon Street at that time. So when we started the Dozen, it was meant to be a rehearsal group more than anything else, because there wasn't any work going around
.

The original group was myself, Kirk and Charles Joseph. Tuba Fats used to come to the rehearsals, but when we started Playing things other than just traditional music, Tuba didn't want to do that. Roger Lewis was actually working with Fats Domino when we got the band started. He came along right at the end of the Tornado band; he came out to play a parade with us. And then he came with us in the Dirty Dozen. We had another cornet player named Cyrille Salvant (he's dead now), and Andrew “Big Daddy” Green and Benny Jones played drums
.

In the beginning, there was a lot of rehearsal going on, so several people were in and out. We started to develop a repertoire. Then we knew who the band was going to be. There was me, Efrem Towns, Roger Lewis, Kevin Harris on tenor sax, Charles and Kirk Joseph, Jenell Marshall on snare drum, and Benny Jones on bass drum. We were the eight people who took it out on the road
.

At the time, I was studying at Loyola University, and Roger and Charles were studying at Southern University with Kidd Jordan. Our influences were rhythm and blues, bebop, post-bebop like John Coltrane, Freddie Hubbard, Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. I was listening to Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker and Miles Davis. So we were hearing music coming from everywhere. We recorded the tune “Bongo Beep,” which I had heard on a record and brought to the rehearsal. That's how we operated: we weren't working a lot, so in addition to learning traditional New Orleans music, guys would say, “Hey, here's something interesting I just heard. Let's see what we can do with it.” At the time, we were just rehearsing, and we were interested in learning the chord progressions and the melodies, that kind of stuff. Whoever brought the songs in, it was their responsibility to bring the charts. We were all free to bring whatever we wanted to rehearsal. We weren't thinking about getting gigs
.

The interesting thing about it was, some of us were in school, some of us were newly married, some had jobs and whatever, but no matter what, we rehearsed almost every night. And rehearsals would start at nine o'clock at night and go on until 2:00
A.M
. It was just thefun of getting together and playing. This was at a time when disco was happening. All of Bourbon Street had turned disco—there was no live music anywhere. No one was really hiring bands. So the only chance we had to play was at rehearsals. The band was founded on love of music
.

The first few gigs that we had as a unit were at a softball game, or birthday party— some of them didn't even pay any money; we just did them because they were a chance for us to play. It was a very localized thing: we were firmly grounded in the Tremé area. On the bass drum, our name was the Original Sixth Ward Dirty Dozen
.

As I can recall (and I'm sure if you talk to someone else, you'll get a different story), the band before I got in there would march around on Halloween as some kind of joke, with kazoos and stuff. But then some of the social and pleasure clubs that had been in existence and had gone away wanted to start having a brass band at their picnics and parties, play funerals, or whatever
.

Benny Jones, who was in the social and pleasure club scene (he was a part of that world) was asked to put a band together. So he would call us to come out and do those jobs. Once I assumed leadership of the group, I thought it would be better to use the same people as often as I could, because they knew the repertoire that we had rehearsed. That helped to keep it tight
.

Our first regular gig was at a place called Daryl's, a small black club in the Seventh Ward. It was happeningfor us on a Thursday night—it grew into something big. The Glasshouse job started on Monday night and became even bigger than Daryl's. How it happened was this. The Sunday before, we had performed at one of the second line parades—it may have been for the Money Wasters or one of those. The parade ended at the Glasshouse—it can probably comfortably seat about thirty people or something like that. The people who hired us wanted us to play a few more songs after the parade ended. The Glasshouse sold out of everything they had during the hour that we played
.

On Monday nights, the social and pleasure clubs would get together and start planning their parades and have something to eat and drink. They asked us to come out and play for them after the meeting. We played, and they sold everything they had again. So then they decided to do it every Monday night. It lasted about seven to eight years. But we went for seven years without missing a Monday. Once we started traveling, it became more difficult to get back for that job. That's how the Rebirth got started: they were hired to substitute for us on Monday nights when we couldn't get there. Eventually, our weekend trips turned into two weeks, three, five- or six-week trips, and it just got impossible
.

We had everything going for us. While it was happening, I don't think any of us were really thinking, “OK, we got this in place, let's make it work.” It was just a gig, and it was fun to do, and we were playing this supposedly new music. Really, there wasn't anything new about it—we were just taking things that had already been done, just adding a little something to it, changing it a little bit
.

But these young dancers were coming out to the gigs in groups. They would challenge us with their dancing, they'd do some steps, and we'd have to say, “OK, now you top this. We'll play something.” The next week, we'd have something new for them to try and top what we were doing. It was a competitive kind of thing. So not only did the music change, but the style of second lining and buck jumping changed also, along with what we were doing. Now that I look back on it, I can see the development, whereas when I was in it, I wasn't really paying attention to what was happening
.

It's had its ups and downs. One of the reasons the band has lasted so long is because we were able to weather the storms. In the music business nobody's up all the time. But we had enough going on, even when we didn't have records out—the neighborhood support was always there. Nowadays, you have to have a record out to maintain a tour and get current air play and so forth. Fortunately, we were able to work clubs and festivals around the world
.

Our first international tour happened in 1982. Some guy from the Groningen Festival in Holland had contacted Kidd Jordan (he had been over there before), and he put us in touch with them. Shortly after that, George Wein of Festival Productions brought us over for our first real tour—we did Nice, Perugia, some stuff in Spain. That was in 1984. George brought us up to New York to do a couple of his festivals there. Some clubs in New York heard we were coming, and we got booked at a club called Tramp's for a week and the Village Gate for a couple of weeks. Man, it went so well that by the time we came back from Europe, they wanted us for two more weeks at the Village Gate and another week at Tramp's. My wife was pregnant at the time, and what started as a two-week tour extended to six weeks. I was ready to go home, but two days before we were due to fly back, George Wein called me and wanted me to meet some lawyers and booking agents. I told him, “I have to go home.”

It was happening real fast. When I got home at the end of the six weeks, I was getting calls from promoters in California who wanted me to come out there the following week. That ended up being a four-week trip. That year, between July and December, we went to Europe four times. Europe made me aware that there were people outside New Orleans—in fact outside the United States—that were listening to what we were doing. I found we were more widely accepted in Europe than in most of America. New Orleans was different; we began there, and we were very successful locally. Before we started traveling, we were doing two or more gigs a day, five or six days a week. We worked a lot
.

Outside Louisiana, support was in pockets. It was OK in California, but our widest acceptance was in Europe. I had heard that, but you don't know how it is until you actually go there. There were many more festivals and clubs that featured jazz, and a high level of enthusiasm. We got the same sort of reception in Japan. We'd play clubs that held four hundred people, play three shows a night, empty the place each time, and fill it back up for each show, which was obviously good for the pocket
.

I can still see the concert when we recorded the
Mardi Gras at Montreux
album. That was back in 1986, but I can still remember going out to play in that auditorium. It was so powerful, so electric! I can still feel it. A couple of years previously, when we were in Europe, we had experienced this thing where it doesn't get dark. We were sitting up, talking and drinking and playing around, waiting for it to get dark so we'd know what time to go to bed. Then it was six o'clock in the morning, and we saw people coming out to go to work
.