Keeping the Beat on the Street (20 page)

In the early summer of 1983, a group of high school musicians left their first-ever gig, which was at the Sheraton Hotel on Canal Street. They didn't feel like going home, it was still early in the evening, and they decided to try their luck playing for tips in the French Quarter. That spontaneous decision led to the formation of the Rebirth Brass Band, and for those founding members, music was to be the only job they ever had.

They were taking local jobs and playing in the Quarter every day when they came to the notice of Allison Miner, whose close involvement with the new bands of the time accelerated interest in their music. She had bonded with the music community while working at Tulane's Hogan Jazz Archive with Quint Davis, and she had noticed how fickle public tastes threw good musicians out of work. In a sense, she almost became the conscience of the Jazz Festival, prompting the organizers to put older musicians like Tuts Washington and Professor Longhair back in the public eye.

After a few years living in Cleveland and New York, she returned to New Orleans in the late eighties and began working with the Rebirth—she had been turned on to the street music scene by photographer Jules Cahn. She persuaded Quint Davis to book the band in Europe and set up a deal with Rounder Records.

All of this was more than fifteen years ago, but the Rebirth has lost none of its energy and drive. They've been resident at the Maple Leaf Bar on Oak Street for at least twelve years.

Their speciality is doing a forty-minute set without any pauses between the songs—just a few bars of bass horn and drum to set the groove, and straight into the next number. After twenty years, they're still working hard.

BORN
: New Orleans, February 10, 1966
Founder and leader of the Rebirth Brass Band
Interviewed at 3621 Burgundy Street, November 2002

Photo by Emile Martyn

I have two brothers who are musicians: Keith is the bass drummer with the Rebirth Brass Band, and my baby brother, Kerwin James, is the tuba player with the New Birth. Kerwin has my mother's last name. Cié Frazier is my great uncle. I started playing music because of my mother—she played gospel piano in the Christian Mission Church on North Robertson, in the Tremé. My brothers and sister used to sing in the choir there
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When I got in grade school, I started playing trombone. My brother started playing baritone horn, and we used to go to church sometimes to play with my mother. That's where it started, but in high school, that's where it really took off. I attended Joseph S. Clark High School; so did my brother Keith. The band director at the time was David Harris; he was a trumpet player. Also my mother had been to Clark School. Milton Batiste had been at Clark with my father; they were in the first class
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I played the usual high school stuff. Marching in Mardi Gras parades, football games, stuff like that. We would play regular military marches for the most part. At that time, I was playing trombone. Then, at Clark, they started to run out of tuba players. During the eighties, there weren't so many young people taking it up. I was really small and skinny, and I decided to start playing tuba. Everybody thought I was joking! But I knew I could pick it up pretty good. I took a tuba home and practiced every day. I used to sleep with it: my mother thought I was crazy
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I was also the band captain of the school band. We had this band parent booster club. One of the parents asked me to get a brass band together to come and play at a function. I got a group of guys together: Kermit Ruffins (because he was in the band with me); Reginald Steward, the trombone player, who's now with the New Birth Brass Band; Cheryl McKay on clarinet—she now plays with a reggae band; and Dimitri Smith, old Smitty D, on tuba; and I played trombone. We practiced, got some material together, and did a function at the Sheraton Hotel on Canal Street. We were still sixteen and seventeen years old, and they were serving alcoholic beverages. That meant that after we played, we had to leave
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I had seen Keith Anderson playing with the Young Men Brass Band, and they were hustling in the French Quarter every day for tips. So I had the idea to do the same—it was only about ten o'clock, at night. Dimitri Smith was in the union, so he couldn't go down there. I said, “OK, give me the tuba.” I went down there with the rest of the guys, and we put a box down for tips. We made some money, and everybody wanted to do the same thing the next day. Everybody slept at my house, and we went back to the Quarter the next day. This was the summer of 1983—it was just something good to do
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We had listened to the Preservation Hall Jazz Band and the Olympia Brass Band on records. That's where we got our first music from. Tunes like “The Saints” and “Second Line.” We just happened to be in the right place at the right time, as things happened. We were playing in the French Quarter, and then we got our first paying gig, playing for the Zulu Club at their picnic
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The tunes came out sounding different from the Olympia, but that was just a natural thing. By us all coming from a high school band, we were powerful. That was when the rap and hip-hop thing started, around the same time as we did. We heard those things on the radio, and we wanted to incorporate them into our repertoire. It worked real well, because we were the youngest band in the city, apart from the Young Men, but they had started breaking up. So nobody else was doing it
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The Dirty Dozen is one of my favorite bands. One night, my stepfather (he was in a second line club) drove me up to Second and Saratoga and parked outside the Glasshouse. We could hear the Dirty Dozen through the door. That was in the late seventies, and it made me want to get into brass bands. I first heard them play again at my cousin's funeral, and that's the first time I heard them play “Blackbird Special.” I can remember it like it was yesterday—it was on Dumaine and North Robertson. I had never heard anything like that before in my life. It was phenomenal. They were a big influence. When we got old enough, we used to go hang in the Glasshouse every Monday night. One of my favorite records is the Dozen's “Feet Don't Fail Me Now” album, when Mr. Benny Jones was in the band. We call that album “the bible.”

The Rebirth plays a kind of unorganized organized music. We didn't write anything down; we just had a basic formation. We'd start with the tuba and then bring in the melody, and everybody else would play around it—that was the whole thing. In the past, brass bands would introduce the tunes with the drum, but when we were on the street, the parades would have such a vibe, the music couldn't stop. So I'd tell the drums to keep going, and I'd bring in another song on tuba, like setting the groove
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My two favorite tuba players are Kirk Joseph and Tuba Fats—they're top of my list. And I love the sound of my brother Kerwin. He's a big guy, but he's got a sweet sound. I just left him; he's going to Brazil tomorrow with the New Birth
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Our success didn't happen overnight, but in the nineteen years we've been together, it's been a phenomenal life. People first noticed us on the parades, because we would play twenty-five songs in a row without stopping. That started a new trend. As we got more into playing the hip-hop tunes we heard on records, we started to write more of our own material. Everybody had an input to that
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We had a few connections, one of whom was Ice Cube Slim—Dan Untermyer. He got us to Europe, to a couple of North Sea festivals in Holland, and to Japan. Then a lot of stuff in Germany, and then a lot of stuff around the States. We were doing pretty well traveling. But where the breakthrough really came was when we did the song “Do Watcha Wanna,” which was written by Kermit Ruffins and me and Keith Anderson. We recorded it first in 1986 with Milton Batiste and again in 1986 for Rounder Records. They put the song in a record rotation on a hip-hop radio station. The songs being broadcast were in competition with each other, and “Do Watcha Wanna” was the number one for eight weeks in a row. That really did it. We were number one, in competition with Luther VanDross and O.J. It really opened doors for us
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I first met Allison Miner—God bless her—when we were playing a gig by the municipal auditorium. People had told me about her and how she had worked with Quint Davis when they started the Jazz Festival. She had been in Cleveland but had just come back to New Orleans. She came up to us and said, “I heard about you guys—I have a gig I want you to do.” She took us to Baton Rouge, and after that she loved the band so much she became our manager. That lasted about five years. It was a great connection; she was really good for the band. She took us to another level. She kind of taught me the ropes, in a business way. I give her credit for all that side that people don't see. How to get a tax ID, how to get incorporated, all of that. I still miss her
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Among the upcoming brass bands, I would vote the Lil' Stooges and the Hot 8 Brass Band. I mean, they're patterning themselves after the Rebirth, but they're the new generation. They're doing parades, playing in clubs, and now they've started recording. They're the newest groups that are coming up, and in a way, it's due to us
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Right now, listening to everybody, they're still following what we're doing. The only difference is we live it. What I mean by that is we've really lived Rebirth twenty-four hours a day since day one. We opened doors for a lot of other bands. When we were out in the French Quarter playing for tips every day, we didn't have anything else but the Rebirth Brass Band. But a lot of younger musicians now have to have day jobs and also be in a brass band. That's all I've ever done. We're getting ready to do our twenty-year anniversary record next year; I'm trying to get everybody back for that: Kermit, Keith Anderson—a big reunion. It's been kind of like Rebirth University, the number of people that came out of the band and are doing something
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When we do something without chord changes, we call that simple music—the bass horn just stays on a set line, and it makes it danceable music. When people want to go out and dance, they don't care about chord changes. What they want to hear is a hook. With a good hook, they always recognize that song, and it makes them feel like dancing. If music is too complicated, people don't dance, they go and sit down. We try and get them up to dance. They say, “Hey, I like that line,” and it moves them. We put the bass line down first, and everything else goes on top
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Sometimes on the street, I think of these things, sometimes I think them up at home— if you can dance off it, we can work with it. We want people to be dancing all the time. If we don't want them dancing, we do music with all the changes and stuff. But those simple things get the crowd dancing, get everybody to rowdy up—it works good. We're still playing for the younger generation, but we're better playing for people around our own age, because they know us from when we started
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The competitions of the bands on the street are great, but it's more because that's what people want to see. Sometimes we do it to make the parade more entertaining, a bit of friendly competition. Let me put it like this: if we were a football team, our competition record would be a hundred and twenty. A hundred wins, twenty losses. Right now, the biggest threat is the Hot 8 Brass Band. They're the new guys coming up, and they're hungry
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My dream is I would love to win a Grammy with a brass band. But if I had to do it again for no money, I would, because I love doing it
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BORN
: New Orleans, October 3, 1968
Founding member of the Rebirth Brass Band
Interviewed at 2621 Burgundy Street, November 2002

Photo by Emile Martyn

I came into music by watching my brother Philip playing when I was in elementary school. It seemed something that was fun to do, so I wanted to do it too
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He was playing trombone in the James Lewis Elementary School. When I got to be his age, I wanted to get in the junior high school marching band. I was playing snare drum at the time, but they said I was too small to play drums, so they switched me to baritone horn. I carried on with the baritone horn all the way up to college. I was just playing drums on the side, really, until the Rebirth officially formed
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